Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy

This book is detailed, thorough, well researched and well thought out. If you are not familiar with the time period and the large cast of characters, it might be overwhelming. This book brings to life a woman history has been neither kind to nor treated with honesty or respect -- she deserves better.

I must agree with the former (and much less favorable reviews) that this book contains a lot of Renaissance Italian, names -- people, places, families. There are a lot of names. There is also quite a bit of information about the Borgia family (and to a lesser extent the other major families in Italy at the time). I don't see how you can tell the story of anyone in a major Italian Renaissance family without including the story of the family. I will concede that this is not an easy read. Yes, it helps to already have some familiarity with the time and place. However, I found it to be extremely well researched, nicely written and with a keen sense of the author's impression of the person that the historical evidence portrays.

I cannot agree at all with the reviewers who found this book "boring." Lucrezia's early life, before she was Duchess of Ferrara, was inextricably caught up in the lives of her brother and her father. She didn't keep a diary, and there are few letters from her during the years of her first and second marriages; all observations about her motives and her views came from outside observers. She was a pretty pawn, and she was voiceless. As Duchess of Ferrara, she was minutely observed, and still was not truly free to speak in her own voice. However, her position meant that her letters were preserved, and so we have the correspondence with Pietro Bembo, Federigo Gonzaga, and Alfonso d'Este that show a woman who adroitly played the hand she was dealt. I don't know what other readers were expecting - breathless declarations and confessions in Lucrezia's own words, maybe, but these are declarations that just do not exist. It is necessary to read between the lines. Even the wardrobe descriptions (which I loved, by the way, because I do historical costuming and re-enacting) added to the portrait of Lucrezia.

Lucrezia Borgia: murderer? whore? or merely the helpless victim of her patriarchal family? The question is a fascinating one. Having previously published two accounts of the Borgia family, including a biography of Cesare Borgia, best-selling biographer Sarah Bradford (AMERICA'S QUEEN, DISRAELI, GEORGE VI, PRINCESS GRACE, and ELIZABETH) knows her subject. Perhaps the most notorious woman in history (her name has become synonymous with evil), Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1501) was the daughter of Pope Alexander VI (aka Rodrigo Borgia) and the sister of ruthless Cesare Borgia. In the five hundred years since her death, Lucrezia has been accused of first having incestuous relations with her father and brother, and then poisoning her father. In assisting Cesare with his career (p.101) and the scheming Borgias family in its political and dynastic goals (p. 64), Lucrezia first married at age thirteen at the behest of her father, and then married a second time to a man who was then murdered on the orders of her brother, before marrying a third time to the Duke of Ferrara (aka Alfonso d'Este), who opposed the notion of marrying her. Along the way, Lucrezia pursued numerous extramarital affairs and suffered several miscarriages and difficult pregnancies. Not surprisingly, Lucrezia lived a life of "supreme sorrow" (p. 270), "horror and tears," before turning to God in her later years. While Lucrezia Borgia will always remain an archetype, Bradford succeeds in portraying her subject in a more human light, demonstrating that Lucrezia was transformed over the course of her lifetime from a powerless victim of the Borgia patriarchal order, to an enlightened Duchess of Ferrara and patron of the Renaissance arts. Scandalous reading, this biography. G. Merritt

In her 39 years Lucrezia Borgia lived quite a life, but then again when your father is the Pope.... ==We remember Lucrezia and her brother Cesare as incestuous and murderous villans of the time. Ms. Bradford's biography, probably destined to be the definitive work, present her in a somewhat different vein. Her view is more sympathetic, more of a pawn of a power hungry family than the untimate femme fatal. Married off by the political whim of her father and brother when she was thirteen, divorced, then married for a second time before she turned twenty. Her second husband was murdered by Cesare. She learned how a woman could obtain power in a society ruled by men, and her next marriage was of her own choosing. She then proved to be an enlightened ruler, a skilled administrator and a friend to the arts. This is a tale of sex, gossip, murder, astonishing beauty and ambition -- and this was the time of the Renaissance when the arts were flourishing, when the ancient writings of the Romans and Greeks were marking the end of the dark ages. Fascinating Book.