Young Queens

Young Queens is a narrative history of power, family, and survival in sixteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three queens bound by blood and marriage: Catherine de’ Medici of France, her daughter Elisabeth de Valois (queen of Spain), and Mary Stuart (queen of Scots and briefly queen of France). Leah Redmond Chang follows them from childhood into the brutal realities of rule, where their bodies become instruments of dynastic strategy and their private relationships carry public consequences.

Moving across Florence, Paris, Madrid, and Edinburgh, the book shows how queenship shifts over a woman’s lifetime—sovereign, consort, and queen mother—and how gender shapes authority even when a woman wears a crown. Through diplomacy, letters, and intimate court dynamics, the story traces the collapse of alliances, the rise of religious conflict, and the personal costs that culminate in imprisonment, exile, and death.

• Listeners who like narrative, character-focused Renaissance history centered on women and dynastic politics
• Fans of Tudor/Valois/Habsburg-era intrigue who want France–Spain–Scotland connected in one storyline
• Students of gender and power interested in how queenship worked in practice (motherhood, regency, diplomacy)

Leah Redmond Chang is a historian of early modern France and queenship. She is the author of Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France and Portraits of the Queen Mother: Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters. She has taught French literature and early modern history and has held research positions in the US and UK.