Abstract
The Discours Merveilleux de la Vie…de Catherine de Medicis1 [The Marvelous Discourse of the Life of Catherine de Medici], a tract published in 1574 anonymously, but attributed to Henri Estienne, was brought out in an English edition in 1693. The preface began: “no greater injury can be done to Posterity, than to bury in Oblivion the cursed Memory of those, whose Ambitious Designs for Rule and Empire have been managed with such Furious Lusts, that they have not stuck, in their pursuit of them, to commit the basest Villanies.”2 Thus, one hundred years after the death of Catherine de Medici, the Black Legend of the wicked Italian Queen surfaced again as an English tract in which John Wyat, the publisher, warned “to attain her ambitious Designs with Masculine thoughts, exchanged the imperfections of her Sex.”3 The Black Legend, the “cursed Memory” of Catherine de Medici, began as an attempt to bring down the regency of the Queen Mother, using anti-Italian and misogynist arguments about how unnatural it was to have a Queen.4 Reading the Black Legend carefully over time, we can detect the gender codes of the period in which the myth is revived.
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Notes
Nicola Mary Sutherland, Catherine de Medici and the Ancien Régime (London: Historical Association, 1966)
and Robert Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomews Day Massacres, 1572–76 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Robert J. Knecht, Catherine de’Medici (New York: Addison Wesley Longman Inc., 1998), p. 58.
Robert M. Kingdon, Myths About the St. Bartholomews Day Massacres, 1572–76 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 20–211.
Douglas Cole, Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).
A. D. Wright and Virginia F. Stern, In Search of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Vanguard Press, 1965), p. 35;
Andrew M. Kirk, The Mirror of Confusion: The Representation of French History in English Renaissance Drama (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996), p. 90.
Roger Sales, Christopher Marlowe (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 10, 37.
Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris in The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), pp. 535–84.
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 61–62.
Penny Roberts, “Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris: a historical perspective,” Renaissance Studies, 9, no. 4 (1995), pp. 430–41.
Janet Letts, Legendary Lives in La Princesse de Cleves (Charlottesville: Rockwood Press, 1998), pp. 67–71, 229–30.
Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725, ed. Arundell Esdaile (London: Oxford University Press, 1922) in British Biographical Archive II (Microfiche edition, London: K.G. Saur, 1991), p. 106.
Lois G. Schwoerer, “The Queen as Regent and Patron,” in The Age of William HI and Mary II: Power, Politics and Patronage 1688—1702, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin and Martha Hamilton-Phillips (College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1989), p. 222.
Daniel Hamiche, Le Théâtre et la Révolution: La Lutte de Classes au Théâtre en 1789 et en 1793 (Paris: UGE, 1973);
Jacques Boncompain, “Théâtre et Formation des Consciences: L’Example de Charles LX,” Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre, 41:1 (1989), pp. 44–48.
Charles Ostyn, “Le proces de Marie Antoinette,” La Revolution Française, 6 (1884), pp. 646–64 contains the complete transcription of the trial.
Nicole Cazauran, Catherine de Médias et son temps dans la Comedie Humaine (Lille: Université de Lille, 1977), pp. 48–9. Cazauran provides a detailed study of Balzac’s inconsistencies in dealing with Catherine.
Frank Paul Bowman, Prosper Mérimée: Heroism, Pessimism, and Lrony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), p. 29.
Prosper Mérimée, Chronique du Règne de Charles LX. Preface (Paris: Charpentier, 1865), p. 6.
Honoré de Balzac, Sur Catherine de Médicis in Oeuvres Completes, vol. 15 (Paris: Grapinhot, 1967), pp. 471–72.
Jo Burr Margadant, “The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France,” in The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Jo Burr Margadant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 33–71.
Alexandre Dumas, La Reine Margot, ed. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 12.
Nicola Mary Sutherland, Princes, Politics, and Religion, 1547–1589 (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), p. 247.
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© 2003 Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, Debra Barrett-Graves
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Kruse, E. (2003). The Woman in Black: The Image of Catherine de Medici from Marlowe to Queen Margot. In: Levin, C., Carney, J.E., Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10676-6_14
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