Successive generations have remembered Marie de’ Medici (1575–1642), Queen of France, as an incompetent regent, obsessed with power and alleged to have murdered her husband. Moreover, historians often saw no more to her cultural work and politics than a female and Italian parenthesis between the reign of Henry IV and the ministry of Richelieu. This unfavourable image of the second Medici-regent survived the French Revolution and was solidified in the master narrative of an increasingly bourgeois, republican and secular French nation. The present volume provides the first-ever investigation into Marie de’ Medici’s colourful reception during the 19th century. It offers an in-depth analysis of historical writing, society and politics in the pan-European period of crisis and change called the Age of Nationalism

This book is included in DOAB.