The Life of Marie de Medicis, Queen of France, Consort of Henri IV, and Regent

Julia PardoeProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
708K words
Chapters
71

Tags

English Originals World HistoryWomen's Biography Historical ReappraisalPolitical AllegoryPalace IntriguePower GameAntiheroComplex HumanityBiographical NarrativeSocial ObservationModern ChinaFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Life of Marie de Medicis, Queen of France, Consort of Henri IV, and RegentAuthor: Pardoe, Miss (Julia), 1806-1862,Language: English, Class: DC: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: France, Andorra, Monaco, Release Date: Mar 1, 2004

Editor's review

This biography of Marie de' Medici by Julia Pardoe belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of English historical biography, tracing in narrative form the political career and courtly circumstances of the French queen and regent. Its value lies not in offering source criticism in the modern academic sense, but in showing how a Victorian author understood the balance of power after the French Wars of Religion, royal marriage, and the legitimacy of female regency. The book gives a fairly complete account of the court factions during Marie's regency after the assassination of Henri IV and of the tensions between mother and son with Louis XIII, making it useful as supplementary reading for understanding early modern French court politics. It should be read as material for the history of historiography rather than as a definitive work of scholarship, with attention to the author's value judgments and the limitations of her era. As the original is a public-domain English electronic text, the language has the elegance and prolixity of nineteenth-century written English, and non-native readers will need some patience.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introductory chapters first to clarify the relationships between figures, then follow the regency period in order
  2. Keep a chronology of the French Wars of Religion and the Bourbon dynasty at hand for reference
  3. With nineteenth-century long sentences, identify the main clause first, then revisit the modifiers; avoid word-for-word translation
  4. After reading, compare with modern studies of Marie de' Medici and note differences in the author's stance

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  5. 5
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  51. 51
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  55. 55
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  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
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FAQ

Is this a contemporary academic biography? No. It is a narrative biography written in the nineteenth century by Julia Pardoe, a public-domain work of history lacking modern scholarly annotation and archival criticism. It is better read as a sample of historiography and narrative tradition.
Can I read this book if my English is not good? The original is nineteenth-century written English with long sentences and elegant diction. Readers with upper-intermediate to advanced English who are willing to use a chronology and a character chart will find it smoother; complete beginners should start with a Chinese summary before attempting the original.
What background knowledge do I need before reading? It helps to know the basic outlines of Henri IV, Louis XIII, the French Wars of Religion, and early Bourbon politics, and to know Marie de' Medici's position as queen and regent. This will make it easier to follow the court factions and power struggles.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Julia Pardoe Author · English · 1806–1862

Julia Pardoe (1806–1862) was an English poet, novelist, historian and travel writer, born in Beverley, Yorkshire. In 1836 she travelled with her father to Constantinople, and the journey became the basis of The City of the Sultan and The Beauties of the Bosphorus; she was among the first English women writers to describe Turkey. Her travel writing focuses on the daily life and manners of local people, with careful observation and lively narration, and it did much to shape nineteenth-century British readers' understanding of the Ottoman Empire. Besides travel books, she wrote The Thousand and One Days: A Companion to the Arabian Nights and historical works on the French court, including The Life of Marie de Medicis. Six of her works are held in this collection. She died in London in 1862.