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Jacquette de Montbron (1542-1598), a favourite of Catherine de’ Medici, is described by her brother-in-law the writer Brantôme, as an enlightened woman who had mastered the art of building, loving geometry and architecture, being a great expert and engineer of those arts. The particular intellectual environment in which Jacquette was brought up explains not only her unusual achievements, but also the decisions she made regarding her numerous possessions in Angoumois and Périgord. However, it is because of her role as a woman in the dissemination of Renaissance models and in the creation of technical and artistic projects that the complex and singular figure of Jacquette de Montbron deserves further attention. A player in the humanistic movement that was burgeoning in the provinces, and a notable patron of writers, Jaquette bears witness, amongst other things, to the ways in which female patronage could flourish and develop outside of the royal circle.