I've enjoyed reading Elizabeth Lev's biography of Caterina Sforza called The Tigress of Forli . It's not hair-raising adventure or some romantic tale of unrequited love, though that's in there. It's not pedantic hammering of over-arching themes drumming out the overlooked charms and abject failures of a rich culture losing it's standards. But that's there too. Gold hemmed dresses and oodled gobs of jewelery gifted by an old pope, appointments with famous painters, architects and city planners, rumors, intrigue and catastrophe all play walk-on roles. No, what gives all this strength and import is the clarity the author brings in the telling. This is another book that starting from the footnotes branches out and tells a story with just enough context to make the story real and yet still remain credible.
This fairly simple idea that a good history book should have credible sources, told in primary and secondary sources listed and in ordinary footnotes, so that other readers can go check if they want, is needed as much now in the digital age as ever. I use this book as an example of how much I enjoy the footnotes in history, because these show just enough of the hordes of what is to be found out in the world - and mostly not yet online. In this way this book becomes a great start off point for further study. The author does come from the art history world, which to some may be deemed a negative criticism. Not for this reader, when the rest of the story is told as well and fleshed out as real as this.
This then, is just a short list and gives just a little detail, yet just enough to show - like the mesoamerican studies - that there really has been centuries of scholarship checking and double-checking, reworking old ideas, trying to find what happened, as far as can be seen.
Lev lists the Archives, Florence State, Forli, Imola; the Mantua State Archives, Gonzaga Archive; Milan State Archive, Sforza Archive; Naples State Archive, Private Archive Sforza Riario; Vatican Archives. A hundred books are listed in the bibliography from the period to the present, in Italian, English, Latin, German and French. Many are in Bologna, Italy. Some are widely available, some are probably unique or rare, some on microfiche or are dissertation papers. Burckhardt and Boccaccio, Johann Burchard and Baldessare Castiglione, the diaries of Stefano Infessura, Johannes Gherardi and Marin Sanudo all get a mention.
In the telling of the Pazzi conspiracy, the confession of Girolamo Riario's bodyguard Montesecco comes from the Storia della reppublica Fiorentino vol 5A p. 547 compiled by Gino Capponi and published in Florence, 1888. The affection that Bona of Savoy, Caterina's step mother showed her, comes from letters in the Milan State Archives and reprinted in a three volume history by Pier Desiderius Pasolini called Caterina Sforza, published in Rome, by Loescher in 1893. When Girolamo and Caterina first came to Forli as new rulers, eyewitness to the celebrations were documented by an anonymous writer whose retelling is kept in the Florence National Library.
These are just a couple of examples out of ten pages in fine print of footnotes and bibliography for this book. Very welcome. Without such an apparatus, the story can get lost in the weeds of lousy provenance and then amount to little more than rumor, even if all a footnote refers to is an anonymous eyewitness. At least there is that.
A real problem is getting access into the archives. They often don't let just anyone in, which is good, and even when they do, access to certain materials can be very controlled and viewings, when granted are often timed or otherwise barred, disrupted. It reminds me of Barry Unsworth who (GRANTA 64) wrote a short story about trying to get into the Castel Nuovo or the Palazzo Reale in Naples, researching about Horatio Nelson. In three full days, he doesn't get far at all.
First there was a strike so one place was closed before he could get in. The next day, the Palace attendants were helpful but needed to know what specifically he was looking for with one worker handing him off to another worker until he was in the papyrus room. The woman there patiently explained all about papyrus (what he said he'd been looking for) and showed examples of carbonized papyri left over from Herculaneum and the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Very interesting, but nothing to do with Horatio Nelson or his time in Naples. So, if Elizabeth Lev can be believed, what she prints as having come from the various state and local archives of all these places is, in itself, remarkable.
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Elizabeth Lev, The Tigress of Forli: Renaissance Italy's most courageous and notorious countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de'Medici : 2011, USA, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing Company
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