As queen of France and duchess of Brittany, Claude de France (r.1515–24) ostensibly possessed the same politico-cultural stature as her mother, Anne de Bretagne (r.1491–98, 1499–1514), who earlier bore the same titles. While we know little about the actual relationship between Anne and Claude, their sharing of cultural space, a unique circumstance in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, can be measured through an examination of their joint appearance in contemporary books. One of the earliest known images of the princess and her mother decorates the king's copy of Petrarch's Remèdes de l'une ou l'autre Fortune (BnF MS ffr. 225, folio 165r) (Figure 9). Featuring Anne holding an adult-looking four-year-old Claude on her lap, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, the miniature appears to venerate the females of the French court as its own self-contained unit.

This portrayal of royal mother and daughter is nonetheless ambiguous, for in its mise en scène of Louis XII's confrontation with Fortune and Reason, the text accompanying the illustration conveys anxieties about the lack of a male heir. Anne, who looks downward as if shamed, and Claude thus essentially emblematize the queen's failure in her most anticipated function as spouse. Their stature is all the more diminished by the larger, more imposing and accusatory figure of King Louis XII above them in the center of the miniature, accompanied by Cardinal Georges d'Amboise and the king's courtiers. The portrait of Faith and Hope at Reason's feet is offset by the presence of Adversity and Fortune in the left background along with Fear and Grief.

Figure 9. Louis XII complains to Reason about the lack of a male heir, Petrarch, Remèdes de l'une ou l'autre Fortune

(Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 225, fol. 165r)

This ‘sharing’ of a book's paratextual space by Anne and Claude is more favorably cast in the primer of Claude of France (c.1505–10), currently housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge MS 159). Destined for the daughter's instruction, this manuscript stages verbal and visual scenes of women (St Anne) teaching children (the Virgin Mary, Claude) to read. And yet the identification of the figure depicted in the liminal miniature has been disputed. Some scholars assume the female kneeling beside Mary represents Claude herself, but Binski and Panayotova (p. 231), followed by Wieck (p. 269), claim that the opening illustration portrays Anne de Bretagne as commissioner of the book kneeling before her daughter's patron, St Claude.