Storia and Storie: The Substantiated Historical Fiction of Sarah Dunant

I grew up in a family in which history (storia) was subsumed in conversations and stories (storie): my grandmother's recollection of the announcement of the armistice in November 1918; my father's description of the fires provoked by Allied bombings of Milan; my mother's telling of her adventures during WWII, when she and her father would bike many miles to buy rice. These were not abstractions, or words on a page; rather, they instilled in me a sense that there were personal as well as large-scale elements at play, and that both were important, although their impact carried different weight. As a scholar and teacher of early modern culture, I find it challenging to convey both sets of perspectives: to my students, typically, history is either battles and coronations (to wit, boring and lifeless), or everyday occurrences (stories devoid of frames of reference). Women's lives tend to fall in the latter category; connecting the individual to the larger setting is therefore of paramount importance. Bringing fiction to a pedagogical setting offers the valuable advantage that it can reconcile the two perspectives, but only if it is informed by verifiable, and verified, events. (On the difficulty of filming historical fiction, especially when scholars are excluded from parts of the creative process, see Margaret F. Rosenthal and Shannon McHugh, "Interview. From Helicon to Hollywood: A Dialogue on Veronica Franco and Dangerous Beauty," Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11.2 [Spring 2017], 94–114.)

Sarah Dunant's five novels under review here fall into a category that I would call "substantiated historical fiction." They are confessedly the product of the author's imagination, yet they are based on extensive readings of primary and secondary sources, all duly listed in bibliographies at the end of each volume. Like my family members' narratives, the novels present individual points of view, sharply observed details, and a varied sense of awareness of the larger context, all of which generate personal emotional involvement and at times even empathy. These are not easy goals to achieve when presenting the lives of women and men of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it is to Dunant's credit that these books read well as novels and also engage a reader who is trained to spot anachronism and inconsistencies.

In The Birth of Venus, Dunant's main character is Sister Lucrezia, known to the world as Alessandra Cecchi, believed to be the youngest legitimate child of a wealthy Florentine cloth merchant, but who is, in reality, Lorenzo de' Medici's illegitimate daughter. The plot develops in first-person narrative in what is dubbed a "testament" or memoir, written in 1528; it follows an intriguing third-person "Prologue" that contextualizes the protagonist and poses questions to be answered in the narrative. Most of the story (Parts I, II, and III) takes place from 1492 to 1498, the period leading up to the Medici exile and theocratic rule by the Dominican monk, Girolamo Savonarola. A young woman, "fourteen that … spring" (11), Alessandra is attracted to a painter brought back by her father from one of his trips to northern Europe to fresco the family chapel. She wants to learn to paint and be able to move around town, but both cultural norms and the rule of Savonarola curtail her ability to do so. Soon after she "started to bleed" (85), in the uncertain times of the French invasion of Italy, Alessandra is...