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  • Margaret of Parma: A Life by Charlie R. Steen
  • Magdalena S. Sánchez (bio)
Margaret of Parma: A Life. Charlie R. Steen. Leiden: Brill, 2013. ix + 321 pp. $179. ISBN 978-90-04-25744-3.

A fascinating early modern woman with a long and varied life, Margaret of Parma (1522–86) well deserves a scholarly biography in English. Margaret was the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Charles V and Jeanne van der Gheynst, the daughter of a Flemish tapestry worker. Born in the Netherlands, she spent her early years in Brussels, often visiting the court of her great aunt, Margaret of Austria, and later that of her aunt, Mary of Hungary. At the age of ten she was sent to Italy to be educated and to await her marriage to Alessandro de’ Medici, whom she married when she was thirteen and he twenty-seven years old. After Alessandro was murdered in 1537, Charles V negotiated a second marriage for Margaret, this time to Ottavio Farnese, two years her junior, whom she disliked. When Ottavio became Duke of Parma, Margaret became duchess. She bore him one son, Alexander, whom she sent to be educated at the Spanish court when he was ten years old. In 1559, Philip II of Spain, her half-brother, appointed her regent of the Netherlands, where she served until the Duke of Alba replaced her in 1568. After her regency, she lived for a short time at her husband’s court in Piacenza before choosing to retire to her territories in Abruzzo, where she governed and oversaw a small court. She returned to the Netherlands briefly in 1580 to govern while Alexander served as Philip II’s military commander there. When her son was appointed governor of the Netherlands in 1581, Margaret petitioned to return to Italy and in 1583 was finally able to do so. In early January 1586, she died in Ortona, the small town on the Adriatic that she had developed commercially and where she had constructed a palace.

In his introduction to Margaret of Parma: A Life, Charlie R. Steen states that Margaret’s life is “worthy of attention because she was more than just a pawn for the Hapsburg males; rather she actually helped to craft policy in each of the [End Page 192] political environments she encountered and also had an impact on the cultural life of her time” (3). To illustrate Margaret’s agency and political influence, Steen concentrates on her regency in the Netherlands, detailing her struggles with aristocrats and Calvinists, but also with her half-brother, Philip II, who limited her power from the start. Steen carefully chronicles her frustration at being forced to wait for orders or permission from Philip who, despite the dire situation in the Netherlands, was notoriously slow in making decisions and even slower in communicating them to her. He argues that Margaret, much more than Philip, appreciated the political culture of the Netherlands and was more open to negotiation and compromise. When religious disputes became particularly rancorous, she managed to negotiate with key Netherlandish aristocrats, offering the possibility of a meeting of the Estates General and even the possibility of limited religious freedom, all the time knowing that Philip II would never allow the Estates to meet, and that she herself would make no religious concessions. These tactics helped keep aristocrats on her side and gave her time to allow religious unrest to diminish while she marshalled sufficient forces to subdue the worst of the revolts. Before the arrival of the Duke of Alba, whom Philip II had sent to pacify the Netherlands, Margaret had succeeded in calming many of the cities. In other words, her policies had been effective. Leaving the Netherlands after Alba replaced her, she watched from Italy as his extreme policies destroyed all the gains she had made.

Although Steen fully details the complicated religious and political conditions in the Netherlands during Margaret’s regency, and although he discusses well her efforts to take control of an extremely difficult situation, his book is hardly a biography. He subtitles it “A Life,” but seven of its eleven chapters deal exclusively with the three years from 1565 to 1567, the...

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