I thought this book is a biography of Lucrezia Borgia. No! It is a portrait of Felice della Rovere, illegitimate daughter of Pope Julius II (The Pope is remembered for commissioning artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael).

It is indeed pity that Felice doesn't deserve as much mention as Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine, Elizabeth, Isabella d'Este. She is an astute thinker, a shrewd politician, a hard task master, and a very benevolent regent. A survior to the core who kept wits about her to make a splash in Renaissance Italy. ( )

This was a delightful insight into the life of an extraordinary woman who experienced the papacy from a family viewpoint. Her insights and determination allowed her to survive and even thrive against many odds. The deductions presented by the author are the result of keen insight and intuition. It was wonderful to enter the church of San Agnesi, off the Piazza Navona, and realize she worshiped there. The Bracchi Museum, at the foot of the Piazza Navona, has several paintings of enormous festivals held in the buildings on the Piazza - during the lifetime of Felice. Perhaps she even attended them. It's a very engaging story and I will read it again before my next trip to Rome. ( )

Een nieuwsgierige reis waard! ( )

A fascinating story of the papacy just before the reform of John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila. This book also gives great insight into life in rome in the 16th and 17 centuries ( )

This is an eminently readable, vivid account of Felice della Rovere's life, and, considering the nature of the surviving sources, one has to applaud the author's skill in bringing her subject to life even if the account at times creates the impression of being coloured at least as much by the imagination of a novelist as by pure scholarship. Unfortunately, the scholarship that went into its writing is itself suspect in more than one instance. Despite popular belief to the contrary, for example, there is no sound documentary evidence that Martin Luther ever nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg church door (a legend debunked, for example, by Gerhard Prause) as Murphy mentions in passing on p. 178.

More glaringly, the author seems unaware of the lapse of a century or so between the Late Roman Republic and the time of the Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), devoting a paragraph to the history of the site of the Gardens of Lucullus in which she rather confusedly states that Claudius' wife, Messalina, plotted to have Lucullus put to death in order to acquire his gardens herself. As Lucullus, in fact, died in 56 B.C. this would have been a singularly pointless enterprise on the part of Messalina, who did in fact covet the park still known in her day as the Gardens of Lucullus but who persecuted their contemporary owner to get them. This was one Decimus Valerius Asiaticus, who Tacitus (Ann. XI) tells us committed suicide in A.D. 47.

It is a great pity that howlers like these should have slipped past the scrutiny of both the author and the editors at OUP, and this reviewer cannot help wondering what other errors may be present that readers unfamiliar with Renaissance history would miss. In summary, the book is a pleasant read but not to be trusted for factual accuracy without independent verification.