author
dame Catherine Fredonnoit Des Roches
1542–1587
A Renaissance writer from Poitiers, she was part of a celebrated mother-daughter literary partnership that helped make their home a center of French intellectual life. Her poems, dialogues, and salon culture offer a vivid glimpse of women’s voices in sixteenth-century France.
1 Audiobook
La Puce de Mme Desroches
by dame Catherine Fredonnoit Des Roches, Etienne Pasquier
About the author
Born Catherine Fradonnet in Poitiers in December 1542, she became known as Catherine Des Roches. She was educated by her mother, the writer Madeleine Des Roches, and the two were closely linked in literary life, publishing together and building a reputation that reached well beyond their city.
With her mother, she helped host an important literary circle in Poitiers during the later sixteenth century. Their salon drew poets, jurists, and humanists, and Catherine wrote in several forms, including poetry and prose, as part of the lively French Renaissance culture of her time.
She never married and seems to have devoted much of her life to study and writing. Catherine Des Roches died in Poitiers in November 1587, the same month as her mother, and is remembered today as one of the notable women writers of the French Renaissance.