In the film Queen Margot, Catherine de Médicis is depicted as one of the main instigators of the massacre of Protestants at the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Others saw her as a woman of power supporting her sons, the last descendants of the Valois dynasty. She was also, in her time, a great patron of the arts. This lecture will try to reconcile the three contradictory images of this rich and complex historical figure.

Jane Couchman is Professor Emerita of French; Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and Humanities at Glendon College and the Faculty of Graduate Studies, York University, Toronto. Her research focusses on women in France and the Netherlands in the16th and 17th centuries, especially Huguenot women and their letters. She has co-edited, with Allyson M. Poska and Katherine A. McIver, the Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (2013); with Colette H. Winn, Autour d’Éléonore de Roye, princesse de Condé (2012); and with Ann Crabb, Women’s Letters Across Europe 1400-1700 (2005), and has published more than 30 book-chapters and articles. She is Past President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. In 2015 she received the Prix de l’ensemble d’une carrière / Lifetime Achievement Award, by the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. 

Lecture in English, as a prelude to the Toronto Consort’s The Italian Queen of France concerts on November 11 and 12, 2016.

Free admission.

Following the meeting, Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 film Queen Margot will be shown at 7:30 p.m.

Partners: The Toronto Consort, the Italian Cultural Institute