Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy

Tracy Adams is Professor in European Languages and Literatures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance (2005), The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (2010), Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France (2014), and co-author with Christine Adams of The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (2020).

• Introduction: Why a New Study of Agnès Sorel?Part One: What We Know About Agnès Sorel and How We Know ItChapter One: Who Was Agnès Sorel?Chapter Two: The Primary SourcesChapter Three: The First Royal Mistress in Historical ContextPart Two: The Spectacular Afterlife of Agnès SorelChapter Four: Communicative Memory: The Melun Diptych and the Saviour NarrativeChapter Five: Cultural Memory: Agnès as CelebrityChapter Six: Agnès la GallanteChapter Seven: History, Gallantry, and National IdentityConclusion: Agnès as Modern Celebrity

Tracy Adams’s newest publication is succinct yet dense and informative. In her trademark style, she challenges the historical record. The monograph’s titular subject is Agnès Sorel, the fifteenth-century beauty celebrated as the first famous royal mistress in France, but the subtitle conveys the ingenuity of Adams’s study. With an interdisciplinary scope, she surveys art, literature, historical records, and even forensic evidence to track Agnès’s biography and fame. Most provocatively, Adams teases out the personal interpretations and underlying motivations influencing chroniclers, artists, authors, and historians who write about Agnès Sorel. It is ultimately a book about how those who create history are themselves influenced by the contexts in which they live and record.