The French queen's letters
Subtitle: Mary Tudor Brandon and the politics of marriage in sixteenth-century Europe
By: Erin A. Sadlack
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Queenship and power
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 266
ISBN-13: 9780230620308
Subjects: Correspondence; Relations with French; Chivalry; Marriage; Queens; Biography; History
Description: The life of Mary Tudor the French queen, younger sister of Henry VIII, has been chiefly defined by the scandal of her secret marriage to Charles Brandon after the death of her husband, Louis XII of France. Such limited focus has obscured Mary's role as a political figure, one whom poets celebrated for bringing peace between England and France. In this biography, Erin A. Sadlack contends that Mary was neither a weeping hysteric nor a love-struck romantic, but a queen who drew on two sources of authority to increase the power of her position: epistolary conventions and the rhetoric of chivalry that imbued the French and English courts. By reading Mary's life and letters within the context of early modern political culture, this book broadens our understanding of the exercise of queenship in the sixteenth century. - - From back cover.
Table of contents: title: A queenly education; title: Becoming the queen; title: Marrying where "my mynd is"; title: Always the French queen : identity politics.