La persona de la princesse au XVIe siècle: Personnage littéraire et personnage politique (review)

Which symbolic systems could entice the terribly disparate members of the hierarchical society of orders that composed Renaissance France to cohere around the king? In La civilisation du cœur: Histoire du sentiment politique en France du XII^e au XIX^e siècle (1998), Jean Nagle offered a fascinating anthropologically inflected investigation of the ideologies of communication centered around "the heart," which over the centuries provided bricks for royal consensus-building. The most successful contribution of Claudie Martin-Ulrich's gendered study of the figure of the archetypal princess in sixteenth-century France — under discussion here, and positioned in a very different intellectual space from that of Nagle — is to show how rhetorical discourse interplayed with real princesses, shaping and misshaping them, but also testifying to their empowerment as major protagonists in the fabrication of social cohesion around the statutorily male French king.

A list of princesses inserted at the end of the book names twenty-one women, including even the insignificant Louise of France (1515–17), who fit into (1) the author's restrictive definition of "princess" (wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the king), and (2) her theoretically broad chronological span (from fifteenth-century Charlotte of Savoy to seventeenth-century Anne of Austria). The most detailed case studies, however, zoom in on major queens and/or regents: Anne of France (77, a slip makes the regent a queen), Anne of Brittany, the Marguerites of Navarre and Valois, and Catherine and Maria de' Medici.

Martin-Ulrich sets out to unpack numerous literary representations, herein divided into three different sorts. A first category consists of flattering portraits chosen from an interdisciplinary body of texts — poetry and prose, royal entry accounts, dedications, epithalamia, funerary discourses, memoirs, pamphlets — by Symphorien Champier, Jean Marot, Pierre Gringore, Clément Marot, Charles de Sainte-Marthe, Ronsard, Du Bellay (interacting with Marguerite of France), and Brantôme. Portraits of praise are scrutinized to extract the archetype of an exceptionally well-educated, multifaceted princess construed to embody a positive set of values for a community that, because it was divided to the hilt, was ever in search of peace and social concord. A second category is made up of a limited number of portraits of blame, aimed mainly against Catherine and Maria de' Medici ("L'impossible régence"). These foreign queen mother-regents are seen operating in the land of Salic law, holding the hence tenuous reins of power in their hence potentially very evil hands. This series is interpreted as a sign that during and after the Wars of Religion, the former ideal princess of majesty and humility was detached from her subjects, hoisted out of reach into the clouds. Though somewhat true, a broader array of representations of female regents might have shown that what mattered most was whether the power of the princess stemmed openly from her "illegitimate" role of substitute prince, or whether it grew out of the safer "subordinate" space tradition prescribed. Martin-Ulrich demonstrates that here, seemingly on the margins, the princess's role as mediator ensured her position as an active political and artistic agent. Begging further reflection, too, is the status of the men behind the portraits — men of letters vs. men of law.

Remarkable self-portraits constitute the third category at play, portraits extracted from texts produced by two of the princesses themselves: the Enseignements of Anne of France (whose educational advice book is arguably more modern in content than the author contends), and Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron. An initial (rather lengthy) methodological section prepares the ground for the subsequent selection of Renaissance texts, laying bare their roots in ancient rhetoric (Aristotle and Quintilian), topped off with an Augustinian moral stance. Martin-Ulrich finally draws the pieces together to show how the mastery of the art of rhetoric by these flesh...