Sarah dunant borgias6/28/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Frequent pleasure comes from Dunant’s sly employment of lines that now read counterintuitively, as when Lucrezia thinks of “The Pope. Readers in an era when the papacy has come to stand for celibacy and pacifism can only goggle at the spectacle of Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia, who is running almost as many wars and whores as he has children. In other words, the other guy is being a bit, well, Machiavellian.īut, while offering new perspectives on two long-defamed names, Dunant is unsparing in her presentation of the fabled derangement of the period. What worries Niccolò is that Cesare is “a man who never does what anyone expects”. Continuing a reclamation that began in the previous novel, Blood and Beauty, this Lucrezia has “sweetness and modesty”, and is disarmingly nervous as we observe her on the eve of her third marriage, by which she will become Duchess of Ferrara.Īs for Niccolò, those who have read The Prince – or observed the various politicians or football managers influenced by that treatise on statecraft – may be surprised to find its author panicking during a meeting with Cesare Borgia, Lucrezia’s brother, who, in the main action of the novel, grabs more kings and bishops for the Borgias on “the chessboard of central Italy”. ![]() Those reputations, though, are skilfully managed by Dunant in the fifth of her sequence of novels set in Italy during the Renaissance. ![]()
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