Anne de Bretagne, Claude de France, and the Roots of Renée’s Persona

Wilson-Chevalier, Kathleen

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-69121-9_2

Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier⁵

Part of the book series: Queenship and Power ((QAP))

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Abstract

Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier explores Renée’s upbringing in France, delineating the figures who shaped her secular and religious sense of self. She firmly establishes the emotional and intellectual role of a strong female dynastic line on Renée’s adult life, including her mother, Anne de Bretagne’s educational, economic, financial, and religious legacy, and her godmother, Anne de France’s tradition of fostering young women. This chapter examines the influence of Renée’s governess, Michelle de Saubonne, Baronne de Soubise, and the liberal religious upbringing of the young princesses, who, from early childhood, were surrounded by trusted people and prelates engaged in religious reform in an effort to cultivate a “learned, rejuvenated Church.” Renée would later draw on these traditions to structure her own court, where she would exercise charitable and protective actions toward the religiously persecuted and serve as a hub for dissidence and tolerance at the Ferrarese court and beyond.

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Lineage and Coming into Her Own

An Anglo-Saxon Princess

A Florentine ambassador recounts that on May 25, 1510, the future Renée de France emitted a signal from within Queen Anne de Bretagne’s womb.^{Footnote 1} Exactly five months later, Renée emerged into a realm governed by her father King Louis XII, teeming with great ladies of clout. In many a European court, princesses were poised as the head of households over which and from which they ruled, generally alongside their princely kin.^{Footnote 2} Anne de Bretagne is henceforth recognized as a “major woman of State,”^{Footnote 3} and it was hard to match the spectacular aura of her royal court, which reflected and refracted her power. Like all power though, Anne’s was predicated on an unstable balancing act.^{Footnote 4} Twice queen, but sovereign duchess, too, Anne built upon models of exemplary ladies of her caliber, with whom she had much in common yet who could at any moment pose a threat, especially because she lacked a male heir in the land of Salic law. Having brilliantly mastered the rules of the beastly courtly game, Anne was bent on transmitting her painstakingly acquired skills to her heiresses, Renée and her older sister Claude. Both were raised around their mother’s (lost) tapestries of Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies, and the broader universe haunted by these privileged filles de France afforded copious gendered lessons to be absorbed.^{Footnote 5} Amboise, a major castellar base that Anne and her progeny frequented throughout their lives, had been the hub of the (unnamed) regency of one of Renée’s godmothers, Anne de France, during Queen Anne’s first marriage.^{Footnote 6} The elder Anne was a formidable woman of power in her own right. At the summit of the numerous princesses also groomed in her orbit were the reigning regent of the Low Countries, Marguerite d’Autriche, and the rising political star Louise de Savoie, chatelaine of Amboise from 1500.^{Footnote 7} When death hovered over Anne de Bretagne, whose second reign radiated out from the nearby castle of Blois, the queen confided her daughters and her possessions to Louise (or so Louise proclaimed).^{Footnote 8} Only Anne’s political acumen could have led her to gamble on Louise, set to rise to power alongside her beloved son King François I and Anne’s elder daughter Claude. After Anne de Bretagne expired in early 1514, not yet thirty-seven, the futures of her precious daughters were unsure. Would the pawns she had set in place suffice to protect the thirty-seven-year-old Louise’s young “wards”?

Queen/Duchess Anne’s impending successor Claude was only fourteen at her mother’s demise, and the future Duchess of Ferrara, Renée, not quite three years and three months old. A worthy maternal dynasty had fortunately girded their way. Anne’s short-lived mother Marguerite de Foix-Navarre, already afflicted with the absence of a male heir,^{Footnote 9} had been well groomed by her own mother Éléonore, queen regnant of Navarre for almost twenty-five years.^{Footnote 10} Prior to the Breton États’ ratification of female succession on February 8, 1486, acting regent Anne de France had been pressuring Marguerite to accept a royal marriage for her nine-year-old daughter Anne.^{Footnote 11} Before her decease the following May, Pierre Le Baud had dedicated to Marguerite his Genealogie des tres anciens roys, ducs et princes qui, au temps passé, ont regy et gouverné ceste royalle principauté de Bretagne, justifying the rule of women in Breton history.^{Footnote 12} In late 1498, in the wake of the Italian wars and as she was completing the negotiation of her strong second marriage contract, Anne commissioned three tombs, including a magnificent Franco-Italian sepulcher honoring the mother who had asserted her rights (Fig. 2.1) as well as the father from whom her duchy of Brittany accrued.^{Footnote 13} Alone, (until recent catastrophe) the mother-daughter pair continued to command over the damaged west window of the cathedral of Nantes, dated to the period when Anne lavishly transferred Marguerite’s remains from there to the Carmelite convent upon finalization of the tomb in 1507.^{Footnote 14} When its chief sculptor Michel Colombe carved his Janus-like self-portrait on the reverse of the youthful Allegory of Prudence (Fig. 2.2), symbolizing an ancient male past, he gave added importance to the political virtue placed near the head of the wise mother whose success Anne unceasingly labored to repeat.^{Footnote 15} By then, she was fully engaged in a battle over her duchy with Louis XII, the father of her extant progeny, and her second royal consort who coveted her territory no less than her first, Charles VIII. Like Marguerite d’Autriche, Louise de Savoie was insistently claiming the same political virtue for herself and her daughter Marguerite, too.^{Footnote 16} Understanding that Claude and Renée’s future paths would be daunting, Anne shouldered a support team with the responsibility of ensuring her daughters’ political and religious fortitude (another virtue on the Nantes tomb). A highly competent household, and staunch allies, stood forward to continue her fight to empower her daughters beyond death.^{Footnote 17} Importantly, even the path toward Renée’s heterodox court had been traced.

The Power of a Proactive Household

In January 1499, Anne’s marriage contract with King Louis XII adroitly reasserted her control over Brittany.^{Footnote 18} Ten months later, Claude, her first viable daughter, was born. Despite the princess’s public engagement in 1506 to the heir apparent François de Valois/Angoulême, the conflicting marital strategies of her parents, centered around the transmission of the Breton duchy, remained unresolved at Anne’s death. Their tug-of-war reached its peak in 1505, when Anne abandoned the Loire Valley and regained her duchy in a huff. A flurry of letters ensued, most penned by her faithful financial officer Jacques de Beaune, already by her side at the marriage contract signature, and Anne’s young wardrobe mistress, secretary, and confidante Michelle de Saubonne.^{Footnote 19} After these able servants negotiated Anne’s return to Louis’s court with the king and François’s mother Louise, the political, cultural, and religious role of Michelle, Madame de Soubise from 1506,^{Footnote 20} only grew. Simultaneously, Anne’s temporal and spiritual interests were increasingly intertwined with de Beaune’s extensive clan.^{Footnote 21} The queen/duchess had built a strong support network that was henceforth neatly braided into her own and her daughters’ fates.

Anne’s 1499 marriage contract stipulated that her “nearest and true heirs” would succeed her, even foreseeing the eventual inheritance of her duchy by her second child, male or female: so Renée.^{Footnote 22} From January 9 to March 23, 1514, double funerals—the most elaborate ever to celebrate a French queen—prolonged the unequal royal/ducal tug-of-war over her intention to perpetuate an independent Breton line.^{Footnote 23} Anne’s household first participated in the grandiose processions that accompanied her body to the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, and then, no longer accompanied by the royal court, transported the sovereign duchess’s heart to the Carmes in Nantes. Her fine cardiotaph was interred between her parents’ bodies in the underground vault, where Anne had discretely placed Duchess Marguerite on Duke François’s heraldic right. Louis XII proceeded to transfer Anne’s parents’ hearts to the Orléans chapel in Paris^{Footnote 24}—a counter move that signaled his determination to strip control of Brittany from his daughter the future queen and his “treschere et tresamee fille Renee” (as he referred to her on October 25, 1510, the day she was born).^{Footnote 25} In July 1514, upon the death of Chancellor Philippe de Montauban, who had conveyed Anne’s heart to Brittany, Louis suppressed the Breton chancellery, which Anne had immediately reinstated when her first spouse died. Then, on Renée’s fourth birthday October 25, 1514, he handed the administration of the duchy over to heir apparent François.^{Footnote 26} Prudent Anne had envisioned inimical assaults, and sometime in 1514 her household launched a remarkable communication campaign. Today, nearly forty illuminated manuscripts subsist in two different versions, all with textual and pictorial variations:^{Footnote 27} mostly Pierre Choque’s Commemoracion et advertissement de la mort de la très chrétienne et souveraine dame, madame Anne, deux fois reine de France, duchesse de Bretagne, but the Trespas de l’hermine regrettée too.^{Footnote 28} Among the recipients designated as spiritual kin, two were foreign queens, Catherine of Aragon (probably)^{Footnote 29} and Catherine de Foix/Navarre^{Footnote 30}; at least four copies relate to the Bourbon clan, then headed by Renée’s godmother the duchess of Bourbon Anne de France and the dowager duchess of Bourbon-Vendôme Marie de Luxembourg.^{Footnote 31} “Dame royalle,” Louise de Savoie received her tardy copy only once she had become “Mère du roy.”^{Footnote 32}

Several of the numerous extant miniatures open a fascinating window onto the multifaceted heritage that Anne bestowed upon her daughters. The sole dedicatory image (Fig. 2.3), that of Claude’s personal copy of the Commemoracion,^{Footnote 33} squarely positions Anne’s heiresses at the very core of this posthumous maneuver. Her herald Pierre Choque, shown with two companions bearing the queen’s arms, offers Claude his account of the funeral ceremonies from which the royal family was proscribed. Below, the first line of text insists on her status as the “daughter of a king, a queen, and a duchess,” while above, the gold sacralizing canopy and the fleur-de-lis insist on her unsurpassable royal rank (higher than her consort’s, in fact). The rather generic women in mourning could possibly foreground great ladies of the court, including Renée’s godmother, paying homage to the filles de France. Yet the six female mourners are almost certainly the leading dames and damoiselles of the queen’s household, highlighted by both text and subsequent miniatures, and charged, alongside her male “servants,” with the continuity of Anne’s female line. To Claude’s lower right, the matron could well be the first woman mentioned in the narration of the ceremonies, the “dame d’honneur de la noble royne,” Jacqueline d’Astarac, dame de Mailly.^{Footnote 34} It was the latter’s husband, the king’s ambassador to Savoy Antoine de Mailly, who produced the divine sign said to announce the moment of Anne’s death—one of the standard illustrations in these manuscripts, tasked with broadcasting the miraculous status of a blessed queen.^{Footnote 35} Slightly above Claude, to her left, appears her three-year-old sister Renée, not yet old enough for mourning dress it would seem. The little princess is depicted gesturing toward a lady who in turn, she too from above, gestures back to her: most credibly Madame “de Soubize” [Soubise], the woman cited directly after Madame de Mailly. Surrounded by a cluster of court ladies dressed in black, and perhaps two of the men of learning who contributed epitaphs to these volumes, Michelle de Saubonne figures as the eminence grise of the now motherless princesses. The preceptor of her famed granddaughter Catherine de Parthenay later recounted that shortly before Anne’s death, the queen had made de Soubise the surrogate mother of Renée.^{Footnote 36} Hagiographic though the text and its editor may be, Renée’s tight bond to one of her mother’s most trusted ladies is beyond the shadow of a doubt. The moment illustrated in this miniature becomes a fundamental one in the narrative of Renée’s life which, from a pictorial point of view, begins here. Michelle would be exiled from the royal court in July 1518, three and a half years into Claude’s queenship, in the months following the birth of the dauphin, henceforth the heir to Brittany for François I and Louise.^{Footnote 37} The act surely reflects the pair’s fear of Madame de Soubise’s superior ability to defend the interests and moral values that her former mistress meant to transmit to the gouverante’s young protégée(s). What exactly were these?

Anne de Bretagne and Prelates Engaged in Religious Reform

The Petit Palais version of the anonymous Trespas de l’hermine regrettée places emphasis on the religious side of the funeral ceremonies, with an insistence on sacred books.^{Footnote 38} Two of its magnificent vellum sheets picture Philippe de Luxembourg, the Bishop/Cardinal du Mans, in front of Notre-Dame de Paris as he receives Anne’s catafalque.^{Footnote 39} The same powerful prelate appears again at Saint-Denis (Fig. 2.4), where he buries Anne in the extraordinary cope she had gifted to the abbey—the most magnificent it ever received.^{Footnote 40} Choque specifies that Louis XII chose the French monarchical burial site, so the queen’s donation ensured the lasting visibility of her Breton emblems on royal ground. The illumination gives prominence to the cope’s ermine (associated in a number of these miniatures with royal and ducal crowns), an emblem that confounded Anne and Claude.

Anne is generally perceived as rigidly traditional in the realm of religion. Is it possible that she and her direct entourage were actually favoring a learned, rejuvenated Church? The aging Philippe de Luxembourg was one of the earliest reforming bishop/cardinals of France. His promotion of the reform of Chazal-Benoît precedes that of the up-and-coming reforming bishop Guillaume Briçonnet the Younger (1470-1535).^{Footnote 41} Briçonnet, a nephew of Jacques de Beaune, had been Anne’s almoner since 1496, and he rose to the status of first almoner in 1513.^{Footnote 42} In 1511, the queen/duchess and Philippe de Luxembourg had worked hand-in-hand to reconcile Louis XII and Pope Julius II during the Council of Pisa, where Briçonnet and his brother Denis were active alongside their father (long-attached to Anne), too.^{Footnote 43} Together with his mentor Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples,^{Footnote 44} whom he had called to his side at Saint-Germain-des-Près in 1508, Guillaume Briçonnet the Younger led the reform of the abbey with the help of the king and the queen, whose confessor Geoffroy Boussard intervened in 1513. Driving Briçonnet and Lefèvre’s action was an apocalyptic world view shared with the monks of Saint-Vincent du Mans, reformed by the Bishop/Cardinal du Mans in 1500.^{Footnote 45} Briconnet’s religious stance was hence crystal clear when he officiated at Anne’s last funeral mass on February 15, 1514, on the outskirts of Paris at Notre-Dame-des-Champs, just before her body was spectacularly welcomed by his ally the bishop/cardinal at Notre-Dame.

Philippe de Luxembourg’s ties to Anne’s successor Queen Claude are patent too. The young queen acted in favor of Church reform almost as soon as she rose to the throne. In 1516, Pope Leo X appointed Cardinal de Luxembourg papal legate charged with monastic reform, and Giles of Viterbo, who was in contact with Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, worked with her confessor Louis Chantereau to reform the recalcitrant Augustinians of Paris.^{Footnote 46} In August, Claude chose the elderly bishop/cardinal to officiate at her May 10, 1517, coronation at Saint-Denis (Fig. 2.5),^{Footnote 47} while Jacques de Beaune choreographed the ceremony. The occasion was again celebrated in manuscripts, illustrated by the “Master of the Paris Entries” workshop responsible for Claude’s earlier frontispiece (Fig. 2.3). They repeatedly refer to Claude as “royne et duchesse,” “femme de roy, fille aisnee de France et heritiere de Bretaigne” and specify that “Monsieur le Legat, cardinal du Mans” wore her mother’s extraordinary ermine-laden cope as he performed mass.^{Footnote 48} At this point in time, before Luther’s impact revolutionized the parameters of religious change, major emphasis was placed on exemplary bishops as leaders of Church reform. The queen’s “masterpiece” Morgan Library prayer book is replete with meritorious prelates in the image of Philippe de Luxembourg (and Guillaume and Denis Briçonnet), for whom the literacy of the priesthood was a primary concern; and it cannot be coincidental that the volume foregrounds St. Claude (fol. 35v and fol. 36r), soon followed by St. Julian of Le Mans (fol. 39r), who is then directly followed by St. René (fol. 39v), all three associated with books. This unique, highly personal girdle book, worn around the queen’s waist, is generally dated near the time of Claude’s coronation,^{Footnote 49} and God places a crown on the head of the pious Virgin of the Assumption (fol. 23v). Like the Virgin at the moment of her coronation (fol. 24r), these saintly figures shine with the light of Christ that Lefèvre d’Étaples considered to illuminate his Commentaire des épîtres de Paul, completed in the prophetic climate of reform at Saint-Germain-des-Près. The uncommon prayer accompanying these images of the crowned Virgin concludes with an invocation to “protect the petitioner [the queen] ‘against all enemies.’”^{Footnote 50} From which flank might threats have come?

Queen/Duchess Anne, Madame de Soubise, and Their Daughters

In 1528, François I acknowledged in writing the services that Madame de Soubise (†1549) had rendered to Queen Anne, the deceased Queen Claude, and Renée (whose birth Michelle accompanied and in whose name she intervened after Anne’s death).^{Footnote 51} Anne’s daughters’ households were interlocked at the end of her life, their shared accounts overseen by Jacques de Beaune’s son Guillaume, their mother’s most direct financial officer since 1491, dispatched to Genoa shortly after Claude’s birth to select the marble for the Nantes tomb.^{Footnote 52} Historians have misdated the moment Louise de Savoie and her son ousted Madame de Soubise from court.^{Footnote 53} Three epistles enacting her disgrace were dispatched from Angers. In the king’s mother’s missive, Louise enquires about [her grandchildren] “monseigneur le daulphin et mes petites filles.”^{Footnote 54} The hostile dismissal thus took place in 1518, not 1515, during a royal progress to Brittany, the duchy surely at the core of this concerted move, and Michelle’s dismissal but one of a litany of curbs on Claude’s power effected by François and Louise. It follows, though, that Madame de Soubise was by Renée’s side uninterruptedly for nearly the first eight years of her life. The attempt of “Madame la régente” [Louise] to impose the precedence of her own daughter Marguerite over “Madame Renée” may be related to Michelle’s continued championing of Anne’s daughters at the time of Claude’s belated coronation.^{Footnote 55} Prior to her departure, Michelle replied to Louise (July 11, 1518), mentioning Jacques de Beaune as a witness to the truth of her assertions and specifying that she would leave court with her mother-in-law and “her daughter.” She had three daughters, however; and her eldest, Anne de Parthenay (at most three years older than Renée),^{Footnote 56} figures as one of Claude’s ladies-in-waiting in 1523.^{Footnote 57} Did Anne help negotiate her mother’s return to court four years after Claude’s death, when Renée hinged her acceptance of a marriage to the future duke of Ferrara on permission that her former mentor be allowed to re-integrate her household? Madame de Soubise figured as Renée’s official lady of honor in Ferrara in 1529, her daughters Charlotte and Renée the first ladies-in-waiting listed in the duchess’s retinue.^{Footnote 58} Clément Marot’s Ferrarese epistle to Michelle, contemporaneous to his epistles and epigrams for her daughters Anne and Renée, attests to his long trajectory by Madame de Soubise’s side.^{Footnote 59}

Until at least mid-1518, Madame de Soubise’s protection of humanists had long-term effects on the combined education of the royal princesses and her own daughters. Remarkably, the earliest, and two of the only three extant (religious) primers made for princes and princesses in Renaissance France, are those of Claude, no later than 1506, and of Renée, no later than 1517, the second written in the highly legible humanistic script of Claude’s prayer book and book of hours.^{Footnote 60} The poet Clément Marot credited Madame de Soubise with having introduced his father Jean Marot to court.^{Footnote 61} The elder Marot produced some of his most important texts for Anne, beginning with his Vraye disant advocate des dames in 1506,^{Footnote 62} the year the empowerment of Claude catapulted to the top of her mother’s agenda. Jean Pichore was simultaneously completing his illustrations of Antoine Dufour’s Vies des femmes célèbres for Anne. Though written in male voices, both volumes placed a great number of famed women before female eyes.^{Footnote 63} During their formative years, even before they could read, both of Anne’s daughters, and the Parthenay sisters, would have been able to view therein a large number of heroines, both good and bad: learned in Greek and Latin like Nicostrata, credited with the invention of many of the Latin characters (fol. 21v); treacherous like Athalia, capable of killing her own offspring (fol. 27v); outspoken like Hortensia, shown announcing to the Triumvirate that women without representation will not finance their wars (fol. 44r). In keeping with the spirit of the Enseignements that Renée’s godmother Anne de France was penning for her daughter Suzanne de Bourbon,^{Footnote 64} Anne de Bretagne and her confidante knew that discernment was a crucial tool for staying afloat in the perilous waters of court life. Hence an alignment of Amazon queens and queens as Amazons (Marpesia, Orithyia, Penthesilea, Semiramis, Thomyris, and Zenobia to name but a few) braced ladies and damoiselles, including Queen Anne’s and Michelle’s daughters, for their battles in and between courtly power centers. Minerva (fol. 11v), the goddess of Wisdom (often associated with Janus and Prudence),^{Footnote 65} was fittingly cast in the androgynous Amazonian mold.

Claude, Renée, and Marguerite d’Alençon/Navarre: A Durable Spiritual Bond

Continuity colored the humanist program initially fostered at Anne’s court, and Jean Marot seems to have composed a series of works, finished or unfinished, for Claude.^{Footnote 66} Then in his Temple de Cupido, plausibly sometime between 1516 and 1519, his son Clément identified himself as “Facteur de la Royne” [Claude]; and he may well have intended for her his Espitre de Maguelonne.^{Footnote 67} If Clément’s poetry was shaped under the influence of the circle of Meaux,^{Footnote 68} the budding author neatly fit into the nascent evangelical clusters orbiting around the late Queen Anne, Madame de Soubise, and then Claude and Renée. Logically too, as courtly dynamics evolved, the younger Marot addressed his Epistre du despourveu to Marguerite d’Alençon (later Navarre), seemingly encouraged by his father to seek entry into the duchess’s service around 1519.^{Footnote 69} Marguerite’s tight bond to Claude has been of scarce interest to historians, often dismissive of the short-lived queen. Yet together, Queen Claude and her sister-in-law—and even Marguerite’s mother Louise de Savoie, until politics prevailed—had been promoting religious reform since early in the new reign.^{Footnote 70}

Following Claude’s premature death in 1524, both Jean and Clément Marot composed texts in her honor^{Footnote 71}; and Guillaume Briçonnet’s renowned correspondence with Marguerite d’Alençon addressed the latter’s deep grief.^{Footnote 72} Less known is the Erasmian Antonio Brucioli’s account of Battista della Palla sighting a distressed Marguerite mourning Claude in the cathedral of Lyon (which bore a heavy Bourbon mark). The encounter spawns an imaginary dialogue over bodily resurrection between the deceased queen and Marguerite, in which Claude recalls her friendship, concord and very tight kinship with Marguerite, based on shared divine and human beliefs.^{Footnote 73} The Italian’s presentation of an apocalyptic discourse uttered by Claude, attuned to her interaction with the reforming circle around Arcangela Panigarola in Milan in 1518, may have inspired Marguerite’s first literary work, her Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne.^{Footnote 74} The text, revolving around the death of Claude’s daughter Charlotte, who quickly followed her mother to the tomb, can be related to a drawing of the effigies of mother and daughter on their mortuary bed (Fig. 2.6).

The accompanying Latin and French epitaphs have been attributed to the Italian humanist Théocrène (Benedetto Tagliacarne), tutor to at least some of the children, and a secretary of the king and queen of Navarre, Étienne Clavier, both of whom were in contact with Marot.^{Footnote 75} As for Brucioli, after this initial text conjoining Claude and Marguerite, he dedicated works to François I (1532), Marguerite (1534 and 1536), whom he never actually met, and finally Renée (1538), who extended her protection to the Nicodemite over a series of years.^{Footnote 76} At the end of her life Renée joined this evangelical chorus, recalling the impact of her older sister’s death, experienced as God’s punishing his children and suffered to the extreme: “Jay de la divinité du bon père celleste entremeles des chatimens envers les enfans quil aime me rendit poupille des lenfence ensuyvit encores le décès de la Royne Claude Madame et seure aynee que Je senti Jusques a extremité” (I have received from the divinity of the good celestial father the mixed punishments of the children that he loves, rendering me a ward from infancy, also followed by the death of Queen Madame Claude my older sister which affected me to the extreme).^{Footnote 77}

Returning to Madame de Soubise, it was she who in 1512 incited Anne de Bretagne to employ Jean Lemaire de Belges as her secretary and historiographer, and that very year he began dedicating works to Claude, or Anne and Claude.^{Footnote 78} In honor of her mother’s obsequies he went on to offer his earlier treatise on ancient and modern funeral ceremonies to “Madame Claude premiere fille de france et de bretaigne.”^{Footnote 79} Did Michelle, whose wisdom and political acumen were supposedly lauded by Guillaume Budé,^{Footnote 80} also introduce to the queen/duchess the Hellenist Germain de Brie, who had rubbed shoulders with Erasmus in Venice in 1508 and who corresponded at length with both Erasmus and Budé?^{Footnote 81} Two years before supplying funeral epitaphs to Pierre Choque, de Brie offered Anne a Latin poem on the sinking of her fine vessel the Cordelière, published in January 1513, then translated into French by the aforementioned Pierre Choque for Anne.^{Footnote 82} Choque addressed to Claude after her rise to the throne a version of the manuscript with new poems, written in the fine humanistic script of her religious books, again a sign of the humanist culture in which Anne and Michelle’s young daughters bathed.^{Footnote 83} The dedicatory page stages a crowned queen/duchess of Brittany (Fig. 2.7). Heavy emphasis is placed on the virtue of Justice: the word is spelled out, and both the queen and the allegorical rendition extend a raised sword with a not-quite-visible tip (echoing Justice’s intentionally blunted sword on the Nantes tomb).^{Footnote 84} Choque’s Incendie de la Cordelière dedication is to “dame Claude Royne de france et duchesse de Bretaigne” [my emphasis] (fol. 4r). Between his act of translation (before January 9, 1514) and the fabrication of this manuscript (after January 1, 1515), Louis XII made François de Valois/Angoulême administrator of the Breton duchy, diminishing the power of the scepter here relegated to the queen/duchess’s left hand.

The period around Claude’s coronation seems to have been particularly portentous. A double page in her miniscule prayer book (Fig. 2.8) highlights her Breton roots via her mother’s favored St. Ursula,^{Footnote 85} represented in front of the maritime empire foregrounded in de Brie and Choque’s texts. Ursula’s pious (and literate) court of maidens was probably conceived around 1517, also possibly the date of Claude’s Book of Hours with its crowned Cs, which includes not only Latin mottoes but, rather precociously, Greek ones too.^{Footnote 86} The year 1517 is also presented as a turning point in the career of Louise de Savoie’s almoner François Demoulins: he had begun corresponding with Erasmus, sought a French translation of his In Praise of Folly, and introduced Guillaume Budé to the king.^{Footnote 87} At Louise’s request, he was preparing a magnificent manuscript, the Vie de la belle et clere Magdalene (Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 24955), in humanistic script, it too replete with Latin and Greek. To this end, he consulted with the evangelical scholar Lefèvre d’Étaples who, around the time of Claude’s coronation, dedicated to François I his controversial treatise on Mary Magdalen. Further editions were addressed to Demoulins (1518) and Denis Briçonnet (1519).^{Footnote 88}

Was Madame de Soubise’s disgrace sealed in Autumn 1517, around the royal contestation of Renée’s hierarchical precedence at her sister’s coronation? On October 11, a month before this regal ceremony placed the scepter of power back in the queen’s dexter hand (Fig. 2.5), François I reinforced the status of his sister Marguerite, Duchess of Alençon, bestowing on her person the duchy of Berry.^{Footnote 89} Sometime thereafter, Marguerite received a manuscript constructed around a musical mass, La Messe de Sainte Anne, composed to encourage the realm to pray to the traditional protectress of infertile women to come to her aid.^{Footnote 90} Its frontispiece (Fig. 2.9) bears a clear dedication to “Marguerite de France Duchesse d’Allençon et de Berry,” whose arms are prominently displayed beneath a crowned female figure commanding over the scene from her throne. Yet the ecclesiastical author is arguably offering his work not to an enthroned Marguerite, as is generally supposed, but rather to her brother the kneeling king shown extending his hand. The enthroned figure would then be Queen Claude, already blessed with two girls and perhaps even the dauphin. Actively seconded by her ladies, she recommends to St. Anne the worried childless dedicatee singled out to her right. The ensuing text, seemingly colored by the “spirit of blackmail” around royal posterity that has been linked to Church reformers,^{Footnote 91} dovetails with the apocalyptic vision of the Briçonnet brothers. Just before urging Marguerite to request that “monseigneur reverendissime mon seigneur le legat” approve the mass, the author (Denis ?) specifies that his brother (Guillaume?) asked him to pray for Marguerite at three pilgrimage sites dedicated to St. Anne (3v-4r). The patron saint of childbirth is then associated with an illuminated plea to the kings and princes of Christianity to launch a crusade against the Turks (5r). Anne’s royal lineage (“lignee royalle iudaicque”) is next linked to “la royne ma souueraine dame et mes dames du royal sang de France” (5v); aided by the supplications of French subjects (6v), royal ladies will procreate and ensure peace among princes and kings. The theme of universal peace through wedlock had already been so dear to Anne de Bretagne that she arranged imperial marriages for little Renée right up to her death.^{Footnote 92}

In Rome, Denis Briçonnet, then being avidly sought out by the reforming abbess Panigarola, played an active role in the negotiations of the papal/royal marriage that followed the baptism of the dauphin on April 16, 1518, at which Anne de France served as godmother once again. Written shortly after the birth of the dauphin (February 28), Panigarola’s March 10, 1518, missive, however, contains an allusion to the bishop’s being slandered before Louise de Savoie.^{Footnote 93} The reform movement was floundering at court, and La Messe de Sainte Anne was plausibly commissioned as a bridge to the Valois-Angoulême. On June 6, the royal family appeared in unison at the king and the queen’s entries into Angers, the capital of Louise’s duchy of Anjou. Guillaume Briçonnet (“Bishop of Lodève”) rode amid the participating ecclesiastics; and two days later the legate a latere Marco Cornaro was feted.^{Footnote 94} On June 28, François penned a letter from Angers ordering the replacement of “madame de Soubize” as Renée’s governess; June 29, Claude was forced to do the same; and June 30, Louise confirmed the transferal of her charge to “madame la contesse de Tonnerre” [Françoise de Rohan]. By foregrounding St. Anne, the Briçonnet/Lefèvre circle was reaching out to the official Royal Trinity—François and Louise, but especially Marguerite. Are these the very circumstances that pushed Lefèvre d’Étaples to turn his attention to the saint? Sometime during the same year he had himself depicted presenting to Marguerite’s mother Louise, her almoner Demoulins by his side, his controversial Petit livret faict à l’honneur de Madame Saincte Anne, which undermined the very saint honored in the musical mass.^{Footnote 95} In 1519, the now Erasmian Demoulins was promoted grand almoner of France.^{Footnote 96} Renée had lost her governess, but the prominence of evangelical ideas was on the rise and the bond between Claude, Renée, and Marguerite tightened.

Contextualizing Early Depictions of Renée de France

If princes and princesses were taught to read around the age of seven,^{Footnote 97} then 1517 becomes the most probable year for Claude’s commission (in tandem with Madame de Soubise?) of Renée’s prayer book-cum-primer.^{Footnote 98} Like Claude’s own illuminated prayer books, Renée’s is attributed to the artist to whom her sister’s name has accrued: “The Master of Claude de France.” The sisters’ three religious manuscripts devolve from works commissioned by Anne de Bretagne. Their spirit, however, has evolved. In Renée’s very first book, the traditional prayers are accompanied by rarer invocations, the implications of which remain to be explained. From a pictorial point of view, Renée’s manuscript differs notably from the late fifteenth-century primer of Anne’s ill-fated son Charles-Orland (1492–1495), in which his mother figures twice. The slightly older motherless Renée, instead, plays an exceptionally independent and proactive role in her unusually high number of appearances on the vellum stage, moving from an initial portrait of sorts, fol. 6r (Fig. 3.1), to idealized images (as Charles-Orland) of the princess she would become (fol. 8r; fol. 8v, Fig. 3.3), fol. 9v (Fig. 3.4) and fol. 13v. The depiction of her confession differs from that of her mother Anne [Fig. 3.9]: a pure young princess kneels in close proximity to her namesake St. René, the exemplary bishop of Claude’s prayer book, here shown blessing his protégée (Fig. 3.3). Lefèvre’s insistence that confession should be from one Christian to another, heartfelt, and directly to God seems to inflect the image.^{Footnote 99} Sanctity was being closely scrutinized, and Renée’s book reduces the male and female saints adorning Charles-Orland’s primer to a single important female protagonist: the Mary Magdalen then being dissected by Lefèvre,^{Footnote 100} shown on fol. 11r embracing the cross. Demoulins, in his perhaps contemporaneous life of Magdalen, affirms that she is correctly referred to as “Apostola,” because a messenger of Jesus Christ.^{Footnote 101} Logically, then, it is also the “belle et clere Magdalene” who appears on the heraldic right of St. Peter on fol. 6v, boldly penning her own text as the Apostles compose their Creed. In a comparable vein, Renée’s prayers twice conjure up a vision of Christ, first perceived directly on the other side of her prie-Dieu, descending to earth (Fig. 3.4), then, on fol. 13r, bathing her humble yet pure princessly figure in his divine light. The evolution from his more distant appearance to Charles-Orland (fol. 31v) is notable, much in the spirit of the Veronica da Binasco illustrations sent from Milan to Claude in 1518.^{Footnote 102} Could Renée’s future motto, In Cristo Sol Renata,^{Footnote 103} already be nascent here?

The patronage of the first “portrait” of the infant Renée in prayer (Fig. 3.1) is surely imputable to Claude, plausibly seconded by de Soubise. What, though, triggered the creation of the finest extant rendition of the princess, the Chantilly drawing by Jean Clouet?^{Footnote 104} Although historians date it uncertainly between 1519 and 1524, it is undeniably one of the earliest high-quality Clouet crayons depicting figures at the French royal court. Did François I and his mother request it as they negotiated the second official marriage treaty involving Renée, which promised her to the Margrave of Brandenburg,^{Footnote 105} or did Claude impel this image too? Tendentially, women, but first and foremost mothers, oversaw the production and exchange of children’s portraits^{Footnote 106}; and six comparable extant drawings figure the royal children, minus the youngest, Marguerite de France, born in June 1523. All logically date from before Claude’s death in July 1524, like the related oil paintings of the Dauphin François (Antwerp), Charlotte (Minneapolis and Chicago), Madeleine (London, Weiss Gallery), and Charles (Orléans).^{Footnote 107} The stylistic similarity of these panels to Clouet’s painting of Marie d’Assigny (Edinburgh) has been noted; and it has been suggested that such portraits project a serene and humble “evangelical conception of being.”^{Footnote 108} Marie d’Assigny (or d’Acigné) was one of Claude’s ladies-in-waiting, as was Madeleine d’Astarac, whose crayon portrayal must have been made during Claude’s lifetime too.^{Footnote 109} Kin to Anne’s lady of honor Madame de Mailly, Madeleine’s first spouse was the son of Anne’s half-brother François II d’Avaugour, charged with her scepter at the Saint-Denis obsequies. Was the “Mademoiselle Anne de Bretagne Damoiselle D’Avaugour” who figured among Renée’s “dames et damoiselles” in 1525 the daughter of Madeleine?^{Footnote 110} Anne d’Avaugour went on to serve Claude’s youngest daughter Marguerite de France, Renée’s lifelong ally, until at least 1547. Artistic clusters could be shaped by lasting household loyalties.

Evangelical Humanism, Spiritual, and Political Fortitude

When Anne de Graville had herself depicted around 1521 offering her Beau romant des deux amans Palamon et Arcita to Claude de France, Renée was at least ten and logically part of Claude’s suite. Graville had the queen represented under a canopy bearing (as usual) the emblems of both France and Brittany, accompanied by three ladies-in-waiting caught in animated debate.^{Footnote 111} The Parthenay memoirs assert that Renée’s surrogate mother Madame de Soubise knew “the true religion” at an early date and raised her young children accordingly.^{Footnote 112} Initially, this was perforce the evangelical humanism propounded by Erasmus and Lefèvre, both of whom were laboring to reform the Church.^{Footnote 113} In 1521, Marguerite d’Alençon was operating in tandem with Claude’s court, alongside the reputed evangelical Anne de Graville, seen as a lady-in-waiting to Claude but without firm proof, and Anne Boleyn, who after almost seven years by the queen’s side, remained attached to the ideas of Lefèvre d’Étaples for the rest of her life.^{Footnote 114} Forty years later, in a conversation with the English Ambassador Throckmorton after she returned to France, by then a correspondent of Calvin, Renée recalled her acquaintance with Queen Elizabeth’s mother when she was serving her sister Claude.^{Footnote 115} Claude’s circle of damoiselles disseminated new religious sensitivities, even abroad.

No caesura ensued. After Claude’s premature death, the spirit of Christian humanism colored the education of the royal children at court. No later than early 1526, a free translation of Erasmus’s Institution d’un prince jusqu’à l’âge d’adolescence was illuminated for the three royal sons and their tutor.^{Footnote 116} That year, it is purported, Lefèvre d’Étaples, after perilous attacks and a period of forced exile, was called to Blois by the king, where he became the preceptor of Madeleine and Charles, at least. Two years later, around the time Renée left for Ferrara, he published a Liber Psalmorum to teach the six-year-old Charles Latin, then in 1529 two others, a Vocabulaire du Psaultier dedicated to both of his young pupils, and a Grammatographia to Madeleine alone.^{Footnote 117} All three were published anonymously, the need for dissimulation ever more pressing.^{Footnote 118} This meshed easily with the concept of “juste ypocrisy,” already an integral part of the education of young maidens, as Christine de Pisan and Anne de France’s writings prove.^{Footnote 119}

Madame de Soubise’s role as an active protectress of “heretics” by Renée’s side has been well circumscribed in Ferrara in the mid-1530s, when secrecy was becoming an ever more critical tool for survival.^{Footnote 120} Regarding great ladies and Church reform, her impact has been judged second only to that of Marguerite de Navarre, and she has been identified as the first noblewoman of high rank to convert.^{Footnote 121} After her second involuntary return to her Parc-Soubise domain in 1536, she is credited with having furthered the spread of Protestantism in the Bas-Poitou.^{Footnote 122} Perhaps her compulsory distance from courtly centers of governance facilitated this bold alignment with religious change. Renée, instead, remained in the vortex of power until the end of her life, and contradictory loyalties—royal, ducal, and religious—perforce complexified her fundamentally (“Fabriste”) tolerant stance.^{Footnote 123}

Just as Anne de Bretagne remained stifled during her first reign, young Queen Claude was unable to prevent her father and her spouse’s imperialistic absorption of Brittany or to impose her conceit of state. To make matters worse, Claude’s lady of honor, whose wages were three times those of Anne de Parthenay in 1523, was Françoise de Foix/Châteaubriant, her spouse’s very public mistress, whose presence sapped her household at its very core.^{Footnote 124} Such a model appealed to male rulers, as Ercole d’Este later demonstrated through his relationship with Renée’s lady-in-waiting Madame de Noyant.^{Footnote 125} Yet Marguerite de Foix/Bretagne had modeled for her daughter and her granddaughters not only political but also sexual fortitude; and Anne’s Spanish motto Non Mudera (“she will not change”), revitalized by Claude in her Book of Hours, harks back to their royal Navarrais roots.^{Footnote 126} The devise urges steadfastness, a comportment that permeates the final image of Anne de Graville’s Palamon et Arcita translation for “her sovereign mistress” (Fig. 2.10). A princess donning the ermine of a French queen, discretely supported by two alert ladies-in-waiting, boldly confronts a group of four courtly gentlemen, delivering to them a lecture on perfect love while denouncing the counterfeit love of her day.^{Footnote 127} The preceding story, however, recounts the deadly conflict of two knights, just as tensions were peaking between the king and his constable, Bourbon. Claude is arguably charged with pleading the cause of political reconciliation with her husband the king, too. Renée was perforce familiar with this manuscript and its author; and she demonstrated throughout her life that she had absorbed Graville’s model for her royal sister who, like the ancient Hortensia, remains resilient yet firm.

Resisting Women

The night preceding Claude’s death, the queen/duchess “accepted” to bequeath Brittany to her children according to their gendered order of birth, beginning with her son the dauphin and including her daughters, were all the royal sons deceased.^{Footnote 128} Clément Marot’s subsequent epitaph suggests that death brought Claude relief from the battles that had incessantly plagued her life,^{Footnote 129} that of Brittany among those doomed. Ambassadorial accounts are contradictory; nothing proves the common conviction that Claude was weak. Her parents had espoused Claude de Seyssel’s concept of a “consultative” monarchy,^{Footnote 130} and Claude surely continued to embrace their political stance, implying collaboration with the powerful Bourbon clan. The most remarkable expression of the alliance between the Valois/Breton sisters and Renée’s godmother Anne de France occurred in July 1515, when the royal court was celebrated as François I embarked on his first Italian campaign. Duchess Anne masterminded an entry into Moulins, followed four days later by a well-documented and highly elaborate one into Lyon, a territory under Bourbon sway. Scaffolds on both water and land highlighted not only the king, but also Anne’s crucial protégé, the constable Charles de Bourbon and the fifteen-year-old queen and her little sister, staged as heiresses enabling the Italian campaign.^{Footnote 131} As early as May 1517, though, Anne de France and Louise de Savoie locked horns over what the former perceived to be the dishonorable Valois-Angoulême treatment of Charles.^{Footnote 132} The subterranean male/female Breton/Bourbon affiliation was still effective the following April, when Anne de France presented the dauphin at the baptismal font. Yet the demolition of the feudal empire fortified by the dowager duchess and the duke de Bourbon proceeded inexorably; and the young Renée perforce experienced the slow ripping to bits of her brilliant godmother’s domain. The lesson could only have enhanced her sense of caution, made her ever-more-inclined to a “juste ypocrisy” that would help her surmount the adversity that would traverse her life. Prior to her departure for Ferrara in 1528, the heavy-handed royal mother/son team managed to snatch both Breton and Bourbon lands. Yet Queen Anne’s intent regarding her sovereign territory remained so self-evident that when her second daughter married Ercole II d’Este, she was forced to renounce her rights to Brittany (as were her d’Avaugour kin). The tug-of-war was dormant, not resolved. If Anne died when Renée was a mere infant, her profile as a “bonne duchesse,” grounded in a genuinely clement Breton fiscal policy, still lives on.^{Footnote 133} Following their father’s death, Claude, Queen of France and Duchess of Brittany, “The all white lily, the all black ermine / Black with lassitude, & white with innocence,” remained for a decade the closest kin and lady of highest rank in Renée’s life. Unable to transmit an independent Brittany to her sister, Claude gave her an unassailable gift: the superior model of a princess motivated by charitable evangelical humanist ideals and revered by her subjects—no mean task.^{Footnote 134} Brantôme, whose aunt and grandmother had belonged to Anne’s court, traces an unequivocal line of descent: from mother, “the true Mother of the poor,” to daughter, “very good and very charitable,” to daughter/sister, “real fille de France, true in goodness and charity.” The word “charity” recurs abundantly in his depiction of Renée, whom he had encountered in both Ferrara and France^{Footnote 135}; and visual and/or literary proof confirms his assertions. The first historiated initial of a missal made for Anne’s ally Philippe de Luxembourg depicts St. Julian healing a blindman at the Le Mans gate, while the saint’s entourage draws the destitute commoner to the attention of a governor, crowned.^{Footnote 136} A comparable vision of monarchical responsibility infuses Claude’s prayer book illumination of a model St. Louis, a young king pictured distributing alms (fol. 37r). Similarly, the highly personalized “Epistre envoyée de Venize à Madame la Duchesse de Ferrare,” dedicated by the fleeing Clément Marot to Renée in 1536, contrasts the painted and gilded luxury of Venetian churches to the “ymaiges vives” (living images) of “Les pouvres nudz, palles & languissans” (the nude, pale, and languishing poor), cast as more appropriate recipients of their misspent wealth.^{Footnote 137} Along with more generic lessons learned from great ladies of rank, this is the specific dynastic, political, and religious model (buttressed by the feared wisdom of Madame de Soubise) heralded by Renée de France.

The Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris narrates the belated funeral of Claude in November 1524, announcing miracles performed by the queen’s body and noting that she had been “highly loved during her lifetime and after her death.”^{Footnote 138} Renée, fourteen, had learned to stand up to Louise de Savoie;^{Footnote 139} funereal rank positioned her after the regent, yet she preceded her ally and sister-in-law Marguerite. Her governess Françoise de Rohan countess of Tonnerre still by her side, Renée was fully armed for independent battle and would never relinquish her conviction, as Brantôme puts it, that the “awful” Salic law (ceste méchante loy salique) had prevented her from ruling France.^{Footnote 140} While her strong unorthodox religious beliefs caused her considerable grief, they fortified her determination to rule her domains with equity. The year before she left for Italy, her mother’s ally Jacques de Beaune, Semblançay, fell to the unblunted sword of “Justice” wielded by François I and his mother Louise. Duchess, Renée took numerous risks to protect her subjects, particularly those condemned by what to her eyes was an unjust Church, and to further reconciliation no matter one’s religious beliefs. From the 1540s, the seat of her court in exile was the Este delizia of Consandolo. Even after its very location had fallen into oblivion, the memory of Renea, a heretical duchess who did not disdain the Virgin, endured.^{Footnote 141} Non Mudera. Never give up. In the early 1570s, she and Anne d’Este, her no less determined and even-more-learned daughter, pressured the French Crown to regain the Breton heritage that, to their mind, was rightfully theirs.^{Footnote 142} Like that of other successful Renaissance princesses, Renée de France’s superior education hinged on a broad collaborative team. Figuring at the very top of the list of the many capable individuals who helped shape her steadfast and resilient persona are her mother Anne and her sister Claude. Thus, from Nantes (Fig. 2.2) to Ferrara (Chaps. 10 and 11) and beyond, Prudence/Minerva stood by Renée’s side as she doggedly labored to wield her agency and patronage to good end.

Notes

1.
Alessandro Nasi’s account involves King Louis XII, Queen Anne de Bretagne, the defunct Cardinal d’Amboise and Florimond Robertet. Giuseppe Canestrini and Abel Desjardins, eds., Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, vol. II (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1861), 507; cited by Pauline Matarasso, Queen’s Mate. Three Women of Power in France on the Eve of the Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 259n24.
2.
Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben, eds., The Politics of Female Households. Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014); Caroline zum Kolk and Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, Femmes à la cour de France. Charges et fonctions XV^e-XIX^e siècle (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2018).
3.
Michel Nassiet, “Anne de Bretagne, A Woman of State,” in The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne. Negotiating Convention in Books and Documents, ed. Cynthia J. Brown (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 163–175.
4.
Theresa Earenfight, “A Lifetime of Power: Beyond Binaries of Gender,” in Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400. Moving beyond the Exceptionalist Debate, ed. Heather J. Tanner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 271–293, convincingly frames monarchical power as “a family affair.”
5.
Antoine Le Roux de Lincy, Vie de la reine Anne de Bretagne, femme des rois de France Charles VIII et Louis XII, vol. IV (Paris: L. Curmer, 1861), 79; Susan Groag Bell. The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies. Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2004), 144–145.
6.
Most recently, Lucie Gauguin, Amboise un Château dans la ville (Tours and Rennes: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais de Tours, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014). Her other godmother was her governess Madame du Bouchage; Pauline Matarasso, Le Baptême de Renée de France en 1510. Compte des frais et préparatifs (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011), 68.
7.
Tracy Adams, “Fostering Girls in Early Modern France,” in Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900, ed. Susan Broomhall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 103–118, on the concept and widespread practice of fostering. Thierry Crépin-Leblond and Monique Chatenet, eds., Anne de France: art et pouvoir en 1500 (Paris: Picard, 2014); Aubrée David-Chapy, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, inventions d’un pouvoir au féminin (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), and “La ‘Cour des Dames’ d’Anne de France à Louise de Savoie: un espace de pouvoir à la rencontre de l’éthique et du politique,” in Femmes à la cour de France, 49–65; Zita Rohr, “Rocking the Cradle and Ruling the World: Queens’ Households in Late Medieval and Early Modern Aragon and France,” in Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: More Than Just a Castle, ed. Theresa Earenfight (Boston: Brill, 2018), 309–337.
8.
Nadine Kuperty-Tsur, “Le Journal de Louise de Savoie, nature et visées,” in Louise de Savoie 1476–1531, ed. Pascal Brioist, Laure Fagnart, and Cédric Michon (Tours and Rennes: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais and Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 270.
9.
Elizabeth L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood. Gender, dynasty and visual culture in the later middle ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 219ff; Joris Corin Heyder, “Les Heures de Marguerite de Foix: sources artistiques d’un atelier Nantais presque inconnu,” in Nantes flamboyante, (1380–1530), ed. Nicolas Faucherre and Jean-Marie Guillouët (Nantes: Société archéologique et historique de Nantes et de la Loire-Atlantique, 2014), 123–139.
10.
Elena Woodacre, The Queens Regnant of Navarre. Succession, Politics, and Partnership, 1274–1512 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 109–130.
11.
Julien Havet, “Mémoire adressé à la dame de Beaujeu sur les moyens d’unir le duché de Bretagne au domaine du roi de France,” Revue historique, 25 (1884): 276.
12.
Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, ms. fr. 131. Jean-Christophe Cassard, “L’histoire en renfort de la diplomatie: la Genealogie des roys, ducs et princes de Bretaigne de Pierre Le Baud (1486),” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, 62 (1985): 67–95.
13.
Jean-Marie Guillouët, “Michel Colombe,” and fig. 51: “Deux Vertus…,” in Tours 1500 Capitale des arts, exh. cat. Tours, musée des Beaux-Arts, ed. Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot et al. (Paris: Somogy, 2012), 186, 216; and “Les ducs de Bretagne et le couvent des Carmes de Nantes,” in Le Cœur d’Anne de Bretagne, ed. Laure Barthet and Camille Broucke, exh. cat. château de Châteaubriant (Milan: SilvanaEditoriale, 2014), 67–69.
14.
Françoise Gatouillat, “Une grande commande de la reine Anne de Bretagne: la verrière occidentale de la cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Nantes,” in Nantes flamboyante (1380–1530), ed. Faucherre and Guillouët, 158–159.
15.
On this virtue singled out by Christine de Pisan in her Le Livre de Prudence, see La Vertu de prudence entre Moyen Âge et âge classique, ed. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, Catherine Pascal, François Roudaut and Trung Tran (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), especially Nathalie Dauvois’s chapter “Prudence et politique chez les grands rhétoriqueurs: Janus bifrons,” 55–71.
16.
Tracy Adams, “Louise de Savoie, la prudence et la formation des femmes diplomates vers 1500,” in Louise de Savoie, 29–38; Mary Beth Winn and Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Louise de Savoie, ses livres, sa bibliothèque,” 239-240; Charlotte Bonnet, “Louise de Savoie et François Demoulins de Rochefort,” 254–255.
17.
On her court and that of Claude, Monique Chatenet, La Cour de France au XVI^e siècle. Vie sociale et architecture (Paris: Picard, 2002), and Caroline zum Kolk, “The Household of the Queen of France in the Sixteenth Century,” The Court Historian 14, no. 1 (June 2009): 3-22.
18.
Michel Nassiet, “Les traités de mariage d’Anne de Bretagne,” in Pour en finir avec Anne de Bretagne?, ed. Dominique Le Page (Nantes: Conseil général de Loire-Atlantique, 2004), 74-81, and “Anne de Bretagne,” 165-166.
19.
Alfred Spont, Semblançay (?-1527): la bourgeoisie financière au début du XVI^e siècle (Paris: Librairie Hachette & C^ie, 1895), 76 and 85-100; Pauline Matarasso, “Seen through a squint: the letters of Jacques de Beaune to Michelle de Saubonne. June to September 1505,” Renaissance Studies, 11, no. 4 (1997): 343-357.
20.
Spont, Semblançay, 88n2; 1507 for Jacques Santrot, Les doubles funérailles d’Anne de Bretagne, reine et duchesse (9 janvier-19 mars 1514) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 592.
21.
Spont, Semblançay, 75-76; Bernard Chevalier, “Tours en 1500, une capitale inachevée,” in Tours 1500, 32-34.
22.
Nassiet, “Les Traités de mariage,” 75-76.
23.
Santrot, Doubles Funérailles.
24.
Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 195.
25.
From the king’s lettres patentes: Matarasso, Le Baptême, 5.
26.
Dominique Le Page, Finances et politique en Bretagne au début des temps modernes, 1491-1547 (Vincennes: Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique, 1997), 28-29; Dominique Le Page and Michel Nassiet, L’Union de la Bretagne à la France (Morlaix: Éditions Skol Vreizh, 2003), 147 (assuming Claude’s weakness and consent).
27.
Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 285-458.
28.
Also Pierre-Gilles Girault, Les funérailles d’Anne de Bretagne, reine de France. L’Hermine regrettée (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2014); Elizabeth A. R. Brown, Cynthia J. Brown and Jean-Luc Deuffic, “Qu’il mecte ma povre ame en celeste lumiere,” Les funérailles d’une reine Anne de Bretagne (1514) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
29.
Alternatively, Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland (“Noble royne, fille et femme de roy.”), Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 292-293. Anne is designated as “Vostre parente, [t]ante et prochainne parente”: Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert I^er, ms. IV.521.
30.
“Noble dame yssue de Foueix, royalle lignee… / Vostre parente en qui est le renom” (Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 5095). Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 292-293.
31.
The future constable Charles de Bourbon (not Santrot’s identification), “Vostre parente” (Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 5096); Marie de Luxembourg, dowager duchess of Bourbon-Vendôme (Paris, Arsenal 5224) [“Perdu avez la grant royne et duchesse / Vostre cousine…”] and Renée de Bourbon, abbess of Fontevraud “vostre bonne cousine” (Paris, BnF 5100); and an unspecified “Noble dame yssue de Bourbon, royalle lignee … vostre bonne cousine” (Nantes, Bibliothèque municipale, coll. Lajarriette, ms. 653). Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 287-288, 290, 295.
32.
“Vostre parente”: Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 5094. Two other Savoie recipients were “cousins” Duke Charles II de Savoie and Louise’s half-brother René. Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 293 and 300.
33.
Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 25158, fol. 3v.
34.
Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 346 and figs. VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI.
35.
Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 25-28, 514 and 566-567.
36.
Jules Bonnet, ed., Mémoires de la vie de Jean de Parthenay-Larchevêque sieur de Soubise (Paris: Léon Willem, 1879), 5-6.
37.
This date is justified below.
38.
Paris, Petit Palais, coll. Dutuit, ms. 665; fol. 5v for the importance of books.
39.
Dutuit, ms. 655; fol. 27v and fol. 28r.
40.
Dutuit, ms. 655; fol. 36r.
41.
Jean-Marie Le Gall, Les moines au temps des réformes: France, 1480-1560 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2001), 39-40, 49, 101-102.
42.
Santrot, Double funérailles, 527.
43.
Sandrot, Double funérailles, 454-455. On Guillaume Briçonnet the Elder’s tight relation with Anne, see Bernard Chevalier, Guillaume Briçonnet (v.1445-1514). Un cardinal-ministre au début de la Renaissance (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 172-175. On the Briçonnet brothers and Claude de France, Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Denis Briçonnet et Claude de France: l’évêque, les arts et une relation (fabriste) occultée,” in Les Evêques, les lettres et les arts, ed. Gary Ferguson and Catherine Magnien, Seizième Siècle, 11 (2015): 95-118.
44.
Chevalier, Briçonnet, 324-325, and Chevalier, “Tours en 1500,” 34.
45.
Guy Bedouelle, Lefèvre d’Étaples et l’Intelligence des Ecritures (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 57-60; Guy-Marie Oury, Histoire religieuse de la Touraine (Tours: CLD Normand & Cie., 1975), 153; Le Gall, Les Moines, 77, 143, 199.
46.
Sheila M. Porrer, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and The Three Maries Debates (Geneva: Droz, 2009), 26; Bernard Barbiche and Ségolène de Dainville-Barbiche, “Les légats a latere en France et leurs facultés aux XVI^e et XVII^e siècles,” in Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, Vol. 23 (1985): 100; Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Claude de France and the Spaces of Agency of a Marginalized Queen,” in Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563, ed. Susan Broomhall (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 155-161.
47.
Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 5750, fol. 19v. One of six extant manuscripts discussed in Myra D. Orth, Renaissance Manuscripts: The Sixteenth Century (London & Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2015), II, fig. 19, 88-91; on the heraldic double crown, Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 155.
48.
Cynthia J. Brown, Pierre Gringore. Les Entrées royales à Paris de Marie d’Angleterre (1514) à Claude de France (1517) (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 279, 282-285 (transcribed from Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 5750).
49.
New York, ML MS M.1166. Roger S. Wieck and Cynthia J. Brown, The Prayer Book of Claude de France. MS M.1166. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Luzern: Quaternio Verlag, 2010), 175, 190-193. Maxence Hermant, “Le Mâitre de Claude de France,” in Tours 1500, 263-267, and Eberhard König, The Book of Hours of Claude de France (Ramsen: Heribert Tenschert, 2012), 16-26, on prayer books as girdle books.
50.
Wieck and Brown, Prayer Book, 213.
51.
Marcel Giraud-Mangin, “Michelle de Saubonne. Dame d’atour d’Anne de Bretagne,” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, 16 (1946): 85: “[…] en considération des bons et agréables services qu’elle a faits, tant à la reine Anne qu’à la feue reine Claude et qu’elle fera à Mme Renée,” citing an archival act dated September 14, 1528.
52.
Paris, BnF, Clairambault 835, fol. 2025-2030; Santrot, Double Funérailles, 517-518, 592; Guillouët, in Tours 1500, 216, citing Flaminia Bardati for his identification with “Guillaume Bonino.”
53.
Beginning with Bonnet, Mémoires, 6n2; Matarasso, Le Baptême, 74-76.
54.
Giraud-Mangin, “Michelle de Saubonne,” 82, citing copies of five letters preserved at the castle of Blain (now with the other letters at the Médiathèque Louis Aragon in Nantes); Matarasso, “Seen through a squint.”
55.
Bonnet, Mémoires, 6.
56.
V.-M. Saulnier and Rosanna Gorris “Anne de Parthenay,” in Dictionnaire des lettres françaises. Le XVI^e siècle, ed. George Grente (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 908.
57.
BnF, ms. fr. nouv. ac. 9175, fol. 367-370.
58.
Paris, BnF, Clairambault 835, fol. 2047. My thanks to Caroline zum Kolk for her assistance with these documents.
59.
See Guillaume Berthon’s Chap. 5 in this volume.
60.
Maxence Hermant, “L’héritage d’Anne de Bretagne et Claude de France,” in Trésors royaux La bibliothèque de François I^er, ed. by Maxence Hermant (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 226, n° 108. For Claude’s, see Roger S. Wieck, Cynthia J. Brown and Eberhard König, The Primer of Claude de France. MS 159, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Commentary to the Facsimile Edition (Luzern: Quaternio Verlag, 2012); for Renée’s, see Wieck’s chapter in this volume.
61.
Georges Guiffrey, ed., Clément Marot. Œuvres (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), Epistres, III, 388; Guillaume Berthon, L’Intention du poète Clément Marot “autheur” (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), 46, n. 4.
62.
Cynthia J. Brown, The Queen’s Library: Image-making at the court of Anne of Brittany, 1477-1514 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 166-180, with additional examples.
63.
Nantes, musée Dobrée, ms. 17. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, Un manuscrit d’Anne de Bretagne. Les Vies des femmes célèbres d’Antoine Dufour (Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France, 2007); Anneliese Pollock Renck, “Les Vies des Femmes Célèbres: Antoine Dufour, Jean Pichore, and a Manuscript’s Debt to an Italian Printed Book,” The Journal of the Early Book Society, 18 (2015): 158-180.
64.
On the ritualized “emotional performance” that the two Annes shared: Tracy Adams, “Rivals or Friends?: Anne de Bourbon and Anne de Bretagne,” Women in French Studies, Special Issue (2010): 46-61. On the Machiavellian edge to Anne de France’s writings: Rohr, “Rocking the Cradle.”
65.
Dauvois, “Prudence et politique,” 62-71.
66.
Published in 1533 or 1534 as the Recueil Jehan Marot: Ellen Delvallée, “Le Recueil Jehan Marot: un manuscrit inachevé et perdu édité par Clément?” Ad Hoc 6 (2017) https://adhoc.hypotheses.org/presentation-de-la-revue-ad-hoc
67.
Berthon, L’Intention, 49-59 and 93-94, Mary McKinley, “Marot, Marguerite de Navarre et ‘l’Epistre du despourveu,” in Clément Marot “Prince des poëtes françois” 1496-1996, ed. Gérard Defaux and Michel Simonin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 620-621, identifies “Ferme Amour”/Claude as a female patron willing to take the poet into her service (at an earlier date). My thanks to Kelly Peebles for this reference. On the Maguelonne text, differently, Richard Cooper, “Picturing Marot,” in Book and Text in France, 1400–1600: Poetry on the Page, ed. Adrian Armstrong and Malcolm Quainton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 53-71.
68.
Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent. Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) and Her Evangelical Network (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), I, 73n81; Dick Wursten, Clément Marot and Religion. A Reassessment in the Light of his Psalm Paraphrases (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 7-21.
69.
McKinley, “Marot.”
70.
Wilson-Chevalier, “Denis Briçonnet” and “Quelle ‘trinité royale’? Reine, roi, régente et sœur de roi: Claude de France, François I^er_, Louise de Savoie et Marguerite de Navarre,” in “La dame de cœur.” Le patronage religieux des reines et des princesses XIII^e-XVII^e siècle, ed. Murielle Gaude-Ferragu and Cécile Vincent-Cassy (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 123-136; Benoist Pierre, “L’entourage religieux et la religion de Louise de Savoie,” in Louise de Savoie, 117-141; duplicating the misattribution of the dedication of Louis Chantereau’s La Vie et les miracles de saincte Véronique to Louise, not Claude, 126.
71.
Les Deux Recueils, ed. Gérard Defaux and Thierry Mantovani (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 227-230, for Jean Marot’s Deploration de la feue Royne Claude de France and Epitaffe de la feue Royne Claude de France; and Gérard Defaux, Clémént Marot. Œuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Bordas, 1990), I, 371, for Clement’s De la Royne Claude.
72.
Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême. Correspondance 1521–1524, ed. Christine Martineau and Michel Veissiere (Geneva: Droz, 1979), II, 144.
73.
Richard Cooper, “Marguerite de Navarre et la réforme italienne,” in Marguerite de Navarre 1492-1992, ed. Nicole Cazauran and James Dauphiné (Paris: Eurédit, 2006), I, 163-165, citing a particularly significant passage from Brucioli’s Dialoghi published in 1526 (and 1529): “Strettissima parente, et charissima et fedele et compagna, con laquale in somma concordia, del medesimo parere delle divine et humane cose, vivuta sempre sono, essendo uno et il medesimo animo stato sempre di ambidue, come se l’una nell’altra vivesse” (fol. 47v).
74.
Cooper, “Marguerite de Navarre et la réforme italienne,” 164-165. Wilson-Chevalier, “Denis Briçonnet,” for Claude and Panigarola.
75.
Rémi Jimenes, ed., Geoffroy Tory de Bourges libraire et imprimeur humaniste (1480-1533) (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2019), 131, fig. 25; Girault, Les Funérailles, 55; Pierre Jourda, “Un humaniste italien en France: Theocrenus (1480-1536),” Revue du Seizième siècle, 16 (1929): 40-57.
76.
Cooper, “Marguerite de Navarre,” I, 169-173; Eleonora Belligni, Renata di Francia (1510-1575). Un eresia di corte (Turin: UTET Libreria, 2011), 185 and 156.
77.
From one of the many iterations of Renée’s testament; Fontana, Renata di Francia, III, 324.
78.
Cynthia J. Brown, “Like Mother, Like Daughter: The Blurring of Royal Imagery in Books for Anne de Bretagne and Claude de France,” in Cultural and Political Legacy, 105-108, 113-114; Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 561-562; Delvallée, “Le Recueil” for Lemaire’s influence on Marot father and son.
79.
Jean Lemaire de Belges Œuvres, ed. Jean-Auguste Stecher (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 270-292; Santrot, Doubles Funérailles, 104-105.
80.
Bonnet, Mémoires, V, citing her granddaughter Catherine de Parthenay.
81.
Marie Madeleine de la Garanderie, “Les épitaphes latines d’Anne de Bretagne, par Germain de Brie,” Annales de Bretagne, 74, no. 3 (1967): 390-394.
82.
On the vessel, Max Guérout, “A quoi ressemble la nef la Cordelière?,” in Anne de Bretagne. Une histoire, un mythe, ed. Didier Le Fur (Paris: Somogy, 2007), 104-111; on the poem, De la Garanderie, “Les épitaphes,” 389. Paris, BnF ms. fr. 1672, for an early version; Humbert de Montmoret, Germain de Brie, Pierre Choque, L’incendie de La Cordelière, ed. Sandra Provini (La Rochelle: Rumeur des Ages, 2004); Michael Jones, “Les manuscrits d’Anne de Bretagne Reine de France, Duchesse de Bretagne,” Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Bretagne, 60 (1978): 612n88; Brown, “Like Mother,” 109-111.
83.
Now Paris, BnF, NAF 28882: “Ce present traicte par moy desdiee a vostre sacree mère me confiant a vostre clemence vous presente” (fol. 4v).
84.
Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Claude de France: Justice, Power & the Queen as Advocate for Her People,” in Textual and Visual Representations of Power & Justice in Medieval France. Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Anne D. Hedeman, and Bernard Ribémont (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 243, figs. 11.1-11.2.
85.
A fleet already plays an important role in the depiction of St. Ursula in the prayer book of the ill-fated Charles-Orland, no later than 1495 (Morgan Library, MS M50, fol. 17v). In Jean Bourdichon’s Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 9474), completed in 1508, the saint bears the Breton banner (fol. 3r).
86.
Roger S. Wieck, Miracles in Miniature. The Art of the Master of Claude de France (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 2014), 6-7. König, Book of Hours of Claude, 10-11, suggests a dating in the 1520s and “Protestant tendencies” perceptible in the borders.
87.
Bonnet, “Louise de Savoie et François Demoulins de Rochefort,” 255-256.
88.
Porrer, Lefèvre d’Étaples, 33 and 491.
89.
Ordonnances des rois de France. Catalogue des actes de François 1^er (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1887), I, 128, n° 742.
90.
Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 1035, fol. 1v. Myra D. Orth, “Manuscrits pour Marguerite,” in Marguerite de Navarre, I, 89. The text and music are studied in depth in Michael Alan Anderson, St. Anne in Renaissance Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chap. 7. My conclusions differ from theirs.
91.
Le Gall, Les Moines, 112: “le milieu réformateur paraît avoir exercé un vrai chantage à la postérité royale.”
92.
Matarasso, Queen’s Mate, 270-275.
93.
Eugenio Giommi, La monaca Arcangela Panigarola, madre spirituale di Denis Briçonnet (1512-1520). L’attesa del “pastore angelico” annunciato dell’“Apocalypsis Nova” del Beato Amedeo fra il 1514 et il 1520, tesi di laurea (Florence: Università degli Studi di Firenze, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, 1968), 127ff.
94.
Armand Parrot, Voyage du roi François I^er à Angers, en 1518 (Angers: Imp. Cosnier et Lachèse, 1858), 18-19.
95.
Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal 4009, fol. 1v; Porrer, Lefèvre d’Étaples, 62-84.
96.
Bonnet, “Louise and Demoulins,” 256-262.
97.
Marie Madeleine Fontaine and Elsa Kammerer, “Nourrir et instituer l’enfant,” in Enfants de la Renaissance, ed. Caroline zum Kolk (Luçon: In fine éditions d’art, 2019), 52-58.
98.
See Wieck’s chapter in this volume; for bibliography on the Master, notes 35 and 69.
99.
Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Lefèvre Pioneer of Ecclesiastical Renewal in France (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984), 93.
100.
Porrer, Lefèvre d’Étaples. Lefèvre began writing a text on the saints in 1519, but abandoned it to avoid controversy, Hughes, Lefèvre, 96.
101.
Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 24955, fol. 51v: “C’est bien raison que Magdalene qui a esté messagiere de iesus christ soit nommee Apostola. Eve nostre mère, diffamant le sexe feminin, apporta les nouuelles de triste mort, et Magdalene sauuant et reparant l’honneur des dames apporta les nouuelles de resurrection et de ioyeuse vie.”
102.
In Isidoro de Isolanis, Inexplicabilis mysterii gesta B. Veronicae virginis, Paris, BnF, Rés. Vélins 2743; Wilson-Chevalier, “Denis Briçonnet.”
103.
Kelly D. Peebles, “Embodied Devotion: The Dynastic and Religious Loyalty of Renée de France (1510-1575),” in Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty, ed. Caroline Dunn and Elizabeth Carney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 123-137.
104.
Chantilly, musée Condé, inv. MN 28.
105.
Alexandra Zvereva, Portraits dessinés de la cour des Valois. Les Clouet de Catherine de Médicis (Paris: Arthena, 2011), fig. 21, 210; Zvereva, “Louise de Savoie,” 192-201; Mathieu Deldique, Clouet. Le Miroir des dames (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2019), 22-23; Gabriel Braun, “Le mariage de Renée de France avec Hercule d’Esté: une inutile mesalliance. 28 juin 1528,” Histoire, économie et société, 7, no. 2 (1988): 148.
106.
Zvereva, Portraits dessinés, 117. Like Alexandra Zvereva (Les Clouet de Catherine de Médicis. Chefs-d’œuvre graphiques du musée Condé [Paris and Chantilly: Somogy éditions d’art and musée Condé, château de Chantilly, 2002], 62, fig. 20), Deldicque, Le Miroir, 24 and 22, nonetheless hypothesizes a commission from François I of the portraits of his children, to which he links that of Renée.
107.
Deldicque, Le Miroir, 24, for a reproduction of the painting of Madeleine, who later corresponded with Renée. She is surely younger than four.
108.
Étienne Jollet, Jean & François Clouet (Paris: Éditions de la Lagune, 1997), 169-172, tying this “conception évangélique de l’être” to Marguerite de Navarre.
109.
Chantilly, MN 230; dated ca. 1523 in Zvereva, Les Clouet de Catherine, 125, fig. 56. Another of Claude’s ladies-in-waiting drawn by Clouet at an early date is Anne de La Tour, dame de Turenne (Florence, inv. 14930 F).
110.
Paris, BnF, Clairambault 835, fol. 2031; Gallica http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc13947q/cd0e225.
111.
Paris, Arsenal, ms. 5116, fol. 1v. The volume also contains the Espistre de Maguelonne (see note 67).
112.
Bonnet, Mémoires, 7.
113.
Bonnet, Mémoires, V. On the interrelations of the two scholars, Bernard Roussel, “Lefèvre d’Etaples et Erasme: une amitié critique,” in Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, ed. Jean-François Pernot (1450?-1536) (Paris: Champion, 1995), 23-54.
114.
Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Queen Claude of France,” 95-96; “Spaces of Agency,” 160-161.
115.
Gustave Masson, “L’histoire du protestantisme français étudiée au Record Office,” Bulletin de l’Histoire du protestantisme français, 17, no. 11 (1868): 545n1: “Theyre was an old accqueyntans betwixt the Queen hyr mother and me, when she was on of my syster Queen Claudes mayds of honor.” See “Elizabeth: January 1561, 1-10,” in Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 3, 1560-1561, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1865), 489-490. British History Online, accessed September 23, 2019, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol3/pp480-495. Adams, “Fostering Girls,” 113.
116.
Patricia Stirnemann, in L’Art du Manuscrit de la Renaissance en France, ed. Cécile Scailliérez and Patricia Stirnemann (Chantilly: musée Condé and Somogy éditions d’art, 2001), 26-29, fig. 6. For a slightly different reading, Wilson-Chevalier, “Queen Claude of France,” 109-110.
117.
Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, “Simon de Colines, Imprimeur de Lefèvre d’Étaples,” in Pernot, Lefèvre d’Etaples, 110-117.
118.
Jacob Vance, Secrets: Humanism, Mysticism, and Evangelism in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and Marguerite de Navarre (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
119.
Rohr, “Rocking the Cradle,” relates Pisan’s notion of “juste ypocrisy” to Anne de France.
120.
See Belligni, Renata di Francia, and Gabriella Scarlatta’s and Roger Wieck’s chapters in this volume.
121.
Nancy L. Roelker, “Les femmes de la noblesse huguenote au XVI^e siècle,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (1974): 231.
122.
“Chronique d’histoire régionale: Société d’émulation de la Vendée. 1925, La Roche-sur-Yon,” Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 12, no. 55 (1926): 269.
123.
Leonardo De Chirico and Daniel Walker, Lealtà in tensione: un carteggio protestante tra Ferrara e l’Europa (1537-1564) Giovanni Calvino, Renata di Francia (Caltanissetta: Alfa e Omega, 2009). See Dick Wursten’s chapter in this volume.
124.
Zvereva, Portraits dessinés, 265, fig. 165, accepts the identification of a crayon at the Uffizi as a representation of Madame de Châteaubriant around 1520.
125.
See my chapter “Under the Rubble” in this volume.
126.
Charles Sterling, The Master of Claude, Queen of France. A Newly Defined Miniaturist (New York: H.P. Kraus, 1975), 8; König, The Book of Hours, 37-44.
127.
The last line on the folio reads: “J’entens aymant d’ung amytié par faicte / Non pas de celle aujourd’huy contrefaicte.” See Wilson-Chevalier, “Spaces of Agency,” 160-163 for bibliography and further contextualization.
128.
The verb in quotation marks is used by Le Page and Nassiet, L’Union, 153. Transcribed by Jean-Alexis Néret, Claude de France: femme de François I^er: 1499-1524 (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1942), 191-192: “dame Claude, par la grâce de Dieu reine de France, duchesse de Bretagne,” and so on.
129.
Defaux, Œuvres complètes, I, 371: “Esprit lassé de vivre en peine, & dueil, / Que veulx tu plus faire en ces basses Terres ? / Assez y as vescu en pleurs, & Guerres, / Va vivre en paix au Ciel resplendissant, / Si complairas à ce corps languissant, / Sur ce fina par Mort, qui tout termine, / Le Lys tout blanc, la toute noire Hermine, / Noire d’ennuy, & blanche d’innocence.”
130.
Nicole Hochner, Louis XII. Les dérèglements de l’image royale (1498-1515) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2006), for example, Chap. 6: “Une philosophie du partage,” 216-244.
131.
Anne-Marie Lecoq, François I^er imaginaire, symbolique et politique à l’aube de la Renaissance française (Paris: Macula, 1987), 144-145, 188-207; Orth, Renaissance Manuscripts, II, fig. 65, 219-222.
132.
Guillaume de Marillac, “Vie du connétable Charles de Bourbon de 1490 à 1521,” in Choix de Chroniques et mémoires sur l’histoire de France, XVI^e siècle, ed. J.-A.-C. Buchon (Paris: Panthéon Littéraire, 1861), 124-184. For a resumé of the dynastic confrontation between the two courts, see Philippe Hamon, “Charles de Bourbon, connétable de France (1490-1527),” in Les Conseillers de Francois I^er, ed. Cédric Michon (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 95-97.
133.
Le Page and Nassiet, L’Union, 130-136.
134.
Wilson-Chevalier, “Spaces of Agency,” 165-166.
135.
Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Recueil des Dames, poésies et tombeaux, ed. Étienne Vaucheret (Paris, Gallimard “La Pléiade,” 1991): “la vraye Mere des pauvres,” 16; “très-bonne et très-charitable, et fort douce à tout le monde,” 171; “bien fille de France, vraie en bonté et charité,” 176.
136.
Le Mans, BM ms 0254; imprecisely dated between 1495-1503 (see http://initiale.irht.cnrs.fr/codex/2698, with bibliography). The Healing of a Blindman on fol. 4r (https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/enluminures/D-006914) accompanies the beginning of Psalm 138 (my thanks to Elizabeth L’Estrange for her assistance) and seems to reflect the psalm’s insistence, line 6, on the Lord’s regard for the lowly.
137.
Defaux, Clément Marot, II, 102-105: “Temples marbrins y font & y adorent / Images peinctz, qu’à grandz despens ilz dorent / Et à leurs pieds, helas, sont gemissans / Les pouvres nudz, palles & languissans. / Ce sont, ce sont, telles ymaiges vives / Qui de ces grans despenses excessives / Estre debv[r]oient aournées et parées / Et de nos yeulx les autres separées” (lines 39-46).
138.
Reprinted in Michel Nassiet, “Les reines héritières: d’Anne de Bretagne à Marie Stuart,” in Femmes et pouvoir politique. Les princesses d’Europe XV^e-XVIII^e siècle, ed. Isabelle Poutrin et Marie-Karine Schaub (Rosny-sous-Bois: Éditions Bréal, 2007), 144-145.
139.
Kelly Digby Peebles, “Renée de France’s and Clément Marot’s Voyages: Political Exile to Spiritual Libération,” Women in French Studies Special Issue 7 (2018): 40–42.
140.
Brantôme, Recueil des Dames, 174.
141.
Elena Marescotti et al. La delizia estense di Consandolo (Consandolo: l’Associazione Ricerche Storiche di Consandolo, 2008); Emanuel Rodocanachi, Renée de France, une protectrice de la réforme en France et en Italie (Paris, P. Ollendorf, 1896), 297 for her commission of a gold and enamel Virgin as late as 1556; 309-311 on her generosity.
142.
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The American University of Paris, Paris, France
Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier

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Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier
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Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Kelly Digby Peebles
University of Michigan–Dearborn, Dearborn, MI, USA
Gabriella Scarlatta

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Wilson-Chevalier, K. (2021). Anne de Bretagne, Claude de France, and the Roots of Renée’s Persona. In: Peebles, K.D., Scarlatta, G. (eds) Representing the Life and Legacy of Renée de France. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69121-9_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69121-9_2
Published: 24 July 2021
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69121-9
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Anne de Bretagne, Claude de France, and the Roots of Renée’s Persona

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