Roundtable Feature: Royal Mistresses

In this episode, hosted by Susannah Lyon-Whaley, we have a roundtable highlighting recent research on royal mistresses and the important part they played in the French and English monarchies. 

Guest Biographies:

Tracy Adams is a professor in European Languages and Literatures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has also taught at the University of Maryland, the University of Miami, and the University of Lyon III. She was a Eurias Senior Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies 2011-2012, an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions Distinguished International Visiting Fellow in 2014 and a fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek fellowship in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, in 2016. 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), Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy (2022), and Reflections on Extracting Elite Women’s Stories from Medieval and Early Modern French Narrative Sources (2023). With Christine Adams, she co-authored The Creation of the French Royal Mistress from Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (2020). With Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier, she is co-editor of the volume The Waxing of the Middle Ages (2023).  

Christine Adams is professor of European history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She publishes primarily in French gender and family history (17th–19th centuries). Author of A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) and Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Illinois Press, 2010), her most recent book, with Tracy Adams, is The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). Adams was a 2020–2021 fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and a spring 2021 Andrew W. Mellon long-term fellow at the Newberry Library, where she worked on her current book project on The Merveilleuses and their Impact on the French Social Imaginary, 1794–1799 and Beyond. She also writes frequently on current events, including politics, education, gender, and reproductive rights.

Mirabelle is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Auckland. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the visual representation of Maria Fitzherbert (1756-1837), through the lenses of celebrity culture, erotic capital, and female reputation. Maria was the mistress, and illegal wife, of King George IV of England (1762-1830). Mirabelle completed her Master of Arts with First Class Honours in Art History in 2021. Her thesis examined the relationship between portraiture, gender, and sexuality at the Restoration Court, focusing on two of the royal mistresses of Charles II (1630-1685), Louise de Kéroualle (1649-1734) and Barbara Villiers (1640-1709). In 2019 she received her BA(Hons) with First Class Honours in Art History. Upon completion of her Bachelor of Arts degree, double majoring in Art History and Classical Studies, she was awarded the Louise Perkins Prize as the top graduating student in Art History. 

Further reading:

 Tracy Adams. Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy: History, Gallantry, and National Identity. ARC Humanities Press, 2022.
https://www.arc-humanities.org/9781641893527/agnes-sorel-and-the-french-monarchy/ 

 Tracy Adams and Christine Adams. The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry. Penn State University Press, 2020.