Well, actually two tales.

I hadn’t intended on discussing these two books together, but it actually is a good fit, so here goes. Tales of two Renaissance women, one fiction and one non-fiction. Guess which one is more interesting?

I’d probably seen Sarah Dunant’s books in stores, but had never thought of looking at one until this past spring, when, in the midst of DVC madness, I heard her interviewed on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. She sounded smart and interesting,  clearly had a passion for her subjects – women in renaissance Italy and a commitment to getting things right. This was very refreshing as I was traveling from place to place assuring people that no, Constantine did not convene the Council of Nicaea in order to force devotees of the Nice Teacher Jesus to worship him as Lord.

So, on one of those trips, I picked up The Birth of Venus in an airport bookstore, read a couple of pages, but then never got any further. A couple of weeks ago, packing up for Amarillo, I threw it in the bag just in case I ran out of reading material..which I did, so there it is.

As one commenter remarked when I said I might be reading it, "not so good." Dunant tells the story of a young woman, the less marriageable of two daughters, living in 15th century Florence. The life she recalls in this first-person narrative is lived in the context of Savonarola’s rise and fall, which provides counterpoint and indirect commentary on her own situation.

The detail is initially absorbing, but ultimately, Dunant doesn’t do character. Despite all the detailed renaissance ruffles and flourishes, it’s essentially a 21st-century vision of female oppression and liberation, with some rather unbelievable choices made by characters – not unbelievable because they were made, but because there’s this gap in the context – Dunant fills in the exterior pallette, but the interior pallette, of what a woman making these choices would really wrestle with, is far more 2000 than 1450.

And if you’ve read it…see if you agree with me on this: did you find her liason with the painter totally out of the blue and kind of odd? The way the fellow was described up to that point is as such a borderline madman – and in the reclusive, greasy, in-the-corner kind of madness – I was just not believing that this young woman, no matter what other kind of difficulties she’d been through, would hook up with him.

And…I’m reluctant to say any more (although I will in the comments if anyone is interested) since I don’t want to "spoil" the plot for anyone. Even though I’m not recommending the book. Which I’m not. But now..on to Felice.

The Pope’s Daughter is a biography – as close as one can be constructed from available sources – of Felice della Rovere, daughter of Pope Julius II.

Conceived while he was a Cardinal, Felice was not alone in being the illegitimate child of a clergyman – after all, Julius II followed the papacy (after the 18-day reign of Pius III) of  Alexander VI, who had the most famous papal daughter of all – Lucrezia Borgia.

(Incidentally, the old Catholic Encyclopedia article on Julius says he had three daughters, but Murphy does not discuss the existence of any others beside Felice)

Felice’s story is not as scandalous as Lucrezia’s, but in its own way, just as interesting. I’ll be up front about one of the problems with this book, first though:

The material on Felice’s early life – up to her marriage into the Orsini family –  is sketchy to non-existent. Author Murphy does what she can with her sources, and fills the rest in with what he know about the life of renaissance women in general or life in the places in which Felice lived.

The text doesn’t make claims which the evidence can’t bear, but the first quarter is burdened by a lot of "Felice must have" and other phrasings venturing suggestions about the young woman’s feelings and perceptions. It’s irritating – I am not sure how else she could tell enough of the story to carry the narrative along, and she’s certainly upfront in her forward to the book in acknowledging her approach – but there’s a bit of creative history going on at times which I really didn’t like.

But once Felice gets married (for the second time – her first husband, to whom she was married as a young teenager, died) to an Orsini, things kick into high, and more well-documented gear, since the Orsinis were one of the great families of Rome during this period, and left voluminous archives and had histories written about their families even in the late 16th century. But I suppose we should backtrack a bit.

As I said, Felice was conceived in a liason – no one knows if it was long or short-term – between then Cardinal della Rovere and Lucrezia Normanni, and was probably born in 1483. As was often the case with the mistresses of the elite, Lucrezia, once pregnant, was married off to a family servant – in this case, Bernardino de Cupis, who was the maestro di casa – that is, property and business manager – for Cardinal Girolamo Basso della Rovere, Julius’ cousin. The house he built and in which Felice grew up, is the Palazza de Cupis, is located on Piazza Navona in Rome.

Felice’s existence and paternity were never a secret, and once she was married and returned to Rome (after an adolescence elsewhere with other family), the records are filled with her presence after a rocky start = she had turned down several of her father’s choices for a husband for her, and Murphy speculates that this greatly irritated Julius, a conclusion she draws by comparing the relatively modest wedding he gave Felice to the celebrations he hosted for other female relations and the fact that he banned any public celebrations in relation to her marriage, although the greater point there might have been to set himself up in contrast to Alexander VI’s gaudy flaunting of his own family.

After that point, Felice’s live takes an interesting turn beyond the expected quiet role of a well-to-do Renaissance woman. For Felice was intent, Murphy infers, to maintain her independence – she had been a widow once, and seen the consequences, and in this situation, her new husband had been married before and had two children already. Widowhood for Felice would probably mean a very dicey existence.

So Felice set about establishing herself. Using her dowry and other funds, she bought property that was solely hers (and came in handy later when she needed some cash and then-Pope Leo X needed a hunting retreat to rent out), and established herself as an able manager of that property as well as her husband’s. After she had produced two male children (and two female), her sights shifted slightly – to solidify their claims, especially in sight of any conflict with their older half-brother who was, naturally, extremely irritated at his displacement, especially after Felice’s husband died, leaving her in charge.

It’s a story of perpetual insecurity, on a broad and small scale. There were constant wars and conflicts a-brewing with emperors, kings and city-states, conflicts which might personally devastate a family as it loses its males to battle, but also certainly took its economic toll.  Felice’s properties were greatly reduced during and after the 1527 Sack of Rome, which not only cost her dearly in terms of destroyed property and funds handed over to the Spanish army as protection money, but in the space it gave her stepson to operate and wreak havoc.

Felice played a role in the Papal court – not as visible as Lucrezia Borgia, of course, but she was there, showing up in accounts of various types of meetings, most notably, in a years-long effort to avert war with Venice, and then France – Julius deeply involved Felice in negotiations on the latter, which were, on the French side, also represented by a woman, the Queen of France, Anne of Brittany.

The whole thing is a fascinating tale of power brokering, negotiation and court intrigue of one kind or another. The simony is rather breathtaking, as it always is when we face up to the Renaissance Church, with every position from cardinal to bishop to abbot up for sale, an taken-for-granted element of negotiations. The family ties are dizzying and hard to keep straight – but that’s also an inevitable side effect of looking at this period.

Murphy avers that there is more to be told of Felice’s story – that there are archives which no one has really mined, and what that tells us is something very interesting. We can’t imagine that there is more to learn about the past, but as any serious student of history knows, more is always being discovered, hidden in those archives for those who have eyes to see – unexamined, perhaps because the subject wasn’t deemed worthy, as was the case in historical studies in terms of women up until the past few decades. When I was in graduate school, and a professor met with us would-be historians about our search for a thesis topic, he told us about the newly acquired microfilm collection, a product of Smith College, I belive, that contained reels and reels of copies of primary material about women in American religion. "Just go down there," he said, "and pick a reel. You’ll find an interesting subject, and I guarantee no one’s ever looked at it before." 

The contrast between the two books is rather striking, and not just in an obvious way. Dunant’s heroine operates out of 21st century priorities for the most part – she wants to express herself (although I’d say that Dunant doesn’t make it creakingly anachronistic – the heroine’s yearnings are subtle and she does, for the most part accept the limitations her arranged marriage and so on places on her) – and that’s it.

Felice’s priorities are different – she lived in treacherous times, and as the illegitimate daughter of a Pope married into a family that was in many ways hostile to her, even as they appreciated the connection to the Papal court – she knew she had to secure herself. So she threw herself into business, working against type and expectations, but with an eye to survival for her and her children, as opposed to Dunant’s fantasy of a renaissance woman who has no other real concerns but self-expression.