Tag Archive: Catherine de Medici
By C. W. Gortner
Catherine de Medici is known as the evil queen who masterminded a massacre. Or so the legend says. In truth, Catherine has been the target of a smear campaign that began in her lifetime and culminated with Alexander Dumas’s famous depiction of her in his novel La Reine Margot. Dumas exalted the queen we love to hate and enshrined her as history’s black widow.
Of Italian birth, Catherine came to France as a teenager to wed Henri II. To this day, she is not considered French; her background as a Medici made her a parvenu and prejudice against her because of her nationality haunted her throughout her life. Italians were despised as experts in the black arts; Catherine’s natural inclination toward her fellow countrymen was thus often used against her.
One of the greatest misconceptions is that Catherine nurtured a “passion for power”—another Italian trait. Though not raised to rule, she became regent for her sons in a kingdom torn apart by war. Her alleged ambition was in fact an effort to defend her adopted realm. While she made serious errors, she was usually motivated by the urgency to salvage a crisis than any cold-blooded urge to destroy her foes.
In the end, she is best revealed by her own words: “It is great suffering to be always fearful.”
C.W. Gortner, author of The Confessions of Catherine de Medici: A Novel
, holds an MFA in Writing, with an emphasis in Renaissance Studies. Half Spanish by birth, he was raised in southern Spain and has traveled extensively to research his books. He is currently at work on The Princess Isabella, a novel about the early reign of Isabella of Castile, as well as The Tudor Secret, Book One in The Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles. C.W. is available to chat with book groups via speaker phone or Skype. To book a chat and learn more about his work, please click here.
IMAGE: Portrait of Catherine De Medici and her children
Congratulations to the following W & M winners of this book:
Jennifer, Kitty, and Dana
By Randi Hutter Epstein
Last year, I visited a sperm bank (was awash in a winter wonderland of frozen samples), watched a woman have her egg frozen, and sorted through websites of available egg donors. Would anyone really want an egg from a woman who put cheerleading under academic information in her donor-web entry? That was Donor 850991 in the Donor Egg Bank. This was all, of course, for book research. But even before I started my journey, I knew that for many couples, today, getting pregnant means marching through a whirlwind of conflicting advice and sorting through all sorts of low-tech and high-tech remedies.
What I didn’t know was that our great-great-great grandmothers, who may have been literally scared to death when pregnant, were bombarded with often contradictory words of wisdom. And they, too, had to pick and choose between an array of how-to-get-pregnant treatments.
Take Catherine de Medici, France’s sixteenth century Queen, for one. For years, the teenage queen (she married at 14) could not get pregnant. First, like so many women today, she tried folk remedies. But in her case, the Queen drank the urine of a mare and then soaked her “source of life” (vagina?) in a sack of cow manure mixed with ground stag’s antlers. The king was never attracted to his wife, preferring his mistress Diane de Poitiers. I can’t imagine the dung diaper helped get her back her man.
The teenage Queen then tried her own tactic. She had her servants drill a hole in the floor so she could watch her husband have sex with his mistress and learn a thing or two. Talk about an emotionally painful remedy. Finally, the two youngsters went to see a doctor who diagnosed the couple with physically deformed reproductive organs. We don’t know what he saw, what he did, or what he recommended, but shortly thereafter, they went on to have nine children.
A sampling of her articles are available at www.randihutterepstein.com
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