Catherine de' Medici and the Forest of Orleans: Queenly Participation in Early Modern French Forest Management

Abstract This essay demonstrates how a gender‐informed, more‐than‐human lens can provide new ways to analyse how the role of a queen in forestry management was conceptualised by sixteenth‐century professional men. It explores these ideas as they are presented in a work published by Guillaume Martin, Lieutenant General of the forests and waterways of the Duchy of Orleans, in 1582, dedicated to Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France and mother of the king, Henri III. This text unusually conjoined intellectual, literary, legal and practical aspects circulating in the forestry discourse of sixteenth‐century France and blended with them the presence of a queen who was also a major landholder in the forest of Orleans, France's largest forest. The essay argues that this discursive combination made the forest, and this work, a fertile site to explore the possibilities and limits of both queenly forest management and that of Catherine in particular, and in which gender‐distinct notions of knowledge production, measurability and sustainability sat alongside corporeality, affectivity, and intimacy, as important elements of the ecosystem the work created.