ABSTRACT
Modern scholars have long studied the political history of the French Wars of Religion (circa 1560-1610) in order to understand the relationship between the history of queenship, regency government, and the changing basis of royal sovereignty in early modern France. The forty-year tenure of Catherine de Médicis as queen and regent of France (1549-1588) during the reigns of her husband Henri II and of her sons François II, Charles IX, and Henri III marks a decisive period in both contemporary and modern historiography on these subjects. During this period of politico-religious turmoil, contemporary perceptions of Catherine’s public authority were disputed in public forums, foremost the institutional loci of the royal court, the law courts (parlements), and the dispersed resources of publishing houses. The law courts purportedly established a canon of French law which denied women lawful authority to preside over royal institutions, and the polemical literature, written in response to the failures of Catherine’s government to protect life and property, encouraged the invention of a political vocabulary that severed the connection between her authority as guardian of her subjects’ welfare and the communal bonds of kinship that bound individuals into a corporate body politic. Yet, the collected correspondence of Catherine de Médicis suggests a different model of queenship and communal kinship during the Wars of Religion. Of special interest in this essay is how a study of the queen’s epistolary legacy during her marriage and through the early years of her regency for her second son, Charles IX, offers some new answers to well-established questions about female agency in early-modern France.1 To summarize, questions regarding the history of regency government have vexed recent studies of women and power in early modern France. Without recourse to the corpus of letters written by Catherine de Médicis, scholars have presumed the queen was forced to
1 Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, ed. Hector de La Ferrière (Paris: 1880-1943), 10 vols, hereafter cited as Lettres. All translations are mine.
