Duchess of Ferrara, daughter of the king of France, leader of the evangelical circle at the Este court, friend and patron of John Calvin
Born in France to Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, sister-in-law of King Francis I, Renee de France married Ercole II d’Este, duke of Ferrara in 1528, becoming Renata di Francia. Arriving in Ferrara with all the prestige of a daughter of the king of France, Renata made the Este court a destination for artists, poets, and philosophers and a sanctuary for reform thinkers in the 1530s and 1540s. Encouraged by her older cousin and mentor, Marguerite de Navarre, who had supervised her religious education at the French court, Renata entertained her countryman John Calvin at the Este castle in the summer of 1536. Under the duchess’s tutelage, Calvin’s opus magnum, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, circulated at the Este court in two Latin editions (1536, 1539) and in 1541 in French. From the late 1530s on, the duchess gathered around her a circle of men and women who met regularly to discuss Scripture and translations of the Bible. Among the women who attended were the duchess’s two daughters, Anna and Lucrezia, Giulia Gonzaga’s protegee Isabella Bresegna, and the poet and reform thinker Vittoria Colonna, who had traveled from Rome to Ferrara and remained at Renata’s court for several months in 1537—1538. The charismatic evangelical Bernardino Ochino was also preaching in the cathedral in Ferrara at the time.
Renata’s friends and religious reformist activities deeply disturbed Duke Ercole, who was a devout Catholic. The duchess had instituted a reform salon that operated within the auspices of the Este court yet was not sanctioned by the duke. Books prohibited by the church as Protestant circulated freely at the Este court, and men and women the Catholic church would soon condemn as heretics were shown hospitality and welcomed by Renata, among them the professor and published poet Celio Secondo Curione and the writer Olympia Morata, both of whom subsequently fled Italy, the former to Switzerland and the latter to Germany. As if to stem the Protestant influence, Ercole at first expelled Renata’s gov-
Renata di Francia, duchess of Ferrara and religious reform leader. Drawing by studio of Clouet. Musee Conde, Chantilly, France. (Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Erness, Michelle de Soubise, and then her secretary, Clement Marot, from the court, sending both back to France. In 1554, however, the duke confined Renata to the ducal palace and forced her to renounce her evangelical beliefs. Nonetheless, Renata continued to correspond with Calvin until his death, and, when Duke Ercole died in 1559, she returned to her birthplace in Montargis, France, where she lived the rest of her life as a Protestant, though not without turmoil since her daughter Anne’s husband Francis of Guise sacked her castle at Montargis during the French Wars of Religion.
Diana Robin
See also Anne of Brittany; Bresegna, Isabella;
Colonna, Vittoria; Gonzaga, Guilia; Marguerite de Navarre; Morata, Fulvia Olympia; Religious Reform and Women.
Bibliography
Bainton, Roland H. Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing, 1971.
Baumgartner, Frederic J. “Renee of Ferrara" In
Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. Edited by Paul F. Grendler. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999.
Caponetto, Salvatore. The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Translated by Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1998.
Robin, Diana. Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
World History
