San Antonio College Library

"Catherine de' Medici has become almost a legend. As the queen-mother of France who was responsible for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572 she has incurred the odium of centuries and her enemies held her guilty of other more subtle individual murders perpetrated with the help of her alchemist-astrologer."--Dust jacket flap.

Queen of France and very nearly of England, Blanche of Castile was a beautiful, fascinating woman and a wise and able ruler whose personality and political power dominated Western Europe in the first half of the thirteenth century. She was the granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the mother of France's only canonized king, Louis IX, and it was her efforts that led to the great victory over England at the Battle of Bouvines. Her husband, Louis...

"Marie de' Medici (French: Marie de Médicis; 26 April 1575? 4 July 1642) was Queen of France as the second wife of King Henry IV of France, of the House of Bourbon. She herself was a member of the wealthy and powerful House of Medici. Following the assassination of her husband in 1610, which occurred the day after her coronation, she acted as regent for her son, King Louis XIII of France, until he came of age.[1] She was noted for her ceaseless political...

Stefan Zweig's "Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman" is a dramatic account of the guillotine's most famous victim, from the time when as a fourteen-year-old she took Versailles by storm, to her frustrations with her aloof husband, her passionate love affair with the Swedish Count von Fersen, and ultimately to the chaos of the French Revolution and the savagery of the Terror.

A biography of the consort of Louis XVI, King of France, until her execution during the French Revolution in 1793. "Giddy and extravagant, Marie Antoinette came to France as a child-bride from Austria, France's traditional enemy. But the hatred she aroused at Versailles seems out of proportion to her faults, which were mostly those of an inexperienced girl suddenly presiding as Queen over the most formal and splendid Court in Europe. It was not the...

A new look which fundamentally overturns our understanding of this famously "out of touch" queen. Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on Marie-Antoinette's story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood...

"This book tells the history of the French Renaissance through the lives of its most prominent queens and mistresses, beginning with Agnès Sorel, the first officially recognized royal mistress in 1444; including Anne of Brittany, Catherine de Medici, Anne Pisseleu, Diane de Poitiers, and Marguerite de Valois, among others; and concluding with Gabrielle d'Estrées, Henry IV's powerful mistress during the 1590s. Wellman shows that women in both roles--queen...

"Anne of Austria (22 September 1601? 20 January 1666) was Queen consort of France and Navarre, regent for her son, Louis XIV of France, and a Portuguese and Spanish Infanta by birth. During her regency (1643?1651) Cardinal Mazarin served as France's chief minister. Accounts of French court life of her era emphasize her difficult marital relations with her husband Louis XIII, her closeness to her son Louis XIV, and her disapproval of her son's marital...

"Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (20 April 1808? 9 January 1873) was the first President of the French Republic and, as Napoleon III, the ruler of the Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoleon I. Elected President by popular vote in 1848, he initiated a coup d'état in 1851, before ascending the throne as Napoleon III on 2 December 1852, the forty-eighth anniversary of Napoleon I's coronation. He ruled as Emperor of the French until 4...

Biography of the wife of King Henry II of England and mother of Richard I, the Lionheart, and John.