The calculated use of feminine rhetoric in Catherine de’ Medici’s correspondence
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81
Catherine de’ Medici wrote regularly to her sister-in-law and her daughters who were married to European princes, to the princesses of the other reigning houses of the continent, as well as to the great French aristocrats; she discusses in these letters—and sometimes in those she addresses to the husbands of these women—“feminine” themes such as health, motherhood, and children. Should we therefore conclude that the Queen Mother had a feminine writing style? This paper rather proposes to reflect on how the Queen Mother, or those involved in preparing her correspondence, mobilized her femininity according to the objectives her letters must achieve. In other words, rather than starting with the idea that Catherine de’ Medici wrote as a woman because she was a woman, the assumption on which this paper is based is that this was simply one of the possibilities opened to her by her gender. Concerning her correspondence, this leads to the analysis of what she could do as a woman—to consider, in other words, her agency: her specific ability to act on the world. Thus, by playing with categories, by manipulating them or adopting them, the Queen Mother built the widest possible range of options and reinforced the efficiency of monarchical communication, her correspondence being of an official nature and her letters almost systematically accompanying those of the king.
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