anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (Default)
[personal profile] anghraine
Overall: 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

on 2018-12-17 05:04 pm (UTC)
meridian_rose: pen on letter background  with text  saying 'writer' (Default)
Posted by [personal profile] meridian_rose
I had the misfortune of encountering this as someone I knew was writing a Riario/Caterina reimagining (basing Riario on the Da Vinci's Demons version). I found it offputting how the author kept gushing about Caterina being Bold! and Beautiful! and Beautiful and Bold and Brave! It felt like a fangirlish essay in places rather than an actual biography. And the way Lev hated Riario, who comes across as being possibly depressed, sickly, and asocial rubbed me the wrong way, called 'fat' and 'cowardly' as opposed to his Beautiful Charming wife.
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!

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anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (Default)
Anghraine

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