Poison, Pregnancy and Protestants: Gossip and Scandal at the Early Modern French Court

This chapter examines the scandalous case of Isabelle de Limeuil, a lady-in-waiting to the sixteenth century French queen mother Catherine de Medici, whose notorious affair with the Protestant Louis de Bourbon, prince of Condé, illegitimate pregnancy, public birth and subsequent imprisonment for attempted poisoning was the stuff of gossip at courts across Europe. Given the multiplicity of scandalous factors in this case, and the historical contingency of many of those factors, the story of Isabelle de Limeuil provides an illuminating study of how gossip and rumour could be expressed and controlled at the early modern court.