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  • Portraits of the Queen Mother: Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters by Catherine de Médicis and others
  • Susan Broomhall
Catherine de Médicis and others, Portraits of the Queen Mother: Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 35), trans. Leah L. Chang and Katherine Kong, Toronto, Iter/CRRS, 2014; paperback; pp. ix, 283; 6 colour illustrations; R.R.P. US$31.95; ISBN 9780772721723.

This compact volume will be ideal for use in class readings or for a scholar new to the study of Catherine de Médicis, best known as a French consort, sometime regent, and queen mother, who dominated courtly life in France for much of the late sixteenth century. Her attempt to steer the Valois dynasty, into which she had married, successfully through the complex religious politics of the period left few satisfied with her interventions or substantial influence. The selection of documents translated by Leah Chang and Katherine Kong for this volume reflects the varied textual positions in support or hostility that were taken by contemporaries, along with the range of genres in which they can be found. Such texts also provide much of the [End Page 278] documentation with which scholars have worked in order to understand Catherine, including letters both to and from Catherine, mixed accounts from individual ambassadors who came to the court, hostile pamphlets from both Catholics and Huguenot propagandists, and fulsome praise in the memoirs of those who observed her at court.

Chang and Kong commence with a detailed Introduction that summarises Catherine’s access of forms of power during the reigns of her husband, Henri II, and sons, François II, Charles IX, and Henri III. This is followed by an analysis of Salic law and the nature of political influence that this constructed for women in France. Exploration of current scholarship on the Wars of Religion, Catherine’s changing strategies over the long period in which she remained influential, and her possible role in the St Bartholomew’s Massacre provide further historical and historiographical contexts. The Introduction supplies a wealth of footnotes directing interested readers to further information. In general, the authors eschew any conclusions themselves about Catherine’s aims and success; their focus concerns ‘the fashioning of a female political persona’ (p. 2) in this period and the ways in which female authority could be rhetorically constructed. They ask how the sources that comprise this multiple portraiture interacted, producing the widespread, predominantly negative, view of Catherine.

Chang and Kong carefully interpret Catherine’s letters as mediated documents that present multiple voices. This analysis considers not only the role of secretaries and the nature of Catherine’s epistolary practice, but also the manner in which she treated topics from the seemingly intimate to the more formally diplomatic, creating differences of tone across her letters. The selection here spans her first letters in the 1530s to those at the end of her life some fifty years later; texts have been chosen to represent both a range of her styles and the varied challenges that she faced.

These are followed by examples of Venetian relations from 1546 to 1589, considered as performed negotiations by different ambassadors between their courts of origin and residence, and as political documents themselves. As the authors make clear, no document translated here can be seen as neutral. A series of selections from the virulently polemical Marvelous Discourse on the Life, Actions, and Deportment of Catherine de Médicis, Queen Mother (1575) are also included. This pamphlet underwent nine editions in five years, and was also translated into Latin, German, and English. In retrospect, it constituted a powerful portrait that caused Catherine’s reputation lasting damage. The Marvelous Discourse is contrasted with the sympathetic portrait of memorialist and courtier, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, a direct response to what he saw as a text ‘more full of lies than truth’ (p. 51). The authors continue to emphasise the local political contexts of each text, highlighting [End Page 279] Brantôme’s insistence on his own authority and access to the court’s chief political protagonists.

These key texts are completed by appendices that offer a series of complementary sources...

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