Why I am not enjoying “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia”

As part of the summer reading program at my local library, I have to read books from a number of different categories – a novel, a non-fiction book, a biography. I decided I’d choose for my biography the life of someone whose time period or lifestyle I’m interested in as a broader research topic. My first choice was William Marshall, but alas, the reknowned Plantagenet knight has few books and fewer biographies devoted to his life and times, a problem I think someone should solve very soon, because he’s a fascinating historical character. I didn’t have a second choice as I trolled the ‘Biography’ section of the library, and the books I was seeing on the shelves weren’t helping me either, because the library seems to have stopped buying biographies in the late eighties and nothing looks interesting when the dust cover is sun-faded and the books smell like they haven’t had a good airing in a while. If no one else has read them in a while, why should you, right?

Then it hit me – Showtime is doing a series on the Borgias soon, starring the always amazing Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, the patriarch of an eccentric family whose 15th century exploits would make most gossip magazines today kill for coverage of. I’ll read about the Borgias. Specifically, I’ll read about Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo’s illegitimate daughter and Renaissance bombshell who married three times, had a lot of affairs, and may or may not have poisoned a bunch of people, slept with her brother and organized an orgy at the Vatican.

This girl knew how to party, in other words. How bad can reading her biography be?

Lucrezia has three books on the shelf, none of them published before 1960. Wonderful. I pick the least moldy looking, “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia” by Maria Bellonci (published 1939, translated by Bernard and Barbara Wall, 1953) and check it out, my anticipation on slow simmer. Today I actually sit down to read said book, and about fifty pages in, I can take no more.

I’ve read fifty pages, and what I’ve gotten so far is not “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia”, but rather “The Times and Political Climate Surrounding Lucrezia Borgia, Who’s Really Just in the Title of this Book so Someone Who’s Interested in 15th Century Women Will Be Persuaded to Read About Italian Renaissance Politics.” Lucrezia’s come up ONCE in the first fifty pages of her biography, and in that one instance, she was getting married.

 Eeeeenteresting.

I take a moment to step back and consider why this is. Certainly one can make the argument that in order to understand Lucrezia’s life one has to understand the political circumstances of her father, Rodrigo, who, as I have already mentioned, was Pope Alexander VI. But to open a biography with the events that got her father elected as pope and not with, say, the birth of the title character, seems to me a bit dodgy.

Maybe there’s not enough research material on Lucrezia, and after Miss Bellonci picked her thesis topic figured this out and so padded it out with the available material on the men in Lucrezia’s life to make her three hundred page mark and appease her Ph.D. Thesis Examining Board, who wouldn’t have liked a biography on an Italian Renaissance wildwoman anyway. Too edgy. Not suitable reading material for the Misses Smith and Jones of the world who need good examples of pristine womanhood when they get home from their jobs as secretaries and elementary school teachers.

I’ve been reading Jill Ker Conway’s True North, the second of her three memoirs of her life as an Austrailian academic and a female trying to find a place in the post-secondary system. (For my review of her first memoir, The Road to Coorain, click here) Conway talks a lot about being taken seriously as a female academic interested in studying the contributions of women throughout history, and I wonder if that wasn’t the case with Miss Maria Bellonci circa 1939. It’s a man’s world in academia, and if she wants to write a book about one of history’s leading ladies, what she really has to write is a book about the men surrounding history’s leading ladies and keep her title character in the role she herself is supposed to be playing – a pretty face, a focal point at parties, but not the headliner or the leader of anything worth reading.

It struck me that history writing has changed a lot since this book was written – since women like Conway have worked their way up the ladder and worked to get Women’s Studies on the curriculum and allowed historians and economists and theologians to examine the part of history that can get ignored in history books. Nowadays, women like Antonia Frasier and Alison Weir can write biographies where their subjects can become the center and not the periphery of the world being described. I enjoy reading biographies like that, where I get just enough historical context to get me through the chapter and enough about the person I wanted to read about to sustain my attention.

Now come on, Amanda Foreman or one of you other great literary ladies, get on this Lucrezia Borgia issue and write me a biography I’m not going to have to kill myself reading.

(Interestingly, I read two articles on the “feminization of history” while writing this post – apparently a British historian named David Starkey got his undies in a bunch about a year ago over the fact that some people think the history of Europe wasn’t exclusively piloted by white males. You can read one response to his comments here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6035805.ece )