Eye8Pudding
Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford / Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant
Lucrezia Borgia -- "Historians who have attempted to rescue Lucrezia Borgia from her legend as a poisoner who slept with both her father, Pope Alexander VI, and her brother, Cesare Borgia, have mostly described her as a pawn. Indeed, before she was twenty-one she was twice married off to men who were disposed of once their political usefulness expired. (The first had to declare himself impotent and grant her a divorce; the second was strangled in his bed.) Bradford sees Lucrezia neither as a helpless victim nor a femme fatale but as a resourceful individual—an able administrator, a genuinely religious woman, and the equal in political skill, if not in brutality, of her notorious male relatives. When the family of her third husband balked at alliance with a woman described as the “greatest whore there ever was in Rome,” she used all her craft and charm to win them over—by, among other things, making her pious prospective father-in-law a gift of several nuns." -- from www.barnesandnoble.com
Chock full of information but a rather dry read. It would have been better reading if more of the focus had been on Lucrezia herself and less about he men in her family, i.e. her father, brothers, and husbands.
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Blood & Beauty -- "By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family—in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia—in order to succeed.
Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest—though increasingly unstable—weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player." -- from www.barnesandnoble.com
A nice novel...far more expansive and well written than the other novel I've read by Dunant.
Lucrezia Borgia -- Started: Sep. 2, 2013 Finished: Sep. 18, 2013
Blood & Beauty -- Started: Sep. 9, 2013 Finished: Sep. 18, 2013
Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford / Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant
Lucrezia Borgia -- "Historians who have attempted to rescue Lucrezia Borgia from her legend as a poisoner who slept with both her father, Pope Alexander VI, and her brother, Cesare Borgia, have mostly described her as a pawn. Indeed, before she was twenty-one she was twice married off to men who were disposed of once their political usefulness expired. (The first had to declare himself impotent and grant her a divorce; the second was strangled in his bed.) Bradford sees Lucrezia neither as a helpless victim nor a femme fatale but as a resourceful individual—an able administrator, a genuinely religious woman, and the equal in political skill, if not in brutality, of her notorious male relatives. When the family of her third husband balked at alliance with a woman described as the “greatest whore there ever was in Rome,” she used all her craft and charm to win them over—by, among other things, making her pious prospective father-in-law a gift of several nuns." -- from www.barnesandnoble.com
Chock full of information but a rather dry read. It would have been better reading if more of the focus had been on Lucrezia herself and less about he men in her family, i.e. her father, brothers, and husbands.
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Blood & Beauty -- "By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family—in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia—in order to succeed.
Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest—though increasingly unstable—weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player." -- from www.barnesandnoble.com
A nice novel...far more expansive and well written than the other novel I've read by Dunant.
Lucrezia Borgia -- Started: Sep. 2, 2013 Finished: Sep. 18, 2013
Blood & Beauty -- Started: Sep. 9, 2013 Finished: Sep. 18, 2013