French Mistress

French Mistress

French Mistresses with Dr.s Christine and Tracy Adams
French Mistresses with Dr.s Christine and Tracy Adams

Mute/Unmute Episode

Rewind 10 Seconds

1x

Fast Forward 30 seconds

Copyright 2022 The French History Podcast
Intro: Today’s special episode is an interview with Dr.s Christine and Tracy Adams. Christine Adams is a professor of history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland whose works include A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France and Poverty, Charity and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France . Tracy Adams is a professor of French literature at the University of Auckland, whose works include Violent passions: Managing love in the Old French verse romance , The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria , and Christine de Pizan and the fight for France . Today we are discussing a book these two sister scholars wrote together: The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame DuBarry . In the book, Christine and Tracy detail the role of the royal French mistress. The mistress was not just a sexual or romantic partnership for the king, it was also an important political position and mistresses wielded incredible power and influence over the kingdom.
Gary: Thank you very much for joining me, Professor Christine and Tracy Adams, the two of you are sisters with Dr. Christine Adams being a historian, and Dr. Tracy Adams, a literature professor. Can you explain your methodology in working together to produce this book and how you brought together literary aspects with a historical narrative?
Dr. Christine Adams: I’ll just I’ll start here by saying that Tracy and I had wanted to do a joint book project for a long time, since our areas of expertise are actually closely related. And about 10 years ago, we were both finishing up projects. We decided we were interested in working on beauty and history and especially how women use beauty as social and political capital. And so we organized an interdisciplinary colloquium on female beauty systems throughout the centuries that was held in the Netherlands, where Tracy had been a fellow a few years earlier. And it was while we were working on the edited volume that came out of that colloquium that we realized that our focus on beauty as political capital had taken us in the direction of royal mistresses and that our complementary areas of expertise, Tracy’s of medieval, early, modern scholar, whereas my expertise is the 17th through 19th centuries, that that would allow us to write a survey that spans over three hundred years together. You’re right that we come at it from slightly different perspectives and Tracy can expand on that a bit.
Tracy: Yeah, I’m just to say a couple of words about how a historian would approach something differently from a literary historian. So just imagine that you’ve got a historian, literary historian. You’re going to study the same woman and say woman of the upper nobility from them, I don’t know, say, the early 15th century. The historian will be interested in amassing all of the, the physical traces of that person, so her accounts, so we know how much money she had and how she spent it and her entourage, so we know what her networks were, maybe where she lived, what her education was, what kind of books she had…And the literary historian will be interested in all of those things. But first and foremost, I think the literary historian will be interested in the narratives and the constructed nature of the past, very conscious of this construct, the nature of the past that that she’s trying to recreate. And so I guess that a historian wouldn’t be uninterested in those things, especially over the past 30 years, historians have really learned how to read text critically. But I think that that’s the major difference. And then in a concrete sense, I think you see the difference when you read historical accounts of women that really take for granted as truth contemporary documents, as opposed to the literary historian who will always be questioning who the who the documents come from and what their purpose in creating them in the first place or what that purpose was. So I don’t know, Chris, do you want to add anything to that? Does that sound-
Christine: I mean, I think that historians are always very, very much aware of the past is constructed and are always very suspicious of documents and in a similar way. So, you know, the Venn diagram overlap is pretty big. And what the two of us would be doing, I guess, is as historian and literary scholar and your work has always been very, very historically based as well. And I read texts. And so I think they come together,
Tracy: I think for this period especially, that there’s not much distinction between historians and literary historians because you’re always dealing with texts. Right. And you’re reading manuscripts and chronicles and that kind of thing. And that’s that that’s your first job, I guess.
Gary: And I assume the two of you got along during the whole process and there wasn’t any conflict between the two?
Tracy: No, we got along very well and
Christine: there really wasn’t any conflict because I think we both fit into that Venn diagram space. Right. Sort of. And neither extreme neither of us is. Chris isn’t terribly interested in the empirical side. I mean, only the empirical side. And I’m not a post-modernist. So so we do come together right there in the middle.
Tracy: Right. And we get along so well.
Christine: And so we listen to each other. We respect each other. Yes.
Gary: All right. Well, I just ask because I don’t think I could write a book with my brother. So in any case, when people think of a mistress, they think of a woman outside of a married couples relationship that one person has an affair with you to make the argument in your book that the royal French mistress was not this at all. Can you explain what role the royal French mistress played?
Christine: So the position of the powerful French royal mistress really is unique in Europe as this recognized extra conjugal social position that has its own defining features and most notably that the French mistress had a very important political role at court. Now, we all know, of course, that kings in other countries had mistresses. I mean, basically all kings had mistresses. But in France, it really becomes a tradition. It becomes this open secret, as we call it, that was that was made possible by the theatrical nature of court like that, that allowed courtiers to sort of act in different roles in different spaces at court. And this was especially the case since the majority of royal mistresses were noble women. They had other reasons to be in court. And so even though everybody knew who the royal mistress was, everybody could sort of behave as if all was honorable, which are the words that Catherine de Medici used when she talked about the end to end. So people could just sort of ignore the fact that this was going on in a sense, even though everybody knew about it. I think historians have been reluctant to recognize the political influence of mistresses and of female courtiers more generally, and probably because they’ve been to influence and accepted into straightforward a fashion. Louis, the XIV’s insistence that he would never allow a woman to influence his policies. He always claimed that he never let women have influence. Whereas you look you look at the documents and you see very clearly they had they had influence. The other thing that I think has kept historians from recognizing just how important these women were is the very narrow definition of the political that has dominated our understanding of politics for four. So long, and I think it’s important to understand that at the early modern court, because there wasn’t really a strict distinction between formal and informal power and because women operated within the framework of family and court networks that valued women as mediators and brokers. This meant that women really could exercise significant political power. And in some cases, they even held influential positions in the in the queen’s household. They could acquire significant social capital through these official positions. They help now. Now, that said, we can’t ignore the erotic element of the relationship between kings and mistresses. I mean, this is a society where kings marry for dynastic and diplomatic reasons, that they’re going to look for romance in other relationships. So there is that that whiff of romance and scandal that’s attached to the position of the royal mistress, even if she was generally accepted and even if she does have these other important roles. And one final thing I think that’s important is that the kings couldn’t entirely trust their wives. I mean, their wives were foreigners and their wives were often from the families of their competitors. And so mistresses were French. They were dependent on the king for favor. They were completely devoted to the king’s interests. So the king felt that he could trust them. So that’s sort of the backdrop of what her position was. The position of the royal mistresses that emerges in France, though, is due to the confluence of a number of factors. And one of those that we talk about is a particular idea of gender that that while women were legally inferior to men, politically, they’re just as capable. And that meant that they could be particularly valuable as advisers. And this is something that that Tracy talks about in the early phases of the book.
Tracy: So maybe I’ll say just one other thing there about why we think of this as a tradition, an actual tradition, as opposed to just a sort of discrete series of mistresses. And for that, I think you need to look at the 19th century, which we don’t actually do in our book, because it’s a short survey. We had a word limit number of a number of words that we were allowed to to use. But just to show why it’s a tradition in the 19th century, you start to get popular histories about the French royal mistress, where this narrative is sort of woven with [Agnès] Sorel as the good mistress. And she is distinguished from the bad, greedy mistresses. So French historians, certainly popular historians are themselves very interested in themselves as well as a kingdom or a republic, even that that has this this long and venerable tradition of the royal mistress.
Gary: I think that’s a very important and very interesting thing that I hadn’t thought of is that the mistress was inherently French and loyal to the nation, whereas the wife was often from a rival kingdom. So thank you for pointing that out. Now, let’s move on into the core of the book. What were the precursors to the mistress that allowed women to take up this role?
Christine: Well, our argument is that it wasn’t other royal mistresses. I mean, there were royal mistresses from probably from the Pepin, the shores. I mean, on there have always been royal mistresses. But this but this position, I think, is more closely related to the rise of the mingons or the court favorite. And you start to see those emerge under Charles VIIth. So ruling in the middle of the 15th century. And that’s the same time that you see Agnès Sorel become so, so popular in the sense that everyone knows who she is and the chroniclers are fascinated with her. So Agnès arises at the same time as the favorites. And I think that’s the context that we need to consider her in. So the favorites are young people who have no great loyalty to any other aristocrat except the King himself. So this sort of direct line to the king, very much disliked by the courts, either see their influence usurped. So I think that this sort of small coterie of favorites at Charles VIIth’s Court is the beginning of the possibility of the French royal mistress that she develops.
Tracy: And there’s also, of course, the fact that women had traditionally had an important role potentially at court as regent. That women were excluded from rule by Salic law, which they kind of invented in the 14th century as an excuse to justify women’s exclusion from the throne. But there’s a lot of emphasis on the particular type of power that can be wielded by women semi-overtly, but not officially as female regent. And we see those regions of emerge at a fairly early time. And they play an important role in that sort of it sets the stage for the fact that women can be important political players.
Christine: Right. And you’re just going to need a structure, which I think you don’t see until the court of Francis I. So early 16th century to mid-16th century, you’ll see structures at his court that make it possible for the royal mistress to wield power earlier on as hard because there just isn’t a space that people can recognize as a political royal mistress. I mean, she’s a prostitute or a newspaper of the queen, but there’s just really no possibility at Charles VIIth’s court as seeing her as anything like a positive political figure. So we’ll talk about how she becomes how she sort of creates that space in the 16th century. But we’re going through chronologically. If you wanted to talk a bit more about Agnès, we won’t talk about that yet. Just to say that Agnès doesn’t have her own quarters at court mean you don’t see them. In any case. I mean, some of the chroniclers complain that she’s got a lifestyle in a state that rivals the Queen’s. But when you look at the plans of the royal residences, there is no space for her quarters. So she had her own her own places that she lived, but she did not live next to the queen.
Gary: Moving on from on. Yes. To the Duchess d’Étampes. How did your second mistress and become France’s first true mistress, as you call her?
Christine: OK, that’s a complicated question. And first of all, we just have to acknowledge that Agnès’ reputation continued after her death. So she she died by poison in 1450. And there were a number of icons created of her. The most famous is the Melun Diptych, the Virgin lactating with the little with the little Christ in front of her. And you’ve probably seen that that image. And no one knows for sure if it was actually meant to represent her. We’d have to go into a long discussion about the degree to which artists actually reproduced actual features of the face or signs to show who people were. But I’m convinced that this is meant to gesture towards Agnès Sorel, and that’s the reason that her image continued so positive after her death. So Agnès Sorel continues to be a figure that everyone knows she makes it to the court of Francis I we know because France, the first mother, Louise of Savoie, collected an album of sketches, portraits, sketches of all of his favorite courtiers when he was being held captive by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. She created this album and Agnès’ picture appears there along with these other contemporary curators. And so what was she doing there? Well, possibly justifying the position of Francis I as his own mistress. Not quite sure what she’s doing there, but in any case, she still has a reputation then at the court of Francis I. But it’s in this environment that she’s able to flourish. And so we see other icons of her produced at the same time that these portraits of her become very popular. So we’re in an atmosphere where the royal mistress is accepted, maybe not as a political figure yet, because Francis I is very dependent on his mother and his sister as political advisers, so he personally has no problem with taking direction, taking advice from women, so he’s already predisposed to like women, to respect them, to take advice from them. And after his mother dies, then he eventually turns to his favorite mistress, who has been his favorite mistress since 1526. By the end of the 1530s, he is openly soliciting her advice on political matters. And in turn, diplomats from other countries come to the court and they solicit her advice because it’s known that she’s the only way you can actually get through to the king. So she gains this sort of central position among the ambassadors and the ambassadors we think are absolutely essential to the position of the French mistress, as a political figure…under Francis I you start to have resident ambassadors. So you’ve got this whole audience of support now of people who are there representing their own lords and trying to get information from the various courtiers about what the king is up to, and they’re looking at things that they never quite understand because, of course, the courtiers aren’t going to give them the information they want. But the royal mistress in this in this environment is a central figure because she’s got direct access to the king. And she’s someone that you can actually talk to. So the rise of the residents and the resident ambassador we think is essential to the creation of this of this role.
Gary: An interesting part of your book is about the conflict between one mistress Anne [de Pisseleu d’Heilly] and the future Mistress Diane de Poitiers. What spurred their conflict and how did it impact the King Court and France?
Tracy: That conflict, I think, was entirely political. I mean, I suppose that you can always have personal problems with them, with the people you’re involved with, politically speaking, but they come from two different factions. So, Anne, or the Duchess d’Étampes, if you want to call it that, is the king’s mistress and Diane de Poitiers’ is the Dauphin’s mistress and the king and the Dauphin disagree on almost everything for all kinds of good reasons. They’re also divided by religion. The Duchess of a Top is allied with Marguerite of Navarre the sister of Francis I, the first who is an evangelical. So that’s sort of the French version of sort of shifting towards Protestantism, whereas Diane de Poitiers is very much Catholic. So they have these factional differences that aren’t personal. The that’s then turned into a personal conflict by court observers who just love to turn any kind of conflict between two women into a sort of catfight. And that’s already happening during their lifetime. Some court observers are writing back to their to their lords that these these two women hate each other and that the court factions have formed around them. But in fact, the court factions don’t form around them. They happen to be part of court factions. But it’s not as if this is a personal fight between these two women created the factionalism at court. That’s just one of those sort of long narratives that that is especially tenacious. So let’s just say that it was political differences because because the Duchess of Étampes is the king’s biggest champion and an Diane de Poitiers is the Dauphin’s biggest champion.
Gary: You called Diane the epitome of the French royal mistress. What made her the perfect mistress?
Tracy: She had something that a top lacked and that was she had a persona. She had she had a look that was carefully cultivated. We don’t really know what Duchess d’Étampes looked like. There are a couple of portraits that may be her, but it’s hard to see what she looked like. She didn’t associate herself in particular with any mythological figure. She doesn’t have anything that we can kind of grasp onto that makes her vague, makes her a celebrity. There’s nothing, nothing in the way of icons that have subsisted as opposed to, say, Agnes, who has to have that beautiful, beautiful diptych with her where she is the lactating virgin and then Diane de Poitiers, there are dozens of icons of Diane de Poitiers, although of course most of them aren’t art tested. But I think there’s three images that that actually were created of her during her lifetime. But we all have an idea that Diane is the Huntress, she associates herself with
Xxx Full Hd Free Porn Video
Kinky Tube
Blonde Handjob Video

French Mistress

Report Page