Daughter of Venice: Catherine Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance by Holly S. Hurlburt (review)

This lavishly illustrated book offers the most sophisticated analysis yet written of the life and career of Caterina Corner (c. 1454–1510), the much-celebrated Venetian queen of Cyprus. Scholars have shown much recent interest in Corner, and the basic facts of her life are well known. The daughter of a powerful Venetian merchant-aristocrat with interests throughout the Mediterranean, she found herself married at age fourteen to Jacques II, the last Lusignan king of Cyprus. When Jacques died about a year after her arrival, she faced numerous obstacles, first to her regency for their infant son and then, after his death, to her direct reign. These included a long-standing dynastic challenge from Jacques’s half sister, a coup, a persistent military threat from the Ottomans, and, perhaps most daunting of all, Venice’s determination to control her hand at every move. Eventually, she yielded her crown to Venice in a gesture of patriotic self-sacrifice that was almost certainly forced upon her. She returned to Venice, where the republic proclaimed her the sovereign mistress of Asolo, a small county in the Veneto and an even smaller consolation for her surrender of Cyprus. Throughout her life, she had to contend with the circumstance that, as much as Venice and the Corner family gained prestige from her royal status, queenship with its attendant spectacle contradicted Venice’s republican emphasis on moderation and devotion to the common good.

Daughter of Venice marks a rich contribution not only to scholarship on Venice and the eastern Mediterranean, but to the histories of art, literature, and gender. Hurlburt brings a wealth of new archival, literary, and artistic evidence to this story. More than anyone else who has written on Corner, she theorizes the challenges of narrating the life of a talented woman demonstrably devoted to her Cypriot and Asolan subjects but whose agency was held in check by her uncle, father, brother, and the Venetian state. Hurlburt lays out the complexities of Corner’s much-vaunted abdication with particular brilliance. Venice seems to have compelled her to surrender her crown after she began negotiating a second marriage that challenged Venetian interests in the region. Her own brother sided with the doge and pressured her to yield, a fraternal treason for which the state amply rewarded him. Corner’s profound loss became part of the family myth of continual service and self-sacrifice to the republic.