Jeanne d'Albret et sa cour: actes du colloque international de Pau, 17-19 mai 2001 (review)

As Jean-Pierre Babelon indicates in the preface to this collection of twenty-three conference papers, Jeanne d'Albret, the mother of Henry IV of France and a committed Protestant, has acquired a sufficient historical importance not to require an anniversary volume. The work under review is divided into five thematic sections concerned with the queen's religious beliefs, her entourage, her patronage of humanism, her artistic legacy and her posthumous reputation. In a characteriscally polished paper Ann-Marie Cocula traces the journey of Jeanne and her children to La Rochelle in 1568. She implies that Catherine de' Medici's role in the events of the time may not have been as innocent as her apologists maintain. Serge Brunet draws on hitherto untapped material in the Simancas archives to illuminate the fraught relations between Jeanne, her great uncle, Pierre d'Albret, bishop of Comminges and Blaise de Monluc. The latter, it seems, was less than frank in his Mémoires about his secret dealings with Philip II of Spain. Also valuable is Véronique Castagnet's account of the difficulties faced by Jeanne's episcopal nominees in Béarn following her conversion to Protestantism. Dominique Bidot-Germa's prosopography of the officials who served Jeanne shows that they were for the most part Béarnais risen from the peasantry or merchant class; not all were Protestants. Pascal Rambeaud draws on archival evidence not used by Nancy Roelker in her standard biography to throw light on Jeanne's activities at La Rochelle during the third religious war: she played an active political role, leaving military matters to the Condés, her son and Coligny. Natalie Kuperty-Tsur focuses on the skill with which Jeanne sought to justify her move to La Rochelle by appealing to public opinion; she claimed to be serving the king of France by promoting the Protestant cause. Although Jeanne never became a literary celebrity like her mother, Marguerite de Navarre, she was not indifferent to poetry: after receiving poetic tributes from Marot and Du Bellay in her youth, she commissioned Du Bartas's Judith following her conversion in 1560 and embraced the psalms with fervour. Jean-Yves Casanova considers Pey de Garros's unsuccessful attempt to turn the brand of 'occitan' spoken in Gascony into the state language of Navarre, and Mariangela Miotti shows how the poetry of André de Rivaudeau tried to solve the contradiction faced by Protestant humanists between their faith and the classical culture of the Pléiade. For various reasons, considered by Véronique Duché, Jeanne has not attracted the attentions of romantic novelists from Mademoiselle de la Force onwards, yet her life was exciting enough from her forced marriage as a child to the duke of Cleves to her mysterious death on the eve of the massacre of St Bartholomew. This scholarly and wide-ranging collection of essays will do much to revive and enhance her reputation.