Overview

Full Product Details

9781472428219

Table of Contents

Reviews

McIlvenna's case studies confirm how scandal literature shaped individual reputation, but more broadly, how it provided the contours for derogatory understandings of whole groups of people. Women at the Valois court were rarely seen in a positive light. This is the sting in the tail: Catherine de' Medici may have done all she could, but her women, the women of the court, and women more generally were nonetheless routinely demonized, disrespected, and dismissed in print and in the public eye. Historians, McIlvenna reminds us, don't have to buy the scurrilous version of the story, but seeing through it does not make it go away. - Katherine Crawford, Vanderbilt University, H-France Review

'This is an important study that explores how rumour and reputation were carefully constructed, circulated and controlled in the high intensity environment of the Valois court of late sixteenth-century France. McIlvenna provides a much-needed analysis of gendered strategies of information management, occurring through social networks of communication sustained in oral, epistolary, and print forms as well as through actions. Significantly, McIlvenna places women's own experiences in the foreground, not only providing insights into the origins and nature of the vicious propaganda that has dominated the memory of their activities, but also analysing the evidence of female practices to manage its effects on their lives and historical legacy.' Susan Broomhall, The University of Western Australia

Author Information

Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Australian National University’

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available