Book review: Young Queens a vibrant retelling of three Renaissance women’s herstories

Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women And The Price Of Power

By Leah Redmond ChangHistory/Bloomsbury/Hardcover/513 pages/$41.28/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3snJYHp)
4 stars

Young Queens is the latest book to challenge traditionally male-centric historical narratives.

Historian Leah Redmond Chang’s deeply researched and snappily told narrative is more than mere woke tokenism. It revisits the lives of three royal women, tied by blood and politics in 16th-century Europe, and in retelling their stories from a female-centric perspective, reveals new nuances to herstories.

The longest reigning royal woman in this narrative is Catherine de’ Medici, a pawn in the Italian Medici family’s social climbing schemes, who comes into her own after the shocking and unexpected death of her husband, Henry II, King of France.

Her eldest daughter Elisabeth de Valois is born into the preset role of royal consort and married off to King Philip II to seal an uneasy peace between France and Spain.

Last but not least is Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, who inherited the throne at the tender age of six days and was raised in the French court as a queen consort to Francis, the French Dauphin (heir apparent).

The tangled family trees take a while to sort out if the reader is completely new to Renaissance Europe history. It does not help that all the royal women seemed to be named Mary, Catherine and Elizabeth.

Mary Stuart, for example, is not to be confused with Mary Tudor, daughter of England’s King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

Mary Stuart, as the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor (King Henry VIII’s sister), was in the line of succession for the English throne, which made her a coveted trophy bride for assorted continental royal sons as well as a threat to England’s Queen Elizabeth I.

This short summation hints at the political complexities embodied, literally, in these women.

As royal women, their bodies were not their own, but bargaining chips to be wedded and bedded for various reasons, ranging from the continuation of royal lineages to the sealing of peace treaties in an age of near constant warfare.

Diving deeply into surviving letters and records written not only by the women themselves, but also by courtiers and ambassadors, Chang draws out the personal relationships between these women.

Catherine is the classic passive-aggressive matriarch, watching over Elisabeth and Mary with eagle eyes. Elisabeth is the good girl, always striving to meet her mother’s expectations even as she is forced to leave everything she knows and loves for a foreign country. Mary starts out the golden girl, blessed with charisma, beauty and status, but ends as a tragic figure, a victim of patriarchy and politics.

The most engaging aspect of this pop history are the lively portraits of the women which emerge from Chang’s empathetic pen. Grounded in meticulously researched detail, her account leaps off the page with energy and vivacity.

There are anecdotes of Elisabeth in the royal nursery trailing after the prettier and more glamorous Mary.

Terrifying accounts of the non-existence of “medical” care for women, which could not even identify pregnancies and prescribed bleedings as a cure-all.

And the detailing of Elisabeth’s staggering dowry, including “coffers of jewels, mounds of plate for her table, wagonloads of furniture and musical instruments” as well as hundreds of people including favoured ladies-in-waiting and gardeners.

The prologue sets the scene deftly in a few pages.

Chang recounts a famous early incident in Catherine’s childhood when members of Florence’s Republican Council burst into the Le Murate convent to grab her as leverage against her uncle, the Medici Pope Clement VII, who was then besieging the city.

Catherine, only 11 years old, faced down her would-be kidnapper and declared her intention to become a nun. When she was picked up bodily and carried through the streets, she wailed and prayed until her abductor promised her safety.

“At 11 years old, she had learned that she had a voice. She’d learned that men would listen,” Chang concludes.

Catherine would find that exercising her voice would entail not just courage, but also patience and guile.

She married Henry when she was only 14. Her husband was ruled by his mistress Diane de Poitiers. Despite her status as the legitimate wife, Catherine’s position was precarious as she did not conceive in the first 10 years of her marriage.

Her daughter Elisabeth, married off at 13 to the then 32-year-old King Philip II, would face struggles with her own fertility. Mary Stuart was luckier as her marriage happened when she was 15 and, unlike Catherine and Elisabeth, Mary had lived at the French court from age six and grew up with her future husband.

The youth of these girls at their marriage comes as a shock to modern sensibilities. So, too, the harshly public focus on their bodies, with issues such as menarche and menstrual cycles the object of much discussion and gossip in the courts.

Royal status also did not protect women from violence: “Sexual assault was a fact of life in the 16th century, both at court and in the country.”

Mary would discover this to her detriment as Chang pulls together a convincing case that her ill-advised second marriage to James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, happened in the aftermath of an assault.

Parsing an explanatory letter Mary sent to Catherine, Chang notes that Mary did not use the word “rape” nor the period specific term “ravish”. Instead, there is “a rambling circuitousness tinged with alarm” even as Mary says Hepburn had resorted to “force” after she repeatedly turned down his marriage proposal.

Despite the gender power imbalance in the system, all three women tried their best to fulfil their duty even as they hoped for happiness and fulfilment in their personal lives.

Chang’s account gives readers pause to reconsider some of the stereotyped images of these women, who have been judged and found lacking in male-centric accounts over the centuries. That alone makes this tale of three faraway and long-dead queens feel very contemporary indeed.

If you like this, read: Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Liveright, 2018, 128 pages, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3MZSrb9). The legendary scholar of Roman history tracks, in this brisk, crisp read, how Roman speech and narrative structures have anchored discrimination in Western culture in ways that still mute modern women.

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