Catherine of Medici between Horrorism and Witchcraft in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques

This paper argues that in his portrayal of Catherine of Medici in Les Tragiques, Agrippa d’Aubigné assembles an eclectic series of cultural and literary sources ranging from contemporary demonological and magic treatises, pamphlets against the queen, and classical literature represented by Lucan’s Pharsalia among other sources. The plasticity of these texts confers multiple identities to Catherine who is compared in turn to a striga, to Medusa, and Erictho, all nefarious characters with a common denominator: transgressors of taboos and practitioners of destructive and extreme violence. Each of these texts function as narrative signposts that allow a fusion between the demonic and representations of violence to construct Catherine as a feral, foreign other who can be held accountable for the horroristic imaginary of the Wars of Religion d’Aubigné depicts in the first part of Misères. For d’Aubigné the ultimate matrix for forms of extreme violence, all perceived as unnatural in themselves, has to be an alterity imagined as a species of the female monstruous with witch-like features whose open, fluid body, defying normal boundaries, pollutes and destroys the state order. 

Andreea Marculescu is an Assistant Professor of French at University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Demonic Possession, Vulnerability, and Performance in Medieval French Drama (2018), co-editor of Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (2017), and guest editor of “Medieval Vulnerabilities” for Digital Philology 9 (1): 2020 and of another special issue for Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes entitled “The Witch in pre-Modern Literature” 44 (2), 2022. She has published articles in Critique, Mediaevalia, Renaissance and Reformation, Literature Compass, Studies in Early Modern France and other collected volumes on the interconnection between late medieval theater and the larger fields of medieval demonology (witchcraft, magic, demonic possession) and emotions. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Fictions of Witchcraft in Early-Modern French Literature and is co-editing MLA Options for Teaching Emotions in Literature. Her work has been supported by fellowships from American Council for Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, and Medieval Academy of America.