Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy

Tracy Adams’s newest publication is succinct yet dense and informative. In her trademark style, she challenges the historical record. The monograph’s titular subject is Agnès Sorel, the fifteenth-century beauty celebrated as the first famous royal mistress in France, but the subtitle conveys the ingenuity of Adams’s study. With an interdisciplinary scope, she surveys art, literature, historical records, and even forensic evidence to track Agnès’s biography and fame. Most provocatively, Adams teases out the personal interpretations and underlying motivations influencing chroniclers, artists, authors, and historians who write about Agnès Sorel. It is ultimately a book about how those who create history are themselves influenced by the contexts in which they live and record.

~Joan E. McRae, Speculum 99, no. 1 (2024): 183-84