The Book of Prayers of the Queen of France, Anne of Brittany, or the instrumentalisation of prayers for political ends. A new and original study by Elizabeth L'Estrange.

Having been born in Nantes in 1477, and meeting her death in Blois in 1514, Anne was the eldest daughter of the Duke of Brittany, François II. In August 1488, the latter had to promise, through the Treaty of Sablé, or the ‘Treaty of Le Verger’, that he would not have her married without the consent of the king of France. On the death of her father, Anne became the Duchess of Brittany, when she was aged eleven. At the age of thirteen, despite the treaty signed by her father, she married Maximillian of Austria, through proxy and in a purely symbolic way. France immediately entered into conflict with Brittany. The ost (the army on military campaign) besieged Rennes, where the Duchess Anne had taken refuge. In 1491, under the military pressure of Anne of Beaujeu, the kingdom’s regent and guardian of her young brother, the king Charles VIII, Anne of Brittany married Charles. On the death of her husband in 1498 she administered her Duchy single-handedly. The new king Louis XII, in order not to lose the union between France and Brittany, obtained from Pope Alexander VI the annulation of his marriage to Jeanne de Valois, Charles’ sister, and married Anne of Brittany on January 7, 1499, as was arranged in the matrimonial agreement with Charles VIII.

The new queen would have eight children. Only two of the daughters survived, Claude of France and Renée, the future Duchess of Ferrare. In 1504 Anne attempted to marry her eldest daughter Claude to Charles of Hapsburg, the future Charles Quint (the Fifth). If at first Louis XII gave her his accord he was to abandon the idea, fearing the encirclement of the kingdom by Habsburgian possessions, and decided that Claude would wed an heir to the throne of France.  Anne died of gravel in the Blois château on January 9, 1514.  Louis XII was to twice defy her wishes: he consented to the marriage of their eldest daughter Claude of France, heir to Brittany, to the Duke of Angoulême, heir to France, the future François I, and he had Queen Anne solemnly buried at Saint-Denis, despite her expressed wish to be laid to rest next to her parents, in her ‘good town’ of Nantes…even if her heart was placed in a reliquary and transported to Nantes in a grand procession and buried in her parents’ tomb (a tomb which she herself had ordered built to honour the last Duke and Duchess of Brittany).