This critical edition of the memoirs of Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay (née Arbaleste de la Borde) is a welcome addition to the ever-growing recovery of the writings of early modern women writers. Arbaleste (1548–1606), one of the earliest French women memorialists, wrote her memoirs of the life of her second husband, the statesman and Calvinist theologian Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1549–1623). Duplessis-Mornay was for many years Henri of Navarre's financial administrator, ambassador to England and the Low Countries, and trusted advisor. Following Navarre's coronation as Henri IV and conversion to Catholicism in 1593, Duplessis-Mornay fell out of favor with the king. Arbaleste undertook in her memoirs an historical, hagiographical, and apologetic account of her husband's moral probity and unswerving devotion to king and his Huguenot faith.

Written over two decades (1584–1606), the memoirs appeared in print in 1624–25, soon after the death of Duplessis-Mornay — unmentioned in the current edition. They were reedited in 1824 and again in 1868–69, the latter in a completed and corrected edition by Henriette de Witt, daughter of the protestant politician and historian Francois Guizot. In addition to two extant manuscripts of the memoirs, the first containing Arbaleste's handwritten marginal notations and the second in what is presumed to be her daughter's handwriting, Nadine Kuperty-Tsur has discovered a third extant manuscript at the library of the Musée de Chantilly which is a replica copy of the first manuscript.

Arbaleste undertook her memoirs when the genre was in its infancy. Previous French women, both queens, who wrote texts resembling memoirs include Louise de Savoie who wrote a journal describing her efforts to get her son elected king of France as Francis I and Jeanne d'Albret who published in 1568 an Ample Declaration in which she defended her political motivations as titular head of the Huguenot party. The Catholic queen Marguerite de Valois began her memoirs in 1594 and the Protestant middle class memorialist Renée Burlamachi wrote on the life of her late husband Michele Burlamachi at the start of the seventeenth century.

Arbaleste conceived her memoirs as a spiritual guide for her only surviving son Philippe in order to rally him to the Protestant cause. She offered him an incomplete copy in 1595 upon his departure at the age of sixteen on his European Grand Tour. The narrative highlights Duplessis-Mornay's consciously chosen militant engagement in defense of Protestantism at the highest political levels. It also chronicles Arbaleste's life story at points where it intersects with her husband's — their dramatic escape from Paris during the Saint Bartholomew massacre, their courtship and marriage five years later in Sedan, Arbaleste's constant and perilous travels throughout France to lend support to Duplessis-Mornay's career, and the miscarriages, births, and deaths of their children. The memoirs end in 1606 with the death of their son on the battlefield at age twenty-eight. Arbaleste died soon after.

Two outstanding features of Arbaleste's memoirs are their use of exemplarity and their historical specificity. Pollie Bromilow and Jane Couchman have shown how authors such as Marguerite de Navarre and Huguenot women writers used female exemplarity to bear witness not to their own accomplishments but to God's grace operating in the world. Arbaleste features not only Duplessis-Mornay as a model for her son but strong women in her and her husband's immediate familial entourage. Second, Arbaleste's extraordinary attention to detail and getting the facts right and her inclusion of events about which her husband kept her constantly apprized pertain to the public nature of memoirs. While the editor comments on the narrative's historical cohesion, she emphasizes instead its private nature stating that since Arbaleste had no intention to publish her work “she seeks to influence no one other than her son” (56). The memoirs’ publication so soon after the death of Duplessis-Mornay and its militant apology of his life would indicate the contrary.

The volume includes, in addition to the memoirs, a discourse on the death of Arbaleste and two sonnets by Duplessis-Mornay. An appendix containing Arbaleste's testament and confession of faith would have been useful as well as a more complete bibliography — missing, for instance, is Colette Winn and Susan Broomhall's important study on self-representation in sixteenth-century women's memoirs, including Arbaleste's (Tangence 77 [winter 2005]).