anghraine | Entries tagged with els borja

I was feeling a bit gloomy about how, in many respects, my life is only just beginning at 38.

Meanwhile, in an article I was reading for my dissertation, there was a reference to the early seventeenth century pop culture concept of Lucrezia Borgia, with a footnote about Actual Historical Lucrezia Borgia (aka Lucrècia). I don't think it actually listed her age at death, but I already knew what it was, and reading about her reminded me of everything that happened to and around her before her premature death at age 39. At that point, she had already outlived most of her brothers and one of her two sisters.

This isn't an "everyone was dying of old age in their 30s back then" thing, which is a wildly inaccurate take on the human lifespan (the greater likelihood of dying young =/= 35-year lifespan). Lucrècia died young. She struggled through years of difficult pregnancies, including after providing her husband with an heir, and eventually died a few days after delivering a daughter who also died. Sarah Bradford's biography observes that Lucrècia had essentially emerged triumphant over the incredibly complex and daunting obstacles she was faced with throughout her life as a political figure, navigating them all, only for childbirth to kill her as it killed so many other women.

In her life, Lucrècia experienced luxury on a scale that is unimaginable to most people today, or ever. This isn't meant to downplay that, but ... it didn't save her. She was at once influential, resourceful, and profoundly exploited throughout her life in ways that hinged on her gender and culminated in her death, only for her name to be trashed for hundreds of years afterwards. This isn't unique to her, or to her region of the world, or her time, even though there were culturally specific elements at work.

And for all the awful, shitty elements of my life thus far, I'd much rather be facing the beginning of life at this age than the end of it.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)

You know, the thing about the history of fanfiction is that I don't think (for instance) that Shakespeare's plays based on pre-existing narratives are actually fanfiction in the contemporary sense. But I certainly do not respect any take on fanfic and its relationship to its source materials that does not engage at all with the very, very, very long history of human beings responding to pre-existing stories by re-telling and re-imagining those specific* stories in a wide variety of ways, often within the same or a similar medium.

People have always done this. The laws and norms and expectations around it do change, the forms it takes change, but the practice of responding to stories by drawing directly on those stories to create other versions of them is not unique to modern fanfiction. If your argument about fanfic (especially if it's ones about the unique evils of fanfic) is contingent upon assumptions or assertions about that general practice rather than anything specific to modern fanfic in particular, your argument is short-sighted, painfully ahistorical, and poorly reasoned.

Like, here's a very obvious example. My favorite Shakespeare tragedy is King Lear. The story told in King Lear was drawn from the pre-existing narratives around the mythical King Leir. This had recently appeared in the anonymous play King Leir (which seems to date from the 1590s, while Shakespeare's Lear was written in the very early 1600s). A version of the story shows up in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (published in the 1590s as well). Shakespeare integrated other narratives into the core Leir story he took from the King Leir play written and performed just a few years earlier (most of the extra narratives in King Lear also have pretty obvious pre-existing sources). Famously, Shakespeare altered details of the traditional story in this process, and especially of the King Leir version, to suit his artistic preferences. In some versions, for instance, Cordelia survives the events of the main Leir story only to be killed years later. Shakespeare didn't even come up with the idea of Cordelia dying tragically after initially seeming triumphant (one of his main changes from King Leir). But he integrated her death into the main story in a more cohesive and streamlined way than it was generally done.

So Shakespeare didn't invent the essential narrative of Leir/Lear. He didn't invent most of the characters in it. He didn't even "file off the serial numbers" in the modern phrase; the characters are meant to be recognized as those familiar, pre-existing characters to a contemporary audience. Part of the power of the play for its original audience would come from their familiarity with other versions of the story and characters. In general, say, they would expect Cordelia's return to the story as an ally of Lear's, but not Cordelia and Lear's tragic defeat. Modern audiences unfamiliar with any other version of the story can still register the shock and horror and bleakness of Shakespeare's handling of it, but not usually in the way that an audience of the time would have registered it. The power of the conventional Leir narrative was such that in later years, Shakespeare's version would get "corrected" back to the established Leir story as appearing in things like King Leir. It was only much, much later that the King Lear of Shakespeare would be regularly performed as he wrote it, without making it more digestible to then-contemporary sensibilities or closer to the "canon" he was working off of.

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Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Somebody To Love (Queen)

tree asked:

i have a fairly random borgia-related question for you, since i know you're very fond of lucrezia. do you know anything about laura orsini, who may or may not have been lucrezia's half sister? the most i've found after a(n admittedly) cursory search is on the italian wikipedia, which is pretty much just a summary of who her parents were, who she married, and who her children were. i wondered if you'd come across anything else in your borgia readings.

I replied:

I honestly haven’t come across much at all, beyond debates about whether she was or wasn’t Rodrigo/Alexander’s daughter. She tends to be very much on the periphery of Borgia research.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: This Is War (Thirty Seconds to Mars)

I reblogged a post from Dec 2016 in which I said:

I’m seriously considering using my paper on The Borgias as my writing sample for one of the PhD programs.

It is genuinely the best thing I’ve ever written, and this program specifically suggests using a sample with “a significant research component.” And, uh, LOL.

My 2020 addition:

I was going through my Borgias tag for Reasons and … lol, it’s three and a half years later, but that is the paper that got me into my PhD program and I’m currently studying for my exam in 16th century lit.

[ETA 20 July 2023: I was actually just talking on Tumblr about how I owe more of my academic career to Neil Jordan than Austen, lol.]

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Sail Away, Sweet Sister (Queen)

I reblogged my earlier post from 2 July 2015:

Lucrezia in 1x02, “The Assassin” + Saint Catherine in Pinturicchio’s The Disputation of Saint Catherine, often believed to be modeled by a young Lucrezia Borgia.

Cesare in 2x03, “The Beautiful Deception + Cesare in profile, Caesar Borgia Valentino (~1500-1510).

2020 addition:

elperian got me thinking about them again, and ... *sigh*

(Am I listening to my Borgia playlist right now? I might be.)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Cesare and Lucrezia's Theme (Trevor Morris)

In response to this post,

jubaah said:

I laughed dbgehnjrgnj

I replied:

haha, you kind of have to!

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Hellfire (Patrick Page)

In a reblog of this post of mine about Oliverotto Effreducci da Fermo murdering his uncle and cousins and then getting killed by Cesare Borgia, I added:

adfkk;adfk turns out (according to Machiavelli) that the uncle actually raised him and that Oliverotto specifically used a conversation about Alexander and Cesare as a pretext for getting his uncle alone to murder him

#*plays the tiniest violin*

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Landslide (Fleetwood Mac)

my heart bleeds for him

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Young and Beautiful (Lana del Rey)

“Whoever, therefore, deems it necessary in his new principality to secure himself against enemies, to win friends, to conquer by force or by fraud, to make himself loved and feared by the people, followed and revered by the soldiers, to destroy those who can or must do you harm, to transform old institutions with new measures, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to eliminate an untrustworthy army, to create a new one, to maintain the friendship of kings and princes in such a way that they must either help you with good grace or offend you with caution—such a person cannot find better examples to imitate than the actions of this man.”

—Niccolò Machiavelli, not pausing for breath, on Cesare Borgia in The Prince

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Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Road to Glory (Audiomachine)

exam notes

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Concerto in C minor: I. Allegro (Johann Sebastian Bach)

I have a gazillion icons, but only made a few of them personally. But I thought I would share the ones that I did make!

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Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Finale (Austen's Pride)

Kuvira reminds me of Cesare Borgia, a lot. And this is why.

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Current Music: Illumination (Jennifer Thomas)

Occasionally, I see people wondering why, if the Borgias were not really any worse than most Renaissance political families, they were so widely reviled and become a byword for corruption even in a very corrupt period. They must have done something that stood out from the others, right?

Um ... well.
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So, every portrayal of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia that I’ve seen, whatever the take on their relationship, involves that relationship falling apart in the end and the two of them turning on each other.

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Current Music: The Fallen Priest (Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé)

As a massive Borgia fan who is 1000% convinced that they were one of GRRM’s inspirations, the BASTARDS CANNOT HAVE THE THINGS wank going down right now is just sort of … lol.

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Current Music: King of the Faeries (Aine Minogue)

I'm trying to finish the month-late chapter of we get dark, only to shine, but I'm enjoying the current plotbunny SO MUCH.

Again, if you're on Tumblr you already know, but the omnipresence in Borgias fandom of business and/or organized crime US-modern AUs + the shitshow of US politics rn got me thinking that politician!Borgias would be a near perfect fit. For one, they were primarily political figures irl, and some of Alexander VI's most unpopular actions:

1. Accepting large numbers of refugees (from the Inquisition)
2. Speaking Spanish (at court)
3. Ignoring traditional policy (esp in terms of nepotism)
4. Expanding papal authority

That would fit exactly???? into US politics at this moment. It would fit into a lot of people's politics, really, but the prevalence of US moderns is where the idea came from and what I know best, so. And it's just so easy to make it work. Like.

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Current Mood: excited
Current Location: Portland, OR
Current Music: Rolling in the Deep (Adele)

I already shrieked about this on Tumblr, but my excitement cannot be contained to one platform!!!!

Y'all, the best thing just happened to me. The BEST. And all because I thought a Showtime series with lovingly gorgeous design and dysfunctional Renaissance families sounded like a nice way to pass the time.

People who have not followed me through my passionate descent into Borgias stanning, all you need to know is that it happened, and being me, was followed by I MUST KNOW ALL THE THINGS. So at this point I've acquired a substantial shelf of Borgia-related histories and watched the shows and read the manga and written the problematic longfic and so on.

I also wrote a grad school paper on how complex the show's divergences from history really are, and on adaptation in general--pretty much the paper on adaptation I always wanted to write through the prism of the particular adaptation I happened to be into at the time. Uploaded it a research sharing site, the end.

OR SO IT SEEMED~

This morning, and by morning I mean 6:30 AM, I got a message in my inbox in Spanish. The name was so unfamiliar that I thought it might just be a site bot or something, so I groggily scanned it and ... well. Not a bot. More specifically, it was from a for-real professor about a conference her university is hosting, about representations of the Borgia, which given my research and interests she thought might be of interest to me. Guess what her university it is?

YOU WON'T GUESS. The Universitat de València. That is, one of the most prestigious in Spain, which has been a university since 1501 when it was authorized by the papal bull of, surprise, Rodrigo Borgia. And when out of curiosity, I checked to see if anyone had read my paper, the site's analytics said someone in Spain had clicked on it yesterday.

So. I, fic writer and grad student at a tiny, low-funded, not particularly prestigious program, got contacted by a legit scholar from Rodrigo Borgia's university about a conference being held in conjunction with the institute of Borgia studies, in his hometown, because of my grumpy intro to grad studies paper. With a prestigious publication attached. Like, even if I don't get in????? This is... me! This happened to me!!!

I'm sorry, Neil Jordan, I've complained about your choices a lot, but all is forgiven. MY YEAR IS MADE, MY LIFE IS MADE

Current Mood: ecstatic
Current Location: Oakland(ish)
Current Music: Time Will Remember Us (Epic Score)