A Risky Business? Representing Catherine de’ Medici’s silk Entrepreneurialism

Abstract

This essay explores the representation of Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France, in her activities related to moriculture, sericulture and silk work manufacture in sixteenth-century France. In a 1602 publication encouraging entrepreneurial leadership in France’s emerging silk industry, Barthélemy de Laffemas proposed Catherine as an exemplar. In doing so, Laffemas, just as Catherine before him, had to navigate firstly how an early modern woman and a queen could engage with emerging business opportunities when contemporary assumptions rendered the association of women and queens to entrepreneurship almost inconceivable, and secondly what a queen’s example specifically could offer to both France’s male ruler and wider publics.