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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:36]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Carvana is so easy. Just a click and we've got ourselves a car. See so many cars. That's a clicktastic inventory. And check out the financing options payments.
- [00:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
To fit our budget.
- [00:47]
Elizabeth Freemantle
I mean, that's Clickonomics101 delivery to our door. Just a hop, skip and a click away. And bot no better feeling than when everything just clicks. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
- [01:05]
Greg Jenner
Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of youf're Dead to Me. In my new family friendly podcast series Dead Funny History, historical figures come back to life for just about long enough to argue with me, tell us their life stories and sometimes get on my nerves. There's 15 lovely episodes to unwrap, including the life of Ramses the Great, Josephine Baker and the history of football, plus much, much more. So this Christmas, give your ears a treat with Dead Funny History. You can find it in the youe're Dead to me feed on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots to from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. On 11 September 1599, a young woman was taken to her execution in Rome. Her name was Beatrice Cenci and she was just 22 years old. Beatrice's tragic story begins in a remote fortress high in the Abruzzo mountains, where her father, a nobleman named Francesco Cenci, held his family prisoner. For years, Beatrice and her stepmother, Lucrezia endured his cruelty, his depravity, his unspeakable violence. Francesco Cenci was a man of immense wealth and aristocratic power, a man who'd committed crimes so numerous that Rome itself whispered his name in horror. Yet he walked free. Bribery and bloodline protected him from justice. The law, it seemed, did not apply to men like him. Until his family decided it would. On a September night in 1598, deep in that mountain castle, a conspiracy unfolded. A poisoned cup, a sleeping draught, a hammer, an iron spike driven through flesh and bone. And a body hurled from a balcony to hide the truth. Francesco Cenci was dead. But the reckoning was far from over. One by one, the protagonists fell to the papal investigators. Beatrice's brother Giacomo, her stepmother Lucrezia, the hired assassin, the castle keeper. Some died under torture. Some confessed. Pope Clement VIII would show no mercy. The public wept for Beatrice. The city's masses cried out for justice. But the verdict against her was already written. Today we're going to re examine the case and the questions that it raises. Chiefly, it puts me in mind of a question I've spent much of my scholarly life trying to answer. In a relentlessly patriarchal world, what power did women have? It was this question that led me into the archives in France to seek out the illegibly scrawled testimonies of ordinary women confronting crises in their relationships, broken marriage promises, rape, violent husbands and illegitimate pregnancies. I was captivated, therefore, by this story, which is told in a new novel by one of my favourite historical novelists, Elizabeth Freemantle. Elizabeth Freemantle's previous novels are about Katherine Queen's Gambit, on which the film Firebrand with Alicia Vikander and Jude Law was based, and about Artemisi Gentileschi in Disobedient, which won the Historical Writers association Gold Crown in 2024. In the novel we're going to be talking about today, she returns to early modern Italy to examine the story of another disobedient woman, Beatrice Cenci. That novel, Sinners, is an evocative and compelling read, but I wanted to ask her what is true, what is imagined, and what can we learn from it about the realities of life for girls and women in the 16th century? Today, I want to find out more about a young woman trapped between tyranny and and desperation, between a father's cruelty and the machinery of power. Was Biache a murderer, a victim? A symbol of resistance? Or was she something far more complicated? A person pushed to the edge of human endurance? I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Liz, welcome back onto the podcast.
- [05:53]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Thank you for having me.
- [05:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I was struck by the way that this intersects with your previous novel, Disobedient, about Artemisia Gentileschi, both in a moment in time and in content. What drew you to this story?
- [06:08]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Well, I'd been aware of this story for some time, you know, when I was researching for My Artemisia Gentileschi novel Disobedient Beatrice's name kept coming up because there are kind of desert of anecdotes about artemisia at age 6 having been taken by Caravaggio and her father, Orazio Gentileschi, to the execution of Beatrice Cenci. It's an anecdote in a book called Secrets of Rome. And it was very beguiling for me as a novelist, this idea that this, this young woman being executed alongside other family members in such a horrific way might have somehow made this impression on the young six year old Artemisia. And there as the suggestion, well, the suggestion has been made at one time or another that perhaps Caravaggio's Judith Slaying Holofernes is a portrait of Beatrice. I think that it's slightly spurious, but it's quite, for me as a novelist, it's quite an attractive proposition. So I kind of wove that in. So Beatrice was kind of haunting me all the way through the process of researching and writing Disobedient. But I didn't really have a sense of a way into her story. I knew she'd been accused of murder alongside other family members and I knew she'd been executed for it. And I knew, you know, the kind of basic facts of the murder. But I couldn't quite feel my way into that as a novel. I didn't really get to grips on the story. But she just kept haunting me. And in fact I was supposed to be writing another novel, which is the novel I'm now writing. And it's another. Was another Elizabethan novel. That's a world that I've written about several times. And I just, Beatrice just, she wouldn't get out of my head. So, you know, I thought, okay, I've got to kind of exorcise her in some ways. And in fact it was one of the most challenging stories because of the way she's been mythologized. I mean, she's not really well known in the uk. In Italy she's better known, but she's not as well known as someone like Artemisia Gentileschi. If you go to Rome, there are still, you know, there's the Piazza Beatrice Cenci, but it's like a car park and the old palazzo is an office building with some apartments in it. And she's very, very hard to find her story. But I was so interested, as you said, in the kind of the position of women. And I did feel that somehow this woman, all the odds were stacked against her. Yes, she was a noble woman. She grew up in privilege, but she was living under a tyrannous, abusive regime of her father, who was a kind of known tyrant. And it wasn't only towards his family, that kind of behavior. And yet, in some ways, she took the only action she could have taken to give herself some agency and free herself from this. And in my mind, she paid the ultimate price. But in my mind, in some senses, she always knew that. And so she took that action, you know, in a way, as an act of rebellion. I mean, that's all my, you know, my imagined Beatrice. But it was appealing to me, that idea that she would take control of her story in some ways, even if it meant she paid the ultimate price.
- [10:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So give us a bit of a flavor, some sort of context. Who are the Chen Qi and what is the world in which they live?
- [10:11]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Okay, so this is Rome in the late 16th century, very late 16th century, sort of dying days. And Rome is a city kind of slightly in a state of flux. I mean, the kind of center of the cultural world had been Florence for so long. And things are slightly moving towards Rome. It's, you know, the very beginnings of the Baroque period. We've got artists like Caravaggio appearing. There's a sort of. There's a new aesthetic. The cities.
- [10:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Many.
- [10:40]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Many of the great monuments that we know now in Rome are being built at that time. St. Peter's the great dome of St. Peter's that's being built. It's not quite finished. I'm not sure of the actual dates of it, but I think it's sort of either just finished or. So this is a sort of new Roma. We've got a new pope or relatively new pope who's worried about the behavior of the aristocracy. All the old families are all fighting amongst each other, and, you know, they're out of control. There are vendettas, There are people fighting in the streets, and young noblemen killing each other in duels. And it's a kind of a place of extreme wealth. And, of course, you've got the always this idea of, you know, the papal rule being. And, you know, the way that the papal fingers reach out throughout the whole of what was then thought to be the civilized world. You know, this is Rome. The noble families. There are three or four huge noble families. The Cens were not one of the kind of the absolute highest. They weren't like the Orsini's, but they were an old noble family. But Francesco, the count, who and his. I am trying to remember how Many children. I think five or six children. He had two girls and four boys. He was disliked. He really, really got under the skin of a lot of the other families. There was trouble between them. The sons were all getting in trouble with things. And particularly Rocco, who was Beatrice's. I think, just older than her brother. And Rocco is killed. He's found, actually, in some of the records, he's stabbed through the eye, which is rather gruesome. He's found dead. I didn't put that in my novel. He's not stabbed through the eye, but gruesome death seems to have not been very rare. You know, these horrible deaths were a kind of. They were happening constantly, from what I've read. And so this is the atmosphere. It's really febrile, this Rome. And I think the Pope was trying to sort of put some kind of order on these old families. And he was also starting to. He'd set up this list of prohibited books. So a lot of the books, books, things like Dante and some of the old classics were all being taken out of the libraries, and they were banned. And so we've got this sense of a Pope trying to impose a new order. You know, I always like these places which are in a state of flux. You know, that's the Reformation in England. When things are on the change, interesting things happen. And that's great for a writer of fiction. So I think that's the Rome. It's a place in a state of flux. Lots of money, lots of art, lots of new money.
- [13:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And the world that you've depicted is a world in which women of this level of society are educated. One of the key points of the novel hangs on our protagonist's learning. How important was it to you to draw on this aspect of what was happening for women of a certain elite status?
- [14:19]
Elizabeth Freemantle
I mean, how I always see it with these women is what they learn is not really the same as what their brothers are expected to learn. And I think Artemisia and her sister had a convent education. And I think largely this is a religious education. You know, I sort of look as like a production line of these virtuous women who are kind of couched in the ideals of Catholicism. And the women who are above and beyond virtuous. They had to be a kind of model of virtue. As females, they didn't really need to be intellectual. In fact, it was probably not a very good thing if they were. And I think Beatrice, you know, I kind of played a little with it. I wanted to characterize her as someone who had access to an education through her brothers in some ways. But I don't think that would have been the expected. I mean, a few women were really highly educated, but I don't think it was really encouraged. The educated woman was seen as something of a threat.
- [15:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that focus on chastity is crucial in this book. And you draw on the true story of an honour killing in 1555. I mean, this really takes us into the reality of patriarchal control in this period, doesn't it?
- [15:46]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Yes. I mean, that honor killing, it was something that I used as inspiration for an imagined honour killing. But I think, you know, I think I looked at women nowadays and there are certain parts of the world where these honor killings continue. And we read about it and we think, okay, this is 400 years ago, but then it's not. This is happening now, that a woman who may be raped, her virginity is taken, and that's about the honor of the family. And, you know, to an extent, I dealt with that in disobedient, because Artemisia Gentileschi is raped by a friend of the family, her painting tutor, and she is expected to marry her rapist. This was normal. This is still normal in parts of the world. And whenever I think of that, it shocks me because we think this is something from the past, an expectation of female chastity and virtue that doesn't exist anymore. And when you imagine that it's better for your daughter to be dead than to have had her virtue compromised, it's so deeply shocking. And I think this is what colors Beatrice's story, because she is a woman who is not. She's not virtuous. She has an affair. And I think we can be fairly sure that this affair happened. And, you know, it appears in a lot of the court documents, it appears in a lot of the different testimonies. And this affair is the thing that ultimately pushes her into the position, that makes her feel she has no way out from her situation other than to oversee the death of her father.
- [17:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's talk a bit about those court documents and the evidence you have. Because I was struck by reading up about the case after I'd read the novel. I like to enjoy them, first of all, before I find out what's true or not, and then struck by how many things that you had included appeared to be verified by the evidence, and yet also by the difficulty of trying to ascertain the truth when it comes to this case. So let's talk about the sort of evidence that exists about the case and you know, where, like a Historian, you have to make judgments on. On what is true or not.
- [18:29]
Elizabeth Freemantle
I mean, this. Of all the novels I've researched this one, the material is so difficult. You know, it's. Every time I'd find a thread and I think, yes, finally I'm coming to something that might be a truth about her story. It would all just fall to dust in my fingers, you know, I think, okay, here's a transcript of a testimony from the court case. And then you think, oh, taken under torture. So, you know, and I think that was common. The common way of taking testimonies in Rome in this period was under torture. It happened to Artemisia Gentileschi. It happened to Beatrice and her family. It happened even to some of the other people. That testimony was taken not from the accused, but from the witnesses, sometimes under torture, which is very shocking to me now. Always something problematic about even this recorded testimony. My starting point for Beatrice was this portrait, which is just the most. Is the most beguiling portrait of a young girl. She's looking over her shoulder, sort of slightly turned away, looking over her shoulder in the same sort of stance as girl with a pearl earring, Same kind of beguiling eyes. And she looks so young. I mean, she looks to me, you know, like about 13 or 14. This portrait, if you Google Beatrice Cenci now, this portrait comes up multiple, multiple, multiple times. It is the portrait that continues to be associated with her, though we've known for 150 years that it is not a portrait of Beatrice Cenci. It was thought to be by Guido Reni. It's not. It's most probably by a female painter, some kind of 60 years later, called Ginevra Cantopoli. It's, you know, the evidence for that is quite substantial. So this picture somehow became associated with Beatrice's story. And this is the picture that in the 18th century, Shelley and some of the other Romantics became completely obsessed with. And they knew she'd been executed because at the time of her execution, there was a huge public uprising. They wanted her pardoned because they felt that the substance of her story, you know, the accusations against her father, that he'd raped her, that he'd abused and, you know, beaten her and her stepmother, that they were extenuating and that she should be pardoned. And in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the religious law, you know, that she shouldn't be condemned. And when she was condemned, this led to a great kind of outpouring and a lot of different accounts at the time kind of embellished her story. And out of this came, over the next 150 years, this sort of story about this. This tragic heroine. And once this portrait became attached to it, they had an image to associate with that. And this image gave a kind of power, sort of rocket fuel to her story. And this, I think, is why her story becomes so confused between fact and fiction. You know, Shelley, he wrote a verse drama called the Cenci of Shelley's work. I don't really recommend it, put it like that, but it, you know, he creates her as this tragic heroine. And she was thought to have been 17 when she was executed. Then in the 19th century, a birth certificate emerged. Now we have some hard fact. Turns out she was 22. So we now know this portrait of this little beguiling girl, 17 years old, is not her. She was a 22 year old. And of course, that ignited my curiosity. Who was this woman who we then discovered had had an affair with one of the men accused of the murder of her father? This suddenly looks like a much, much more interesting story. But how much of that is true? A lot of these 19th century kind of amateur historians, you know, I found one. His sort of mission was to hurl Beatrice Cenci from her pedestal. And so then we've also got a different kind of agenda, working against this previous idea of her as the innocent, tragic heroine, as the kind of wicked Clytemnestra type figure who gets her lover to murder her father. And, you know, all of it's really interesting to me, but I could not find very much firm truth about her story. Hey, Sal.
- [23:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hank.
- [23:52]
Elizabeth Freemantle
What's going on?
- [23:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We haven't worked a case in years.
- [23:55]
Elizabeth Freemantle
I just bought my car at Carvana and it was so easy.
- [23:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Easy.
- [23:58]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Too easy. Think something's up? You tell me. They got thousands of options, found a great car at a great price, and it got delivered the next day.
- [24:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It sounds like Carvana.
- [24:09]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Just makes it easy to buy your car, Hank. Yeah, you're right. Case closed.
- [24:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Buy your car today on Carvana.
- [24:18]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Delivery fees may apply.
- [24:20]
Greg Jenner
Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of youf're Dead to Me. In my new family friendly podcast series, Dead Funny History, historical figures come back to life for just about long enough to argue with me, tell us their life stories, and sometimes get on my nerves. There's 15 lovely episodes to unwrap, including the life of Ramses the Great Josephine Baker and the history of football, plus much, much more. So this Christmas, give your ears a treat. With Dead Funny History, you can find it in the youe're Dead to me. Feed on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcast.
- [25:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting. You reflect at the end of your book about the ways that we tell the stories of tragic women, either as that painting you've described shows as figures of innocence or as figures of horror. There's this bifurcation. You know, they are, you know, Medea, or they are, you know, the Virgin Mary, frankly. You know, there's this kind of great contrast between the two. And actually what you're trying to do here is inject some humanity into women in the past.
- [25:36]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Yes, I mean, I'm really, always really interested in the way we mythologize women who kind of stand out in history. And they always stand out for reasons of kind of horror, you know, things that are terrible about their story, like, as you say, Medea. I mean, you don't get much worse than that. But they're. Or a Phigenia, you know, that she's sacrificed by her father. And these mythological characters are often applied to women from more recent history. Even nowadays, I think we see that. And it's always that. It's always the saint or the sinner. And as you say, I wanted to try and kind of scratch down and try and find a real woman who's flawed. And yes, she has an affair. And as a kind of contemporary reader now we can see that as a kind of. As a love story rather than judge her for it. We don't see it as a problem of morality that she has an affair before she's married, whereas in previous eras that would have been seen as a terrible flaw. So I wanted to see her from our perspective now and understand her as a woman not more sinned against than sinning. But yes, she is a sinner because she does arrange the murder of her father. But, you know, she's human. And the circumstances that lead her to that are circumstances we can all imagine leading us to the possibility of murder. And I thought that was really interesting about her.
- [27:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's talk a little bit about those circumstances. Both I'm interested in the reality of her incarceration as you depict it in the book, and as what you know, happened to the real Beatrice. And also I was struck by the fact that one of your notes say that the. You discovered that there were kinds of abuse that she suffered that you chose not to include in the novel. And I think that was a very interesting decision, that sometimes the truth about the past is actually unbearable.
- [27:53]
Elizabeth Freemantle
So some of the things that her father made her do to him were so disgusting. I mean, I felt almost. It was too revolting to express. But actually, interestingly, nowhere did she ever say that her father raped her. And this was the fact that created this great public uprising around her that she'd been raped. And it was something that Prospero Farinacci, who was the lawyer who defended the Cenci family, he used that as part of his plea, particularly to try and get a papal pardon once they'd been condemned, that he wrote this impassioned plea to try and get them pardoned and really, really believed he would achieve that. And he was the one in this that says that she had been defiled by her father. Nowhere did she say that this happened, and nowhere did anyone else say that this had happened to her. However, it's been pointed out that, of course, her defense was that she had no motive, so she might well have concealed the fact that she'd been raped. Because also, that was also a point of. In a sense, I think I touched on it before, that, you know, a woman who's raped is her fault. Even if you're raped by your father, it's somehow you've tempted him into doing it. The fact of your body being too attractive, the fact of your femaleness, in some ways, it was a defilement that would have been something to judge her with rather than something necessarily to sympathize about her. Anyway, she never. She never said that that happened to her. But I think it's very difficult to cast back that far into the past and understand why her lawyer would have used that as a part of her defence, which is something that she would. She wouldn't have used. So, you know, it's kind of spurious. Did it happen? Didn't it happen? We do know that other terrible things really, really appalling. Beatings her father burn and made her do these unmentionable things. I still feel I can't even speak about them.
- [30:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and it's very interesting. It struck me that there's work by people like Saadi Hartman who've written about how we can encounter women in the past, when the stories that we have about them are violence. And she talks about how we can press against the limits of the archive so that we're not as historians, or in your case, as a historical novelist, only endlessly rehearsing the violence against these dead women and sort of, therefore, kind of reenacting it in her way of seeing it, rendering them as kind of objects of titillation as well as pity.
- [31:13]
Elizabeth Freemantle
This is really interesting. And this is something that, you know, that I always want to engage with, you know, that there's a kind of fetishization of the beheaded woman, if you will, you know, like Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Jane Grey, you know, these beheaded women kind of become fetishized culturally. And somehow I think, you know, more recently we've been kind of in some ways trying to give them back their stories, try and, you know, have another look at their stories, try and understand where their agency was stripped from them. And I thought, you know, I look at the figure again, another mythological figure, Medusa, you know, there she was the rape victim who was, you know, she was so beautiful. She was raped that, you know, that her, you know, she was turned into the monster whose looks would turn men to stone. It was a curse. And she was a rape survivor. Cursed rape survivor. And I think, you know, this. This is a metaphor that kind of echoes to us now. And of course, how was she killed? She was beheaded. So, of course, for me, that was this, you know, and that's a metaphor that I worked through the story of Beatrice. But the thing about Beatrice is that she, unlike Anne Boleyn and unlike these young girls, Jane Grey, you know, who they really are more sinned against than sinning. Catherine Howard, I mean, she was just this little slip of a thing who, you know, didn't know what was going on really. Whereas Beatrice, she really did organize the death of her father. Even if, I mean, in my novel, you know, I mean, I kind of deal with it in a. In a slightly different way. It is what she wanted and she. In some ways, what she wanted happened. She took the agency of having a love affair with some, you know, was very, very ill advised and put her in a very dangerous. But she did those things. And, you know, in a way, what I saw was that gave her a sense of agency and power that we often don't see in those figures. And I felt that that was different about her and that was why I wanted to write about her. And same with Artemisia Gentileschi, you know, she refused to be. She refused to have her story taken away from her.
- [33:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The novel explores also the treatment of people who were neurodivergent or had learning disabilities in the past. And that draws on some evidence around beiche's brother, Bernardo. Can we talk about him?
- [34:11]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Yes. Oh, Bernardo. Now, he's even more difficult to kind of get to the bottom of. There was another brother, we think, called Paolo. And their ages are often confused. Paolo is, in one account, described as disabled. And then in Another account, he's not. And in Prospero Farinacci's plea, Bernardo, who is very much involved in the trial, he's described as an imbecile, which is a terrible term. And I. I didn't know what to do with that. And I thought, okay, I can have his story just fade into the background and not really deal with it. It seems that Paolo died before the case came to trial. So. And I felt that in the record, somehow the two brothers had just become really, really confused. And I thought, but there seems to have been a brother who was in some way disabled and described as an imbecile. I mean, that word is just so terrible. But I felt, you know, in some ways, how do we. How do we look at a figure who's described in the late 16th century in that. In those terms? How would we see them nowadays? And I. So I thought it was an opportunity to explore the idea of somebody neurodivergent growing up in this kind of family. And so this is how my depiction of Bernardo came to be. He's this neurodivergent boy, Beatrice's younger brother. He trusts her as his kind of the purse. His person. She really. She really looks after him. And he has these. I suppose I'd see him as maybe somebody who has certain obsessions and kind of areas of knowledge about very specific things. I suppose we might see him as somebody who was autistic, but we don't know that. So I really, in my terms, I see him as has some kind of neurodivergence. And, of course, he's not really treated as a human being. And I think in those days, much of the time, people with those kind of afflictions would be hidden from society. I mean, the awful thing. Bernardo's fate is absolutely awful. He is condemned to watch. He's very young. He's 14, we think in my novel he's 14. We don't really know his age because the records are confused. He's condemned to watch his family being executed, and then he's sent to the. The. The galleys, which means basically a galley slave. You're rowing the boat. The galleons of what was then the papal navy. Like, God knows what happened to him. It really, you know, it's an awful thought. And I wanted to have the sense that he had some kind of hopeful outcome. You know, I created that outcome. And that's the wonderful thing with fiction. You can kind of create a hopeful outcome for characters who really probably had a. Terrible, terrible, terrible endings. Yeah. And So I wanted to do that for Bernardo because the idea of his life just seemed so deeply sad.
- [37:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. Probably better to die than to be a galley slave, I would have thought.
- [38:01]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Yes. Yeah. With their mustache, a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back.
- [38:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Nice.
- [38:21]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more, pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Stashterms.
- [38:43]
Greg Jenner
Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of youf're Dead to Me. In my new family friendly podcast series, Dead Funny History, historical figures come back to life for just about long enough to argue with me, tell us their life stories and sometimes get on my nerves. There's 15 lovely episodes to unwrap, including the life of Ramses the Great, Josephine Baker and the history of football, plus much, much more. So this Christmas, give your ears a treat with Dead Funny History. You can find it in the youe're Dead to me feed on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcast.
- [39:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Her brother Giacomo here, he's a homosexual and this is a detail you've invented, but you're reflecting on some historical truths about the nature of same sexual relationships in 16th century Italy and how they were treated.
- [39:42]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Yes, I mean it is an invention of mine. I mean what we know about Giacomo was that he had married someone of the wrong class, that his father didn't approve of and he did have children with her, but they were kind of estranged by the time of the sort of the action of the novel. And I mean I always, I'm always very interested in how homosexuality is treated in certain, in particularly in the early modern period. And I had read about this story, it was slightly earlier than this, it was about, I think about 15, 20 years before, I think 1585, there was this case of a group of homosexual men who were, it's significant that they were foreigners. That meaning I don't quite know what, but it was very clear from the case of them that they were, they were called foreigners. They were othered within the trial these, these men who were homosexual and they were all burnt at the stake in Rome for performing same sex marriages. It all seems so strange, you know, they were performing these marriages but what else were they doing? We know that homosexuality itself didn't exist in the eyes of the law, really. It was sodomy that was the terrible criminal activity. And of course that was very, very hard to prove. But of course, in the Catholic world, to abuse the sanctity of marriage by performing this, you know, whatever it was they were doing, these men, it's really hard to get to the bottom of it. But what we do know is that there were, I think there were six of them and they were all possibly more. They were all burnt for this. And so I had the idea of Beatrice's older brother and his homosexuality being the rift between him and his father that, you know, this thing that was so horrific that the father who was doing the most unspeakable things to his family members and servants as well, I believe, could feel that the things his son was doing were even worse when really how I've depicted them is he was having a just a committed and loving relationship with another man.
- [42:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Actually, we covered that story about the same sex marriages on this podcast a few years ago with Giuseppe Marcochi. So if anyone wants to know more about that incident, it's reported by Michel de Montaigne in his the famed French novelist as he's traveling through Rome. So you can delve into the reality of that as well as this, I was also struck by the fact that in Your understanding of 16th century Renaissance Rome and our heroine, if we can call her that protagonist, faith is not something that comforts her. If anything, it tortures her. And I wondered how you had sort of wrestled with questions about the role of belief in her life.
- [43:14]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Yes, I mean, this was really interesting to me. And you know, I think faith is something that raised to these people. You know, we say it goes unquestioned, but of course it doesn't go unquestioned. And I'm always interested in the kind of people that might have questioned it. You know, I love those ideas about in England in that period, John Dee and the wizard Earl of Northumberland and you know, that they're all. They're questioning their. They're a group of atheists that always really fascinated me that we always assume everyone believes in the afterlife and they believe their belief is so firm it could never be contradicted. But that's not true. I mean, faith is faith because it requires absolute belief. And to require absolute belief means that there is the possibility of disbelief. And I love this little space in between that where you can delve in and think, yes, you believe absolutely, but nobody can believe. You have to look at what the saints did to themselves, to kind of encourage their belief. The flagellants, they sort of beat themselves into. Into. Into their faith. That kind of ultimate belief doesn't come easily. And I. I felt like somebody like Beatrice, to whom such terrible things were happening from childhood, what would her relationship with her religion and her God be? You know, what. How would she feel about a faith that had done these terrible things to her? Would she think of herself as a kind of job figure being tested? Or would she begin to resent a God that was allowing these things to happen to her? So for me, I kind of set up this idea of her as against. There's another figure in the book called Hilaria, who's purely fictional, who's a young, very young companion who. She wants to be a saint.
- [45:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hilaria.
- [45:19]
Elizabeth Freemantle
So she is this the typical young religious Catholic girl. She wants. She really. All she really wants is to go into a convent. And of course, the circumstances have not allowed that. Her father's lost all his money and he's kind of in hot. The censure, he. So she ends up within the Cenci family as a companion to Beatrice, who is her opposite. And I often do that in my novels. I like to kind of create, I suppose she's a cipher through which we can understand Beatrice as somebody who really goes against the grain. But I have a suspicion that a lot of people went against the grain in their hearts, if not in their actions. So I explore Beatrice doing that. You know, she's a woman who's prepared to murder her father, so she must have a complicated relationship with God. So Ellaria is, you know, she's set against this sort of idealized picture of female, you know, how the early modern female is supposed to be.
- [46:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You quote Lisa Jardine with this wonderful line. Sometimes it takes something other than perfect fidelity to sharpen our senses, to focus our attention sympathetically in order to give us emotional access to the past. So I thought perhaps we could end by meditating on what that means for you as a historical novelist, to have or get, try to receive emotional access to the past.
- [46:59]
Elizabeth Freemantle
I love that quote. You know, for me, it's sort of something. Lisa Jardine, as someone who I have always had such enormous respect for, as, you know, a kind of a specialist in the early modern period. And it was spoken. It was from. I heard her say that on the radio, and I was like, oh, gosh. This gives me license to really explore things in a way to kind of explore things from the perspective of my own fascination because, you know, in a sense, and we look at it now, we look at this with, you know, different regimes around the world, alternative facts, alternative truths. There are, there is never one truth. And we see that now truth is, is subjective. It sort of turns everything on its head. And I suppose for you as a historian, you must see it in a different way than me as a writer of fiction. For me, it's a really exciting prospect because it gives me license to imagine other truths because we know that the history as it's been dealt down to us through all these different hands of cards, we know that we have to treat everything with suspicion. And of course, that opens up an enormous field of supposition, which is very exciting to me. But it does make it difficult to then say this is based in fact. And I think people always want to feel things are based in fact, but fact is so difficult now. And I like that.
- [48:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you so much for thinking about that with me today and for this novel that takes us into the world of the past with that gives us emotional access to these lives that are so often written out of history. Elizabeth Freemantel, thank you.
- [49:09]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
- [49:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History. Hit.
- [49:39]
Elizabeth Freemantle
Plastic bags, plastic lids. What do we do with you? You can't go in the recycling, but you can be recycled if taken to a new recycle on center. Find one near you@recycleon.org oregoncenters hello, Greg.
- [49:55]
Greg Jenner
Jenner here, host of youf're Dead to Me. In my new family friendly podcast series, Dead Funny History. Historical figures come back to life for just about long enough to argue with me, tell us their life stories and sometimes get on my nerves. There's 15 lovely episodes to unwrap, including the life of Ramses the Great Joseph, Josephine Baker and the history of football. Plus much, much more. So this Christmas, give your ears a treat with Dead Funny History. You can find it in the you're Dead to me feed on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.