YOUNG QUEENS: Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary Queen of Scots
In which I rave about Leah Redmond Chang's terrific new book, and update readers on my own book revisions in progress.
This morning I finished reading YOUNG QUEENS: THREE RENAISSANCE WOMEN AND THE PRICE OF POWER (Bloomsbury/Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2023). Authored by my dear friend and writing think-tank buddy Leah Redmond Chang and weighing in at over 400 pages before the notes, this book is as compelling and as gorgeous a read as it is long.
With the suspense of a Jason Bourne novel (or movie) but with teen- and tween-sized protagonists wielding quills instead of Kalashnikovs, turning curtsies not cartwheels, with platform-soled, backless silk chapins on their little feet (Elisabeth de Valois came to love Spanish footwear), the book is a poignant, immersive, and altogether magnificent re-telling of the intertwined lives of three women who became the very young queens of France, Spain, and Scotland.
Catherine de’ Medici married Henri II of France and had MANY children, three of whom would, in turn, became kings during childhood. After the death of her husband, Catherine ruled for years as regent, and then as unofficial advisor, to her sons in their crowns.
Elisabeth de Valois, Catherine’s daughter, became the third wife of Philip II of Spain (the one who had married Mary I of England, and was, much later, the king behind the Spanish Armada).
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots was brought up in France. Her own mother, Marie de Guise, was French, and ruled as regent in Scotland. Meanwhile, Mary grew up (a little) at the French court, among Catherine’s children. Mary married Catherine’s son, Francis, heir to the throne, when Mary was fifteen, and Francis was fourteen. I’ll draw a veil over the harrowing, disrupted, and action-packed life Mary was to lead: no spoilers!
Looking at three young queens together — with their supporting casts of more queens and princesses, notably Elizabeth I of England — allows Redmond Chang to spot patterns: opportunities, challenges, expectations, and much creativity and strength of will, tempered with great feeling.
Redmond Chang unfurls the lives, loves, and losses of these queens through a Pandora’s box of vivid sources. Diplomatic missives. Poisonous pamphlets. Chronicles, poems, and portraits. And there were many, many private letters, typically delivered by messenger, sometimes written in cipher, and even locked shut with intricate paper mechanisms that could not be unpicked by a spy (or person dying of curiosity) without blowing their cover.
Getting news between Catherine de’ Medici in Paris and her daughter Elisabeth de Valois in Madrid involved horsed couriers scaling the tricksy, sometimes treacherous mountain passes of the Pyrenees.
The action of YOUNG QUEENS unfolds over decades, not days. And yet it always feels tense and fast. Monarchs make decisions about matters of life and state. Teeny children get very sick, repeatedly. There are hasty getaways by rowboat or by window. People end up imprisoned in castles — of course! There’s some Renaissance jousting ending in Some Really Bad Luck. And there are literal hostage situations and cloak-and-dagger murders.
A page into the Prologue, I was intellectually and emotionally hooked, a condition that persisted to the final page. What struck me repeatedly was the TEENY, TINY-ness of so many princesses and princes who became monarchs, dukes, and duchesses in their infancy, weighted down with the hopes and hates of dynastic families, and of three kingdoms undergoing religious breakdown. During the sixteenth century, the Church under the Pope in Rome splintered into shards in the conflicts now called the Protestant Reformation.
This was also an era in which the ennobled classes did much greedy side-eyeing of other people’s lands. Marriage alliances were a cheaper way of bequeathing a new kingdom to your descendants than going to war to acquire it, although both happened.
What makes a book centred on queens who reigned different from one centred on kings? The answer starts and ends with a queen’s potential to bear children: to continue the dynastic line. Through the babies (especially sons) they birthed, they confected the peace and power-base that a straightforward succession-line brought to a kingdom — assuming these kids survived long enough; so many did not.
And in a society where misogyny and child marriage were rife, not even a queen regnant was safe.
There was a cost for these queens, these women who were expected to become mothers. Always a cost. In this era of medicine I sure-as-hell wouldn’t want to experience, childbirth was life-threatening much more often that it is in many places today (although with the rolling back of women’s rights to their own bodies in more than one country, there is some backsliding going on — history never just flows down a hill like water). There are potions, poultices, and bouts of bloodletting.
This rich and complex story is laid out for easy reading. There are four parts, all composed of short chapters, themselves divided into sections of two to six pages. YOUNG QUEENS is easy to pick up and put down during a busy week or month or two without losing the thread.
Order your copy now if you can! And perhaps you can even catch Leah speaking live (in person and on YouTube) at the US book launch in Washington, DC, at that most iconic of bookstores, Politics & Prose (details at the bottom of this page).
Learning to re-write
In my own book news, I am at the sharpest end of Version 2 of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY. The plan is to submit the revised draft to my editor next month. Consequently this will be my last newsletter until that happens (soon after Labor Day, I hope). When I emerge from the cave into which I am about to retreat, you may be sure of a delirious announcement!
You can find me on BlueSky ( @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social ) and on Instagram ( @surekhadavies ).
In the Note below I’ve added links to Leah’s upcoming hybrid book launch and to my earlier book-focused newsletters you may have missed. So many wonderful books; so little time.
Notes and links
Leah Redmond Chang’s website is at this link — and she has a newsletter, too!
For the Tuesday, August 15, 7pm Washington, DC book launch and reading at Politics & Prose, click here. For the live video version of the talk (live in 2.5 days), click here. And check your time zones…. .
For more book thoughts, you might try my last three newsletters, in which I talk about three books I loved reading this year:
For a global story of the African American experience, check out Tamara J. Walker’s BEYOND THE SHORES: A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS ABROAD.
The second half of this newsletter features Noreen Masud’s travelogue and memoir of a transcontinental getaway, A FLAT PLACE.
Nathan Munday’s WHALING is a lyrical, atmospheric thriller, set around a slightly creepy beach. And there is one hell of a whale.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).