Description
Book SynopsisIn explaining an improbable liaison and its consequences,
A Mattress Maker’s Daughter explores changing concepts of love and romance, new standards of public and private conduct, and emerging attitudes toward property and legitimacy just as the age of Renaissance humanism gives way to the Counter Reformation and Early Modern Europe.
Trade ReviewOnce again, Brendan Dooley demonstrates his gift for showing how a minor, forgotten episode can illuminate processes of social and cultural change. -- Peter Burke, Emmanuel College, Cambridge University
This exciting story of love flouting social convention becomes, in Dooley’s meticulously researched and vividly rendered reconstruction, a window onto a wide swath of social history in early modern Genoa, Venice, and Florence—from the difficult life of a family of mattress makers, to the luxury, wars, suspicious deaths, and legal skullduggery which emanated from the Medici court in the age of Galileo. -- Ann Blair, Harvard University
This is a deliciously erudite exploration of the intertwined lives of a bastard of the Medici who strove for a stable foothold in the family and of the ex-prostitute he struggled, ultimately in vain, to hoist into high society as his consort. Ranging across half a continent, the book meditates on war, politics, science, the plastic arts, poetry, self-knowledge, and the odd, sad accidents of love. It is great fun to read. -- Thomas Cohen, York University, Canada
