Download or read book The Pope s Daughter written by Dario Fo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucrezia Borgia is one of the most vilified women in modern history. The daughter of a notorious pope, she was twice betrothed before the age of eleven and thrice married—one husband was forced to declare himself impotent and thereby unfit and another was murdered by Lucrezia’s own brother, Cesar Borgia. She is cast in the role of murderess, temptress, incestuous lover, loose woman, femme fatale par excellence. But there are two sides to every story. Lucrezia Borgia is the only woman in history to have serve as the head of the Catholic Church. She successfully administered several of Renaissance Italy’s most thriving cities, founded one of the world’s first credit unions, and was a generous patron of the arts. She was mother to a prince and to a cardinal. She was a devoted wife to the Prince of Ferrara, and the lover of the poet Pietro Bembo. She was a child of the renaissance and, in many ways, the world’s first modern woman. In this richly imagined novel, Nobel laureate Dario Fo reveals Lucrezia’s humanity, her passion for life, her compassion for others, and her skill at navigating around her family’s evildoings. The Borgias are unrivalled for the range and magnitude of their political machinations and opportunism. Fo’s brilliance rests in his rendering their story as a shocking mirror image of the uses and abuses of power in our own time. Lucrezia herself becomes a model for how to survive and rise above those abuses. Part Wolf Hall, part House of Cards, The Pope's Daugther will appeal to readers of historical fiction and of contemporary fiction alike and will delight anyone fascinated by Renaissance Italy.
Download or read book The Pope s Daughter The Extraordinary Life of Felice della Rovere written by Caroline P. Murphy and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The illegitimate daughter of Pope Julius II, Felice della Rovere became one of the most powerful and accomplished women of the Italian Renaissance. Now, Caroline Murphy vividly captures the untold story of a rare woman who moved with confidence through a world of popes and princes.Using a wide variety of sources, including Felice's personal correspondence, as well as diaries, account books, and chronicles of Renaissance Rome, Murphy skillfully weaves a compelling portrait of this remarkable woman. Felice della Rovere was to witness Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel, watch her father Pope Julius II lay the foundation stone for the new Saint Peter's, and see herself immortalized by Raphael in his Vatican frescos. With her marriage to Gian Giordano Orsini--arranged, though not attended, by her father the Pope--she came to possess great wealth and power, assets which she turned to her advantage. While her father lived, Felice exercised much influence in the affairs of Rome--even negotiating for peace with the Queen of France--and after his death, Felice persevered, making allies of the cardinals and clerics of St. Peter's and maintaining her control of the Orsini land through tenacity, ingenuity, and carefully cultivated political savvy. She survived the Sack of Rome in 1527, but her greatest enemy proved to be her own stepson Napoleone. The rivalry between him and her son Girolamo had a sudden and violent end, and brought her perilously close to losing everything she had spent her life acquiring.With a marvelous cast of characters, this is a spellbinding biography set against the brilliant backdrop of Renaissance Rome.
Download or read book Lucrezia Borgia written by Ferdinand Gregorovius and published by Vita Histria. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucrezia Borgia is among the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the Renaissance. The daughter of Pope Alexander VI, she was intensely involved in the political life of Italy during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While her marriage alliances helped advance the political objectives of the papacy, she also held the office of Governor of Spoleto, a role normally reserved for Cardinals, making her one of the most powerful and dynamic female figures of the Renaissance. Among the first books to employ historical method to move beyond myth and romance that had obscured the fascinating story of Lucrezia Borgia was this biography written by the noted German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius. Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821-1891) was one of the preeminent scholars of the Italian Renaissance. His biography of Lucrezia Borgia reveals the atmosphere of the Renaissance, painting a portrait of Lucrezia and her relationships with her father Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, her brother Cesare, her mother Vanozza, her father’s mistress, Giulia Farnese, her husband Duke Alfonso D’Este of Ferrara, and many others, including important artists and writers of the time. All are vividly portrayed against the colorful background of Renaissance Italy. Gregorovius separates myth from documented fact and his book remains a key reference work on the life and times of the Borgia princess. This new edition of Gregorovius’s classic work Lucrezia Borgia is enhanced with an introduction by Samantha Morris, a noted expert on the history of the Borgias. Samantha studied archaeology at the University of Winchester where her interest in the history of the Italian Renaissance began. She is the author of Cesare Borgia: In a Nutshell and Girolamo Savonarola: The Renaissance Preacher. She also runs the website theborgiabull.com.
Download or read book The Pope s Daughter written by Caroline P. Murphy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The illegitimate daughter of Pope Julius II, Felice della Rovere became one of the most powerful and accomplished women of the Italian Renaissance. Now, Caroline Murphy vividly captures the untold story of a rare woman who moved with confidence through a world of popes and princes. Using a wide variety of sources, including Felice's personal correspondence, as well as diaries, account books, and chronicles of Renaissance Rome, Murphy skillfully weaves a compelling portrait of this remarkable woman. Felice della Rovere was to witness Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel, watch her father Pope Julius II lay the foundation stone for the new Saint Peter's, and saw herself immortalized by Raphael in his Vatican frescos. With her marriage to Gian Giordano Orsini--arranged, though not attended, by her father the Pope--she came to possess great wealth and power, assets which she used to her advantage. While her father lived, Felice exercised much influence in the affairs of Rome, even egotiating for peace with the Queen of France. After his death, Felice persevered, making allies of the cardinals and clerics of St. Peter's and maintaining her control of the Orsini land through tenacity, ingenuity, and carefully cultivated political savvy. She survived the Sack of Rome in 1527, but her greatest enemy proved to be her own stepson Napoleone, whose rivalry with his stepbrother Girolamo ended suddenly and violently, and brought her perilously close to losing everything she had spent her life acquiring. With a marvelous cast of characters, The Pope's Daughter is a spellbinding biography set against the brilliant backdrop of Renaissance Rome.
Download or read book Galileo s Daughter written by Dava Sobel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-09-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a biography of the scientist through the surviving letters of his illegitimate daughter Maria Celeste, who wrote him from the Florence convent where she lived from the age of thirteen.
Download or read book My Big Little Girl written by Greg Pope and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follow along on a journey of a dad's love for his daughter, from the first time he holds her in his arms to the day he has to let her go. The elegant illustrations combined with the beautiful words written by Greg Pope make this picture book the perfect present for any dad or daughter, young or old. Every little girl grows up, but no little girl ever outgrows the need for her dad.
Download or read book Daughter Zion written by Joseph Ratzinger and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daughter Zion explores the biblical witness to the Church's Marian dogmas―Mary’s role as Mother of God, her virginity, the Immaculate Conception, and her Assumption into heaven. Cardinal Ratzinger examines how these beliefs are linked to the Church’s faith in Jesus Christ. Far from competing with the truth about Christ, the Church’s Marian beliefs uphold and underscore that truth. Mary’s role in salvation, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, was anticipated in the Old Testament. She was prefigured in Eve, the Mother of the Living; in the holy women of the Old Testament, such as Sarah, Hannah, Deborah, Esther, and Judith; and in the prophetic image of the daughter Zion. Cardinal Ratzinger also considers Mary’s place as the embodiment of created wisdom, who faithfully received the Uncreated Wisdom of the Word of God in the Incarnation. Daughter Zion avoids the extremes of ignoring the biblical foundation for Marian doctrine on the one hand and fundamentalistic proof-texting on the other. Instead, the author beautifully and lucidly develops key biblical themes to help readers understand and appreciate the Mother of God.
Download or read book The Vatican Princess written by C. W. Gortner and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trade paperback edition includes a reader's guide.
Download or read book Light in the Queen s Garden written by Sandra E. Bonura and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the 1800s, when Oberlin graduate Ida May Pope accepted a teaching job at Kawaiaha‘o Seminary, a boarding school for girls, she couldn’t have imagined it would become a lifelong career of service to Hawaiian women, or that she would become closely involved in the political turmoil soon to sweep over the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Light in the Queen’s Garden offers for the first time a day-by-day accounting of the events surrounding the coup d’état as seen through the eyes of Pope’s young students. Author Sandra Bonura uses recently discovered primary sources to help enliven the historical account of the 1893 Hawaiian Revolution that happened literally outside the school’s windows. Queen Lili‘uokalani’s adopted daughter’s long-lost oral history recording; many of Pope’s teaching contemporaries’ unpublished diaries, letters, and scrapbooks; and rare photographs tell a story that has never been told before. Towering royal personages in Hawai‘i’s history—King Kalākaua, Queen Lili‘uokalani, and Princess Ka‘iulani—appear in the book, as Ida Pope sheltered Hawai‘i’s daughters through the frightening and turbulent end of their sovereign nation. Pope was present during the life celebrations of the king, and then his sad death rituals. She traveled with Lili‘uokalani on her controversial trip to Kalaupapa to visit Mother Marianne Cope and afflicted pupils. In 1894, with the endorsement of Lili‘uokalani and Charles Bishop, Pope helped to establish the Kamehameha School for Girls, funded by the estate of Princess Pauahi Bishop, and became its first principal. Inspired by John Dewey and others, she shaped and reshaped Kamehameha’s curriculum through a process of conflict and compromise. Fired up by the era’s doctrine of social and vocational relevance, she adapted the curriculum to prepare her students for entry into meaningful careers. Lili‘uokalani’s daughter, Lydia Aholo, was placed in the school and Pope played a significant role in mothering and shaping her future, especially during the years the queen was fighting to restore her kingdom. As Hawai‘i moved into the twentieth century under a new flag, Pope tenaciously confronted the effects of industrialization and the growing concentration of outside economic power, working tirelessly to attain social reforms to give Hawaiian women their rightful place in society.
Download or read book Lucrezia Borgia written by Sarah Bradford and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The very name Lucrezia Borgia conjures up everything that was sinister and corrupt about the Renaissance—incest, political assassination, papal sexual abuse, poisonous intrigue, unscrupulous power grabs. Yet, as bestselling biographer Sarah Bradford reveals in this breathtaking new portrait, the truth is far more fascinating than the myth. Neither a vicious monster nor a seductive pawn, Lucrezia Borgia was a shrewd, determined woman who used her beauty and intelligence to secure a key role in the political struggles of her day. Drawing from a trove of contemporary documents and fascinating firsthand accounts, Bradford brings to life the art, the pageantry, and the dangerous politics of the Renaissance world Lucrezia Borgia helped to create.
Download or read book The Perilous Gard written by Elizabeth Marie Pope and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1974 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1558 while imprisoned in a remote castle, a young girl becomes involved in a series of events that leads to an underground labyrinth peopled by the last practitioners of druidic magic.
Download or read book The Bad Popes written by Eric Russell Chamberlin and published by Barnes & Noble Publishing. This book was released on 1986 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories of seven popes who ruled at seven different critical periods in the 600 years leading into the Reformation.
Download or read book Papal Genealogy written by George L. Williams and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2004-08-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papacy has often resembled a secular European monarchy more than a divinely inspired institution. Roman pontiffs bestowed great wealth on their families and forged strategic alliances with other powerful families to increase their power. Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), for example, forced his daughter Lucrezia into a series of marriages for political reasons. When her marital alliance was no longer advantageous, as was the case in her second marriage, her husband was brutally murdered. Many papal families also intermarried in hopes of forming a hereditary papacy; at least two members of the Fieschi, Piccolomini, Della Rovere, and Medici families served as pope. Papal families since the early history of the church are fully covered in this comprehensive work. Genealogical charts graphically show the descendants of the popes, presenting in many cases the interrelationships between the papal families and their relationships with many of the leading families of Europe. Detailed histories examine the impact of the papacy on each pope's family and how each influenced the history of the church.
Download or read book Mistress of the Vatican written by Eleanor Herman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleanor Herman, the talented author of the New York Times bestselling Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen goes behind the sacred doors of the Catholic Church in Mistress of the Vatican, a scintillating biography of a powerful yet little-known woman whose remarkable story is ripe with secrets, sex, passion, and ambition. For almost four centuries this astonishing story of a woman’s absolute power over the Vatican has been successfully buried—until now.
Download or read book Pope Joan written by Donna Woolfolk Cross and published by Crown. This book was released on 2009-06-09 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Pope Joan has all the elements one wants in a historical drama—love, sex, violence, duplicity, and long-buried secrets. Cross has written an engaging book.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review In this international bestseller and basis for the 2009 movie of the same name, Donna Woolfolk Cross brings the Dark Ages to life in all their brutal splendor and shares the dramatic story of a woman whose strength of vision led her to defy the social restrictions of her day. For a thousand years her existence has been denied. She is the legend that will not die—Pope Joan, the ninth-century woman who disguised herself as a man and rose to become the only female ever to sit on the throne of St. Peter. Now in this riveting novel, Cross paints a sweeping portrait of an unforgettable heroine who struggles against restrictions her soul cannot accept. Brilliant and talented, young Joan rebels against medieval social strictures forbidding women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloak—and his identity—and enters the monastery of Fulda. As Brother John Anglicus, Joan distinguishes herself as a great scholar and healer. Eventually, she is drawn to Rome, where she becomes enmeshed in a dangerous web of love, passion, and politics. Triumphing over appalling odds, she finally attains the highest office in Christendom—wielding a power greater than any woman before or since. But such power always comes at a price . . . “Brings the savage ninth century vividly to life in all its alien richness. An enthralling, scholarly historical novel.”—Rebecca Fraser, author of The Brontës
Download or read book Housebreaking written by Dan Pope and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning to his childhood home after his wife kicks him out, Benjamin lives with his 81-year-old father and tries to put his life back together while he rekindles a friendship with his high school crush, who has troubles of her own.
Download or read book Blood Beauty written by Sarah Dunant and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched only by its brutality and corruption. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy, he is defined not just by his wealth, charisma and power, but by his blood: a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If he is to succeed, he must use his Machiavellian son and innocent daughter. Stripping away the myths around the Borgias, Blood & Beauty breathes life into the astonishing family of Alexander VI and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex, and relentless.
