Talk:Claude of France

Untitled

proposed that Queen Claude of France be moved to Claude of France. per Wiki naming convention of former royal consorts Mowens35 19:38, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• oppose. the naming convention is highly debated as well, and until that´s properly settled, voting to keep this. what on earth is Claude of France supposed to be? looking at the heading of such an article, was she princess, duchess, maid...? or propose Claude, Queen of France Antares911 13:58, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Support. The naming convention regarding this question is clear and accepted, and only some lone (loony?) debater attempted to change it some two months ago, being practically shouted down by more experienced editors. Queen consorts do NOT have the "queenly" title in their headings, and so this one will also not have it. Arrigo 08:37, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

why tags were added

this article needs to be clean up and put toghter better and needs sections to make it easyer to readOo7565 05:56, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Did she speak Breton?

Did she speak Breton? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ahassan05 (talk • contribs) 07:39, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Anne of Brittany which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 22:47, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Queen Claude's Down Syndrome

I propose that we remove the section mentioning the possibility of her having Down Syndrome, since: A) There are no English sources regarding her having this condition, which is curious considering she was married to Francis I, long-time rival of Henry VIII, King of England. B) The sources used in the section were published in 2007 and 2010, but were only added to the wikipedia in 2024 (the year in which I'm writing this) which, though not a sign of falsehood does make one question. C) The supposed 'proof' of her having Down Syndrome is that she was good-natured and described as ugly. D) She is certainly not known to be a queen who likely had Down Syndrome, as a quote in the page says so outright. Instead, she is known as the daughter of Anne of Brittany, King Louis XII and the first wife of King Francis I of France. E) Beyond the sources, no other publications about Claude's life or that of her parents mentions that possibility. Bialessasoares (talk) 04:43, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

A) That does not matter. Wikipedia accepts references in other languages as long as they are good references.

B) That does not matter. Information are included in articles by individual decisions. It is entirely up to an individual who hapen to notice a source, decide to edit the article, and decide to put information from the source in the article. There is no reason at all to question why information from an source published in 2007 are put in the article in 2024.

C) Well, if it is a theory from a good source, then it may be included in an article even if it is merely a theory.

D) Such a thing would not in itself be strange at all, since that diagnosis was not historically identified.

E) The sources are enough to include it. --Aciram (talk) 11:56, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@Aciram Thank you for addressing this topic; I would like to add a few points. I explained the reasons that led me to include this point on my talk page to the concerned person who approached me. I made an effort to gather sources from both specialists in Down syndrome, particularly Monique Cuilleret, who is one of the leading French experts on Down syndrome, as well as from historians specializing in the period or the history of disabilities, such as the five archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians mentioned. In total, there are a little less than five separate RS. I have just added an English-language source that discusses the fact that she was evidently disabled (although this is not strictly necessary, and it is unsurprising that research on a Queen of France would be more developed in... French-speaking scholarship logically). In the absence of reliable sources claiming the contrary, and considering that Cuilleret and the five archaeologists/historians/anthropologists hold very strong opinions and speak of more than just a mere possibility, labeling it a 'very likely' fact, I don't see why this should be removed. If the general biographers you consulted did not address the issue, that is their problem; it does not mean she was not affected, especially when specific scientific literature takes a very clear stance in favor of the idea that Claude had Down syndrome. Best regards, AgisdeSparte (talk) 14:37, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@Bialessasoares On a side note, you being banned on your IP for trying to remove it by force and then going on Reddit to say that she doesn't seem to have 'Down Syndrome' because her official portraits wouldn't show it is kind of a red flag regarding your actual historian/encyclopedic background (or goals) and indicates, at the very least, that you clearly engage in original research or biased content in your remarks on this point. It also shows that you don't consider the official portraits of a monarch's consort as being heavily reworked, which they almost always are. These portraits, for anyone with some knowledge of the period and the political stakes, are works of propaganda intended to convey specific ideas, rather than accurate representations of the individuals' faces, especially when those individuals were considered 'very ugly' by the beauty standards of the time. AgisdeSparte (talk) 14:52, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

If you're referring to the unlogged-in anon who was making edits last night and made personal attacks, you can rest assured it was not me, as the IP address will show it. I was using this account to make the edits, which were undone by a mod who told me to stop and I in fact did. As for the reddit, yes, that was me, but since this is not a reddit, I'm confused as to how this is a problem since well, I clearly made a point of asking the question for more information didn't I? Bialessasoares (talk) 15:03, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a problem with disgruntled editors that when they cannot get their changes approved engage third parties in their edit warring to essentially try to recruit a consensus. While you did not do the IP changes, it is very likely that your reddit post caused someone else to. I understand this was likely not your intention, but if the intention of your reddit post was simply to learn more about the subject of the article and her potential diagnoses, mentioning the wikipedia argument is not really relevant and only serves to induce such edits. MatsT (talk) 15:40, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Firstly, to say that Claude is known for being a queen with Down syndrome is false. She is not known for it. In fact, this appears to be neither widely accepted nor commonly discussed. Secondly, the section title should not imply a consensus that Claude definitely had Down syndrome. I cannot find any reference to Claude's Down syndrome in any biographies of the Valois royals, nor are the sources cited in this article specializing in her medical history. Instead, she appears to be mentioned only tangentially. Therefore this may be somewhat of a fringe theory and if so, should be treated as such. Surtsicna (talk) 16:55, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@Surtsicna The fact that she is 'known as' does not imply full recognition. Once again, nothing challenges these points in any of the biographies you cite, and as the other person involved in these problematic edits pointed out, the sources that have begun to address this topic are both academic sources dating from after the last known biography that particularly focuses on her character, which, to my knowledge, is Pigaillem's 2006 biography, and they are also relatively well-known sources. Cuilleres' work on the subject dates from 2007, after the biography, and the book by the five authors dealing with the history of the illness dates from 2010. This second study is particularly interesting because it is part of a historiographical movement that started in the 1950s but has only recently begun to penetrate the academic world. This movement seeks to bring visibility to disabled people and disability traits. This is also a problem noticed on Wikipedia, and against which collectives are fighting within the encyclopedia, as they do with other biases. She is noted by six different researchers (out of six who discuss the topic, and none of whom are questioned regarding their disciplines and works, as far as I know) as being 'very likely' affected by this disability, while a good number of other studies, older and more generalist, discuss her disabilities, with an example added by me (even though it's more recent, dating from 2020). Previously, the fact that she was a disabled woman was not even mentioned, and today it seems to be acknowledged by all research on her. So, we have five researchers who say she is 'very likely' affected by Down syndrome, one who says that the descriptions made of her fit 'purely' the description of Down syndrome, and dozens, which I can add, who say that she was disabled. If she was disabled, what was her disability? The specific sources added address this point directly; and unless one assumes that she was disabled by random and unmentioned things—which is not the case since the articles specifically addressing her disabilities mention Down syndrome, including Cuillères, who is a specialist on the subject, or the five other researchers I won’t repeat but who are all specialists in the history of disability or the relevant period. Returning to a generalist version simply talking about her 'disabilities' does not reflect the sources well at this point because, while such articles may exist, especially in more recent periods depending on the efforts of historical research to make disabled people visible in history, the only ones that delve into and give precise descriptions of these disabilities talk about Down syndrome. The fact that this point is still so widely debated, both by non-affected individuals, like the two accounts that performed WP:BLANK, and by you, who contribute exclusively on Western nobility if I’m not mistaken (we exchanged a few days ago on the Sigurd I of Norway page), shows that there is still a lot of effort needed in general to bring visibility to disabled people. AgisdeSparte (talk) 18:22, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Claude is known for her disabilities, you're correct. But the most well-known of them is her physical disabilities (which are mentioned in this very page) as having given her a limp and a hunchback from a likely scoliosis, traits that are believed to have been inherited from her mother Queen Anne, who wore special shoes to hide her limp. So when people use the term disabilities broadly, they could well be referring to this physical disability, rather than Down Syndrome. Bialessasoares (talk) 18:26, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

And these physical disabilities (limp and a hunchback) were mentioned in this wikipedia before, so it was not like Claude was thought of as an abled-bodied person as you so say. Bialessasoares (talk) 18:28, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, you are mistaken on my scope of contribution. The statement "known for" means "known for". She is not known for it. Tina Turner had intestinal cancer, doubtlessly true, but she is not known for it. It is not Wikipedia's job to bring visibility to anything or anyone. Wikipedia's job is to summarize the coverage in reliable sources and "to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject." (WP:PROPORTION) I am not arguing for the removal of any mention of Down syndrome. I want the article to treat it proportionally. Surtsicna (talk) 18:31, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@Surtsicna So now, the problem is no longer whether she is 'probably' affected by Down syndrome (you deleted the entire section five minutes ago), which you seem to accept, but rather the issue is making it visible—something that, in my humble opinion, is strange, but at least the discussion is progressing. This kind of attitude seems very questionable to me, especially on controversial topics where visibility is being challenged. This characteristic accounts for 1/5 of the article’s sources so far, and it is significant enough to have its own subsection, so I don’t see why it couldn’t be included in the introduction. I have no connection to Down syndrome or anything related to disability; I simply wanted, by adding this subsection and sourcing it extensively, to combat the biases found on Wikipedia of this nature. I’m going to tag some members of the 'Disability' project, which I am not a part of and who know the issues and the subject much better than I do (@Dodger67 @LilyKitty @Schew412 - I took three random members that I have never interacted before with). They can probably provide their opinion on the matter—instead of continuing to argue in vain against people who provide no tangible sources to the contrary, questioning the available sources and trying at all costs to remove the information. Five minutes ago, you were deleting the entire section, and now you’re willing to accept it but want it removed from the introduction. All of this seems very strange to me; I’ve said what I had to say, and I’m not going to dwell on this subject any further - I unfollow this talk page and this article. I would like other contributors to take an interest in this topic, which suddenly seems particularly controversial. AgisdeSparte (talk) 18:43, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

They did not say the problem was making it visible. The problem for them was the addition of the sentence 'She is known for having likely been a queen with Down syndrome. which she is not known for. Claude was known as the Queen of France, Duchess of Brittany, wife of Francis I who was a longtime rival to famous English king Henry VIII and famous Spanish-German monarch Charles V, that's what she is known for. The fact that this information was only added to the wikipedia at least 14 years after the sources you used (2010 and 2007) were published is proof that this is not what she is known for. Bialessasoares (talk) 18:51, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I did not delete the section discussing Down syndrome. The section I deleted is "Ancestry", and I did so with an explanation and a reference to policy, after a long discussion and consensus at Template talk:Ahnentafel. It has nothing to do with Claude's Down syndrome. I further fixed overcapitalization in the article. It is not right that you should revert all of that. Please be more careful and, if I may suggest, try to keep your replies short. Finally, the problem is not "visibility". You have been told what the problem is. Surtsicna (talk) 19:16, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I came here the opposite way (from the Reddit thread mentioned above) and I notice the sources (such as they are) eventually point back to some mysterious documents in the Chateau de Chenonceau. I would assume these are in handwritten manuscript form, and if they're really in Chenonceau they would probably be somewhat less accessible than if they were in, say, the BNF. Have they been edited/published by historians? Are they in Latin? French? Have they been translated into modern French? (Or even, dare I ask, English?) Admittedly I've only been looking for a few hours since I saw the Reddit post earlier today, but I haven't found anything other than what Cuilleret says, but the information in her book (on page 5 in the introduction) is not cited, and she also spells Chenonceau wrong, so that's not very helpful. I'm also not sure about the relevance of these several other archaeologists (what does archaeology has to do with any of this?) My conclusion is that unless we can find an actual historian who discusses these documents from Chenonceau, and/or we can find a published version of them, then neither Cuilleret nor anyone else mentioned in the article is a relevant or reliable source at all. Adam Bishop (talk) 19:31, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm also not convinced that the diagnosis receives consideration widely enough to merit a mention in the opening section. "Noted by six different researchers" is a misleadingly strong statement when the three sources we have at present for the specific claim are Cuilleret in 2007, CCAZ in 2010 (who cite Cuilleret and, regardless of their stature as archaeologists, aren't making a judgment based on archaeological evidence), and Chaisneau in 2018 (who not only cites Cuilleret but quotes her word for word). Disclaimer: I was introduced to this matter by User:Bialessasoares off-site, albeit not on Reddit. 2600:1702:3840:5200:951C:5E4C:30CD:ABA8 (talk) 19:44, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@Adam Bishop If you look at the names of the archaologists mentioned, they are archaeologists, because I described them like that, but several of them are also anthropologists and dedicated to the history of disabilities (I'm sorry, I'm redacting a AN against Surtsicna at the same time, so I don't have that much time). Dominique Castex is a research director at the CNRS and described as follows(1):

'Dominique Castex is an archaeo-anthropologist. Her research program is based on analyses of archaeological human populations using a systemic approach to funerary sites that considers the complex interactions between funerary archaeology and biological anthropology data. This approach allows for a comprehensive examination of biocultural interactions through two main research axes: (1) Methodological work in paleodemography and taphonomy, and (2) Population studies focused on mortality and funerary management during the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, as well as on mortality crises caused by epidemics from Antiquity to the modern period.'

Eric Crubezy is a genetician who is in charge of a laboratory of anthropological biology and is described as follows (2):

'This 56-year-old physician leads the Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology and Imaging Synthesis (AMIS). Nearly 60 researchers there explore the diversity of human populations across the entire span of time. Their work ranges from studying prehistoric human fossils using the most advanced medical imaging techniques, to analyzing the DNA of more recent human remains, and even studying contemporary populations using genetic and genomic approaches.'

Baruch Arensburg has his own WP page.

Jean Zammit is described on Persée as follows(3):

'Doctor of Medicine (Toulouse III, 1974). Associated researcher at the Center for Anthropology of Rural Societies in Toulouse (in 1993).'

I used the term 'archaeologists' because I wanted to summarize all of their bios and research in the best way possible, and because it was in a work published by (among others) the Inrap, but it's true that most of their works are mixing archaeology, anthropology and medicine, which is kind of being expected for people working on the history of disabilities, which is at the same time in the medical, historical and anthropological fields. AgisdeSparte (talk) 19:54, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

(I'm sorry, I'm redacting a AN against Surtsicna at the same time, so I don't have that much time) Oh, that'll be fun. Surtsicna (talk) 20:02, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Well, so what? This article by Castex et al., in Décrypter la différence (which does not seem to be paginated, but it's page 96 of the PDF) doesnt say anything relevant. They write "une description physique et psychologique détaillée de la Reine Claude de France et semblent prouver que cette dernière était très probablement atteinte de trisomie 21", citing only Cuilleret, who, as I mentioned above, does not cite any source. Castex et al. have no idea what Cuilleret is referring to, and neither do we. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:20, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I would have to agree with Surtsicna and Adam Bishop. I've yet to find anything by any historians mentioning this. Specifically, Women in World History, vol. 3, Anne Commire, pages 802-803, and Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France, by Kathleen Wellman, pages 121-124, make no mention of this syndrome. --Kansas Bear (talk) 20:35, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm looking at the English source cited in this article now, by Connolly, and I'm running into the same problem. This book might be ok...it's published by Pen & Sword, which is sometimes a reliable publisher, but sometimes not, it really depends on the book. In this case, Connolly's source for Claude mostly appears to be Soberton, Golden Age Ladies, which is a self-published book and completely unreliable. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:54, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Per Google books, "Phillipa Vincent-Connolly is a secondary school teacher and historian has published both fiction and nonfiction and is currently working towards her Masters in history. She lives in Poole, Dorset with her two children." A source by a person with a Bachelors(Education? History?) with an extraordinary claim? Definitely not WP:RS. --Kansas Bear (talk) 21:39, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I would like to say that I was given a small translation in the reddit post previously mentioned where the commenter provided me with a small translation of a letter from Mercurino di Gattinara, who was ambassador to Margaret of Austria, that described Claude in February of 1515 (When she was 16 and had been pregnant for one month.) The letter can be found in French in this link

"And so on Sunday before dinner, we came to pay our respects to the queen, whose face closely resembles that of her mother; in fact, she is very small and of a strange corpulence, and is already very fat. And most people fear the danger of giving birth, and because the king is powerful, and there is a sign and appearance that the child she is carrying will be large and powerful. [...] I immediately presented her with your letters and made your humble recommendations, telling her of the responsibility I had for you, begging her to hold out her hand to the king, her husband, for your affairs. She replied that she was very happy to do so and asked me: ‘How is my cousin doing? Is she in good health? I told her she was, and she was very happy to hear from you. And certainly, madame, her grace of speech makes up for her lack of beauty."

So Claude is noted to have a close resemblance to her mother and that of her appearance, what was worth noting was that she was very small and extremely pregnant, which had began to worry the people around her. Mercurino was not associated to Claude or her family, so he would not have had any problem describing her appearance, if he thought it worth noting. Bialessasoares (talk) 00:38, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Queen Claude had downs syndrome? First I ever heard of this. Also, Claude had seven children. I thought individuals with the condition were sterile. GoodDay (talk) 21:00, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

According to WP, "females have lower rates of fertility relative to those who are unaffected. Fertility is estimated to be present in 30–50% of females." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:18, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

And her children would have had a 50% chance of having Down syndrome. Surtsicna (talk) 21:37, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I just want to say @Adam Bishop@Surtsicna@Kansas Bearthat it seems AgisDeSparte's account has been removed, or deleted on their own will. So I'm slightly confused as to how move forward... Bialessasoares (talk) 14:39, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Ant Man what the hell happened here.gif Adam Bishop (talk) 14:49, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Well, the Vincent-Connolly source is clearly not WP:RS, so that and the quote can be removed, unless someone here objects. As for the rest, I haven't checked those sources for WP:V or WP:RS. --Kansas Bear (talk) 15:26, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

I went ahead and deleted everything except Cuilleret, since she seems to be the origin of this idea. I'm still questioning whether she's a reliable source though. Also I doubt we should keep the "People with Down syndrome" category. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:30, 9 September 2024 (UTC)