Jeanne d'Albret: Letters from the Queen of Navarre with an Ample Declaration ed. by Kathleen M. Llewellyn, Emily E. Thompson, and Colette H. Winn (review)

This is a slim but perfectly formed volume, both elegant and informative in its explanatory introduction, notes, and careful translation of the rhetorical virtuosity of this most intriguing of women, Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, daughter of Marguerite d'Angoulême (Marguerite of Navarre), niece of François I of France, and mother to Henri III of Navarre, future Henri IV of France.

The editors take care to situate both their subject and her work in an extended introduction, divided into four coherent parts: 'A Woman of Strength and Power', 'Jeanne and the Reformation', 'The Last Years', and 'The Afterlife of the Ample Declaration'; each punctuated by user-friendly sub-headings. While this reader is at one in describing Jeanne as a 'Woman of Strength and Power' (p. 1), she hesitates to conclude that she was 'an exceptional woman'. The most recent queenship scholarship, and studies of powerful premodern women more generally, demonstrate that elite and royal women were not exceptional for their times; like their male counterparts, rank made them exceptional, but not their involvement in public affairs. Roughly contemporaneous with Jeanne, we can point to Margaret of Parma (d. 1530); Jeanne's mother, Marguerite d'Angouleme (d. 1549); Mary, Queen of Scots (d. 1587); Jeanne's nemesis, Catherine de' Medici (d. 1589); Catherine's daughter, Marguerite of Valois (d. 1615); and Elizabeth I (d. 1603). This is not to suggest that Jeanne did not live an extraordinary life.

Despite Jeanne's mother Marguerite remaining a Catholic all her life, her religious beliefs were underpinned to a considerable extent by new French thinking about religion, and she protected both the Protestant Calvin and the Catholic humanist Rabelais. Like Erasmus, Prince of the Humanists, Marguerite, 'Mother of the Renaissance', sought to mediate between Catholics and Reformists to try to reform the Church from within, emphasizing a middle way rather than a complete break. Jeanne was exposed therefore to Reformist thinking from her earliest years, choosing in 1560 a different path from her mother Marguerite's and that of her quisling husband Antoine of Bourbon who, after a couple of false starts, remained within the Catholic Church. It is hardly surprising that their Protestant son, Henri of Bourbon, reportedly conceded in 1593 that 'Paris vaut bien une messe' (Paris is well worth a Mass), ascending the vacated Valois throne of France as Henri IV.

The introduction is followed by a useful 'Note on the Translation', highlighting the pitfalls of translating Jeanne's words due to her tendency to ramble and digress as well as her intentional ambiguities (p. 37). Five very important letters open the translated works: the first 'To the king' (Charles IX); the second 'To the queen, my sovereign lady' (the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici); the third; To Monsieur, [brother of the king]' (Henri, duke of Anjou, later Henri III of France); the fourth 'To Monsieur my brother, Monsieur le Cardinal, etc.' (her brother-in-law, Charles of Bourbon); and the fifth, seeking military support, 'To the queen of England' (the Protestant monarch, Elizabeth I). The first four were all written from Bergerac on the same day, September 16, 1568. The letter to Elizabeth I was written on 16 October 1568 from the fortified port of La Rochelle where Jeanne embedded herself as the leader of the French Protestant party and from where she controlled Protestant propaganda, fortifications, finances, and intelligence gathering. What follows is Jeanne's very detailed rhetorical treatise, Ample Declaration (or justification) of the preceding letters.

Jeanne's Ample Declaration was not just destined for her epistolary correspondents—she intended it to be circulated widely in inexpensive, readily...