Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Châteaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France by Sophie Maríñez (review)

A controversial figure in her time, the Duchesse de Montpensier is now enjoying a renewed notoriety. Granddaughter of Queen Marie de Médicis, cousin to Louis XIV, Montpensier took her own exalted status seriously. During the Fronde, the civil war that threatened the French monarchy in the mid-seventeenth century, she took the side of the opposition, ordering military action against the royal troops in Orléans and Paris. Exiled for her part in the insurrection, she created her own salon and engaged in building and memoir writing. She resumed work on her memoirs during a second exile and after she refused to follow Louis XIV's order to marry the old and paralytic King of Spain. She never wed and she died one of the richest heiresses in France.

The life of this feisty single princess has drawn the attention of many twenty-first-century scholars. Vincent Pitts's biography, La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France (Johns Hopkins University Press), appeared in 2000. Large sections of her memoirs were translated in 2010 by P. J. Yarrow and William Brooks and published by the Modern Humanities Research Association (Cambridge University Press). She is perhaps best known today for the correspondence she exchanged with Mme de Motteville, published in English under the title Against Marriage, edited by Joan DeJean (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Montpensier has also been the subject of studies by Gabrielle Verdier, Patricia Cholokian, Faith Beasley, and others. This profusion of scholarship poses a challenge that Maríñez meets successfully. Building on current research, she distinguishes her own work by proposing a multidisciplinary "reading" of texts, buildings, and iconographic objects, all seen through the lens of Montpensier's "self-construction." This well-written and well-researched study contains an extensive bibliography of archival and published material. It offers ample translations from Montpensier's works, as well as useful notes to older sources difficult to access.

The book is an outgrowth of Maríñez's 2010 dissertation, which she expanded by adding a first chapter, "Building Subjects," connecting the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan to early modern patronesses of architecture. Metaphors of building appear throughout: for example, Maríñez states that in the Book of the City of Ladies, Christine "erects" an allegorical city to honor women; she also "reconstructs" earlier misogynist criticism of Semiramis, who had been condemned for alleged incest with her son. Maríñez connects Christine's allegorical and iconographic work with the actual construction projects accomplished under the patronage of Anne de Bretagne and Diane de Poitiers: like Montpensier, both women reconstructed ancestral fortresses to render them more expressive of their own identities. Diane was the favorite of both François I and his son Henri II, who gave her the château of Anet. Extending Sigrid Ruby's 2007 study ("Diane de Poitiers: Veuve et favorite," in Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, ed. Patronnes et Mécènes de France à la Renaissance [Université de Saint Etienne], 381–99), Maríñez reads Anet "as a château that displays a reconstruction strategy similar to that deployed by Christine de Pizan" (43). Diane's status is elevated by her appropriation of the mythological figure of Diana, who also figures in Pizan's work. Moreover, the new decorations combine the initials of Diane and Henri so as to give them equal importance. This reading is supported by numerous illustrations of the buildings in question.

Chapter 2, "Building and Writing: Strategies of Self-Construction," discusses the parallel projects Montpensier undertook during her first exile. Architectural and literary themes are combined in a quotation from Montpensier's memoirs describing her nocturnal arrival at the "crumbling fortress" of St-Fargeau: "I entered an old house with neither doors nor windows, and grass in the courtyard that reached to our knees. I was horrified. I was led to a horrible-looking bedroom. … I was...