Leah Redmond Chang
Auteur de Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: From the author's homepage
Œuvres de Leah Redmond Chang
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Chang, Leah Redmond
- Date de naissance
- 1973
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- USA
- Pays (pour la carte)
- USA
Membres
Critiques
Prix et récompenses
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 1
- Membres
- 71
- Popularité
- #245,552
- Évaluation
- 4.2
- Critiques
- 3
- ISBN
- 9
- Langues
- 1
At the time of this meeting, Mary was just 18 to Knox’s 45. Her experience as a young queen navigating power, along with that of her first mother-in-law, Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France, and Catherine’s daughter Elisabeth Valois, Queen of Spain, is the subject of Leah Redmond Chang’s book. It explores a 40-year period stretching from the young Catherine’s years as a hostage of Florence’s last republican government, to Elisabeth’s untimely death and Mary’s imprisonment. Catherine, the longest-lived of the three, is a presence throughout, switching from young queen to sometimes-overbearing mother figure. This is an intriguing approach to 16th-century queenship, an area that is hardly short of studies, and all the more so for its choice of subjects.
It is the nature of hereditary monarchy that the suitability of royal children as rulers or consorts is a lottery. Elizabeth I went her own determined way as the Virgin Queen, with remarkable success. In the 17th century, Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated and exiled herself to Rome where she became a patron of the arts and enjoyed multiple affairs. In the 18th, going one better, Queen Caroline didn’t abdicate, swanned off to the Med, hooked up with the low-born Milanese Bartolomeo Pergami, and still retained such popularity in England that George IV could not remove her title. These three young queens, however, are not the sort to tear up the rule book. Catherine, consort and regent of France, her daughter Elisabeth and daughter-in-law Mary dutifully marry and try their best (in trying circumstances) to bear the necessary children. As Chang admits, neither Elisabeth nor Mary had Elizabeth Tudor’s brilliance. Nor did they match Marguerite of Navarre’s literary accomplishments or Renée de France’s important patronage of Calvin. That does, however, give us a chance to find out what it was like to be a rather average woman thrust into a role for which you had to develop the aptitude swiftly or face trouble.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Catherine Fletcher is the author of The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020).… (plus d'informations)