#it's truly insane the way Anne has been criticized as capricious & inconsistent & duplicitous because she changed sides...in situations

[wonder-worker]

It was assumed that, as a woman and one not born to rule, (Anne de Pisseleu) was prey to passions and vengefulness, that she could have no consistent 'policy'. / *Anne’s political activity has often been described as incoherent and Anne herself as a flighty interloper in the male business of politics…whose “role in court politics under Francis I was essentially capricious, with changes of alignment according to the whim of the moment”.

*Contemporary reports are partly responsible for the interpretation. / For Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), who saw too much of her for his own peace of mind, she personified fortuna in all its caprice. For the papal nuncio Hieronimo Dandino (1509–1559), who saw a great deal of her and noted her dislike of gossiping Italians, the king in 1543 was more a prey than ever to his lasciviousness and under her sway. He thought the secret of her success was the spirit of contradiction, always saying the opposite of what others did. For the Imperial envoy Nicolas Villey de Marnol, Anne had been légière (unstable) all her life. This was the same view as that of the Venetian envoy Marino Cavalli (d. 1572), who reported in 1545 that, despite her previous preference for peace with England, she was pressing for further war, hoping that failure would undermine Admiral Annebault, her rival. Literary views were similar; for instance, Rondabilis, the protagonist of the 1546 Tiers Livre by François Rabelais (1494-1553), views all women as frail, variable, capricious, and inconstant.

*(However,) in her political actions nothing distinguishes (Anne) from her male counterparts. Court factions resembled neither modern political parties nor social cliques. Factions formed around a central dispute—in the case at hand, around the long-standing rivalry between Brion and Montmorency over their competing desires for supremacy, or, to put it slightly differently, over their incompatible strategies for dealing with the emperor. In 1540 Montmorency, himself on shaky ground, spearheaded an effort to get Brion investigated for fraud. Begun by the chancellor Poyet in August 1540, the investigation resulted in the admiral’s conviction in February 1541. In general, other quarrels then formed around the central one, with different players joining in when they thought that to do so might further a cause of their own. Factional players changed tactics with shifts in the situation— Marguerite of Navarre and Montmorency switched sides with noticeable frequency, as did François I, Henry VIII, and the emperor—leading to an impression of constant treachery. But such side-switching is quite simply the inevitable result of factional politics, which is, by definition, the spontaneous formation of groups to promote results in the absence of overarching institutions formally invested with the authority to arbitrate. Nothing like a political ideology of the type that unites members of a modern political party and determines their response to issues motivates members of factions. As for the perception of factions as social cliques, it is even more difficult to find evidence of friendship as a motivating factor. Despite the well-known language of love that marks exchanges of the period, decisions were in a strange way also fundamentally impersonal, motivated by family interest.

-David Potter, "The Life and After-Life of a Royal Mistress: Anne de Pisseleu, Duchess of Étampes" / *Tracy Adams and Christine Adams, "The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry"

#historicwomendaily #it's truly insane the way Anne has been criticized as capricious & inconsistent & duplicitous because she changed sides...in situations #that were inherently fluid and volatile which required people to change sides depending on the current context #like it really cannot get stupider than that lmao #anne de pisseleu #french history #16th century #my post #queue #also to be clear: I've merged two different books and the * symbol is put before the Adams' writing