hardback

The best way to describe this book is given by the author in the introduction: "short and lucid popularization of a story which is as dramatic as it is complicated and confusing". It is not a research on Catherine de Medici, nor it is an autobiography. The same introduction makes clear that they are not a product of a real research (and Neale knows what research really means). What this book contains are 4 lectures, written in 1938 about France and Catherine de Medici -- from an Elizabethan scholar who does not attempt to claim that he is a specialist in the French history. At the same time, he knows the period very well and the story of England and France is interconnected at this time.

The 4 lectures form an almost continuous narrative even if they are specialized in a way. Catherine is the main focus for the later ones; France for the earlier. And the story is all there - the death of the French kings that allow Catherine to rule, her mistakes that complicate the situation, the religious wars, the St. Bartholomew Massacre. What emerges from the book is a Catherine de Medici, the mother that tries and fails to be the politician, the ruler, the equal to Elizabeth (even if they are not directly compared, the shadows are there; or maybe I was seeing them because I know who the author is and I had read his work on Elizabeth).

At the end, the book delivers on its promise. It's not what you would expect from a book titled like that today but anyone reading a publication from 1943 (when the lectures are collected in a book) knows what they can expect. It's closer to popular history than scholar one but it does not cross the border completely. And if someone does not feel like reading a huge volume about all this, the book gives an alternative. And it definitely shows another face of the author - until now anything I had read from him was concentrated on Elizabeth. ( )