#which has also been the case for historical women like Elizabeth Woodville (I'm writing a post about this) and Mah Chuchak Begum

[wonder-worker]

[Anne de Pisseleu] has almost entirely disappeared from historical accounts. Francis is generally considered the strongest and most impressive French Renaissance king. To acknowledge Anne’s political power would diminish his reputation. But for errors of political judgment in his waning years, Anne has [often] been blamed.

Kathleen Wellman, Queens and Mistresses in Renaissance France / Tracy Adams, Queens, Regents, Mistresses: Reflections on Extracting Elite Women’s Stories from Medieval and Early Modern French Narrative Sources

"The Duchess of Étampes [Anne de Pisseleu] has been characterized over the centuries in reflexively misogynistic terms, and traces of the misogyny remain despite the scholarship of David Potter and Francis Nawracki demonstrating that that she was a central political figure during the last years of the reign of François I. She is described, for example, as “undoubtedly a detestable person, capricious, arrogant, taking advantage of her powers as favorite of a feeble, aged king,” and as “the duchess, insolent, capricious,” who “made sure that no one was unaware of the power that she held over [the king].” She was at “the heart of much in-fighting at court,” and she was “fickle.” Charges of greed and vainglory persist, as well: “Combining intelligence with beauty, she was also ambitious and grasping.” The reputation of Diane de Poitiers among historians has been different. She was much reviled immediately after her death, but, by the nineteenth century, she had been embraced as a romantic icon, and, ever since, she has been treated with sympathy or curiosity—the story that she ingested gold to preserve her beauty has garnered considerable interest in the popular press over the past few years—in recent biographies."