There’s a new interest in examining women’s roles in world history, highlighting acts of provocation and rebellion instead of covering them up.

“I rule, you serve,” Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) is told by her new husband, the temperamental Peter (Nicholas Hoult), who also happens to be king of 18th-century Russia.

He is a man besotted with himself and surrounded by spineless sycophants, and we spend the first episode of Tony McNamara’s ahistorical dramedy “The Great” terrified for young, naive Catherine, who arrived at the Winter Palace with the intention of ruling her new kingdom at the side of a noble partner but instead finds herself bound to a crass emperor who is as quick to perpetrate petty violence as to throw self-pitying temper tantrums.

Peter is as confused by Catherine as she is by him: he expected a subservient help mate. Showrunner McNamara mines great dramatic intrigue and comedy from this muddled dynamic, rife with coups and affairs, scheming bishops and conniving ladies-in-waiting. But while sagas focusing on historical royalty appear fairly often in film and on TV, “The Great” — whose third season starts streaming on Prime Video this month — and other shows like it signal a new interest in examining women’s roles in world history, painting with strokes that highlight acts of provocation and rebellion instead of covering them up.

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In the first couple of episodes of “The Great,” we are introduced to marriage as transaction, intrusive “purity” tests and disproportionate illiteracy rates amongst women. The show’s other seasons elaborate on these themes, challenging our understanding of certain historical events while also celebrating acts of defiance. Catherine regularly stands up to her new country’s religious order and top military brass: she opens a school for girls despite vocal dissent from powerful male voices and hatches a plan to offer freedom to the serfs.

Season 2 also explored how details of her personal life and reputation were under a microscope, primed to be manipulated and falsified. The ladies of the court, for instance, spread a rumour that Catherine had been intimate with a horse in an attempt to destabilize her position — one of many vulgar legends that have been repeated about the real queen for the past three centuries.

Another show that dramatizes historical women misbehaving is “Mary & George,” a salacious drama focusing on the titular mother-son duo (played by Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine) as they attempt to weasel their way into the English royal court in the early 1600s, roughly a century before Catherine was shipped off to Russia. Mary schemes to set up a romantic relationship between her son and British monarch James I, resorting to forgery and murder to elevate her and her son’s status.

As with “The Great,”  “Mary & George” (now available on Starz via Crave) takes liberties with historical details but succeeds in capturing its protagonist’s emotions — fear, courage, greed — when faced with a similar conflict to that Catherine will face in a century’s time: the desire for action clashing with the repression visited upon women.

It’s a conflict at the centre of most women’s stories throughout history and shows do not have to be based on real occurrences to convey it, along with its impact on individuals and society at large. There’s “The Gilded Age,” from the creator of “Downton Abbey” and green-lit for a third season, which follows women in two fictional upper-class families in a quickly industrializing New York City, as they attempt to make sense of the roles they were born into:, spinster, wife, mother, widow.

Similar issues face the women of “Bridgerton,” the massively successful Netflix show about a fictional family in Regency-era London, whose third season recently debuted.

The show’s women fight back against the restrictive social code that keeps them curtsying and docile in a number of ways: some use clever social manoeuvring to elevate themselves and their families; others scheme to keep their reputations pristine. All this is undertaken to ensure the privilege bestowed by their high social class is not undermined by the expectations of them as women. It’s a springy sort of conflict: we watch characters prosper one moment then grow inhibited the next, indicating the dynamic relationship between gender and class.

Whether historical or ahistorical, what’s notable about this influx of shows isn’t that women’s stories are being told, but rather that they are being told well, treated with great nuance and care.

It’s not very easy to tell dynamic women’s stories when sifting through historical annals almost exclusively written about and by men. Shows like “Peaky Blinders” have tried to offer complex portrayals of their female characters — whether as communist sympathizers, government spies or gangsters — but they almost always end up relegated to love interest, housewife or simply dead.

And while it’s no excuse, it’s easy to understand why women in historical TV are often treated as expendable; there are significantly fewer records that tell their stories. As historian Bettany Hughes put it: “Women have always been 50 per cent of the population, but only occupy around 0.5 per cent of recorded history.”

Hughes’ numbers are rhetorical, but they encapsulate the disparity in the representation men and women receive throughout historical scholarship. Take also the dictum “well-behaved women seldom make history,” a slogan that has been adopted as a sort of feminist call-to-arms, but which was coined as the title of a book by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to express the fickle consideration given to women by writers of history.

So what does it mean when we get to watch Catherine organize a coup to dethrone her husband or Mary lie and cheat her way to the royal court? These shows aren’t meant to fill the gaps in our knowledge — “Bridgerton” creator Chris Van Dusen noted that his show is not a history lesson — but rather open our eyes to the fact that these gaps exist.

Viewers have been treated to meditative monarchs, conniving social climbers and crafty servants and, in their own way, they’re doing their part to unspool the day-to-day lives of women who have for so long lived in history’s shadows.