At Play in Italy and France

Italian ludic literary society influenced characteristics of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century société mondaine in France. Giambattista Marino, invited to France by Marie de’ Medici, served as a go-between for Italian and French seventeenth-century salon society. The queen’s marriage and patronage practices reflect sixteenth-century transnational exchanges of powerful women through marriage, as well as their patronage of poets and scholars. Such women’s tastes in literary, intellectual, and dramatic entertainments, as well as modes of ludic social interaction, proved sufficiently popular to endure into the seventeenth century, illustrating Bernard Suits’s notion that games people play are harbingers of things to come and Roger Caillois’s observation that the principles of games are often accepted and reflected in the larger culture.