Excerpt from Catherine De' Medici and the French Reformation The greater functions of history, the discovery of new documents, the revelation of new facts, demand great scholars. To the achievement of such ends a study like the present one - a study of persons, not an ordered narration of events - makes no kind of pretension. But history has its bye-paths and its lesser purposes, and one of the chief tasks of the minor historian is to read the books that no one has leisure for. It is customary to question the use of writing fresh works when so many have already been written. But we too frequently forget how many of these books are no books. There are unknown contemporary records, buried either in remote publications or between the dusty covers of inconceivably tedious tomes, which have to be gone through for the sake of the solitary paragraph, perhaps the solitary sentence, that may serve the occasion in view. And there are always the volumes, old and modern, which are compiled, not written, out of which a book might be evoked. To gather together some such old fragments, to prevent waste of truth, to rescue the few vivid facts and impressions embedded in ruinous remains - still more, if possible, to throw some light upon the characters of an age, and thus, indirectly, upon its events - these seem aims not altogether incompatible with usefulness, or with the modest means at an ordinary chronicler's disposal. And if the following pages, which disclaim any larger ambition, should succeed in lending vitality to a single personage, a single occurrence of the past, they will not have been written in vain. My thanks are due to Messrs. Longman and to the editor of the Edinburgh Review for permitting me to reproduce parts of an article on "The Women of the Renaissance," published in that periodical last April. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.