Madame Catherine

By Irene Mahoney

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0698106172
• ISBN13: 9780698106178
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Putnam Pub Group
• Length: 381 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.9" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

The Betrayal of Hope

Irene Mahoney was a nun and a professor of English who taught in New York and her biography on The Life of Catherine de Medici, published in 1976, must still stand as one of the very best. Mahoney captures the personality of Madame Catherine with a psychological incisiveness, combined with a detailed and in depth understanding of the troubled religious situation of sixteenth-century France. Held captive as a child within the walls of a Republican Florence under siege by Papal troops, she was handed over to her Medici uncle Pope Clement VII after Florence's capitulation, taking with her the scars of a city under siege that never left her . . . "The fairest city in the world had become a grotesque, a place of jagged wounds. . . . Hunger, lean and pale, had crept into corners where guns would never have found their way. . . . It was hard to tell the living from the dead . . . except that one had ceased to suffer." After her betrothal to the ruling House of Valois in France, it was the effects of this early and terrifying experience, Mahoney claims, that shaped Catherine into a "persistent mediator" for peace. "She saw war plain, without decoration, without idealism. War, she found, was not the tapestries or frescoes that decorated the palace of the Medici; war was an etching whose acid bit into those profound places of her being where nothing else had found its way." Mahoney's appraisal is not all positive however . . . "Her efforts to play the friend to opposing forces could only end in failure . . . she clung to a course of action that ultimately spelled her doom." After the St. Bartholomew massacre in Paris, where Huguenots attended the wedding of Prince Henri of Navarre with that of Catherine's daughter-a wedding that was meant to bring about a political union between Protestants and Catholics but resulted in Protestants being slain in the streets-Catherine's credibility remained severely damaged. The "Blood-Red" wedding that had been sealed with a "bloody kiss," brought the question of "lawful-revolt" against what was perceived to be a tyrannical Valois regime, into open discussion among the Huguenots. On top of the religious and political issues, this is also an up close and personal account of the demise of the Valois dynasty. The children of Catherine de Medici helped bring ruin and ridicule to France through their own ineptitude, poor health and irresponsibility that stood in sharp contrast to the robust ability of their mother; one could hardly call them tragic, certainly the comic is emphasised with the protracted negotiations for marriage between Catherine's youngest son, Francois duc d' Alencon, and Elizabeth I of England, giving us an entertaining side long glance of Gloriana. Mahoney also claims a causal link between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots (one time daughter-in-law to Catherine de Medici, who supposedly offered the crown of England and Scotland to Philip II of Spain) and preparations for the Spanish armada.

The Florentine Shopkeeper

Catherine de Medici is the most vilified Queen in French history - ranking only with Marie Antoinette (another foreign bride) for controversy. Yet, as Mahoney painstakingly shows, Catherine refuses to seek our sympathy. Time after time, she fought her own corner, and up to the bitter end, physically exhausted, she strove in defense of her family interests. She saw out five kings (Francis I, her father in law, Henry II, her husband, and her three children, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III) and was mother in law of Mary Queen of Scots. She sprang from Florence but immersed herself in the fabric of the French state, bearing nine children for the House of Valois. She is associated with some of the worst excesses of the Catholic side in the French Wars of Religion, including the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, yet it is more accurate to see her as a mediator between the truly zealous Guise faction and the equally stubborn Hugenots. Mahoney's biography is both literate and fair, and ranks with the best of Antonia Fraser.