Folly and Feeling: Jeanne d’Albret’s Ample Declaration (1569) and Epistolary Emotion

In 1568, torn between allegiances to the Reformed church, the king, and her own lineage, Jeanne d’Albret, sovereign ruler of Navarre, abandons her lands to join with her son (the future king Henri IV) the Protestant camp at La Rochelle. Halfway through this perilous journey, she pens several letters defending her decision to members of the royal family. A year later she follows up with the Ample Declaration, a self-reflective essay in which she explains her letters to a larger readership. In it Jeanne conveys the emotional perplexity she experiences when navigating allies and foes and facing moral dilemmas exacerbated by the manipulative nature of letter writing. She relates her perplexity to the Pauline trope that human wisdom is folly before God, which helps her reframe it as an inner conflict between good and evil to be resolved by God’s grace. This essay argues that in the Ample Declaration Jeanne stages a redemptive emotional landscape that the letters themselves fail to render. She involves a larger readership in the emotional dynamics of a female sovereign’s conjunction of private and public self and both justifies and exemplifies political and religious decision-making in a universe held together by fragile epistolary communication.