Queens in the Cult of the French Renaissance Monarchy
Queens in the Cult of the French Renaissance Monarchy

Author: Elizabeth McCartney

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2008-02

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780415940542

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This critical study traces the continuity of ideas regarding gender and moral authority in late-medieval and Reformation France. Its central concern is to interpret changing attitudes toward social and political relationships that once supported the public authority of successive queens, foremost Catherine and Marie de Medici, who presided over the French Polity, including elite institutions of the royal court and law courts. While modern scholars write vigorously about the character of French public law, arguing that jurists intentionally forged a cannon of law that excluded women from the lawful jurisdiction of government, this study reveals considerable evidence of the topoi of devotion to the queens of France by those who suffered through the political and religious contests of their age.

Queenship in Medieval Europe
Queenship in Medieval Europe

Author: Theresa Earenfight

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-09-16

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1137303921

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Medieval queens led richly complex lives and were highly visible women active in a man's world. Linked to kings by marriage, family, and property, queens were vital to the institution of monarchy. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to the study of queenship, Theresa Earenfight documents the lives and works of queens and empresses across Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The book: - Introduces pivotal research and sources in queenship studies, and includes exciting and innovative new archival research - Highlights four crucial moments across the full span of the Middle Ages – ca. 300, 700, 1100, and 1350 – when Christianity, education, lineage, and marriage law fundamentally altered the practice of queenship - Examines theories and practices of queenship in the context of wider issues of gender, authority, and power. This is an invaluable and illuminating text for students, scholars and other readers interested in the role of royal women in medieval society.

Ruling Women, Volume 1
Ruling Women, Volume 1

Author: Derval Conroy

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-28

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1137568496

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Ruling Women is the first study of its kind devoted to an analysis of the debate concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a wide range of political, feminist and dramatic texts, Conroy sets out to demonstrate that the dominant discourse which upholds patriarchy at the time is frequently in conflict with alternative discourses which frame gynæcocracy as a feasible, and laudable reality, and which reconfigure (wittingly or unwittingly) the normative paradigm of male authority. Central to the argument is an analysis of how the discourse which constructs government as a male prerogative quite simply implodes when juxtaposed with the traditional political discourse of virtue ethics. In Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France, the first volume of the two-volume study, the author examines the dominant discourse which excludes women from political authority before turning to the configuration of women and rulership in the pro-woman and egalitarian discourses of the period. Highly readable and engaging, Conroy’s work will appeal to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism, in addition to scholars of seventeenth-century literature and history of ideas.

Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen's Day
Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen's Day

Author: Virginia Scott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 135191216X

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This collaborative, interdisciplinary study explores a variety of issues in theatrical and literary history that converge in two performances given at the palace of Fontainebleau on 13 February 1564. Part of the fabled Fêtes de Fontainebleau, this carnival Sunday entertainment was produced at the behest of Catherine de Médicis and created by courtiers and artists including Pierre de Ronsard, the greatest lyric poet of the French sixteenth century. While focused on the text and production of Ronsard's Bergerie and the choice and production of the tale of Ginevra from Ariosto's Orlando furioso, the study also examines the urgent circumstances of the festival - the moment, shortly after the end of the First War of Religion, was critical and highly charged - as well as its political program and the rhetorical strategies employed by Catherine and Ronsard to promote harmony among the opposing factions of nobles. The authors' exploration of the Queen's Day also leads them to consider a range of questions pertaining to Renaissance and early modern court performance practices and literary-cultural traditions. The book is distinctive in that it crosses disciplinary and national boundaries, and in that a number of the issues it addresses have received little or no previous scholarly attention.

The Jesuits and the Monarchy
The Jesuits and the Monarchy

Author: Eric Nelson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1351887238

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The first three decades of Bourbon rule in France coincided with a period of violent fragmentation followed by rapid renewal within the French Catholic community. In the early 1590s, when Henri IV - Protestant head of the Bourbon house - acceded to the throne, French Catholics were at war with each other as Leaguer and Navarrist factions fought both militarily and ideologically for control of Catholic France. However, by 1620 a partially reconciled French church was in the process of defining a distinctive reform movement as French Catholics, encouraged by their monarchs, sought to assimilate aspects of the international Catholic reformation with Gallican traditions to renew their church. By 1650 this French Catholic church, and its distinctive reform movement forged in the decades following the collapse of the Catholic League, had become one of the most influential movements in European Catholicism. This study reconsiders the forces behind these dramatic developments within the French church through the re-examination of a classic question in French history: Why was the Society of Jesus able to integrate successfully into the French church in the opening decades of the seventeenth-century, despite being expelled from much of the kingdom in 1594 for its alleged role in the attempted assassination of the king? The expulsion, recall and subsequent integration of the Society into the French church offers a unique window into the evolution of French Catholicism between 1590 and 1620. It provides new insight into how Henri IV re-established royal authority in the French Catholic church following the collapse of the Catholic League and how this development helped to heal the rifts in French Catholicism wrought by the Leaguer movement. It also explores in unprecedented detail how Henri played an important role in channelling religious energy in his kingdom towards forms of Catholic piety -exemplified by his new allies the Jesuits - which became the foundation of

Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe
Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Author: Allison Levy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1351872982

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Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important relationship between ritual and representation. The fifteen new interdisciplinary essays assembled here read widowhood as a catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual material-representations of, for and by widows, whether through traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or through the so-called 'minor arts,' including popular print culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament, costume and gift objects, in early modern Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Arranged thematically, this unique collection allows the reader to recognize and appreciate the complexity and contradiction, iconicity and mutability, and timelessness and timeliness of widowhood and representation.

Medieval Queenship
Medieval Queenship

Author: NA NA

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1137088591

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A wide-ranging analysis of medieval queenship is provided by these essays, written by North American and European historians who have mined a rich variety of diplomatic, literary, and archaeological sources. Far more than simple biographical sketches, this volume examines queenship across a broad geographical and chronological spectrum.

Women of the Humiliati
Women of the Humiliati

Author: Sally Brasher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1135888256

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This book examines the contribution of women to the Humiliati movement, providing original archival evidence indicating that women dominated the group's membership. These findings have implications for both women's spirituality and women's work, correcting the received opinion that the patriarchal nature of Italian society and of the church limited the institutional options available to women. It also suggests that women found innovative ways to participate in the increasingly restrictive textile industry of the region. This work provides a glimpse at the novel ways in which women in medieval Italy were able to satisfy their spiritual and economic needs within the confines of a male-dominated church and society.

Dancing Queen
Dancing Queen

Author: Melinda J. Gough

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1487503660

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Under glittering lights in the Louvre palace, the French court ballets danced by Queen Marie de M?dicis prior to Henri IV's assassination in 1610 attracted thousands of spectators ranging from pickpockets to ambassadors from across Europe. Drawing on newly discovered primary sources as well as theories and methodologies derived from literary studies, political history, musicology, dance studies, and women's and gender studies, Dancing Queen traces how Marie's ballets authorized her incipient political authority through innovative verbal and visual imagery, avant-garde musical developments, and ceremonial arrangements of objects and bodies in space. Making use of women's "semi-official" status as political agents, Marie's ballets also manipulated the subtle social and cultural codes of international courtly society in order to more deftly navigate rivalries and alliances both at home and abroad. At times the queen's productions could challenge Henri IV's immediate interests, contesting the influence enjoyed by his mistresses or giving space to implied critiques of official foreign policy, for example. Such defenses of Marie's own position, though, took shape as part of a larger governmental program designed to promote the French consort queen's political authority not in its own right but as a means of maintaining power for the new Bourbon monarchy in the event of Henri IV's untimely death.