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"McIlvenna’s case studies confirm how scandal literature shaped individual reputation, but more broadly, how it provided the contours for derogatory understandings of whole groups of people. Women at the Valois court were rarely seen in a positive light. This is the sting in the tail: Catherine de’ Medici may have done all she could, but her women, the women of the court, and women more generally were nonetheless routinely demonized, disrespected, and dismissed in print and in the public eye. Historians, McIlvenna reminds us, don’t have to buy the scurrilous version of the story, but seeing through it does not make it go away."

- Katherine Crawford, Vanderbilt University, H-France Review

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