Catherine Fletcher (1) (1975–)

Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon has fascinated historians for centuries, so it can be hard to offer much new on the topic, yet Catherine Fletcher manages to do just that by focusing on Henry's man in Rome, Gegorio Casali. Along with his family, Casali was a diplomat trying to navigate the turbulent waters of 16th-century Europe. In the service of the English king, he bribed cardinals, solicited scholarly opinions, and organized kidnappings. To further his own fortunes, he married an heiress with a contested inheritance. If anything, I wish there had been more details of Casali and his family's exploits, as these figures clearly interacted with some of most interesting people of their age, yet remain slightly obscured to history. A history book that manages to offer a new perspective to a oft-covered topic and well worth the read for a better understanding of Renaissance diplomacy.… (more)

Catherine Fletcher's The Black Prince is a history of early sixteenth-century Florence as centered around the career of its first duke: Alessandro de' Medici. Fletcher does a good job in wringing as much information and personality as can be gleaned from the sometimes fragmented source base, and in bringing to life the whirl of Renaissance Florence. Alessandro's reign was a short one though—he was assassinated when only in his mid-20s—and much of the interest of his career has to come from the "what if?" of it all. This, combined with the fact that what general/historiographical interest Alessandro has attracted in the last two centuries or so has tended to centre around the question of whether or not he was mixed race, made me feel like Fletcher missed a trick in writing a fairly standard history of Medici Florence rather than a book which dealt as much with his cultural legacy as it did with the events of Alessandro's life.… (more)

That I gave this book a chance was mostly on the strength of the Fletcher's performance with her life and times of Alessandro de Medici. However, while this book is not lacking in virtue, I do have some issues with it, starting with the title. If truth in advertising was in effect, it would be called "Early Modern Italy: Cultural Efflorescence and Political Decline," as this is basically just a history of the so-called "Italian Wars," as the Italian peninsula became a cockpit for the Valois-Hapsburg dynastic conflict, and the Italian city-states became marginalized by the initial rise of the nation-state.

This is a reasonably good study so far as it goes, but whether Fletcher really achieves her goal of putting the players in the Italy of the time in proper relation to each other for the general reader is another question; I can see this work being too indigestible for that. Though it would probably make a good college undergrad textbook. I will say that what Fletcher does well is to incorporate the conflicts of religious practice and authority of the time into her general study; Martin Luther and various Catholic popes are as important in this narrative as any artist or king.… (more)