Don't Believe Everything You Read
For the past several years, I have been researching and
drafting a detective series set in seventeenth-century Florence.
My research has taken me everywhere from peer-reviewed
academic papers to the practical wisdom of historical re-enactors. And today, I
want to talk about an example of cringeworthy bias and blatant mistruths which I came across recently.
Because here is the thing about historical fiction research, you expect the obscure details to be difficult. What you do not expect is to
open a respectable-looking book by a respectable-looking author and find
yourself muttering, “Wait. What?”
Recently I was reading
The Medici in Florence by Emma
Micheletti, published in 1985. Micheletti was an Italian art
historian and, at the height of her career, a director at the Uffizi Gallery in
Florence. So, as reliable sources go, I assumed I was on firm ground.
Then I came to a passage about the marriage of Grand Duke
Francesco I de’ Medici and Joanna of Austria. Their marriage, the book says,
was unhappy “in part because of Joanna’s difficult, disdainful and conceited
character.”
A paragraph later, it says Joanna’s last words to her
husband were affectionate and tender, and that Francesco mourned her death with
what appeared to be desperate sorrow.
 |
| Joanna of Austria by Allesandro Allori |
Right then.
So she was difficult, disdainful, conceited, tender at the
end, and desperately mourned. I'm not saying those things are impossible in
one marriage. But the framing is doing a
lot of work here, and most of it appears to be blaming the woman. I was surprised. Micheletti does not appear to be quite the unbiased academic I assumed her to be.
Once I noticed, I could not stop noticing.
Maria Maddalena of Austria, wife of Grand Duke Cosimo II and
later co-regent of Tuscany, is described as "not a woman of high intelligence," though “gay and vivacious” in youth, and later forceful and dictatorial.
 |
| Marie de'Medici by Frans Pourbus |
Marie de’ Medici, who became Regent of France after the
assassination of Henry IV, is described as “blonde, small in stature, and
somewhat chubby,” before becoming “extremely awkward and corpulent.” She was,
the book says, “not intelligent but presumptuous, shallow and fatuous.”
Somewhat chubby. A woman who was once a Director of the Uffizi is referring to a significant historical figure as somewhat chubby??
Wow.
Christina of Lorraine, another female regent of Tuscany, is
treated no more generously. Following her husband's death we are told, she
lacked political far-sightedness and intelligence, and is blamed, almost
single-handedly, for the decline of the Medici grand dukes from that point forward.
 |
| Christina of Lorraine by Tibero di Tito |
So, to recap: I am reading paragraphs about men who are complex political actors, patrons,
rulers, collectors, and schemers. With the occasional one line where the women are described as difficult,
conceited, unintelligent, dictatorial, fat, shallow, and responsible for
everything going wrong.
No man is described as chubby. In fact, there is not one single physical description of men at all.
But the book had not finished with me.
I reached the claim that Grand Duke Cosimo II’s sole achievement was
“to have given shelter to Galileo Galilei when fleeing persecution
by the Inquisition in Padua."
This is not true.
Galileo was not fleeing the Inquisition when Cosimo
II brought him to Florence in 1610.
In fact he didn't seriously blip on the inquisition radar until 1615 when he got dobbed-in by a Dominican friar named Niccolò Lorini, who sent a copy of a letter Galileo wrote to the Roman Inquisition.*
The book also claims Cosimo gave Galileo a position teaching
at the University of Florence.
Also not true.
Galileo taught formally at Pisa and Padua. In Florence he was a court philosopher and mathematician.
At that point, I put the book down and stared into the
middle distance. This stuff is the basics. Its well documented and a fundamental part of the Medici/Galileo story.
This was not some random online listicle. It was a published
book under the name of a renown Italian art historian who was born in Florence and had also written books on the Medici family history and the women of the family.
Then I looked more closely. The edition I was reading was a
translation, by a man named Paul Blanchard.
Further investigation reveals Mr Blanchard to be a travel writer mostly,
but, curiously, did author a books called “Why Men Cheat and What To Do About it: A practical handbook” in 1995.
Wow.
Sadly I haven't been able to find an excerpt of that undoubtably riveting tome. But I think its fair to say the title gives a hint to how women might be framed within it.
So now I have a new question: did Emma Micheletti have any
idea what had been written in English under her name?
I do not know. Translation is complicated. Publishing is
complicated. Editorial decisions are complicated.
But it is a useful reminder that “published in a book” does
not automatically mean “true.” And that there is nothing stopping a translator adding their own bias, or even their own interpretation of historical facts to a text.
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*Galileo's letter which went to the inquisition in 1615 basically said Scripture teaches people how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. In other words, the Bible’s purpose was spiritual and moral, not technical astronomy. He was working up to claiming the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice-versa.
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