My guest is Elizabeth Loupas, author of several sumptuous historical novels, full of court intrigue and danger. She shares the reality of love, sex, and power of women in renaissance period.
We love to watch The
Borgias and The Tudors and The Other Boleyn Girl and every
richly-costumed, intrigue-and-romance Renaissance drama we can find. We (well,
I) even watch Reign, which is way more
fantasy than history but does have a lot of pretty people and gorgeous (if
inaccurate) costumes. We read thick, luscious books set in the Renaissance, and
go to Renaissance Faires. There’s just something about swanning around in long
silk dresses and glittering jewels, living in palaces covered with magnificent
art and honeycombed with peepholes for spies, nibbling on honeyed cakes and
hummingbirds’ tongues and playing games of love, sex and power with kings and
dukes.
Wait. It wasn’t really like that?
No, it wasn’t. Even royalty and noblewomen didn’t live
the glamorous lives we imagine. And the vast majority of women—the
storekeepers, artisans, washerwomen, farmers’ wives and nuns—lived lives so far
from what we think when we see the word “Renaissance” that they might as well
have been on a different planet.
Love, sex and power? When you have the church on one
side thundering about the sin of Eve and the inherent evil of all women, and men
on the other side controlling everything you do whether you like it or not, love
is hard. Sex is harder. Power is the hardest thing of all.
But women managed. Women always manage.
What women of the Renaissance thought of as “love”
wasn’t the same thing as what we think of as “love” today. Marriages were
business arrangements, even among the peasant, artisan and merchant classes,
and parents pretty much always chose their children’s spouses. Marrying for
“love”—meaning physical attraction or emotional attachment—was considered
unseemly. Love was something that flowered in a woman’s heart after she was
married, and it was a matter of duty and dignity and affection for her
children. Scripture instructed men to “love” their wives, and wives to “submit
to” and “reverence” their husbands.
Even so, women did love their husbands. The number of
marriages made when the woman was already pregnant tell us that was true.
And that brings us to sex. Sex in the Renaissance was
wonderful (as sex has been since time began), pleasurable (ditto), and deadly dangerous.
To begin with, there was no reliable
contraception—women used everything from squeezed lemon halves to magic spells,
with predictably uncertain results. Pregnancy outside marriage meant the girl
was bundled off into a forced marriage, outcast from her family and left
homeless, or turned into a whore or a drudge. Abortifacients existed, but they
were about as reliable as the contraceptives, and in some cases were deadly
poisons. Pregnancy outside marriage for a woman of the royal or noble classes
was unheard-of—which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that it was covered up
with vicious efficiency.
So much for love and sex. Did women in the Renaissance
(barring the occasional outlier like Elizabeth I or Catherine de’ Medici)
really wield any power of their own, or did they grasp what crumbs they could
from the men they belonged to—their fathers, brothers, or husbands?
The surprising thing here is that women in the lower
classes—peasants, artisans and merchants—actually had more personal power than most
of their royal and noble sisters. Women in these classes (and I hate that I
keep talking about classes, but that’s how it was behind all the dazzle of the
Renaissance) brought their own labor and household-management skills to the
marriage, and this gave them value as both workers and teachers of the next
generation. Personal value translated into personal power, at least to some
extent. It’s in the lower classes that one finds widows and single women
actually living and earning independently.
Royal and noble women had less freedom. Their persons
and their property belonged to their birth families, and after marriage, to
their husbands. It’s here that you find the quintessential “power behind the
throne” sort of power for women. In some cases, what they whispered in their
husbands’ ears carried weight and authority. In most cases, sadly, it did not.
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If you had no love, no sex for pleasure, and no power,
you turned to chocolate, right?
Well, the Spanish conquistadores did bring cacao beans
back from the New World around the middle of the sixteenth century, ground them
up, and made a bitter coffee-like drink out of them. Needless to say, nobody
liked chocolate much until some unknown person (thank you, unknown person!)
thought of sweetening it and mixing it with milk. Even so, it was a closely
guarded secret in the Spanish court for at least a hundred years. So you didn’t
live in the highest echelons of the Spanish court? Too bad. No chocolate for
you, even if you were Queen Elizabeth.
Ah yes, the glamorous Renaissance. Love you had to
struggle for, sex that could kill you, and personal power that was pretty much
nonexistent unless you were a very lucky artisan-class widow or could find a
way to twist your nobleman-husband around your sweetly submissive little
finger. And you know, some of that sounds mighty familiar to some of us women
in the twenty-first century.
At least today—and with Valentine’s Day tomorrow—we
have lovely, lovely chocolate.
Elizabeth
Loupas returns with her most ambitious historical novel yet, a story of
intrigue, passion, and murder in the Medici Court...
April,
1574, Florence, Italy. Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici lies dying. The city is
paralyzed with dread, for the next man to wear the red lily crown will be
Prince Francesco: despotic, dangerous, and obsessed with alchemy.
Chiara
Nerini, the troubled daughter of an anti-Medici bookseller, sets out to save
her starving family by selling her dead father’s rare alchemical equipment to
the prince. Instead she is trapped in his household—imprisoned and forcibly
initiated as a virgin acolyte in Francesco’s quest for power and immortality.
Undaunted, she seizes her chance to pursue undreamed-of power of her own.
Witness to sensuous intrigues and brutal murder plots, Chiara
seeks a safe path through the labyrinth of Medici tyranny and deception. Beside
her walks the prince’s mysterious English alchemist Ruanno, her friend and
teacher, driven by his own dark goals. Can Chiara trust him to keep her
secrets…even to love her…or will he prove to be her most treacherous enemy of
all? EXCERPT
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Elizabeth
Loupas was
born and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. She has lived in New Mexico, New
Orleans, North Carolina, Chicago, Dallas, and Austin, and now makes her home
halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River.
She hates
housework, cold weather, and wearing shoes. She loves animals, gardens, and
popcorn. Not surprisingly she lives in a state of happy barefoot chaos with her
delightful and faintly bemused husband (the Broadcasting
Legend™), her flower and herb gardens, her popcorn popper, and two beloved
beagles. Find Elizabeth: Website, Goodreads, and Facebook
After
a few hours, I stop for lunch and go through all the fan mail written on
chocolate stationery. Then I return to work to find that draft I started is
magically finished and ready to be sent to the publisher.
I
finally hit the sweet spot- you know, that place where you're completely in the
story and the characters are lining up and telling you what's going on? Yeah,
that spot. I hit that and nothing else matters. Fire alarms sound and if I
don't smell smoke, I don't really care. I'm in the zone. 
Elizabeth divides her time between her beach cottage and her scrupulously clean house in the hills of West Virginia.
