Catherine de' Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen

by Mary Hollingsworth

ISBN: 9781800244771

Published: 2025-05-08

A Financial Times Book of the Year 'Thoroughly researched.' Sunday Times 'To be devoured.' Philip Mansel 'This book is a treat for fans of well-told history.' Washington Post A new biography of Catherine de' Medici, the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe, whose author uses neglected primary sources to recreate the life and times of a remarkable - and remarkably traduced - woman. History is rarely kind to women of power, but few have had their reputations quite so brutally shredded as Catherine de' Medici, Italian-born queen of France and influential mother of three successive French kings during that country's long sequence of sectarian wars in the second half of the sixteenth century. Thanks to the malign efforts of propagandists motivated by religious hatred, history tends to remember Catherine as a schemer who used witchcraft and poison to eradicate her rivals, as a spendthrift dilettante who wasted ruinous sums of money on building and embellishment of monuments...