CATHERINE DE MEDICI

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 PostA 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 and palaces and most sinister of all as instigator of the St Bartholomew s Day massacre of 1572 in which thousands of innocent Protestants were slaughtered by Catholic mobs Mary Hollingsworth delves into contemporary archives to discover deeper truths behind these persistent myths The correspo