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Historical person
1510–1574
Renée was born in 1510, the younger surviving daughter of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany. After her sister Claude inherited Brittany, Renée was raised within the French royal household and later married Ercole II d’Este, becoming Duchess of Ferrara.
Her court became associated with literary and religious patronage, including protection extended to reform-minded figures. She is relevant to fiction about the childhood court of Claude of France and the intellectual and confessional tensions that connected France and Renaissance Italy.
In Rozsa Gaston’s Queen of Diamonds, after Mary Tudor returns to England, Anne Boleyn remains in France and enters the household of Queen Claude.
Series
The Anne Boleyn Chronicles reconstruct Anne Boleyn’s formative continental years before her emergence at the English court. Beginning in 1513 in Margaret of Austria’s household at Mechelen, the sequence follows Anne through the courts of Louis XII, Claude of France and Francis I, where language, ceremony, patronage and…
All books in this series
