ABSTRACT

This chapter demonstrates how that literature both helped to construct a myth of the female court as scandalous, and how such literature about the court reached the public outside the palace walls. Every scandal investigated in this chapter involves a crime, either actual or potential, and therefore came into contact with the legal system of the Ancien Régime. The conflicts between a traditional way of life and the imposition of new laws, and between the Vatican with its Tridentine decrees and the French authorities who resented its interference, exploded in the scandalous case of Rohan vs. Nemours. Witness testimony revealed the problems around oral agreements in the early modern period, when the only eye-witnesses in this case were mere servants whose word, Nemours argued, could not be trusted. Traditionally, women have only succeeded in entering the historical record because they were holy or because they were scandalous.