Latest / Beheaded / Special Episode: Interview with Dr. Leah Redmond Chang

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Special Episode: Interview with Dr. Leah Redmond Chang · Beheaded

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to Beheaded.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to a special edition episode featuring author Leia Redmond Chang.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Megan Moore and I'm Elizabeth Black.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And welcome, Leah.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's so fun to be here.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we are excited to have you.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: We are here to talk about a very special book recently published called Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: We couldn't put this book down.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: We loved it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we were both sent copies and so excited to read it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We devoured this book probably, what would you say?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe like two weeks?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty quickly.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was a little nervous because I know we were setting up the interview.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, this is a pretty thin book.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I want to have enough time to digest everything.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: But little did we know, we we flew through it because it was such an easy read, but a good read.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh this book will let Leia um discuss kind of what it's about.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: But um, for our listeners who have been following us, um, it goes deep into the relationship between Catherine de Medici, um, Mary Queen of Scots, and then um Elizabeth of Spain.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna say we'll say Elizabeth.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Should we say that?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: How would you say it?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, is it Elizabeth?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would say Elizabeth.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in French, um, it would be a hard z, but it's um in French they would spell it with an S, but it would still be pronounced the Z instead of a soft S.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: So Elizabeth, yeah.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Got it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm excited to get into it.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, first and foremost, I want to know why did you choose this subject to write about?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um there's a long history.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, before I wrote this book, I had actually spent a lot of time on Catherine de' Medici.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Before I started writing full-time, I was an academic, and I wrote a scholarly book about Catherine's Medici because I was um, well, you can't study the 16th century or 16th century France without coming face to face with Catherine de' Medici.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but usually when I had encountered her um before, she was, she always kind of shows up in the background.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: And often there's sort of this one-dimensional portrait of her as the evil queen.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that kind of puzzled me because, you know, she's she's there and she obviously wields so much power and she's so important.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, really, could she could she really be that bad?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I wanted to study more about her, and I I wanted to know how she got that reputation.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: So, with a colleague, I ended up doing um this book called Portraits of the Queen Mother.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a translation and a study of a lot of texts produced in the 16th century about um Catherine de' Medici, and it sort of charted her path towards this terrible reputation that frankly still follows her.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: In the course of doing that book, I saw um this rich correspondence between Catherine and her daughter Elizabeth of Valois, but I didn't know anything about Elizabeth.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: And that was strange to me because I had studied the 16th century for a long time.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: I focused on women.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: So, how was it that I really hadn't met Elizabeth of Valois before?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I could see how much Catherine really loved her daughter.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I started to dig into that.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's when I learned how young Elizabeth was when she marries and goes off to Spain.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: But in the course of you know, just sort of doing that initial research where you go to the archives and you're kind of fumbling through everything, just reading as much as you can, um, I found this um collection of letters by the French ambassador in Spain when Elizabeth was Queen of Spain.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: And there was this sort of strange correspondence going on between Catherine and this ambassador, and they kept referring to the gentleman.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, who is the gentleman?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: Gentleman, the gentleman.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, wow, this gentleman, you know, is is clearly, you know, uh bothering them, but you keep writing about him.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: And then I figured out that they were writing about Mary Queen of Scots.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that gentleman was a code word for Mary Queen of Scots.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that's when I remembered.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's right.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Catherine and Mary have this long history.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Mary grew up at the French court.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I realized that these three women are kind of in each other's orbit.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I started to do more research.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and what I saw was not only, you know, were these women very close, knew each other well, but they were actually all queens, which was sort of interesting.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: For a certain period of time, you have three queens living together in the same court.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um but the other thing that I saw, and that became more and more important to me as I started to research and then and then write was that eventually these three women fan out into three different kingdoms.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they actually are queens in um different sorts of ways.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I can get into that in a second.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: But what I really noticed is that they were all meeting the same challenges, even though they lived in different kingdoms and had slightly different ranks.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: And those challenges very much had to do with their gender and with their youth, the fact that they were young, presumably fertile women whose responsibility it was to bear the heir.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that seemed to be at the core of their experience as queens and as mother, and sort of the great unifier between or among the three of them.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that that theme, that idea of being young and female in the orbit of power became sort of the driving theme for the book.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: I absolutely love that.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And um one thing that you had mentioned just now was uh, you know, that you had found the letters and were digging into um the letters, which I always love.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we actually recently had an interview with Dr.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Owen Emerson, and he was talking about before he even begins to look at what other authors have said, he likes to look at the sources first and like create his own narratives, his own ideas, and then see what other people are saying.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so uh I wanted to talk to you about a little bit about your methodology.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, some call it, I think, close reading.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us a little bit about that?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, first of all, what um Owen Emerson says, that's exactly right.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's so easy to be influenced by these other narratives.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, history is all about storytelling.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: And when you are writing about people who live from so long ago, there's just so much mediation that gets in the way.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's always a little bit of a tricky balance because you have to read enough to know that you want to actually know more, but you don't want to let some of these previous histories um, you know, affect how you're going to be approaching the primary text.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: So close reading, yes, um, that so close reading is actually um a mode of analysis that is normally associated with literary um analysis, with with um uh scholarship and literature.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's how I was trained.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I got my doctorate in comparative literature, partially because I couldn't decide between history and literature, and I kind of wanted to do both, and I thought comparative literature would allow me to do that.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but um I've always been a close reader.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I always just sort of gravitate to looking at the details.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: I find it easier than trying to kind of get the whole picture uh first.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: I I like I like to kind of work with a text as a puzzle.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I was trained to do that on things like poems or you know, short stories and eventually sort of longer, you know, novels or the equivalent.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's you know, sort of really looking at those close details and making the connections between those little details and the larger picture.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so when I started um working more on writing history, I I kind of, you know, just brought that same process to bear, that same approach to bear on the text I was looking at.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's particularly important to do when you are writing and thinking about women um from the past, because their stories are not normally the stories that you kind of associate with big biography, or at least not necessarily.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's been big biographies written about Catherine and Mary Queen of Scots, of course, and partially that's because they were women in roles that were traditionally, you know, men's roles.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: So they kind of um adopt that sort of heroic posture that makes people want to write about them.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: But for someone like Elizabeth of Valois, who led a more conventional life, if any queen can be said to lead a conventional life, um, but she did, you know, her life is closer to what sort of your average queen was or your average aristocratic woman.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so in order to kind of understand how her life could be retold as a story, it was really important for me to kind of pay attention to those close little details.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, whether that was the expression of a certain emotion, um, or you know, the language that her mother used in particular with her, how that language shifted um over the course of years, or you know, my favorite example is just whether or not she got her period, which seems like a very small detail about one young girl, you know, in this whole European landscape, but actually a ton of things were riding on it.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, by sort of making that choice to kind of track, track the story of her period, you know, I could kind of start to see how um how Elizabeth as a young woman was so integral to the bigger picture, not only in Spain or the relationship between Spain and France, but also kind of you know the pan-European story at the time.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and to your point too, about you know, the close reading of the letters, one thing I found fascinating was how in Mary Queen of Scots writing, when she was younger in France, it's like she had this impeccable, beautiful handwriting that was so enviable.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then once she became, you know, Queen of Scotland and went back to like Scotland, she started writing in this frantic, urgent fashion.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just this like scrawl, you know, and it was so funny because we always make fun of my handwriting.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I get it.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: I used to have public handwriting.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Mine looks like doctor's handwriting.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I also just love the storytelling behind Catherine's letters, and that was one thing you really dived into was she wrote letters, and I never realized that before, but it I mean, thank goodness for for those letters, because it does tell the story about these three incredible women.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: And she wrote about everything.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: I could just picture her at her writing desk, just ink probably on her on her hands and just going at it every day.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: But that that was all they had was the letters.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but just how prolific she was.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: And on the one hand, she's writing, but there are also these other modes of letter writing, you know, she's she she dictates a lot.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so I often I have this vision of her, you know, kind of striding through the halls, you know, with her secretaries, you know, trying to keep up as she's dictating.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then she would, you know, they would craft the official letter and then she would sign it.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yes, thank goodness we do have all those letters because um although at the same time, they can also sometimes obfuscate the history, which she did on purpose sometimes, you know, to make people, you know, think one thing was going on when in fact another thing was going on.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: But yes, it is it's quite a legacy that she that she left us and a gift.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine what Catherine would have done today with voice to text with Siri.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, she would have gone ham with that.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wait, this little robot can just put into writing everything I say.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's what she needed.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I actually think of her, you know, as a as a really kind of you know, um avant-garde sort of person.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that she would have been an early adopter of technology.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: I I actually, yes, yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: No, I love that image of her with or like with the you know voice notes or whatever, um, because she was busy and she had a lot of things to do.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that would have been her.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you have this amazing way of despite this being hundreds of years ago, these women feel so relatable.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if it's because we are women reading their story.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I would love to hear maybe a male's perspective of reading the same book.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's okay.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: They do feel like real, relatable people.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so with that, I'm interested to know a little bit more about the parallels between our modern day life today and the women in the 16th century and how you created those parallels throughout the book.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: So, well, okay, so first of all, uh, you know, I think again, getting back to just sort of sitting with the letters, um, sitting with them, you know, it's not always on the first pass, right?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes um, you know, I'd read them multiple times or I'd have to be writing about them, you know, really writing about these letters before I it would sort of click for me, you know, sort of what it was that they were um trying to express or what, you know, sort of psychologically they were negotiating at the time.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um I also I think the other reason why I found these women quite relatable is I, you know, had the chance to kind of look at their writings when they're quite young.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And like a lot of children, um sometimes those, those, those letters are just um, they're a little bit more raw, right?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: They're not quite as artful, um, maybe not as much of an agenda in there.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so so you see a little bit more emotion, you know, coming through.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then I could sort of follow those threads of emotion over the years, you know, with whatever extent letters um uh you know I had at my disposal.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: But in terms of uh current day, yeah, it is a really interesting question.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I do think that there is kind of a through line between um women of the 16th century and women today, partially because there's probably one, well, at least one unifying experience for all women, which is that womanhood is sort of this embodied experience, right?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like to be a woman is is very much a bodily experience.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're often reminded of how our bodies carry so much meaning um and um can be used in political ways.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that, for instance, you know, our current national conversation about gods and abortion is very much about the politicizing of women's bodies and what their value is to a culture, right?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: And um the the question about you know abortion in some ways has has something to do with the relationship between um a woman being able to exert her will and our understanding of the place of women's bodies in our society.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: So there's sort of a tension there.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that we see the same thing going on with these women's bodies in the 16th century, slightly different iteration, but at the core, it's the same.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: And and the idea is that these women's bodies have political value, in fact, so much that you can't really have dynastic, you can't have dynasty, you can't have empire, right, without these women's bodies.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so they are kind of a building block of the political systems of the time.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, anyone who kind of reads history or reads, you know, 16th century kind of knows this.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like we know that women are pawns.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that one thing that sort of stayed me as I as I was writing about this, um, and that I kind of wanted to sort of keep there throughout the whole thing, um, was that uh there are pawns, but it really has to do with the trading of the bodies, like the the physical um experience of being a young girl is instrumental to the politics of the time.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say, and it's interesting because all three of these queens did have challenges with their bodies.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: None of them got pregnant right away.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe Mary Queen of Scots was probably the most fertile of them, but even when in her first marriage, though, the challenge was there, and that was their entire purpose.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if you can't meet that one purpose, yeah.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't realize how young they were being so nervous about conceiving.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're like 18 years old and like so upset they haven't had a child yet.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, oh, thank goodness they finally had children once they were 20, 21.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh, I didn't realize they were so young.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Cause I always think of like maybe an older Anne Boleyn, or you know, or someone who's late 20s, like, you know, 30s.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, maybe they start to get a little nervous.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: But when they're like 18, thinking, like, oh my gosh, my life is over because I don't have a child, I'm like, oh, you are such a kid.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're they are so young.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: And and I think for them too, um, partially it's the it's the it's the political situation at a time at the time.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Catherine and Elizabeth, for sure, you know, it was imperative that they get pregnant so that they could kind of keep their place at court, which for Catherine, um, you know, it's very much about, you know, her wanting to stay at the French court for all sorts of personal reasons, perhaps even more than political reasons.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: For Elizabeth of Valois, you know, she needs to get pregnant so that she can stay at the Spanish court because her mother needs her to essentially be a political influence um in Spain.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so that the this very fragile alliance between Spain and France isn't broken.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it's true.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: Mary, Mary, Queen of Scots, doesn't have quite the same um difficulty getting pregnant, perhaps, although her life would have been very different had she gotten pregnant in France and had it would have been entirely different.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: And Catherine had what, nine or ten children, eventually, yeah, eventually, but um one of them is is stillborn, um, and then eventually two others die.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: So so seven live.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um eventually, you know, makes a name for herself as the Queen Mother and re and producing all these kids, but it was dicey there at the beginning.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, for 10 years.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: For 10, I mean, for 10 years.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh gosh.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: And and so when Elizabeth of Valois struggles with her fertility, you know, all I can think of is is is Catherine sort of rehearsing in her mind all these memories of her own barrenness and how traumatic that must have been.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um just a last thought on the on the body for Mary, Queen of Scots, too.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, one of the reasons why it was um interesting for me to actually have her in there too is that her body causes a different sort of problem because she's also the sovereign queen.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: But uh no one in Scotland really wants her to be the sovereign queen.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: I shouldn't say no one, but you know, certain powers that be don't really appreciate having a woman on the throne.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: So she's always carrying that burden, you know, the the female body just doesn't translate sovereignty in the same way as much as the male body does.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that's her that's her burden.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and there were so many surprising things.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I love that you dive so much into what it is to, you know, have a woman body and be a monarch at the time.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing uh Megan and I just discussed, but right before we recorded, was the notion that like back in the 16th century, they thought that you wouldn't necessarily um get pregnant unless you enjoyed sex.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, like if you were pregnant, it was a sign that you enjoyed like the sexual intercourse.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought that was so odd.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, they're like, oh, well, if a woman is potentially, you know, raped but conceives a child, that it's not it's not actually, yeah, it's not actually a ravishing because she had a child, so clearly she enjoyed sex.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, wow, that's that was painful to read.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: That was hard to do.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: It is, and it's that that idea still exists.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, and it's it again, it's used politically.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: I, you know, I obvio there were obviously many people in the 16th century who didn't actually believe that, who knew, right?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: That, you know, if if you were raped, you you didn't enjoy it, but you could still get pregnant.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: People knew this.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: But there is this argument out there that that's the case.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it could be used, it could be deployed against you.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yes, I think that, you know, that's sort of the bind that women find themselves in is that if they get pregnant, they almost seem to be complicit in the act, you know, even though, of course, they know that it was very different.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: My heart went out during that entire chapter about Mary, because we hear about I I think, well, she had so many ups and downs in her life, right?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: But to I really appreciated that you did go there.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: It got real, it got very raw.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a different angle.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of Mary Queen of Scots that I really haven't I haven't learned about before of seeing her as I hate to say like a victim as a woman, but she was a victim of society in that in that sense.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's very, very surprising.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that take.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but on that same kind of vein, uh, you know, what surprised you most about researching this book?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so where to start?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, on a on a on a big level, just how close Catherine, Elizabeth, and Mary were to each other.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I didn't realize that Mary Queen of Scots had grown up with Elizabeth de Valois and they actually shared a bedroom.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's really cute because you know, Elizabeth was only two when Mary Queen of Scots came to France.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: So when they're sharing the bedroom, we're talking about a five-year-old and a toddler, you know.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but but I did realize that probably Mary Queen of Scots learned some of her French from playing, you know, with Elizabeth and with the other royal children.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, um being able to sort of imagine, imagine these um these these monarchs who we kind of associate always as grown-up, as you said, you know, but trying to imagine them as little kids.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if that was so much of a surprise, but that was really um, you know, kind of a privilege to get to do.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the other kind of more anecdotally uh surprise um actually has to do with a man.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's Philip II.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, who, you know, he he has this reputation, right, for a whole bunch of things, um, including the Armada.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think English speakers, that's how we how we know him best generally.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he gets a bad rap as a husband um because of Mary Tudor, when he was married to Mary Tudor, Mary the First of England, um, which you know, she was his second wife.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: He he just really treated her badly in some ways.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: He, I mean, he just he didn't care about her and um he left her, right?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that was just not the case with Elizabeth de Valois.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: It it takes some time for him to warm up to her, but then he very much does.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then he becomes quite um a loving, a loving husband.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and it he he also um, maybe not to his son Don Carlos, but to his two daughters by Elizabeth, Philip was a very loving dad, which I think in some ways is testament to how much he loved his wife, Elizabeth.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, and and I I would say that uh, you know, bringing it back to Elizabeth, one thing that's interesting about that is you know, he fell in love with her.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think that has something to do with Elizabeth's skill as a queen consort.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, she did what she had to do.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: This is what her mother really wanted her to do was, you know, to kind of nourish that affection, because that's how Elizabeth was going to be able to exert influence, political influence on Philip.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so she dies young, so you know, that influence was cut off, but to all evidence, she was actually succeeding because there was this loving relationship, and that is as much a political move as it is a sort of domestic and marital, marital move.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, and again, because she was so young, and he, I think, uh, what was he at the time, like 42 when she came to right?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when she came to Spain, he's in his 30s.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, 30s gap the big age gap.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so it, but it does seem like they had this very mature romantic relationship.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was with her when she was delivering um one of the children, like holding her hand, which is unheard of in that era.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was surprised to hear that too.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was the moment when I was like, oh, just kind of like a cool guy here.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, usually the men are off hunting or something and just waiting for the news of a boy.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: And here she is giving birth to a girl, and he's like, Wonderful, like you have a child, you have a beautiful daughter.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, he's so celebratory over the fact that you know she's giving birth to girls.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just, I was very surprised by Philip as well.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just like connecting the dots too, because when I had that light bulb moment of wait a second, you're right, Philip was married to Mary Tudor.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then that is always my favorite part when I'm reading history because I feel like it's this big web.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And once you start connecting everything together, like you know, on a surface level, everyone's named Philip, Charles, Henry, first, second, third, you get kind of yeah, and but then when you actually think of them as real people and who they were with before and how they were related to who, you know, it it kind of puts the pieces together, and that's how I felt as well with connecting the three queens of Catherine, Elizabeth, and Mary.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was oh, okay.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: I've kind of seen each of them individually and very segregated in their own story, but then to intertwine all three of them together, it just it just opened up my mind to all the connections that was happening.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think that um, you know, you make a good point.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that was another reason why I wanted to write the book.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that um, you know, we're still kind of emerging from this very 19th century nationhood-based view of uh history and of biography, where we tend to sort of idolize um figures who are important to our unique histories as nations.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: But in the early modern period, in the Renaissance, um it's kind of a global world, you know.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, women are going back and forth all the time, or at least, you know, they're traveling, certainly in these marriages, right?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: They're the borders are different for them, maybe, than they would be for, say, a king.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's a very networked place.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they uh, you know, powerful families, usually through the women, are are sending out sort of representatives um all the time.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I wanted to capture that idea of network because I think that um it's an important angle for understanding this period that we we don't get as much when we when we look at sort of a single biography or biography of a single person.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and you said something really interesting earlier about how really the only big biographies on the on these women, it's because they are in a man's role.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it when you said that, I I would start thinking, you know, you're right.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like who what woman in history has a big biography just in their own right for being an artist or a creative or you know a transitor, whatever?
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's because they are in these male roles.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of a big question here, but why do you think people hate women in power?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: What's up with this?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so um backtrack first to something else you just said that that uh intrigues me.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: I so I like everybody else, relatively recently saw the Barbie movie.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: And and yes, do you remember at the very end uh where there's this sort of plea for ordinary Barbie?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like, why don't we have ordinary Barbie?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: We loved it.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: We saw we were like rooting us at the end.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was cheering, yes, ordinary Barbie.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we need more of that.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think we need more stories of ordinary people, you know, men, women, you know, everybody.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because well, it depends.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of it depends on why we go back to history, you know.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: Do we go to history because we want to hear about these exceptional people, or is that because we just have this idea of the hero that we love and we latch on to?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, that's what we want to hear about.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: I personally have always been a little bit more fascinated by the ordinary people.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: Now, you know, I did write about Queen, so not ordinary, but again, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to get at uh write this book was to get at Elizabeth the Valois because I do think that she represents something quintessential about the female experience at the time.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: All right, but moving on to your other question about why do we hate women in power?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Oh gosh.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think that there's something in our culture that's built on this idea.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I think that uh Mary Beard actually has has written this.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: That um do you know who Mary Beard is?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um she is a classicist in the UK and she's also a feminist.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: And she she um, because she's a classicist, she can go way back to like you know, Greek and Latin mythology.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: And she points out that these stories, these these um this misogyny um is is kind of written into the the the ethos of Western culture.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I think that um to some degree misogyny is an easy tool to take down a political opponent, right?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: So when a woman who's put in power um does something you don't like, you can unpack this whole misogynist or sexist vocabulary that's been around so long that it resonates with people, right?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: They've heard this before, they've heard this before about women.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, that sounds familiar, that's right, you know.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this is how women behave when they're in power.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: That makes sense to me.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think because on some level, you know, we're kind of hardwired to to kind of um uh stick to sort of uh certain familiar forms of language or certain ideas or certain cliches.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's one reason is partially because this misogynist language is already out there and it's an available political tool.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: But the other reason I you know, I actually think it's harder to answer.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like, why um why why do we love to hate them?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it actually has something.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just thinking out loud here.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know how how polished this is going to sound.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it has something to do with our concept of story itself.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, when you think about fairy tales, right, like the evil stepmother or you know, the evil queen, I'm thinking about Snow White, right?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like the evil queen, there's kind of this trope that has become, you know, a pillar in our in our understanding of story, which we hear from the time we're very, very little.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so, um, and so again, like whenever we see a woman in power somewhere in our mind, those tropes are working.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and we reject this figure.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: I, you know, I just feel I this is obviously a huge discussion among you know a lot of people who who who talk about this, and there's no easy answer.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but those are at least some of the ideas that you know I'm I'm thinking about as I'm as I'm working.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you brought up a really good point with the whole um, you know, evil queen and uh, you know, kind of fairy tale aspect of it.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because one thing I've always noticed with fairy tales growing up that I started to question at a very young age was well, you know, whenever they talk about a king, they talk about how strong he is and how he conquered things.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, he was gallant and brave and you know, feared nothing.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you hear about a successful queen, it was she was peaceful, she was gentle with her subjects, everyone liked her, she was beautiful, and it's just such a different you know, view of like it's the same job, you know, this is the same role.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I love, you know, whenever we hear about stories of like Elizabeth Tudor kind of rallying her troops and being on a battlefield because you're like, thank you, somebody, for seeing that a woman can be strong and say, hey, like I don't care, you know, what your notion of a woman should be.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is how I am and how I'm going to rule.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, like you mentioned, it's so ingrained in our society.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, well, if you're a woman in power, just make sure you're a nice woman, make sure people like you, like make sure you're doing all the right things.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a very, like you said, this could be a discussion that we could have for hours and hours.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I've always thought about that when it came to fairy tales when I was a kid.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: And the interesting about Elizabeth Tudor is that you know, there's definitely controversy about whether she actually did rally the troops.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, but I think that's really important because it actually has more to do with the stories that are told about Elizabeth Tudor, you know, um, in in ensuing centuries.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: And even during her whole her own lifetime, like she was very, very clever, very smart.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: She really knew how to work the system.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but she also had a great propaganda machine um with you know very powerful advisor and advisors and men around her who were very invested in her succeeding.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that is something that, for instance, Mary Queen of Scots doesn't have, you know, and she and she can't really um she can't really cultivate it.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh certainly she's too young.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe perhaps you know, she can't quite see the forest for the trees.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: She didn't know what she had to do.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: But so it's a lot of it is about the stories, you know, um told about these women by, and I hate to say it, but by men who are writing the histories and who are invested in that woman succeeding.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: So Elizabeth Tudor, for instance, you know, it's sort of the beginning of the beginnings of the British Empire, you know, and in the end, the British win, right?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: So their stories prevail, and Elizabeth Tudor is gonna is gonna be the good guy in those stories.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: His story, right?
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and but also women always up against other women.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was really rooting, I wanted Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth to be friends, to be BFS.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you wrote about how Mary was really trying for that.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: She kept trying to meet up with her.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I felt like when you have this like older, cool cousin, you're like, hey, let's, you know, let's we are ally, we are bordering countries, we are both women queen, sovereign queens of their own right.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: And Elizabeth was very hesitant to that, and they never actually met.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I was rooting for that relationship of them coming together, but there seems to always have been a jealousy that they just couldn't get on the same page.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and I I just think that you know Elizabeth Tudor has her own problems.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like her claim to the to the English throne uh was was pretty fragile.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: She's definitely negotiating the Mary stuff, uh, the the marriage stuff, I should say, for you know, whether or not she wanted to marry, who she should marry.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: She's getting a lot of pressure.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: She just can't afford to have Mary Queen of Scots there and her friend and her successor, because everyone will just turn to Mary Queen of Scots, who in many ways had a better claim to the English throne than Elizabeth.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: So so politics gets involved, and and you know, I what I can't quite say or or tell is whether did Mary not see this?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like, did did Mary Queen of Scots not understand like what Elizabeth was dealing with?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Or was she just so used to being the charismatic charming girl that she she just really thought, like, I'm just gonna be, I'm just gonna be nice, Mary, and Elizabeth's gonna like me, and we're gonna, you know, do this together.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, it's BFs and my my Protestant nobles want this, so we, you know, this could really work.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: Again, it's it's kind of a political naivety, right?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: That Elizabeth doesn't share.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um so yeah, you know, there's all the I no one has ever really, I think, completely answered why Mary Queen of Scots eventually becomes so fixated on the English succession.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's obsessional.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um but yeah, so but I again I like to go back to thinking of her as a young girl.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, when you when you think of her as a as a young woman who has been sort of thrown in this situation, I think you have a lot more sympathy for why she made some of the choices that she did.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a very good point.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think she was just very, you know, in her own head of like, well, you know, I I am sovereign queen.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: I've been told my whole life that I'm beautiful and I'm charismatic and everyone likes me.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, Elizabeth, what's your problem?
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I handwriting.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: She did have a certain illusion of herself.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we have to ask, who is your favorite queen to write about?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, oh, yeah, okay.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm gonna I'm gonna cheat on the answer.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I so I like, can I can I can I talk about all three, or is that is that I was gonna rephrase the question and say, who was your favorite queen to write about and why is it Catherine?
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I Okay, yeah, yeah.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so assume anything or jump to conclusions.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: No, I mean, in some ways it was Catherine, and and that's because again, you know, I uh was really wanting to work against this um reputation that Catherine has um as you know the the evil queen.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: I I just saw a much more sympathetic person who still for sure had her flaws, right?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there are a lot of things about Catherine that are, you know, uh you can understand how she gets the reputation she gets.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: She's sort of controlling, uh she's hovering, she's a complete helicopter mom.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, I also in at the same time had a lot of sympathy for her, especially when I understood like how her childhood might have, you know, induced these tendencies in her.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but also, man, she was a survivor.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like she just kept going.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: She did not give up.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I just have so much admiration for that grit.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um Mary Queen of Scots.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I told you I was gonna talk about all three.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Mary Queen of Scots, what I really liked about her is I just hadn't really had a view of sort of Mary through Mary's eyes.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: I really enjoyed um kind of writing through her letters and trying to capture the emotional Mary.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um getting back to close reading, kind of looking at some of the correspondence that is just seems a little bit incidental to the plot, but where you kind of feel more desperation or uh more emotion.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: I I like I I really enjoyed that because that was not um, I had not encountered that Mary before in you know, things that I had read about her.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_02: But I will end with Elizabeth um for this question because you know, Elizabeth, um she suffered so much physically um and emotionally, and the ways in which she studied physically are so tied to her to her gender, to to being female.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I really wanted to bring that to the page, you know, that Elizabeth's story is a story of the female body.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, I I wanted to bring it to the page um in a way that wasn't just scholarly, but that was very uh very narrative and very story-based.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: So um that's what I loved about writing about her.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: I I can absolutely see that.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I did feel the physical pain that she was going through, it it was disturbing because she was trying so hard.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: She just wanted, she knew what she needed to do.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: And she was raised.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Catherine did a very good job of teaching her this is what your role is and this is what you need to do.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I just felt like her body was fighting against that, and to die so young.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: It it was that was it was really sad, actually.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: Was yeah, it it's a sad story, it's a sad story in the end, this book.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry to deliver a sad story.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you're right, Catherine was a survivor out of the three of them, despite her being the oldest, she physically survived the longest, right?
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Through all the trials and tribulations that she went through.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you're right though.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: She, speaking of the fairy tale and the evil stepmother and the bad queen, I I agree before reading this book, that was absolutely my interpretation of Catherine.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: I always thought, I'm I don't know, maybe it was I even hate to put this out there, but the terrible show rain, I don't know, maybe they ingrained that into my brain.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't hate rain.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: I hate rain.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: Starting on that.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: I hate rain.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: But that aside, why why do you think um, like she has such a bad reputation?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then you do try to reveal more of her complex side, which is a it's an honor to her memory, honestly.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think she needed this.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so I think there are just a ton of reasons.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_02: So, first of all, some very bad things happened during Catherine's reign.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the wars of religion, for instance.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: When I say her reign, but technically she was the queen mother who was sort of behind.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Throne.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: It was the reign of her sons.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: But she often got the blame.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think because you know, at this we're not yet at the age of revolution.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: We're in the 16th century, not the 18th century in France.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: And it's still hard for French subjects to be blaming their kings for the trouble, trouble in the land.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: They do.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's there's definitely, especially as the as the century goes on, um, there's some actually really biting criticism of French kings, but it's easier to kind of hate on hate on the woman, right?
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: Especially because there are these tropes.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, she was Italian on her dad's side.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's easy to hate the foreigner.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um there were just, it was easy to kind of use this language, the same misogynist, the sort of long history of misogynist language that I was talking about earlier, could be deployed against her and some of her policies.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then you had horrible events like the St.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, where thousands of Protestants are slaughtered.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the crown, the French crown, was never able to give a kind of satisfactory explanation for why they lost control.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think that's what happened is not that Catherine ordered the wholescale massacre, but that you know they they lost control of the situation.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: But then two other things that I think that people have to think about is one going back to England.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: And something you said earlier.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: There seems to be this idea that there can only ever be one woman in the room, right?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: So between Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth is going to strive to win.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: And between Elizabeth and Catherine de' Medici, Elizabeth is going to strive to win.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and certainly again, her propaganda machine.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: And you can kind of see that in the state the the branding, for lack of a better word, between the two women.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: You've got Catherine, um, you know, the Queen Mother, and then you've got Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they're they're kind of playing on these on these two tropes.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: But England, you know, kind of succeeds in the in the long sort of history of of Europe.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_02: They become the the force.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, I think that, you know, it's a Protestant country, they're never going to quit blaming Catherine for this for the St.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: Bartholomew's Day Massacre and just you know, sort of the uh persecution of Protestants in France.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so that version of Catherine starts to take over.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then the the other side of it is that in France you have a shift in dynasty.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: So the Valois dynasty, which Catherine belongs to, she's she's the mother of Valois kings, dies out.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: None of her sons have any children, and so it moves to the Bourbons.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, there's always these competitions among the most powerful families, certainly in France, because you know, if one dies out, the other one's gonna get to be gonna get to be the king.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, I think the Bourbons uh had every interest in kind of you know pushing the Valois aside and showing themselves to be sort of these um these kings who fixed all of France's problems.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: So they were, you know, complicit uh or certainly had no interest in sort of honoring Catherine because she was belonged to the Valois, and it was sort of easy to blame you know all the troubles that um happened under the Valois on her, so that the Bourbons could, you know, by contrast, shine.
• 47:50
  unknown: Right.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: That was a long answer to your to your question.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great answer.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what's interesting is in this book, and it's probably because I've been conditioned by so many different modern representations of Catherine de' Medici, but I thought there would be some mention of the kind of rumors that circulated about her like dabbling with the occults and like poisons and things like that.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, in your opinion, is all of that kind of rubbish, or do you think there's some validity?
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like maybe, maybe that could have happened.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, maybe, but I they were all doing it.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's the thing, you know.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like one of the places where you where you see that is, you know, the the potions.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: I may I maybe I shouldn't say that word, the medicines that she took to try to get pregnant.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you read slightly older scholarship of Catherine, you know, historians often make fun of her, uh, you know, of the things that she took.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_02: But other people at the court were sending her these things to help her get pregnant.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if you look at uh 16th century recipe books, these were all over the place.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: So, and she was desperate.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: She was she was gonna do anything.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_02: And if you think about now what people do, you know, in order to get pregnant, it's it's a version of that.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: So, so I think that, you know, like I said before, she was kind of an early adopter.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, instead of instead of technology, it might have been the occult or it might have been certain potions, you know.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: But um, but but I she wasn't the only one.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's a little unfair to pillory her for it.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's a label, and I feel like that happens so often.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody gets one niche thing about them, all of a sudden that's their brand.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: We run with it, and that is what she went on in history to know.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's true.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, every show that we've seen on Catherine, that's what they surrounded around.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's that's why you put so many layers into her character and her as a person.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I like what you say, Lisa, too.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: About it's true, I didn't even think of this of she's represented as the queen mother, and the yin-yin to that is the virgin queen.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: So and again, Elizabeth had her brand, and that's what she was about.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that still happens today.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: We get siloed into these characteristics, right?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really difficult to break out of that stereotype that society created not.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and for both those queens, those brands still have something to do with the female body, right?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: Elizabeth I, that she's a virgin, and Catherine de' Medici that she's had all these children.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it still comes back to the female body.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: Back to their body.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, it really does go full circle.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I love, you know, because we've kind of been circling this point for a while, but I love how you kind of deromanticized a lot of this.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, like when we're young, we think like, oh, kings and queens, and a prince marries a princess.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you have this evil stepmother who does the potions and the occult things or whatever.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we want to talk a little bit about, you know, I like in going to the Megan's point earlier about how you just cut to the chase in a lot of these.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like you just get to the heart of it, and like, here's what we're not talking about.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: And um, tell us a little bit about you know your choice to kind of do that narrative as opposed to keeping up some of these traditional, I guess, narratives that we're used to.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: The fluffiness, the romantic renaissance period.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: Oh I you know, I think that's because I've I've sort of been in the 16th century for so long, um, that I I I I lost that view of the fluffiness a long time ago.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: So, so you know, it didn't really necessarily occur to me.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_02: And um to be kind of honest, um, sometimes when I'm reading, you know, sort of older accounts, uh, my eyes glaze over at, you know, sort of descriptions of balls and stuff, uh, or you know, uh banquets.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_02: I that was just never what interested me about the 16th century.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, you know, maybe that's why um I I uh sort of left that behind.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_02: What really has always interested me, not just the 16th century, but kind of across the board, it's people and their relationships with each other.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, so that so that's why I think that the book reads the way it does.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but partly it's because the letters read the way they do.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_02: They were people um who had these, you know, concerns and and uh problems that they were dealing with that were were very, very human, um, very relatable in in in some ways.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um, you know, it it kind of just it made more sense to me to kind of just follow what I was already seeing in the letters through rather than adding this, you know, other layer of of glitz and glam.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think we're three of a kind there because not that we don't like dark things, but considering the topic of our podcast, that's what draws us to history because it's so like repulsing at times, but that was life back then.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and even I got really into all the all the times you talked about the bloodletting, and like for example, I thought it was just in the arm, and then at one point you were writing like, Well, they already used to pull her limbs, so they started letting the blood from her feet.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, was that even a thing?
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: But or or her forehead, and that shocked me when I read that, you know.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yes.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's and it is just interesting, the yeah, how different life is today from then, but then actually getting into the nitty-girdie of it, you're like, oh, yeah, it's it's not all glitz and glamour all the time.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, which kind of leads us to just to wrap things up overall here.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Can you let us know a little bit about how your book creates an understanding of the traditionally accepted history of that time period of the 16th century?
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, a new take.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: A new take of it, yeah, I guess.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I think that um, well, I wanted to create uh a really intimate portrait.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: I I wanted to get as close as I can, as I could, to um to walking in their shoes, um, the shoes of these three women.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um I wanted to try for myself, and then hopefully convey that for the reader, to get in their heads as much as possible and to valorize being in the heads of women as women.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_02: So dealing with their problems as women, not just as sovereigns, but you know, as women.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_02: And at the same time, I wanted to connect that that female experience to uh how they how they rule um as sovereigns, whether it's behind the throne or from the throne or you know, sort of next to it.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I wanted to show that there is a link.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: So so you know, to some degree, I I would say that it's kind of um, it's a very character-driven portrait and it's a very um emotionally driven portrait.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I would say that what I'm trying to show is that the emotions of these women, sometimes which are very much wrapped around um topics that are normally considered womanly topics, actually have a huge role to play in the history of the time, and we should be paying attention.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we and again, I mean, not to discredit like some of the other people we've had on the podcast, but I think this is the fastest we've read a book and the most interested we've been in like having discussions back and forth.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it really captured our attention.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like we we loved this book so much.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still just thinking about, and I had to go back and reread some things.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is like so silly, but like even going back to the executions, the executions of the Protestants and the I forgot and the book, yes, and you say it much better than we do.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking like here's a whole episode we've got to talk about.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I circled like five new episodes, yeah.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was really so complex, so many layers to it.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and he you should do an episode on him.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: He he's an important guy.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: And how much I never knew about.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think I enjoyed that because not to say like we felt pretty proficient in a lot of this history, but Elizabeth, then I did not know about so many of these different folks in history.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: Don Carlos, like oh gosh, Don Carlos hold it back.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: I almost wish Don Carlos was executed because I really want to do an episode on Don Carlos alone.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: We could change this.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he he was in a way, just to give you a little bit of an angle.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there is that question about whether or not Philip II had him killed, which I think that you know, the historians have looked at this closely, no, he did not, but in some ways, uh Philip did kind of leave him to die.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: So um you know from starving himself to trying to ice himself to death to eating too much.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was um well, okay.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: So everybody, you need to get your copy of Young Queens.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can find it any place where you like to buy your books.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: We always want to promote shop local.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is there a place of preference where everyone can find their copy?
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: Or I don't know.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: No, you know, definitely uh anywhere that you like to find books, I will say that there are signed copies at Politics and Pros, which is the big independent bookstore.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, one of the big ones, but definitely a big one um near me in Washington, DC, and they do ship.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and there are also some signed copies in New York City, um which you know, I can put it on my webpage or um on Instagram and you can find it there.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we will do the same.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: I will put up some links and everyone can find their signed copy then.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, and Leah, on that note, any final words?
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I am very happy that I'm not a queen and certainly not a young queen in the 16th century.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well said.