The Identities of Catherine De’’ Medici

In The Identities of Catherine de’ Medici, Susan Broomhall provides an innovative analysis of the representational strategies that constructed Catherine de’ Medici and sought to explain her behaviour and motivations. Through her detailed exploration of the identities that the queen, her allies, supporters, and clients sought to project, and how contemporaries responded to them, Broomhall establishes a new vision of this important sixteenth-century protagonist, a clearer understanding of the dialogic and dynamic nature of identity construction and reception, and its consequences for Catherine de’ Medici’s legacy, memory, and historiography.

Susan Broomhall is Professor and Director of the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. She has published more than twenty monographs and edited collections on women and gender in the early modern world.