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A Compelling Revisionist Take on the "Serpent Queen"

I discovered this book thanks to the recent Starz network drama series The Serpent Queen (2022), played admirably by Samantha Morton. Catherine de Medici is regularly reviled as a ruthless, scheming woman who seized and maintained power through any means, including poisonings and witchcraft used against her own family and allies. However, this is a revisionist biography that points out, and rightly so, that the historical accounts of that period were mostly written by her rivals and enemies, and there is also the obvious element of resentment by powerful men at the time of the affront of a woman of those times daring to try and rule when their normal role was largely to have male children to ensure the succession of various dynasties, and not to have independent thoughts or (god forbid) actually be involved in the politics of the royalty and nobility.

What we learn from this alternative take is that Catherine faced some very difficult circumstances very early on in her initially privileged life as a Medici as the political winds of fate blew against her family, and she spent time raised as a hostage by her enemies. She was then forced into a dynastic marriage aimed to unite the Florentine and French powers, and her only way to survive was to get pregnant and produce a male heir, while having to endure the humiliation of her husband’s open love affair with his mistress Diane de Poitiers, who he treated as his personal confidant and partner, while keeping her pregnant with ten successive children. 
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Catherine then has to face a seemingly endless series of crises between rival factions within France, conflicts with the Spanish crown, and then most damaging is the massive rift in society that emerges with the Protestant Reformation and Hugenot rebellions against oppressive Catholic rule. She is forced to take sides against the Huguenots to preserve stability, but at great costs of lives and the loss of her own children to intrigue and illness and war. Throughout all the adversities, so remains determined, cool-headed (on the surface), and ruthless, when many other male leaders are vain, foolish, and hot-headed. This if anything makes her even more hated by her rivals and enemies, and certainly would explain why they would excoriate her later in the historical annals, and blame her for the infamous Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.



The book does pummel the reader with names and details that are quite overwhelming, so I ended up letting much of them just slide past me and try to just focus on the overall flow of events, as it’s impossible to really follow and remember each person’s allegiances, position, and motivations. 

The drama has apparently been green-lighted for a second season, which should cover the latter half of this book, and that is a very exciting prospect that I look forward to.