Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power
By Leah Redmond Chang.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023.
Hardcover, 512 pages, $35.00.
Reviewed by Jesse Russell.
In the Anglophone world, there is one (and only one) Renaissance queen: Elizabeth Tudor. Certainly, other English-speaking queens, such as the oft-confused Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart, may make an appearance in some discourse, but they pale in comparison to the popularity of “Good Queen Bess.” There may be a general sense that there was the “Queen of France” or the “Queen of Spain,” but these figures are usually overshadowed by their husbands and fathers. In Young Queens: Renaissance Women and the Price of Power, Leah Redmond Chang lifts the veil on three of the most important (female or otherwise) figures of the Renaissance: Mary, Queen of Scots, Catherine de Medici, and Catherine’s daughter, Elisabeth de Valois. In her work, Chang further provides a much-needed window into the world of Renaissance France for Anglophone readers who generally are much more preoccupied with matters in the British Isles.
While the twenty-first century (even more than the twentieth) is defined by boredom, the lives of these three Renaissance queens were marked by adventure, glory, and tragedy. The work begins in July of 1530 with a young Catherine de Medici hiding in a Benedictine convent on Florence’s Via Ghibellina. Catherine was being held hostage by the Republican Council of Florence, and Clement VII, Catherine’s Medici relative, was besieging the city. Led by its secretary, Silvestro Aldobrandini, the Council broke into the convent to capture Catherine, who stood her ground against the kidnappers. Catherine de Medici and Mary Stuart are remembered as important historical figures in their own right. However, Elisabeth de Valois is usually overshadowed by her much more famous husband, Philip II. In Young Queens, Chang explores the three queens as important historical figures and women with important personal lives. Indeed, Chang notes that the three women lived during an age of increase in female monarchic power in Europe. The three queens lived together in France but were separated after the death of Henry II in 1559.
Catherine de Medici is better known as a French queen than as the scion of an Italian banking family. Chang notes that upon moving to France to marry the man who would become Henry II (himself made [in]famous by his death by a jousting accident), Catherine changed her name from the Italian Caterina to the French Caterine. She was nonetheless the daughter of Lorenzo di Piero de’Medici (grandson of the more famous Il Magnifico). Her mother, however, was the French countess, Madeleine de La Tour Auvergne (the marriage of Catherine’s parents had been arranged by Pope Leo X as well as the French King Francis). The Medici family at this time was in a state of decline from its previous grandeur; moreover, despite their wealth and fame, the Medici were merely commoners and not nobles, and thus a marriage into Madeleine de La Tour’s noble Valois family would strengthen the faltering Italian banking clan.
Catherine was raised in the firmly Catholic world of Italy. However, even Italy was not untouched by the political tumult of the sixteenth century—Charles V’s troops sacked Rome in 1527, and the Medici city of Florence was in turmoil. The young Catherine was sent to meet her future husband in 1533. She served during important construction projects in France and was at the heart of the French wars of religion. However, as Chang importantly notes, Catherine was a mother who gave birth to kings and queens. Catherine was perhaps the cleverest of the three women and the one who, at least unofficially, exercised the most political power.
Mary Stuart was raised with Catherine’s daughter Elisabeth de Valois in the French royal household. Mary had precedence over Elisabeth due to her projected rule as sovereign queen of Scotland, while Elisabeth, at best, could be queen consort to a sovereign queen. Despite the association between Scotland and rough manners (a stereotype that exists to this day), Mary displayed a natural elegance as a child; she was further known for her beauty and was called “brighter than a Scottish sun.” Mary, however, was not known for her intelligence—a burden that would plague her in her adult years. Chang notes the intellectual contrast between Mary and her English cousin Elizabeth Tudor.
The French Elisabeth de Valois and Mary Stuart would part ways in 1559 when Elisabeth left to marry Philip II, with whom she would share a loving marriage that ended with Elisabeth’s untimely death. Chang’s depiction of Philip II is honest and fair—a rarity in discussion of the Spanish king, whose faults are often overlooked by Catholic historians and who is likewise demonized by some Protestant and progressive writers. Philip and Elisabeth de Valois seemed genuinely to love one another, but Philip was driven by workaholism (as well as a sincere Catholic devotion to evangelization) and the desire to spread Spanish imperial power throughout the world—Philip’s motto was the triumphant No sufficit orbis or “the world is not enough.”
Mary Stuart would famously become queen of Scotland and find herself swept away and manipulated by a series of men—first Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (who was murdered)—and then James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Mary Stuart was also caught in the current of the Reformation that would sweep through Scotland and was, after being imprisoned in Lochleven Castle, (in)famously executed by order of her cousin, Elizabeth Tudor. Catherine de Medici, however, would live to the age of 69, outliving her husband as well as some of her children. As Chang notes, Catherine was both loved and hated—some suggested that she may have had a hand in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.
Within the wider Western world, there is a turn against what is often characterized as progress or “woke” politics. One of the principal targets of the anti-woke movement is the “girl boss.” This figure who appears in films, television programs, as well as carefully curated social media accounts, performs fantastic acts of physical and intellectual aggression against various symbols of the patriarchy. While these girl bosses are ridiculed precisely because they are so (allegedly) unrealistic, there are, in fact, many women throughout human history who performed heroic feats of intelligence and moral as well as physical strength. Moreover, the mockery of the girl boss could just as easily be directed at contemporary twenty-first-century depictions of males. The truth of the matter is that history, rather than being a series of unfortunate events, in fact, contains (at times deeply flawed) humans whose complex lives can be mined for examples of greatness. Providing a complex portrait of three Renaissance figures (who are not without their faults), in Young Queens, Leah Redmond Change presents three examples of women in full.
Jesse Russell has written for publications such as Catholic World Report, The Claremont Review of Books Digital, and Front Porch Republic.
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