YOUNG QUEENS

Catherine de Medici of France; Elizabeth Tudor of England; Mary Stuart of Scotland; and Elisabeth de Valois of Spain. Three Renaissance queens who remain household names to this day; and a fourth, a forgotten queen at the center of them all, whose hidden story is long overdue. No one has brought their stories together into one volume until now.

Elisabeth de Valois and Mary Queen of Scots were childhood best friends who became queens by the time they were in their teens. Catherine and Elizabeth Tudor were the older women who fought to shape these girls in their adolescent years, motivated by love, political ambition, fear, and rivalry.

All four were brought to the highest pinnacles of power during their reigns. And yet each of them at some point faltered under the weight of that very same power because, as women, that power came with a terrible price.

Popular history, drama, and scholarship have often confined these queens to pedestals and rendered them as pure stereotypes: Catherine de Medici as murderous Black Queen; Mary Stuart as beautiful and tragic teen queen; Elizabeth Tudor, stalwart in her unmarried status. While Elisabeth de Valois, far younger when she died, and betwixt and between countries, has all but slipped through the cracks.

By chronicling their relationships and revealing the dramatic contrasts and parallels among them not only within the sweeping context of politics and history, but within the specific, women-centric, and hidden context of female power and sacrifice YOUNG QUEENS presents a much more nuanced and thus more arresting picture of each. Was Catherine really so evil? Was Mary so innocent? Was Elizabeth Tudor so sure of her right to rule and was her virginity such a victory? And could it be that Elisabeth de Valois, young as she was, wielded far more power than her footnote-in-history status might suggest?

With the culture's and marketplace's current emphasis on women's stories and feminist retellings, this seems an opportune moment to free these women from their individual silos to form a natural, and riveting, quartet-narrative one that tells a larger, more revealing, more humanstory of the making of young women into queens. A story of personal sacrifice, loss, and tragedy that unfolds less through the sweeping events of wars, successions, and the rise and fall of dynasties although these certainly have their place than through the shaping of the hearts, minds, and lives of girls and young women, with the understanding that these were as powerful in the shaping of Renaissance Europe as any edict, battle, or birth of a king.

At the heart of YOUNG QUEENS is the premise that, together, Elisabeth, Mary, Catherine, and Elizabeth Tudor tell each other's stories about youth, women, and power better than any one of them can alone. Or, put differently: it was only ever one story, with many different endings.

Leah Redmond Chang's love of literature and history was born in her Chinese-American grandmother's kitchen and on her Irish-American grandfather's knee. Ever since, she has been fascinated by stories and lives that cross borders or that exist " in between " between cultures, genres, and disciplines, and between identities and nations. An interdisciplinary comparatist by training, she received her Bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University in Philosophy, History, and Literature, and her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She works in four linguistic traditions, including Italian, Spanish, and especially French and English. A former Associate Professor of French and Director of the Program in French Literature at the George Washington University, she is now a Senior Research Associate at University College London. An internationally recognized expert in her field, she has been the President of the Modern Language Association's Forum on Sixteenth-Century French Studies, an invited contributing editor for Gale and for Oxford Bibliographies, a Knachel fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a regular peer reviewer of articles and book manuscripts for journals such as Women in French, Sixteenth-Century Journal, and Renaissance Quarterly, as well as for Palgrave, the University of Delaware Press, and the Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto. Her academic work has been consistently praised for its creative angles and approaches. Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France(University of Delaware Press, 2009) looked at how publishers invented the idea of the female author through marketing and production tactics. Her second academic book, Portraits of the Queen Mother: Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters(Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014) made previously inaccessible 16th-century documents available to an English-reading audience for the first time and showed how Catherine de Medici's legacy is the product of conflicting propaganda that began during her reign as queen consort. Portraits of the Queen Motherwas the winner of the Josephine Roberts Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. With her husband and three children, Leah Redmond Chang divides her time between Washington DC and London.