Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book was impossible to enjoy. I love history and I expected this to be a pleasant read about the life of Lucrezia Borgia. Instead, from the very beginning, S. Bradford buries a reader in the myriad of Italian (and non-Italian) names of people and cities, and never let that go. Half of the pages are about the Borgia family and only here and there S. Bradford remembered that this book was suppose to concentrate on Lucrezia. In addition, the story jumps from one event to another without any logical connection. Maybe I needed a PhD for this book, I don't know.

No doubt that S. Bradford did an extensive research and has a great deal of knowledge on Borgia family but I think that the book could have been organized and edited much better.

Where Is The Story??? The book's outline, notes and sources seem to have been published by mistake. I read a lot of historical biographies and a lot of historical fiction. This, by far, is the least enjoyable one I have EVER read.

Sarah Bradford gets so caught up in dispelling the myth of Lucrezia Borgia that she forgets that her readers (me) do not have years experience of researching the Borgia Myth. Her text ( I do not call it a story) jumps in such a jumbled fashion from place to place, person to person, year to year and back again, leaving the reader confused and skimming to find the actual point. I sometimes had to read the same paragraph a couple of times to understand when a person had died/been murdered/been born or married. I think there should have been a more narrative style. I found there to be no actual voice or personality to the writing. If there was, it came across just as stiff and ancient as the endless renaissance letters, records, etc. from which Ms. Bradford draws.

I think I would have to read a few more books about the subject matter to understand what Ms. Bradford was trying to get across. Unfortunately, at this point, I really don't care. I think I deserved to have the myth at least referenced with the "actual" truth in the same book...especially since these myths are mentioned in the inside covers. I gathered from this that the point of the book was to enlighten the reader.

If you are looking for an interesting and informative read...look elsewhere. This book is drudgery.

Or maybe Lucrezia Borgia was just as boring as Sarah Bradford conveys her.

I hate to repeat the views of others, but this book really is a travesty. I was doing a term paper on Lucrezia and thought this book might help. The cover and the promise of dispelling the myths of Lucrezia lured me in, but I could barely comprehend what Sarah Bradford was trying to say throughout the entire book. The whole thing is just a jumble of names, places, dates, and ...more names. There is no narrative, it even goes for pages at a time without even mentioning Lucrezia's name. This book should be retitled "The Political Background of the Time that Just Happened to Include Lucrezia Borgia, Who Will Not Really Be Discussed".
Such potential!
Pity.

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 live what was perhaps one of the most exciting lives in history. She survived the black death, one of the most power hungry families in history, the murder of her beloved husband by her equally beloved brother, several miscarriages three marriages and a power structure that hated her. In an age where women were little more than pieces of property, Borgia was an expert administrator, beloved by her people and relied on by her husbands.
Considering all of that, Sarah Bradford must be some kind of literary genius to have made her biography the most boring thing I've ever read.
Lucrezia's achievements and trials are barely glossed over while her wardrobe is accounted in minute detail. Her notorious romances are treated like a mere side-note to her hair care regime.
I hope someone writes a decent biography of this amazing woman someday!

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

Ok, I don't normally write reviews, but I really feel I need to warn readers about this book. I am a Ph.D. student who studies Italian Renaissance art. I love history, and I am passionate about the Italian Renaissance, especially the few women whose histories have been recorded. That being said, I found this book to be terribly boring. Great biographies bring the character to life; this book did nothing more than list bland details of the time period. The parts that actually directly involve Lucrezia make up maybe a quarter of the book. If you already know a lot about the Renaissance, don't expect to learn anything new, and definitely don't expect to learn much about Lucrezia Borgia. I'd say it felt like reading a textbook, except I've actually had textbooks that were much more interesting than this. If you want to read a great biography of a Renaissance woman, try "Murder of a Medici Princess" or "The Pope's Daughter" both by Caroline Murphy. I've also heard "Lucrezia Borgia" by Maria Bellonci is an interesting account of the life of Lucrezia. Just don't waste your time trying to read this book.

This book could have been so interesting! I was expecting a biography of Lucrezia, but instead got a biography of her father and brothers. There are so many other people included that it is hard to keep track of who everyone is. Occasions that would have been momentous in Lucrezia's life (such as a first marriage) were mentioned only as a passing line amid the myriad details about her family's political situation at that particular time. More details about her and less about her brothers' wars would have been appreciated. Ms. Bradford's biography of Queen Elizabeth is MUCH more interesting than this one.

ok, I admit it, the book is kind of dry. There is a lot of dates, names and references to archives and documentation. It does not read like a novel, nor does it conjure images of a renaissance play...It is not, at least superficially, an entertaining read.

However, if you are into this sort of thing, and somewhat addicted to the history channel, so be it. Knowing the myths and rumor surrounding Lucrezia, this book provides a candid look that is base on solid research. It makes her seem human, although less exotic than we would like. For people who are interested in the "truth" of Lucrezia (at least what we can confirm or speculate from the research), this is worth a read.

The prose in this book drags itself from page to page with all the appeal of a wet blanket. I received it as a present - very much looking forward to a 'good read'. Instead, I found the prose dull, the story disappointingly assembled and the insights into the gusto of the Borgia's lives were meagre. The stage is littered with characters with few attempts made to sift them for the reader into categories of importance.

One of the most peculiar experiences, was my difficulty remembering what I had read the previous day when beginning a new section. Too dull and narratively undifferentiated to be worth bothering with in my opinion.