Daughter of France, Italian Princess, Protector of Protestants

Abstract

O ne of the exciting developments in the growth of court studies as an academic discipline over the past decade has been a shift in focus away from monarchs and first ministers, or even from queen-consorts, towards more ancillary members of the court, notably royal siblings or cousins. There is still a long way to go before we develop a full picture of all of the working parts of the early modern monarchy in Europe, as many studies of such individuals remain within the silos of a national histories and therefore lack the comparative element. This is one of the key strengths of this volume about Renée de France (–), daughter of a king and sister of a queen, who then crossed borders to become an Italian duchess. The essays look at her life in both geographical spaces and are written by scholars of both France and Italy. Moreover, this group of scholars also crosses academic boundaries, in coming from the disciplines of history, art history, languages and literature. Preferred styles of writing scholarly articles differ between national groups and academic disciplines, so the two co-editors, Peebles and Scarlatta, are to be highly commended for pulling all of these chapters together into such a coherent and readable collection. The volume as a whole reveals a woman who early on adopted the wisdom and skills of her royal foremothers and used these tools to forge her identity as a consort in an Italian court famed for its cultural patronage, and to maintain this identity in the face of adversity. She did this even when confronted with a religious inquisition in Ferrara and later in life after she returned to France where she strove to provide a safe haven for Protestants in the turbulent early years of the Wars of Religion. Renée’s truly admirable achievement was the maintenance of two identities throughout much of this, acting as both an independent royal woman, daughter of a king, and loyal (most of the time) consort to a prince of relatively lower rank. Renée de France was the younger daughter of King Louis XII and Anne, duchess of Brittany. Her older sister Claude was married to King Francis I, leaving Renée as the potential heiress of a sovereign duchy of Brittany. Complex deals were done in the marriage contract of  to ensure this did not happen and that Brittany was ultimately annexed to France, but even as late as , the French Crown worried that Renée, or her daughter Anne, duchess of Guise would revive the claims, so confirmed her possession of the lucrative duchy of