Sarah Bradford
One Long Party?
The French Renaissance Court
By Robert J Knecht
Yale University Press 415pp £25 order from our bookshop
In November 1575 King Henri III of France and his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, amused themselves in the streets of Paris snatching lapdogs from nuns; three years earlier during the reign of Henry’s brother and predecessor, Charles IX, the quarry had been Huguenots hunted down and killed in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, allegedly again at the instigation of Catherine. As this history of the French Renaissance court demonstrates, the elaborate pursuit of game was the consuming passion of the Valois kings.
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