The Identities Of Catherine De Medici

Download or read book The Identities of Catherine de' Medici written by Susan Broomhall and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative analysis of the representational strategies that constructed Catherine de’ Medici and sought to explain her behaviour and motivations.

Download or read book Madame Serpent written by Jean Plaidy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fictional account of Catherine de' Medici, the fourteen-year-old reluctant Italian bride to the second son of the King of France, Henry, during the sixteenth-century.

Download or read book The Devil's Queen written by Jeanne Kalogridis and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009-07-21 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Jeanne Kalogridis, the bestselling author of I, Mona Lisa and The Borgia Bride, comes a new novel that tells the passionate story of a queen who loved not wisely . . . but all too well. Confidante of Nostradamus, scheming mother-in-law to Mary, Queen of Scots, and architect of the bloody St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Catherine de Medici is one of the most maligned monarchs in history. In her latest historical fiction, Jeanne Kalogridis tells Catherine's story—that of a tender young girl, destined to be a pawn in Machiavellian games. Born into one of Florence's most powerful families, Catherine was soon left a fabulously rich heiress by the early deaths of her parents. Violent conflict rent the city state and she found herself imprisoned and threatened by her family's enemies before finally being released and married off to the handsome Prince Henry of France. Overshadowed by her husband's mistress, the gorgeous, conniving Diane de Poitiers, and unable to bear children, Catherine resorted to the dark arts of sorcery to win Henry's love and enhance her fertility—for which she would pay a price. Against the lavish and decadent backdrop of the French court, and Catherine's blood-soaked visions of the future, Kalogridis reveals the great love and desire Catherine bore for her husband, Henry, and her stark determination to keep her sons on the throne.

Download or read book Catherine de' Medici written by Mary Hollingsworth and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life and times of Catherine de’ Medici—the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe—as seen through her often controversial role in religion and the arts. During an age of heightened religious conflict, Catherine de' Medici lived her life at the center of sixteenth-century European and French politics. Daughter of Lorenzo II, the Medici ruler of Florence—and then wedded to a French prince by papal decree at the age of fourteen—Catherine first became queen consort of France and then mother to three French kings (Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III) who reigned in an era of almost continuous civil and religious strife. A lavish promoter of the arts, Catherine patronized poets, painters, and sculptors; lavished ruinous sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces; and masterminded spectacular entertainments and tournaments that prefigure the splendor and ritual of the court of Versailles. Catherine maintained eighty ladies-in-waiting at court; it was rumored she used these women as bait to seduce courtiers for her political ends. Her admiration for the seer Nostradamus fueled claims of her love for the occult and the dark arts. Posterity has condemned her as the epitome of the scheming royal matriarch, her reputation tainted forever by her role in instigating the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants in 1572. Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen is Mary Hollingsworth's evocative, authoritative biography of the most extraordiary woman of the sixteenth-century.

Download or read book Catherine de Medici written by and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Katie Barclay and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern European world. In addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe.

Download or read book Catherine de'Medici written by R J Knecht and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catherine de' Medici (1519-89) was the wife of one king of France and the mother of three more - the last, sorry representatives of the Valois, who had ruled France since 1328. She herself is of preeminent importance to French history, and one of the most controversial of all historical figures. Despised until she was powerful enough to be hated, she was, in her own lifetime and since, the subject of a "Black Legend" that has made her a favourite subject of historical novelists (most notably Alexandre Dumas, whose Reine Margot has recently had new currency on film). Yet there is no recent biography of her in English. This new study, by a leading scholar of Renaissance France, is a major event. Catherine, a neglected and insignificant member of the Florentine Medici, entered French history in 1533 when she married the son of Francis I for short-lived political reasons: her uncle was pope Clement VII, who died the following year. Now of no diplomatic value, Catherine was treated with contempt at the French court even after her husband's accession as Henry II in 1547. Even so, she gave him ten children before he was killed in a tournament in 1559. She was left with three young boys, who succeeded to the throne as Francis II (1559-60), Charles IX (1560-74) and Henry III (1574-89). As regent and queen-mother, a woman and with no natural power-base of her own, she faced impossible odds. France was accelerating into chaos, with political faction at court and religious conflict throughout the land. As the country disintegrated, Catherine's overriding concern was for the interests of her children. She was tireless in her efforts to protect her sons' inheritance, and to settle her daughters in advantageous marriages. But France needed more. Catherine herself was both peace-loving and, in an age of frenzied religious hatred, unbigoted. She tried to use the Huguenots to counterbalance the growing power of the ultra-Catholic Guises but extremism on all sides frustrated her. She was drawn into the violence. Her name is ineradicably associated with its culmination, the Massacre of St Bartholomew (24 August 1572), when thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and elsewhere. To this day no-one knows for certain whether Catherine instigated the massacre or not, but here Robert Knecht explores the probabilities in a notably level-headed fashion. His book is a gripping narrative in its own right. It offers both a lucid exposition of immensely complex events (with their profound imact on the future of France), and also a convincing portrait of its enigmatic central character. In going behind the familiar Black Legend, Professor Knecht does not make the mistake of whitewashing Catherine; but he shows how intractable was her world, and how shifty or intransigent the people with whom she had to deal. For all her flaws, she emerges as a more sympathetic - and, in her pragmatism, more modern - figure than most of her leading contemporaries.