Book Shopping, Day Four
This book looks like a novel but it’s actually a biography, and a very good one at that. I gobbled it up because its subject Isabella de’ Medici was an older sister of my Lucrezia, and my fictionalized vision of Isabella actually plays a key peripheral (albeit offstage) role in The Second Duchess.
Isabella was Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s third child and second daughter, and a great favorite of her ambitious, powerful, and sometimes violent father. Caroline P. Murphy uses painstaking research and the extensive extant correspondence by and about the Medici to characterize Isabella, her family, her friends, and the courtiers that surrounded her. Much of the focus is on women and women’s lives, on delicious details about food, clothing, art, music, sport, daily living, the roles of servants, and the dazzling spectacles and entertainments a girl like Isabella took as a matter of course.
Most readers won’t really like Isabella—she was a woman of her time and place and position, cruel, arrogant, self-centered and sensual. But in her context—as a Renaissance princess, a patron of the arts, fluent in five languages—she is certainly fascinating. I won’t spoil the suspense with all the lurid details of her death, but I will say her beautiful ghost supposedly appears periodically in the Medici mansion where she was murdered, and at Castello Orsini Odescalchi in Bracciano, where she supposedly entertained many of her lovers.
Murder of a Medici Princess would be a wonderful gift for anyone interested in the Renaissance or women’s history. I think it would also appeal to readers of mysteries and thrillers.
Murder of a Medici Princess by Caroline P. Murphy is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, and your favorite independent bookstore. Hardcover and paperback editions are available.
