Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: 3 Reformation Women Classic About this episode This 2017 episode covers Katharina von Bora, Marguerite d’Angoulême and Jeanne d’Albret, who all left their mark on the Reformation, but all in different ways.
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1:48 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these Trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health Versus Hype wherever you get your podcasts. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition,
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2:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. Jeanne Delbray, Queen of Navarre, was born on November 16th, 1528. So 496 years ago today. She is one of three women we talk about in today's Saturday Classic, which is on three women of the Protestant Reformation.
3:12 Holly Frey? This episode originally came out on November 1st, 2017. Enjoy.
3:19 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
3:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy D. Wilson.
3:33 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
3:35 Tracy V. Wilson? As you may know, this podcast is initially being published on November 1st, 2017. So that's the day after the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther famously posting his 95 theses, which is more formally known as Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences at the Dora Wittenberg Castle Church. So there's some historical debate over the details of this. Martin Luther probably didn't defiantly nail them up there as a lot of people imagine. And it might not have even happened at all, although the theses were basically points he planned to discuss at a public disputation. So it would have been customary for him to post them there ahead of time. Regardless of all that.
4:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Detail, though, October 31st, 1517, has come to be marked as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which was the religious and social and political schism that ultimately led to centuries of war and upheaval and religious persecution and the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the rise of seemingly countless Protestant denominations of Christianity. So, obviously, that was a big moment in history. Consequently, we've gotten a lot of requests for a Reformation episode, including from Sarah, Mani, Boris, and Josh. And a recent note from Rachel was what finally sparked today's show. Rachel sent us a quick email suggesting that we focus on some of the women involved in the
5:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Reformation. I was originally planning to focus on just one, but I kept stumbling on to other tidbits from other women's stories. So I've decided to make this episode into one that focuses on three.
5:16 Holly Frey? Alrighty. We're gonna start with Katharina Von Bora, also known as Catherine. She was the former nun who, in June of 1525, married former monk Martin Luther when she was 25 and he was 41.
5:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Von Bora was born around 1499, although there aren't clear records of exactly when or where. In 1504, her family sent her to the Benedictin Kloister at Bretta to be educated. Then in 1508, she moved to a Cistercian monastery at Nemshen, where her aunt also lived, and that is where she eventually became a nun.
5:52 Holly Frey? Von Bora didn't really like her life as a nun, though. But being educated in a convent meant that she knew how to read, and she and some of the other women living there managed to get access to the writings of Martin Luther, as well as other reformers. This material was almost certainly banned behind monastic walls, so bringing it in and keeping it relatively secret would have taken some gumption.
6:16 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1523, Von Bora and several other women in her monastery contacted Martin Luther to ask him for help in escaping. This was both dangerous and illegal. It was against Roman Catholic law for a person to abandon their religious vows, and people who were caught could be imprisoned. Helping someone escape was also illegal, as was harboring or sheltering someone who had.
6:41 Holly Frey? But Luther agreed to help. On April 4th, 1523, which was Easter Eve, a merchant smuggled Katerina and 11 other women out of the convent in a cart normally used to deliver herring. According to some sources, she got out while hiding in a fish barrel.
7:00 Tracy V. Wilson? It's actually more likely that they were under the coverings used to cover the fish barrels, but I like the in the barrel.
7:07 Holly Frey? Was not a delightful smelling ride.
7:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Probably not. Katerina and nine of the other women were taken to Wittenberg, where they met Martin Luther, and he started trying to reunite them with their families. When their families weren't willing to take them back, Luther started trying to find husbands for them, and he got some kind of situation in place for everybody except Von Bora pretty quickly. She fell in love with one of Luther's students, but his family refused to allow their marriage. For a year after that relationship fell through, Von Bora refused every option that was presented to her. She steadfastly maintained that she would only marry someone worthy of her and of her choosing. She's not going to cut it
7:50 Tracy V. Wilson? for some random single person to be her husband. She finally said she would either marry Lutheran reformer Nicholas von Ammsdorf or Luther himself. Those were her only options that she was willing to agree to, and Luther ultimately agreed to do so.
8:09 Holly Frey? A lot of Luther's Reformation peers did not like this at all. His collaborator, Philip Melanchthon, was particularly scathing, writing, quote, "In these unhappy times in which good people are suffering so much, this man lacks compassion and rather, as it seems, revels and compromises his good reputation, precisely at a time when Germany stands in particular need of his spirit and authority." The good people suffering so much that he's referring to here is largely the peasants revolt, which was an incredibly bloody uprising against oppression by landlords and members of the nobility that was going on in Germany at this time.
8:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Aside from this whole "it's not the time for this" argument, reformers were worried that Luther's decision to get married was going to add fuel to claims that the Catholic Church had made to try to undermine his work, namely that he was only doing that work to try to get out of his vows of celibacy. This was compounded by the fact that only a year after renouncing his vows, he was marrying someone who had abandoned her vows as well. Now, eventually, it would become fairly common for former monks and former nuns to marry one another, especially when convents and monasteries closed down later in the Reformation. But at the time that Martin Luther himself did this, what they were doing was absolutely scandalous.
9:33 Holly Frey? So Luther's response to all of this criticism was that he had done it to please his father, who had never approved of his decision to become a monk, as well as to spite the devil and the pope. Getting married also meant that Luther could stop feeling like a hypocrite for encouraging Protestant clergy to marry while not doing so himself.
9:52 Tracy V. Wilson? The two of them finally wed on June 13th, 1525, more than two years after von Bora escaped from the monastery. Although they definitely did not get married for love, I mean Luther's comments make that pretty clear, they ultimately wound up having what was, by all accounts, a really supportive and loving and affectionate relationship. They had six children, and all but one of them survived infancy. Eventually, one of von Bora's relatives and six of Luther's sister's children came to live with them as well.
10:24 Holly Frey? That is a full house.
10:26 Tracy V. Wilson? It is.
10:27 Holly Frey? They had room for so many because their home was the Black Kloyster, which was one of the Luther family holdings in a former Augustinian monastery. This Von Bora converted into a home as well as a thriving business. She made the old monastic cells into student housing and she attracted scholars to live there by playing up the association with Martin Luther. She managed the property's farm and its brewery. And when she needed to, she secured donations to improve the building and the grounds, making it into what was essentially a 16th century conference center. Unsurprisingly, she also got a lot of criticism, basically for being really bossy.
11:07 Tracy V. Wilson? That's criticism often leveled at women taking charge of matters in a way that needs to be done. So Martin Luther died in 1546 and Caterina was heartbroken. He had advised her to sell the black cloister if he died, but she really didn't want to do it. Even so, without his income and influence, she and the rest of the family really fell on financial hard times. This was followed by wars and bad harvests and an outbreak of plague. Fleeing the plague, Caterina went to Torgau, where she died three months after having been seriously injured in a cart accident. She died on December 20th, 1552, at the age of about 53.
11:51 Holly Frey? In her marriage to Martin Luther, Katharina Von Bora became the prime example of the idea of a clergyman's wife. In 2017, it is highly annoying for a woman's own accomplishments to be framed in terms of her husband. But in the 16th century, a marriage like theirs was really new territory for Christian women. As emerging Protestant denominations encouraged members of the clergy to marry, Martin Luther and Katharina Von Bora became the most notable example of what such a marriage could be like.
12:22 Tracy V. Wilson? In their marriage, this was largely about her being his helpmate while also successfully running a home and a business, and that left him free to really focus on his religious work. But these marriages played out in other ways as well. Some wives of the clergy essentially became partners in their husbands ministry, influencing how scripture was interpreted and taught. Others became prominent members of their communities, educating children and seeing to the health and welfare and spiritual wellness of their congregations.
12:53 Holly Frey? This was also part of an overall change in the kinds of lives that were considered acceptable for Christian women to lead. Prior to the Reformation, there were basically two acceptable roles for a Christian woman: homemaker and nun. And one of those options effectively disappeared for a lot of women during the Reformation, as families converted away from Catholicism and convents were closed down, displacing the women who had lived there. Of course, men were also displaced with the closure of monasteries, but they generally had far more options open to them for what to do with their lives afterward.
13:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, a man who was displaced from a monastery generally had an education. A lot of times, a really good education. He often had connections with his community, like he could go on to do other things. And often, a woman who was displaced from a convent could get married or go back home with her parents, and that was pretty much all that was available. Now, being a clergyman's wife was not a one-to-one replacement for being a nun. Women joined convents, both voluntarily and involuntarily, for a whole range of reasons. And one of those was the very practical fact that for a lot of women, a convent offered more freedom and autonomy than a marriage could. So, being married, not the same thing.
14:10 Tracy V. Wilson? At the same time, though, the role of the clergy wife did allow some women into positions of prominence and influence that they didn't really have access to before. We should also note, this wasn't the same as actually being in the clergy. And today, there are still plenty of denominations that don't ordain women.
14:28 Holly Frey? Next, we're going to move on to talking about a couple of women occupying one of the few other roles considered to be suitable for women in the 16th century, which was being royalty. We're gonna talk about that after we first pause for a little sponsor break.
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16:53 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
17:36 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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18:09 Tracy V. Wilson? In the new podcast, Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture, including sports, business, wellness, and entertainment, to find the whole person behind the public identity.
18:21 Holly Frey? Whether she's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show, the conversation starts with the official bio ends.
18:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions, and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along the way. No lectures, no know it all host, just real people being real.
18:43 Holly Frey? Come curious and leave with something you can use.
18:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores out now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico.
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20:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Before we get on to our next subject, we need to take just a second to lay a little bit more groundwork about the Reformation in general, because her involvement began before October 31, 1517. So even though Martin Luther and his 95 Theses are generally considered to be the beginning of the Reformation, that didn't come out of thin air. People had been criticizing and trying to reform the Church for centuries. And in a lot of ways, Martin's Theses recapped and outlined points that he and other people had already been making. This was sort of like the Twitter thread that encapsulates a lot of existing conversations and then goes viral.
20:53 Holly Frey? Often, these criticisms played out within the Church itself. As one example, when St. Francis of Assisi established the Franciscan Order in 1209, it was with the approval of Pope Innocent III. But today, he's seen in part as a reformer, and later followers did their own work to reform the Franciscan Order itself, as well as the Greater Church.
21:15 Tracy V. Wilson? So the Protestant Reformation similarly started as a reform effort within the Roman Catholic Church, not as an attempt to start a new church. When Martin Luther wrote his 95 theses, he wasn't intending to break away from the Church, but to address what he saw as problems that the Church should address. But in 1521, the Church excommunicated him. And so what had started out as an internal reform movement developed into a schism. It also wasn't the first schism in history. Another previous schism within the Church included the East-West Schism of 1504, which is what split the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches apart from one another.
21:58 Holly Frey? So when Marguerite d'Angulem was born on April 11th, 1492, Martin Luther was still 25 years away from posting his 95 theses. But criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church, many of which were incorporated into those theses, were well underway.
22:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Marguerite was the daughter of Charles de Valois-Aurelien and Louise of Savoy, and she had a younger brother, François, who was born on September 12th, 1494. Although it seemed pretty likely that the French monarchs, King Louis XII and Queen Anne, would have an heir of their own, François was in the line of succession for the throne. So he received the sort of education that would prepare him for the possibility of becoming the king. Then Louise made sure that Marguerite got the same education as well.
22:46 Holly Frey? In 1509, Marguerite married Charles, the Duke of Alençon, and took an active role in trying to improve the lives of the people of Alençon. She raised money for hospitals and almshouses and prompted her brother to establish an orphanage in Paris. She insisted that poor women be given shelter and food during the last days of their pregnancies and after the birth to try to combat ongoing problems of infanticide and child abandonment. She also remedied the Alençon's castle's lack of a library, and she began inviting scholars and poets to stay with them to enrich the spiritual and emotional atmosphere at court.
23:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, her husband did not have a reputation for being a particularly scholarly man. So when Louis XII died without an heir in 1515, Marguerite's brother did become Francis I, King of France. She took this same sensibility that she had put into place in Alençon to his court as one of his advisers. Their mother was influential in the court as well, and both of these women were really intelligent and educated and politically aware. They were well-read and they were informed about all the ongoing efforts to reform the Church, some of which were considered to be heretical. So with Marguerite and Louise both among King Francis's advisers, the French court became one that welcomed scholars and other figures who were advocating
24:09 Tracy V. Wilson? for religious reform.
24:11 Holly Frey? Marguerite herself never left the Roman Catholic Church, but she and those around her actively questioned and criticized Church teachings and practices. Guests at the court included François Rabelais, a humanist and former priest whose satirical work lampooned religious hypocrisy. Marguerite read and translated the work of Martin Luther and stridently advocated for the Bible to be translated into French and available to the French population. She was a patron to such artists and scholars as Leonardo da Vinci, John Calvin, and Desiderius Erasmus. She sometimes is known as the mother of the French Renaissance.
24:51 Tracy V. Wilson? She became a student of Guillaume Brisslone, the Bishop of Mieux, whose followers, who were known as the Circle of Mieux, were at the heart of Reformation thinking in France at the time. Through the Circle of Mieux, Marguerite funded the printing and distribution of a range of Reformation texts in France. She also sought out and obtained translations of these texts to be brought to her in France so that she could stay up to date about what was going on.
25:18 Holly Frey? Under Marguerite's influence, King François I's court also provided protection and shelter to a number of reformers, whose work was considered heretical and blasphemous. Marguerite herself might have faced the same fate had she not been sister to the king. Even in spite of her advocacy, though, several of the reformers and scholars Marguerite associated with were eventually executed for heresy.
25:43 Tracy V. Wilson? As all of this was going on, on February 24th, 1525, the forces of Francis or Francois I of France fought those of Habsburg Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Pavia, which was part of the Italian Wars. This was a whole series of conflicts in which a number of nations, primarily France and Spain, tried to take control of Italy. This battle was a decisive victory for Charles V and Francis wound up being taken prisoner. Marguerite's husband, Charles, sort of took the fall for this whole thing. He died not long after.
26:20 Holly Frey? Marguerite was actively involved in the negotiations for the release of her brother, including personally meeting with Charles V. She returned to France only when her brother began to suspect that Charles was dragging out the negotiations on purpose, in the hopes of taking her captive as well. Her brother was only able to return home after signing the Treaty of Madrid in 1526, which surrendered all French claims to Italian territory.
26:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Later on that year, Marguerite got married again, this time to Henri II Valbré, the King of Navarre. On November 16th, 1528, they had a daughter, Jeanne, who we'll talk more about in a bit. After remarrying and having a daughter, Marguerite became a lot less involved in her brother's court politics, focusing more on her own writing and her own personal religious studies. She did continue to shelter Protestant refugees in Navarre, though.
27:14 Holly Frey? In addition to her translations of others' work, Marguerite was also a writer herself. Her only work published during her lifetime was Marguerite de la Marguerite des Princes, which was published in 1547. She died two years later, on December 21st. Her most notable work, Heptameron, was published posthumously by Claude Gruger in 1559, at the request of Marguerite's daughter. Written in the style of Boccaccio's De Cameron, it satirizes, among other things, religious hypocrisy. She wrote volumes of work beyond these two works, though much of it existed really just as her own personal manuscripts until the 19th century.
27:56 Holly Frey? And a lot of it was explicitly religious and infused with Reformation ideas.
28:01 Tracy V. Wilson? There really also were not very many women who had published work during their lifetimes at this point in history in Europe. Aside from her writing, Marguerite's support for the Reformation really helped it to survive in France in the early to mid 16th century. As we noted earlier, punishments for spreading material that was deemed to be blasphemous or heretical were really severe, and they included execution. So without having such consistent and vocal support from the French court, as well as the active sheltering of Reformation leaders, the Reformation really might not have established much of a foothold in France. Marguerite also actively mediated between the Roman Catholic Church and France Protestants,
28:43 Tracy V. Wilson? really advocating for tolerance between the two of them.
28:47 Holly Frey? She never publicly converted or left the Roman Catholic Church, likely because to her, her religious beliefs were private, even as they were mirrored in her own writings. But she so publicly supported reformers and sheltered people accused of heresy, that she's both credited for nurturing Protestantism in France, and criticized for weakening the Catholic Church there.
29:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Unfortunately, that atmosphere of tolerance that Marguerite had tried to nurture, did not last long beyond her death in 1549, which is something we're going to talk about after another quick sponsor break.
29:26 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not
30:08 Holly Frey? to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:29 Holly Frey? Deanna Flores, flag football star, trailblazer, broadcaster and entrepreneur, knows what pressure feels like. She knows what it takes to step up in the moment, and she knows that even the biggest achievement is never the end of the story.
30:42 Tracy V. Wilson? In the new podcast, Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture, including sports, business, wellness and entertainment, to find the whole person behind the public identity.
30:54 Holly Frey? Whether she's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show, the conversation starts with the official bio ends.
31:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along the way. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real.
31:15 Holly Frey? Come curious and leave with something you can use.
31:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico.
31:31 Tracy V. Wilson? For any small business owner, there's a moment when you realize the next hire could be the difference between staying busy and actually growing. The challenge is finding the right person without wasting time sorting through candidates who aren't the right fit. That's where Indeed Sponsored Jobs comes in. When workplace chaos hits and you need someone who can step in and make a difference, this is a job for sponsored jobs. It helps put your job in front of candidates who match the criteria that matter most to you, whether that's skills, experience, certifications or location. And you're certainly not alone in using Indeed. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. That's millions of businesses turning to Indeed
32:13 Tracy V. Wilson? to help solve hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
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33:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter,
33:53 Tracy V. Wilson? and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
34:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Last up in our trio of Reformation women is Marguerite Dangollam's daughter, Jeanne Delbray. She was born on November 16, 1528, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And as was the case with her mother, her upbringing wasn't exactly typical for the time, even for a princess. She was tutored by humanist scholars with Nicholas de Bourbon overseeing her education. Her mother had the same sort of influence on Jeanne's education as she had had on her brother's court in France.
34:50 Holly Frey? When she was 11, Jean's uncle, King Francis of France, or Francois, as you've heard us say, arranged for her to be married to William, Duke of Cleves. As we've mentioned before on the show, royal marriages to children were typically seen as political affairs, and they were not consummated until the couple reached childbearing age, often not living together until that time. Regardless, Jean's parents were not in favor of this match. Her father had been trying to negotiate her marriage to Philip of Spain.
35:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Either way, regardless of which of these two men she was going to marry, she was being used as a pawn for someone else's political ends, and she was defiantly opposed to marrying William, like, just really not okay with it. She wrote out a whole document detailing that the marriage was taking place against her will and had it witnessed. It began, "I, Jean de Navarre, continuing my protests already made, in which I persist, say, declare, and protest again by these presents, that the marriage proposed between me and the Duke of Cleves is against my will, that I have never consented to it and I never will.
36:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Anything that I may say or do after this, because of which it could be said that I may have given my consent, will have been because of force against my will, out of fear of the King, of my father the King, and of my mother the Queen, who had me threatened and beaten by the Béaude de Can, my governess." That also went on from there, some more.
36:25 Holly Frey? She didn't really hold back. I like it. She also told King Francis to his face that she would rather enter a convent than go forward with this marriage he had arranged, and she yelled so loudly that she would rather throw herself down a well if people heard it in the next room.
36:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Jean protested so vehemently on her wedding day that she had to be forcibly carried to the altar. Afterward, the king insisted that the couple observe some kind of symbolic formality in lieu of consummating the marriage since she was a child. So Jean and the duke were taken to a nuptial chamber where he put one foot on the bed while she was sitting on it.
37:06 Holly Frey? Jean's defiance did not stop once the wedding was over. She continued to object to the unwanted marriage for five full years. Her mother made a series of excuses why she couldn't leave for Cleves to join her husband, until the duke finally just agreed to end the marriage in 1543. Pope Paul III honored a request for it to be annulled in 1545. And all of this, of course, led to a huge rift between Marguerite and her brother, who had ordered the marriage in the first place.
37:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, one of the reasons that she was not so involved in his court after getting married and having a child was that she literally moved away, but also this happened. Jean's level of really stubborn defiance and all this was startling to people, not just because it was not at all the behavior that was expected of a girl, especially a princess who was raised to like have certain princessly behaviors, but also because her health was really frail for pretty much her whole life. She sort of mustered up a level of strength that people did not think was in her in all of this.
38:13 Holly Frey? Three years later, Jean married again, this time to Antoine de Bourbon. And this was another match arranged for her for political reasons, this time by King Henri II of France, who had become king after the death of his father, François I, or Francis I. Antoine was next in line for the French throne after Henri II's own sons. While Jean agreed to this match, this time, her parents refused, putting off their departure so long that they were eventually informed that the wedding would take place whether they were there or not. Jean and Antoine married on October 20, 1548.
38:51 Tracy V. Wilson? The two of them had a son on Reid Navarre in 1553. And then in 1555, Jeanne's father died, and so she and her husband became the queen and king of Navarre. They later had a daughter Catherine in 1559.
39:06 Holly Frey? The same stubborn defiance that had been such a hallmark of Jeanne's forced childhood marriage, revealed itself once again in the matter of religion during her time as queen of Navarre. In this, she actually butted heads with her mother. She didn't like the fact that her mother never really took a strong stance, one way or the other.
39:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Nevertheless, it was only after her mother's death that Jeanne officially announced her conversion to Calvinism in 1560, and the Kingdom of Navarre became increasingly explicitly Protestant under her and her husband's rule. This ranged from having the New Testament printed in the Basque language, which was spoken locally, to forcibly closing monasteries and outlawing Catholic religious rituals, to eventually establishing Calvinism as the official religion of Navarre.
39:57 Holly Frey? Apart from Navarre's Catholics, who found themselves persecuted, this presented a greater problem in the larger scope of Europe. Navarre was a tiny nation with much larger Catholic neighbors, and although Jeanne's parents had tried to keep its territory independent from France, it was really considered to just be a semi-autonomous state.
40:19 Tracy V. Wilson? As France put increasing pressure on Navarre to conform to Catholicism, Jeanne and Antoine also found themselves caught between two other powerful families. Catherine de Medici of France was, at least at the time, relatively sympathetic to the French Huguenot cause, while the Roman Catholic House of Gize was not.
40:39 Holly Frey? Ultimately, Antoine relented to this pressure and took up the Catholic side, while Jeanne steadfastly supported the French Huguenot. This erupted in the French Wars of Religion, beginning in 1562. That was a series of bloody conflicts and massacres that went on literally for decades, which was as much a civil war as it was a religious one.
41:01 Tracy V. Wilson? For Jeanne's part, in the earlier years of the French Wars of Religion, she reinforced Navarre's defenses, she confiscated Catholic property, she established a Calvinist community in Berne, and she stayed out of the actual fighting for the most part. Even if she was branded as a heretic and threatened with excommunication and threatened with trial under the Inquisition. And even when her son Henri was taken captive at the age of four, she refused to convert.
41:29 Holly Frey? Fighting for the Catholic side, Antoine lay siege to Rouen in September of 1562. Although the Catholic side ultimately seized Rouen from the Huguenot, Antoine was fatally wounded in the process. He died on November 17, 1562, and Jeanne was denied entry into France to be with him before he died.
41:51 Tracy V. Wilson? After her husband's death, Jeanne was the sole monarch of Navarre, and she refused other offers of marriage, especially since a number of them came along with the requirement that she convert back to Catholicism.
42:03 Holly Frey? Although Jeanne had been actively supporting the Huguenot cause throughout the French Wars of Religion, it wasn't until the Third that Navarre really became involved from a military perspective. Before that point, she had acted more as a diplomat, trying to negotiate between Catholic and Protestant forces and balancing a slew of international factors in the process. But with the Third War of Religion, it was clear that Navarre was going to be at the mercy of France and Spain if it did not take a military stance.
42:33 Tracy V. Wilson? So Jeanne rallied the troops. She left her council in charge of Navarre and moved to the Huguenot port of La Rochelle for about three years. There, she took on the role of Minister of Propaganda and Foreign Affairs. Just as the name sounds, she wrote letters and pamphlets and other literature in support of the Huguenot cause and against religious oppression of Protestants. This included her 1568 Ample Declaration, which was her defense of her move to La Rochelle.
43:02 Holly Frey? The French Wars of Religion came to an uneasy peace with the peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1570, which made specific allowances for Protestant worship. Members of the high nobility were allowed to practice Calvinism in their own homes, and La Rochelle, Montauban, Cognac, and La Charite were designated as Huguenot strongholds.
43:25 Tracy V. Wilson? This treaty didn't really please anyone. Staunch Catholics didn't want Calvinism to be practiced at all. And most Calvinists still could not worship freely since it was only the top of the nobility that had gotten that freedom. The peace also did not last for long. After about two years of things being pretty touch and go, the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre began on August 24th, 1572, and thousands of French Protestants were killed at the hands of Catholics.
43:56 Holly Frey? Jeanne had died of tuberculosis just a couple of months before the massacre on June 9th, 1572. She was 44. At the time, she was negotiating the marriage of her son to Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Medici and Henri II of France. Jeanne hoped that a marriage between the royal families of Navarre in France would lead to a longer lasting peace and that it would give her Protestant son a greater influence. And in a way, it did exactly the opposite. It was actually that very wedding that attracted so many high ranking Huguenot to Paris where the massacre began.
44:34 Tracy V. Wilson? So there are a lot of podcasts about the Medici family, including this particular marriage, as well as a couple that get into the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre in more detail in our archive, and we will link to them both in the show notes. The reason that I wanted to talk about these particular women as, as the, the episode expanded to be about three women instead of just one. One of them is that each of them had something just so particularly compelling to me in their stories. There was the fish barrel and there was the, the hiding of people who were, um, who were at risk of being executed for heresy. This vehement opposition to being married off to somebody as a child.
45:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Like each of them had a moment that made me go, I really want to talk about this in the show. And the other is that all three of them were really influential people in the Protestant Reformation, but in three really distinct ways. Like you had a woman who was basically making room for Martin Luther to do all of this religious work that he was doing. And he is, I think, probably the most, he and John Calvin are like the most notable people in the Reformation, I think. At least, I think those are the names that people are most likely to recognize. And then Marguerite was really negotiating and trying to keep
45:57 Tracy V. Wilson? the peace and trying to also make room for there to be a Protestant movement in France. And then we have Jean, who was the person who took up arms in the very violent struggle that this blossomed into that went on for so long.
46:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
46:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Deanna Flores is a flag football star, a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and now host of a new podcast.
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