The Malleus Maleficarum: A Synthesis of Discourse

[NOTE: Heinrich Kramer published a demonology by the name of Malleus Maleficarum, "Hammer of Witches," in 1486 that is widely credited as a major contributor to the formation of the early modern concept of the witch as female. The following reflection was prepared in answer to the question of to what extent Kramer's perspective can be viewed, not as the expression of a sole individual, but a result of wider religious and social assumptions and concerns. Unfortunately, citations were not documented in the preparation of this exercise, but the arguments are based on The Malleus Maleficarum and on Dr. Yvonne Petry's Winter 2012 lectures at the University of Regina, Luther College.]

The formation of the witch as outlined in Heinrich Kramer's 1846 Malleus Maleficarum was the result of a synthesis of late medieval philosophical discourse concerning religion and gender and the fears of society at large. 

Kramer devotes Part I of the Malleus to proving that witches are real, in league with the Devil, and primarily female. While Kramer himself was viewed as peculiar by his contemporaries,  his vision was directly in line with the late medieval/early modern worldview of Christian theology and the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy dominant in Europe at the time of his writing.

The worldview of medieval Europe asserted that the Devil was a real and present threat. Reality comprised of natural, preternatural, and supernatural worlds that were intrinsically connected. God had supreme authority over these realms and intervened directly in human affairs. The Devil was likewise constantly at work attempting to thwart and/or overthrow God.

The Flammarion Woodcut

Kramer is working out of a widely held belief, firstly, that magic is real, and, secondly, that it is bad. According to the mechanics of the preternatural world, demons and angels exist as powerful beings with the ability to affect the natural world. People can fall victim to the actions of demons and can also call on their powers to commit unexplainable acts - that is, to commit sorcery. To manipulate demonic powers - to do magic - was considered sinful, even if the intention was to do good, as humans should put their faith in the power of God, not in demons. The infliction of harm by magical means was termed "maleficium." Kramer names witches as those who cohort with demons and commit maleficium against their neighbours.

Witches brewing up a rainstorm; Ulrich Molitor, 1493.

Kramer's Europe in the late fifteenth century was on the brink of drastic political, social, economic, and religious changes that resulted in a heightened atmosphere of tension among the people and an increased fear of conspiracy. The uncertainty of this transitional period created an apocalyptic mentality, part which emphasized the role of the Devil in actively seeking people to do his work.

Marginalized groups, such those who differed racially or religiously from the white Christian masses, became targets of their paranoia and were persecuted by having European society's greatest fears projected onto them. In the late fifteenth century, the female sex became the next marginalized group targeted for persecution. Kramer's third point in Part I of the Malleus - that the witch is primarily female - contributed significantly to the gendered nature of the European witch panics.

The Church taught that the Devil targeted the weak in body and spirit for his recruits. Women as a sex were the Devil's most likely targets, as religion and philosophy dictated them to be physically and intellectually inferior to men. 

According to the humoural system of Hippocrates and Galen that served as the authoritative medieval and early modern biological model, if a dispositionally cold female was not  sufficiently heated up during intercourse by her dispositionally hot male sexual partner, the resulting child would be imperfectly formed as a female. 

Early modern attempt at understanding the mysteries of the female anatomy

 The abnormally cold female body, with its sex organs unnaturally tucked up inside, was a human deviation from the perfect male form and, by definition, inferior to man both in mind and body. This inferiority, says Kramer, makes women vulnerable to the Devil's influence, as their weak minds are more "credulous" and "impressionable." 

The Church additionally ascribed moral weakness to the  female sex based on the aforementioned assumptions. The cold female body is afflicted with an insatiable craving for the heat it receives from the male body in sexual intercourse. This abnormality means that women are more carnal in nature than men - a reprehensible defect in a theological tradition that emphasizes the value of celibacy and chastity. The Church warned that the Devil could take advantage  of women's sexuality to attack the morality of men, as demonstrated by the example of Adam and Eve. Kramer expands on these ideas to claim that the female weakness for sex makes them easy prey for the Devil's seduction.

Devil embracing a woman

As the new targets for social persecution, females would come to be accused, as did other marginalized groups before them, of blasphemy, sorcery, sexual deviance, and cannibalism. These fears culminated in the concept of the witch.

 Kramer, in Part II, describes the activities of the witch as making a formal pact with the Devil, copulating with the Devil, and interfering with the process of reproduction. These charges essentially represent an attack on the institutions of the Church and that of marriage and family. These institutions maintained the structure of everyday life in which people worked, lived,  provided for themselves, and perpetuated society. 

Apparent in Kramer's work is a system of many discourses becoming one. Religion dictates that there is a Devil targeting the weak for evil. Philosophy asserts that the weak members of society are women. At the same time, society is concerned for the stability of their everyday lives, specifically, a conspiratorial attack on livelihood and social normality.

The result is the concept of a woman in league with the Devil who harms people by posing a threat to their offspring, reproductive capacity, agriculture, and health, and who transgresses social norms by engaging in alternative religious and sexual practices. These fears were exacerbated by the conditions of heightened political and social tension that characterize the early modern European experience and were expressed by the creation of the "witch" and the obsession with her destruction that ensued in the witch panics of the following century.

Image sources, where available:

http://historicmysteries.com/the-malleus-maleficarum
http://www.witchcraftandwitches.com/history_medieval.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15137818@N08/2053804995

flammarion: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FlammarionWoodcut.jpg
http://www.cyberwitchcraft.com/witchcraft-in-elizabethan-england.html 

Possession - http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.5/ah0502001379.html

http://segonku.unl.edu/student_projects/hist970/s07/smeyer/imagegallery.html    

 

"The Just Rewards of Unbridled Lust"

Syphilis in Early Modern Europe


     The late 15^th century introduced a period of momentous transition to European history. A stream of intellectual, religious, economic, and political developments set Europe on a course of turbulent change that left little time for social adjustment. It was into this climate of tension and social unease that syphilis spread across the continent as a new, devastating, and rapidly spreading plague. Syphilis, or the pox, shocked all who encountered it; sufferers were afflicted with nasty sores and pains, often resulting in a particularly gruesome death.[1] No record of a similar ailment could be found in any of the ancient philosophical texts, from which, in addition to medieval Christian theology, Renaissance scholars derived all their knowledge of ethics, medicine, and science.[2] Unequipped with the knowledge to understand, combat, or control the pox, early modern Europeans contended with their fear by projecting blame onto the marginalized groups of society over whom they could assert control and by utilizing a providential worldview to justify the ensuing devastation.[3]


     Though the exact origins of European syphilis are unclear to this day, the start of its spread through Europe is believed to have coincided with Columbus’ return from America in 1493.[4] The timing gave rise to a popular theory that Neapolitan men in Columbus’ crew contracted the strange disease from Native Americans and infected the prostitutes in their home city. French soldiers invading Italy, so the story goes, contracted the disease from Naples’ prostitutes. In this way, the early modern phenomena of international and trade and warfare facilitated the illness’ progress of infection across the continent.


     The religious and philosophical European worldview included a providential and moralistic  understanding of causation. In a society that placed God at the head of every action, it was natural to assume that God meted out rewards to His people in the form of favourable circumstances and punishments as misfortunes, such as poverty and disease. Symbolic, metaphorical reasoning turned a person’s exterior into a representation of their interior qualities; imperfections, such as the debilitation and blemishes that came with syphilis, were then interpreted as signs of immorality on the part of the sufferers.[5] Syphilitics must then, logically, have sinned a great deal to bring such a horribly gruesome affliction upon themselves, and fear of the disease caused a significant degree of social tension. A mere accusation of infection could provoke lawsuits or terminate marriage engagements; contraction was synonymous with public shame.[6]


     With the concept of health linked to personal integrity, groups began to associate syphilis with those whom they disliked. Increasingly powerful nation-states found the popular abhorrence of syphilis to be an effective propaganda tool, naming rival nations as the origins of the disease. This gave political leaders grounds to criticize the habits and practices of their neighbours and maintain a popular nationalistic sentiment among their own people with regards to their nation’s purity. For example, a widely-used term for syphilis was the French Disease; this had the effect of not only blaming the French for causing the illness, but also of pathologizing Frenchness itself, attributing negativity to everything from the speech patterns, dress and customs of France among a nation’s own citizens. [7]


     While uneasiness over what was foreign was now inextricably linked with anxiety over the pox, the appearance of syphilitic sores on the genitals allowed Europeans to additionally link its spread to sexuality, though the mechanics of transmission remained unclear. Jacques de Béthencourt, a French physician practicing in 1527, believed that the illness was generated by the passions aroused during immoral sexual behaviour. [8] Though sexuality applies to both men and women, it was women who received the majority of the blame, both for the pox’s origin and for its spread. Europe’s steadfastly patriarchal structure made it easy for women, with their “natural” inferiority, to be incriminated for society’s social ills.


     Greek medical philosophy had established femininity in the European mindset as abnormal and somehow inherently diseased. The Galenic humoural model of male and female anatomy exacerbated the sexual double standard. It was believed that qualities of the uterus, coupled with the dark, “cavernous” nature of the female interior, encouraged the corruption of vapours generating syphilitic infection.[9] Additionally, men’s hot complexion caused them to suffer from the disease more than women. Women, however, were cold, dry and dense, making them less susceptible to damage. In other words, a defenseless man could fall ill by a single sexual encounter with an infected woman, but a woman could only catch syphilis through repeated intercourse with an infected man, automatically branding female syphilitics with promiscuity.[10] An Italian theory claimed that the pox could lie dormant in women without displaying symptoms, and the disease would only become “activated” when exposed to heat during sex; thus no woman, chaste or otherwise, was exempt from suspicion.[11]


     The view of promiscuous women as the primary source of the disease brought tremendous persecution onto Europe’s prostitutes. Prostitution, by no means a respectable profession, was not particularly shameful for women during the 15^th century. The occupation served as a profitable refuge for women with little other means of subsistence, such as orphans, the homeless, and victims of rape and domestic abuse. The era held a relatively free attitude toward  male sexuality, and prostitution was actively endorsed by many Church and town authorities. St. Augustine declared prostitution a necessary evil and compared it to a sewer system; prostitutes, he said, were “full of shame and disgrace,” but by providing men’s vulnerable sexual impulses with a controlled outlet, the industry saved society from being “overturn[ed] with lust.”[12]


     This attitude changed with the shifting moral climate of the 1500’s.  Stricter familial and personal values being enforced by the Protestant and Counter-Reformations as well as the providential fear of sexual disease provoked a renewed aversion to sexual immorality. Prostitutes were punished harshly for spreading the pox, while the men who bought their services were pitied as victims. “L.S.,” the 17^th century author of the Prophylaktikon, advised Europeans to be patient with men, for it was the strength of passion that drove them to foolishness; on the other hand, prostitutes, he wrote, could provide a more productive service to society by hanging themselves.[13] Authorities in Scotland declared that all “loose women” would have their cheeks branded with hot irons. Many brothels were shut down with the prostitutes banished from the town.[14] The Counter-Reformation used the image of the repentant Mary Magdalene to urge “fallen women” away from prostitution and the uninfected public.[15] The Convertite in Venice was a convent specifically established for reformed syphilitic prostitutes who were cloistered after having been treated in the hospital for Incurables.


     Anxiety over the destructive nature of the female body increased to a point at which girls were being confined even before they became infected. Renaissance Italian culture valued beauty, but beauty was defined in terms of harmony and balance, with ideal beauty existing only in nature. Excessive feminine beauty upset this balance, and beautiful women were regarded as prone to infidelity and vice.[16] Following the example of the Convertite, Venice founded the Zitrelle, an institution with the mandate of cloistering the young girls with the highest risk of succumbing to prostitution; those admitted were required to be young (between the ages of 12-18), healthy, poor, and beautiful. While the Zitrelle’s aim was supposedly to protect these girls from sin and infection, they were equally intended to protect outsiders from them. Society equated attractive women with wicked temptresses and maintained that feminine beauty was powerful enough to rob men of their ability to control their actions.[17] The community responded to this agitation in conventional early modern fashion; the girls and their feared feminine sexuality was confined, with the intention that they would remain so until marriage.


     In this age of religious warfare, popular attitudes were growing increasingly puritanical. The first victims of the illness having been soldiers and prostitutes, both infamous for immoral lifestyles, confirmed the association held by many between pox and the sin of lust.[18] The interpretation of the pox as divine displeasure with human sexuality combined morality with medicine to an unprecedented degree.[19] Law enforcement authorities used the disease as a tool to police sodomy, that is, criminal sexual behaviour. A diagnosis of syphilis was used as legal grounds for criminal investigation; agents searched for sodomites by interrogating patients in pox hospitals.[20]


     Medical responses to the pox threw scholars into what Kevin Siena has called “an intellectual scramble.”[21] Early modern conceptions of medicine proved problematic with regards to venereal disease. Latin Galenism described sexual intercourse as a primary method of maintaining good health; one of the earliest reactions to syphilis was to encourage the infected to continue copulating – a counter-productive measure, to say the least. It was not long before Europeans made the connection between sexual activity and transmission, while also recognizing non-sexual means of contracting the disease, such as from a mother to baby in childbirth.


     When early treatments, such as prescribed sex and washing of the genitals, proved ineffectual against the pox, more extreme procedures rose in popularity. The first of two principle treatments was the use of mercury, which ancient Arabic writers recorded as a remedy for skin disorders. European physicians tested mercury’s effects on syphilitic sores and combined it with the Galenic concept of humoural balance. The patient was confined to a hot room for periods between five and thirty days so they might sweat out the corrupt matter in their bodies, while mercury was rubbed onto the patient’s body in the form of ointments. Instead of curing the patient of syphilis, this procedure had seriously damaging side effects.[22] While mercury possesses certain anti-bacterial qualities that may have helped the Arab’s immune systems fight off their ailments, it is also a deadly poison that would have been especially dangerous when entering the person’s respiratory tract during the sweating procedure. One physician went so far as to suggest that his patients ingest the liquid mercury mixed with hot chocolate, but he warned them that this treatment was risky – he worried that the chocolate might be too dangerous for his patients’ consumption.[23] Not only did mercury fail to cure patients of the pox, but mercurial overdose commonly resulted in the loosening and loss of teeth, uncontrollable shaking, paralysis, and sometimes death.[24]


     An alternative treatment gained popularity among those who rejected or feared mercury. Many Europeans supported a theory that the most effective remedies for an ailment would be found in the region of the ailment’s origin. Thus, physicians who believed the pox hailed from the New World turned to guaiac wood, a plant native to the Indies, for the cure. The guaiac treatment involved grinding the wood into a powder and boiling it in water. The syphilitic patient was then confined to a warm room, as in the mercury treatment, and was restricted to a diet consisting of the guaiac decoction, little other food, and laxatives.[25] While guaiac wood was not poisonous, it had no other effect on the patient other than to induce sweating. This procedure, which lasted roughly one month, took a debilitating toll on those who tried it.


     Despite the ineffectiveness of these processes at curing syphilis, physicians’ patients continued to repeat them; many of them believed that the greater their suffering, the more likely they were to be healed. Their attitude is more understandable when one considers that in the early modern period, it was not expected that an ordinary life would be free of pain.[26] The painful and detrimental effects of prescribed medical treatments were not even necessarily perceived as negative. If the illness was a punishment for bad behaviour, then it made sense that redemption would come at a price, and Christian doctrine dictated that suffering in the present allotted for future rewards.


     The progress towards formulating a person-to-person theory of disease transmission in early modern medicine created problems for those who continued to view the pox in providential terms, and treatment of syphilis was dramatically affected as a result.[27] Few denied that the disease was, as William Clowes called it, “the just wrath of God,” but it was also clear that not all sufferers could be morally condemned, as babies and faithful wives also fell victim to it.[28] Christian charities—the primary, if not the only, source of medical treatment for the poor—faced the dilemma of distinguishing between “the deserving and the undeserving poor,” the undeserving being those who brought the pox on themselves through licentious living, and the deserving being those who contracted it through “innocent” means, such as a wife infected by an unfaithful husband or a baby by its nurse’s milk.[29] Clowes’ book, De Morbo Gallico, illustrates the contradictory attitudes toward medicine and syphilis. The book expresses the importance of healing those who suffer, but also that certain people are “unfit to be cured.”[30]


     The moral implications of the disease’s sexual nature split physicians on how best to approach it. Was it more important for the physician to save his patient’s body or his soul?[31] Some applied a providential perspective to their treatments, believing that any remedies were gifts directly given from God and required penance and God’s grace to be effective. Others avoided  treating syphilitics out of fear for their own souls; if the pox was a punishment issued from God, then it would be a sin for them to interfere with God’s will. [32] Syphilis became “a social disease,” as sufferers were shunned, both for their supposed depravity as well as for the contagion they carried.[33]

     Commonly adopted by early modern physicians was the notion that they had a duty to personally punish those who had brought this illness on themselves for their sins.[34] Marie de Maupeou Fouquet, a 16^th-century author of a book of medical remedies, stressed that syphilitics were not to be comforted “with mild remedies,” but that caregivers should “increase their torments by meting out the rigorous penances they deserved.”[35] Many charitable hospitals refused to treat syphilitics within their walls, transferring their pox patients to confinement in other locations or barring their doors to them completely. Paris’ Hôtel-Dieu, already full to bursting without the influx of pox-patients, called itself a hospital that “receives, feeds, and tends all poor sufferers, wherever they come from, and whatever ailment they have, even plague victims – though not if they have the pox.”[36] Others mercifully distributed their charity to pox victims, but returning patients would not be allowed treatment a second time; if they insisted on reverting to their licentious habits, then they deserved to suffer the consequences.[37]

     Out of this attitude developed the practice of publicly whipping syphilitics. Not only did this function as “necessary” penance on the part of the recipient, but in this way, authorities were able to use the “lewd and incontinent” lives of the sufferers as moral examples for others to follow. The flogging of victims already suffering intense physical torment illustrates the early modern centrality of public shaming rituals to the enforcement of social conformity.[38]

     The degree of suffering endured by the first European syphilitics went far beyond their considerable physical torment. Because every aspect of early modern life, from science and medicine to law and order, was based in Christian morality and uncompromising social mores, victims of the dreaded pox had to contend with equally dreadful medical treatments if they were lucky and ostracism from supportive social networks, religious condemnation and legal persecution if they were not. The Renaissance values of beauty and spiritual and aesthetic purity left no place for victims of disease associated with ugliness, uncleanliness, and sin.[39] Instead of reaching out to their lowly neighbours their time of need, the European masses blamed and criminalized the victims of the pox for all of the fears and anxieties that their unpredictably changing society produced. As the modern world examines its own responses to venereal disease, it would do well to remember the unwarranted suffering endured by the first European syphilitics and to be mindful that punitive and judgemental measures are ultimately harmful and ineffective.

---

[1] Irwin W. Sherman, Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World, (Washington: American Society for Microbiology Press, 2007), 84.

[2] Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 42.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Sherman, 84.

[5] Kevin Siena, “Introduction,” Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 7.

[6] Allen, 45.

[7] Siena, 16.

[8] John Parascandola, Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America, (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2008), 7.

[9] Laura J. McGough,“Quarantining Beauty: The French Disease in Early Modern Venice,” Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 219.

[10] Parascandola, 8.

[11] McGough, 219.

[12] Allen, 46.

[13] Ibid, 50.

[14] Ibid, 42.

[15] McGough, 225.

[16] Ibid, 222.

[17] Parascandola, 11.

[18] Allen, 42.

[19] Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 73.

[20] Siena, 19.

[21] Ibid, 20.

[22] John Arrizabalaga, et. al, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 139-140.

[23] Allen, 54.

[24] Parascandola, 16.

[25] Ibid, 18.

[26] Allen, 59.

[27] Siena, 20.

[28] Allen, 42.

[29] Quétel, 65.

[30] Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “Early Modern Syphilis,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, No. 2, (Oct., 1990), 198.His

[31] Allen, 48.

[32] Boehrer, 202.

[33] Ibid, 201.

[34] Allen, 51.

[35] Ibid, 50.

[36] Quétel, 69.

[37] Siena, 280.

[38] Ibid, 277.

[39] Siena, 8.

The Rule of Catherine de' Medici

[NOTE: The research and writing of this paper was the most challenging of any that I have done. My aim was to analyze the role of Catherine as a female ruler, but the restricted scope of the essay meant that my research did not do justice to the extreme complexity of the people and the politics involved in her life. I welcome comments offering different perspectives on France at this time, particularly relating to the opposing political camps and the role of the laypeople in the wars of religion.]


Femininity and Foreignness in Reformation France 

The image of the Italian Catherine de Medici has been a subject of controversy ever since she married into the French royal family in 1533 and continues to be a source of historical debate to this day. Catherine ruled France during an era of tremendous political and religious turmoil, and many of her actions resulted in harmful and sometimes disastrous consequences for the country, leading to the formation of legends dubbing her the “Sinister Queen” or “The Wicked Italian.”[1] However, further research into the motives behind her decisions reveal political skill and dedication to the French monarchy that could redeem her unfavourable reputation as a malevolent villain. 

            Catherine, the only legitimate child of Lorenzo II de Medici, Duke of Urbino, and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, was born on April 13, 1519, and was orphaned a mere three weeks later. At the age of fourteen, Pope Clement VII, Catherine’s Medici uncle, made arrangements with the French King Francis I for Catherine to marry Francis’ second son, Henri of Orléans, and the two were wed in 1533. This marriage was opposed by many in France who believed that a “foreign” daughter from the Italian merchant class was not worthy of marriage into their royal family, despite the fact that Pope Clement’s arrangement with Francis I included an alliance against the Holy Roman Emperor as well as the acquisition of  his niece and that Catherine was indeed half-French through her mother’s side.[2] The xenophobia surrounding Catherine’s Italian background had her stamped with the stigma of a foreigner from the beginning of her life in the French court.

            Catherine captured the attention of her father-in-law Francis with her intelligence and good manners, if not her beauty, and she was soon a favourite among the social circles of the King. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said her husband, who preferred the company of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, over that of his wife. Catherine’s life was made even more difficult in 1536 when Henri’s elder brother Francis suddenly died of mysterious causes. The Dauphin’s cupbearer, an Italian from Catherine’s entourage, was accused of having poisoned him and was executed, spawning rumours that Catherine had been involved with him in an imperial plot for the crown.[3]

            Along with Catherine’s new position as wife to the dauphin came the pressure to produce a male heir. Salic Law explicitly barred females from inheriting the French throne, and went so far as to be classed a “fundamental law”—unalterable even by the king. France was the only country in the west of Europe to enforce this law so rigidly, making Catherine’s necessity for children that much greater. To her and the country’s dismay, Catherine remained childless for the first ten years of her marriage.

            While Catherine had won the favour of King Francis I with her intelligence and good manners, if not for her beauty, the same can not be said for her husband, Henri. Henri much preferred the company of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, whose beauty and influence over Henri have brought her to fame in her own right.[4] Despite his indifference toward her, Catherine was very much in love with her husband, and she endured the humiliation Diane’s precedence over her with wifely composure out of affection for Henri.[5]

A widely discussed story that history has as of yet been unable to confirm tells that rumours had circulated around the court that Henri should put his sterile, unattractive wife aside and marry again. Catherine, so the story goes, presented herself to Francis I tearfully offered to step aside herself and enter a convent should that be of the greatest benefit to the kingdom. Francis, who was very fond of his daughter-in-law, refused to send her away and insisted that she remain. Should the story be true, Katherine Crawford suggests that this episode would mark Catherine’s first exertion of power. While the expectations on Catherine’s role as a female created problems for her, her display of feminine deference and loyalty to her country were admirable in the eyes of the King, and his word ensured that Henri could not get rid of her even if he wanted to.[6]

Henri’s coronation in 1547 elevated Catherine’s rank from dauphine to Queen Consort, and she had by this time fulfilled her duty to France and provided the Crown with two living children with five more to come in the future. Unfortunately, while motherhood improved her image among the people, it did nothing to increase her personal power or her influence over the king. Instead, Henri leant his ear to the Guise brothers from the House of Lorraine, the Constable Anne de Montmorency, and of course, his beloved mistress Diane.

Things would change for Catherine in 1552, when Henri’s military endeavours were at their height. While his troops were fighting the Hapsburg-Valois war in Italy, Henri himself was in the Netherlands battling Charles V. In his absence, Henri appointed Catherine as his regent, allowing her to exercise power and judgement on the realm for the first time.[7] The ambiguity surrounding the extent of her authority as Regent somewhat undermined her power, but Catherine used this opportunity to gain valuable ruling experience that she would need later in life.[8]

Five years later, the French forces suffered a devastating loss at St. Quentin. This was a terrible blow to French morale, and the shock sent France reeling to the brink of despair.[9]  Henri would need money if he was going to pull France through the rest of the war, and he sent Catherine to Paris to ask the Parlement for the necessary subsidies. Catherine appeared before the Parlement and presented her case with an eloquence and earnestness that made her the talk of the town.[10]  In succeeding to obtain the money Henri needed, Catherine succeeded also in winning the good opinion of her subjects. Her success earned for her approval in a domestic sense, as well. From this point on, Henri paid closer attention to his politically able wife, seeking her opinions and visiting her every night.[11]

This happy time was not to last for Catherine, as France was entering one of the most turbulent periods in its history. Henri was working hard for peace in France out of fear not only of financial difficulties, but of insurrection by the rising force of Protestantism. The worldview of Early Modern Catholic France can be represented by the traditional tenet of un roi, un loi, un foi, which maintains that the country will live in peace provided that it remains united under a common faith. The potential for religious division with the rise of French Protestants, who called themselves the Huguenots, was seen as threatening to the political stability of the realm. 

                                                                                                    

In the summer of 1559, the royal court was celebrating the marriage of Catherine’s eldest daughter Elisabeth to Philip II of Spain.  In effort to impress the Spanish, the celebrations included an elaborate collection of festivities, the last of which consisted of a jousting tournament in which Henri was participating. During his joust, the lance of Henri’s opponent splintered and pierced him through the eye.[1] Henri II died of his injuries on the 10^th of July. Since Salic Law prevented Catherine from governing France on her own, Henri’s crown passed to his sixteen-year-old son, François, on September 18^th of that year.

The death of the husband she had loved so dearly would alter Catherine’s life forever. She retreated from public life for the forty days appropriate for the wife of the deceased king, and she embraced widowhood as a significant marker of her new identity as Queen Mother.[2] From this point on, Catherine’s whole life would be dedicated to the fulfillment of her late husband’s wishes: the continuation of his lineage on the throne and a France strong in greatness and religious unity, which was, at the time, equated with stability.[3]

King François II had no adult male relatives, but the uncles of his wife, Mary, Queen of Scots, were quick to assume the positions of his chief advisors. The Duc de Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, immensely powerful individuals as well as leaders of the Catholic faction in French politics, now held primary influence over the throne; however, François respected his mother’s political abilities so much that he had the following formula added to all state documents, “This being the good pleasure of the Queen my Lady Mother, and I also approving of the things which are in accord with her advice, I am content and I command that...”[4] Clearly, the Queen Mother was not surrendering her place in the affairs of the realm.

Protestants in France were split into two camps: the religious Huguenots and the political. The religious sought the right to practice their religion freely and without persecution by the Catholics. The political Huguenots, in addition to their religious goals, opposed what they saw as the “Guise usurpation of power,” believing that power belonged in the hands of Antoine de Navarre and Louis de Condé.[5] These Princes of the Blood were also the leaders of the Huguenots, and Condé in particular nursed a personal desire to claim the throne of France for himself. The official position of the Huguenot forces declared their commitment to the integrity of the governmental institutions of their country. Thus, their goal was to invalidate the rule of the Guises and the children of Henri’s “illegitimate” line in favour of rule by the Princes of the Blood, resulting in what has come to be known as the Tumult of Amboise.[6]

            The Tumult of Amboise was a minor conspiracy against the Crown led by Louis de Condé in March, 1560. The plan was for Huguenot troops to seize François II and his family from Blois, where the court was staying, remove the Guise brothers from power, and call a States-General, at which the king would be deposed if he did not convert to Calvinism. Fortunately for the king, news of the plot reached the Guises in time to move the court to the security of Amboise. The insurrection was a failure.[7] Condé’s puppet leader, la Renaudie, was drawn and quartered, and hundreds of their followers were killed in the retaliation. Fifty-seven Huguenot leaders were publicly  executed and their bodies put on gruesome display.[8] These bloody executions made Catherine hated in Protestant eyes, but an armed insurrection against the king was a serious offense, and it is not difficult to understand her need to deal with the threat with equal severity.

Catherine’s policy with regards to religious division was one of moderation. While the Crown’s traditional reaction to heresy had always been to stamp it out decisively, Catherine argued at a Council at Fontainebleau that two thirds of France’s subjects were Protestant and the Crown could not execute them all.[9] Instead, Catherine would try to keep all of the people as content as possible in order to maintain peace. Though Catholic herself, it appears that Catherine had few qualms over Protestants worshipping on their own provided it did not cause harm. Catherine first enacted this policy after the Amboise conspiracy when she advised François to draw up an edict releasing all prisoners arrest because of their faith and allowing Protestants private worship.[10]

Francis II died of an illness in December of 1560, making way for his younger brother Charles to take the crown. Since Charles was only nine years old at the time, and the Guises were no longer connected to the throne through the marriage of their niece, the Orléans assembly requested that Antoine de Navarre become Regent for Charles. Catherine arranged a meeting with Navarre and argued that his plots against the Throne made him unfit to be Regent. She offered him the post of Lieutenant-General as well as the release of his brother Condé from prison in exchange for the regency.[11] Navarre accepted the offer, and Catherine’s skilful powers of negotiation brought her to a position of power stronger than the one she had held with either her husband or eldest son. Henri II, an adult male monarch in his own right, had previously dictated the terms of her regency. No other monarchs were there to limit Catherine in that way again, nor was she expected to withdraw into mourning as she had at the ascendency of Francis II.[12]

One of Catherine’s greatest demonstrations of her policy of moderation was her planning for an assembly to settle the question of religion tearing her country apart. Genevan Calvinists, German Lutherans, French Huguenots, and Catholic ministers and theologians all gathered at the Council of Poissy in 1561, where Catherine hoped the factions could agree on a plan for Church reform as well as a common definition of the Eucharist. Never before had a European monarch attempted a similar feat.[13] A new party, a Triumvirate composed of three prominent Frenchmen, including the Duc de Guise, had formed with the mission to defend Catholicism even, if necessary, against the King, made Catherine all the more desperate for the Council to succeed. It was not to be. While various ecclesiastical practices would be universally recognized as in need of reform, it was impossible to reconcile the differences in religious dogma, particularly in relation to transubstantiation and Communion. The Council disbanded with the various parties even more at odds than when they had first met, for now they had each argued themselves into logically defensible positions.

Unable to get the opposing parties to settle their differences, Catherine’s next strategy at avoiding civil war was to make them live with their differences in peace with her first edict of toleration. The Edict of St. Germain gave Protestant nobles freedom of worship and the right to protect Protestant congregations on their own rural lands, while, for the first time, Protestants could worship freely in the country provided they did so peacefully and during the day. While the concessions of the Edict were still limited (practice was still forbidden in towns and at night, as was the raising of arms), the significance was that Huguenots were now given legal recognition.[14] Catherine, acting as Regent, encountered difficulties with her edict that she would not have faced had she been a male ruling in her own right. Parlement refused to register the edict as the law required. Instead, they formally objected to the edict by letter, arguing that permitting division in the country would lead to its ruin, and implying the illegality of a woman defying the religion of her deceased husband. The edict was finally adopted officially in March, 1562, on the condition that it be temporary pending the majority of the king. [15]

At the same time that Catherine’s edict was being approved by the Parlement, events were unfolding that would lead to the civil war Catherine was so desperately trying to avoid. Upon investigating a Huguenot prêche at Vassy, the Duc de Guise was suddenly involved in a conflict between his men and the Huguenot congregation that left thirty dead and a hundred wounded.[16] His alleged attack and breach of the Edict of St. Germain was “a Godsend to Huguenot propaganda,” and France was decidedly split into two when the Protestants called on the Prince de Condé to raise troops and protect them from the Triumvirate.[17]

The hostilities provoked by the Massacre at Vassy resulted in the outbreak of France’s first war of religion. The war resulted in the deaths of both Antoine de Navarre and the Duc de Guise, while Constable de Montmorency and Condé were taken prisoner, granting some independence to Catherine. Catherine tried once again to stop the violence with a new edict drawn up with Condé and Montmorency known as the Peace of Amboise, in March, 1563, which repeated the essentials of the Edict of St. Germain on a somewhat less tolerant scale and, like St. Germain, remained under limited application until the majority of the king.

Catherine’s attempts at pacification could never stabilize France in the harmonious toleration that she envisioned. Universal appeasement was impossible; the more concessions Catherine made to either Catholic or Protestant side, the more the fears of the opposing side escalated.[18] The settlement of religious differences would not placate the political Huguenots from carrying out individual agendas under the guise of religion, while the genuinely religious would continue fighting for their freedoms regardless of which nobles ruled or whose personal vendettas were realized. Catherine hoped that the concept of the monarchy would be strengthened with a decisive ruler on the throne, and so Charles declared his majority in 1563 at the age of thirteen years. Charles IX reserved his mother’s power to govern and confirmed a version of the Edict of Amboise at this time.[19]

Since she had yet to achieve her dream of Valois stability in a united France through religious policy, Catherine commendably set forth with the court on a two-year progress of the country in spring of 1564 with the goals of restoring the monarchy’s public image, reinforcing the Edict of Amboise, and pacifying the potentially detrimental reactions of Catholic Spain.[20]

Recognizing the potential for Henry of Navarre to one day inherit the throne, Catherine arranged for her daughter Margot to marry him in 1572, thus keeping the throne in the family, albeit through the female line, while simultaneously strengthening the edicts of toleration by allying the Catholic monarchy with the Protestant Navarre.[21] The controversy over this marriage resulted in insufferably high tensions within the city, as crowds of Protestants were packed into predominantly Catholic Paris for the wedding festivities. A mysterious assassination attempt on the Huguenot leader, Admiral de Coligny, drove the royal family into a fear of Huguenot retaliation. The Duke of Guise finished off the assassination the following day, commencing a veritable slaughter of Protestants by Parisian Catholics and vice versa known as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. The precise roles of the instigators of the massacre largely remain a mystery, yet accounts of the massacre generally agree that Charles, most likely pressured by Catherine and his council, initially sanctioned the killings before attempting to call them off as the violence grew out of hand.[22] By that point, there was no hope of stemming the senseless bloodbath, which was spreading to cities beyond Paris and would last for months to come. Catherine herself has been widely accused as the conspirator behind the Coligny assassination out of jealousy of his influence and opposition to his desire to wage war with Spain. The resulting Protestant propaganda highlighting Catherine’s wickedness would spread to England and provide the foundation for the legends of her malevolence in years to come. Catherine’s lifetime mission toward religious pacification and the inevitable conflict that would arise from such an assassination render the truth behind this accusation is unlikely.

Domestic conflicts further complicated the state of the Crown as Catherine’s youngest son, François of Alençon, grew hungry for the throne, attempted numerous assassinations of Charles IX, and converted to Protestantism in 1576. When Henri of Anjou, King of Poland, succeeded to the French throne upon Charles IX’s death in 1574, Catherine firmly protected his position for him as Regent until he could return to France to claim his birthright. [23]

Catherine had longed for the strength and stability that an adult, experienced, legitimate French King would provide, and the country seemed to have found that king in Henri III. While Catherine retained some of the influence she was used to exerting over the Crown, Henri was less interested in her than his brothers had been, and she stepped into a new role in the background. As Catherine aged and grew ill, she had less and less control over the affairs of the state now being directed by Henri III. However, despite the discomfort and difficulties of old age, Catherine never ceased working toward her dream of a strong, stable France by spending the last years of her life travelling the country and attempting to hold off war of any kind by reinforcing Henri’s authority. His authority and power began to steeply decline when he signed the Catholic League’s Edict of the Union. Catherine, the “Eternal Negotiator,” continued her efforts until practically her dying day, on January 5, 1589, 42 years after her tenure as Queen Consort and two weeks after her son’s assassination of  the Duc de Guise.[24]

While it is undeniable that the years of Catherine de Medici’s power in France were years of turmoil and instability, Catherine herself had tried to steer her country through the religious and political storms with policies of co-existence and harmony impossibly ahead of  her time. The concept of toleration was as of yet unheard of, and her attempts at pacification only drove the opposing forces to greater tensions as each tenaciously struggled to dominate the other. While violence erupted as a result of her policies, that clash of interests was inevitable, and Catherine’s altruistic motives can free her from accusations of  wickedness and bloodlust.

Catherine’s ability to preserve the French Crown through her sons’ three successive reigns of conflict is a testament to her abilities as a skilled diplomat and politician. While her influence in the rule of her sons provided some continuity for the policies she attempted to maintain, one can not reflect upon Catherine’s reign without wondering whether consequences would have been different had she been able to rule as a female in her own right. Cultural expectations of female deference rendered Catherine nearly powerless during her own tenure as Queen Consort excepting her brief stints at a regency whose terms were dictated by her husband. As her own monarch, Catherine would never have had to battle for her policies to be approved among the myriad other nobles jockeying for influence over the king. Her Edicts of Toleration would not have been challenged by Parliament as they were, and she could have imposed them more strongly as indisputable law instead of temporary measures pending the majority of yet another underage king.

Catherine had to prove herself against social and political constraints targeting her gender and ethnicity, making each of her triumphs shine brighter for the effort and skill they required. For indeed, there were triumphs. While her policies of pacification never did bring about the national unity and religious tolerance she envisioned in her lifetime, Catherine’s tireless negotiation and brilliant gift of statesmanship allowed her to preserve the concept of the monarchy among the French long enough for Henri IV to ascend the throne and end the religious warfare with the Edict of Nantes in 1598.[25] As a mother seeking the well-being of her children, a wife executing her husband’s wishes, a politician negotiating for power and policy, and a monarch safeguarding the Crown of her country, Catherine de Medici, this great woman whose character merged the best of royal French diplomacy and Italian bourgeois cunning, not only fulfilled the traditional expectations society handed to her, but created new roles for herself and surpassed them as a talented sixteenth-century woman in ways that no man could have.

Catherine de' Medici

Attributed to François Clouet

c. 1555

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[1] Williamson, 82.

[2] Crawford, 656.

[3] Williamson, 89.

[4] Ibid, 94.

[5] Mahoney, 58.

[6] Sichel, 59.

[7] Etienne Pasquier, Lettres Historiques Pour Les Années 1556-1594, pub. D. Thickett (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1966), 41.

[8] Williamson, 100.

[9] Sichel, 111.

[10] Williamson, 98.

[11] Sichel, 116.

[12] Crawford, 653.

[13] Williamson, 119.

[14] Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629, (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 47.

[15] Ibid, 48.

[16] Williamson, 128.

[17] Holt, 49.

[18] Nancy Roelker, One King, One Faith, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 276.

[19] Crawford, 669.

[20] Williamson, 150.

[21] Sutherland, 39.

[22] Barbara B. Diefendorf, The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), 21.

[23] Sutherland, 44-45.

[24] Mahoney, 318.

[25] Roelker, 276.

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[1] N.M. Sutherland, Princes, Politics and Religion, 1547-1589 (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 237.

[2] Katherine Crawford. “Catherine de Médicis and the Performance of Political Motherhood,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000): 643.

[3] Hugh Ross Williamson, Catherine de’ Medici (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 43.

[4] Irene Mahoney, Madame Catherine (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975), 30.

[5] Sutherland, 32.

[6] Crawford, 644.

[7] Mahoney, 39.

[8] Crawford, 652.

[9] Mahoney, 42.

[10] Williamson, 68.

[11] Edith Sichel, Catherine de’ Medici and the French Reformation (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), 16.