ABSTRACT
This essay examines the history of political government, public discourse, and state ceremonial during the French Wars of Religion (1560-1610). Of special interest to the author is how contemporaries articulated the precepts of moral and divine law that supported the authority of the widowed queen and regent, Catherine de Medicis, for more than forty years. By charting the interplay between sites of culture evident in ceremonial assemblies and sights of women as devotional focii, the author reevaluates modern literature of queenship that asserts a rigorous severance of the conceptual and social powers of state and domestic government. This study of the natural, affective elements of political discourse suggests that — to the contrary — contemporaries embraced the topoi of devotion as a means of protecting the legitimacy of female rule well into the seventeenth century.
