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anghraineOverall: eh.
The thing that’s aggravating about how people talk about Caterina is that she’s either feminist icon!!!!! or bloodthirsty virago (not in the cool Renaissance sense), and it’s painfully ahistorical.
The quotations were all translated in very modern parlance, to the point that it actually sounded unnatural. Pretty much anyone who opposed Caterina, ever, is represented as negatively as possible, and her supporters the reverse, a somewhat challenging task with the ever-changing affiliations of early Renaissance Italy.
Never mind the Borgias—this is the nicest Ludovico Sforza ever, and the only reason there was any trouble over his usurpation of Milan is because Isabella d'Aragona couldn’t stand giving precedence to Beatrice d'Este.
The author pushed the feminist heroine angle really hard; the murder of any men, women, or children tangentially associated with her husband’s assassination is a regrettable one-off episode. The unpopularity of the Riarii is all her husband’s doing. The discontentment of the people of Forlì is a combination of her husband’s policies and just being a bad-tempered sort of people (Cesare’s subsequent popularity as an adminstrator is ignored, of course).
She walks a fine line with Caterina-as-mother, unsure whether to emphasize her as a badass or de-emphasize her apparent callousness to her (unworthy!) children. One of her principal sources she describes as a stalker, and dismisses his less flattering later interpretations as bitterness over Caterina’s treatment of him.
It was very readable, very interesting, but it feels like you’re reading through a veil of ~relatability~ the whole time.
original tags:
#renaissance folk gonna renaissance #like if you can't grasp that you shouldn't be writing biographies of them #it's one thing to celebrate caterina sforza's sheer bizarre coolness #like #this is an actual person who lived and packed that much...living into a not especially long life #but to hold someone born in the fifteenth century as a feminist is honestly always pretty questionable #like yeah caterina said she cared about the welfare of girls #but she also had girls thrown down wells and left to die so
The thing that’s aggravating about how people talk about Caterina is that she’s either feminist icon!!!!! or bloodthirsty virago (not in the cool Renaissance sense), and it’s painfully ahistorical.
The quotations were all translated in very modern parlance, to the point that it actually sounded unnatural. Pretty much anyone who opposed Caterina, ever, is represented as negatively as possible, and her supporters the reverse, a somewhat challenging task with the ever-changing affiliations of early Renaissance Italy.
Never mind the Borgias—this is the nicest Ludovico Sforza ever, and the only reason there was any trouble over his usurpation of Milan is because Isabella d'Aragona couldn’t stand giving precedence to Beatrice d'Este.
The author pushed the feminist heroine angle really hard; the murder of any men, women, or children tangentially associated with her husband’s assassination is a regrettable one-off episode. The unpopularity of the Riarii is all her husband’s doing. The discontentment of the people of Forlì is a combination of her husband’s policies and just being a bad-tempered sort of people (Cesare’s subsequent popularity as an adminstrator is ignored, of course).
She walks a fine line with Caterina-as-mother, unsure whether to emphasize her as a badass or de-emphasize her apparent callousness to her (unworthy!) children. One of her principal sources she describes as a stalker, and dismisses his less flattering later interpretations as bitterness over Caterina’s treatment of him.
It was very readable, very interesting, but it feels like you’re reading through a veil of ~relatability~ the whole time.
original tags:
#renaissance folk gonna renaissance #like if you can't grasp that you shouldn't be writing biographies of them #it's one thing to celebrate caterina sforza's sheer bizarre coolness #like #this is an actual person who lived and packed that much...living into a not especially long life #but to hold someone born in the fifteenth century as a feminist is honestly always pretty questionable #like yeah caterina said she cared about the welfare of girls #but she also had girls thrown down wells and left to die so
no subject
on 2018-12-17 05:04 pm (UTC)As you say, anyone who even looked the wrong way at the author's beloved gets short shrift, including Machiavelli. Not one I recommend to anyone!
no subject
on 2018-12-17 07:06 pm (UTC)Exactly.