season four – Page 2 – The Medici Podcast

Episode 53: No Girls Allowed

Catherine de’ Medici has just married into the monarchy of France, arguably the oldest surviving Catholic Christian monarchy in Europe. So it’s a good time to ask the question that would shape Catherine’s life: how was it that a monarchy that barred women and their children from the crown also had a long history of powerful women guiding it?

A funerary monument to Jeanne of Navarre (1328-1349) at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.. At only the age of four or five years old, she became the center of a political controversy over royal inheritance that would lay the groundwork for the Salic Law that would bar women from ever inheriting the throne of France in their own right. Source: Acoma.

A portrait by Jean Clouet of Louise of Savoy, the mother of King François I (date unknown). She ruled as regent for her son while he was off at war, but even when he was present, she remained a powerful political force. Source: The Bemberg Foundation, Toulouse.

Transcript

So I hope you weren’t expecting for me to update you on French history up to the point of Catherine’s marriage in 1533. But for this episode I will give you a crash course on France’s monarchy, the institution that Catherine found herself literally wedded to, and what it meant to be a woman within it.

Episode 52: The Little Duchess

From the start of her life, the orphaned Catherine’s life was marred by politics. First, she was destined to be a figurehead for her great-uncle’s territorial ambitions. Then she was a hostage blamed for the crimes of her family, and next a pawn on the royal marriage market. No one could have guessed that the future had grander things in store for her than just a marriage to some prince…

Claude Corneille de Lyon’s portrait of Catherine de’ Medici as a young woman, circa 1540. Source: Polesden Lacey, Surrey.

The piazza of the church and convent of Santa Maria Annunziata, where Catherine spent perhaps the happiest years of her childhood. Source: Museo Galileo, Erik Franchi.

Transcript

If anyone in history was ever actually cursed from birth, it may have been Catherine de’ Medici. After giving birth to her, her mother Madeliene de La Tour d’Auvergne died less than a week after her birth from complications.