BIANCA'S CURE, fictional reconsideration of a fascinating woman of Renaissance Florence

BIANCA'S CURE
GIGI BERARDI
She Writes Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Lessons in Chemistry, a based-in-fact novel imagining young Renaissance noblewoman Bianca Capello’s experiences as she pursues a cure for malaria in the Medicis’ Florence.

Florence, 1563. Forbidden from practicing her herbal cures in Venice, the young noblewoman Bianca Capello flees to Florence, where the ruling Medici family practices alchemy. There, she wins herself an invitation to their palace, and, as it turns out, a path to the duke regent Francesco’s bed.

The impassioned bond between Francesco de Medici and Bianca is at the core of this fact-driven dive into medicine, politics, love, and ultimately death in Renaissance Florence. Malaria killed many of the Medicis, but traces of the poison arsenic were recently found in Francesco’s remains. Even more sinister: Bianca’s remains have never been found. To this day, what happened to Bianca and Francesco remains one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Renaissance Italy’s legendary Medicis.

Bianca’s Cure probes what might have been as Bianca’s quest for a malaria cure—in palaces, gardens, sick rooms, and whorehouses—collides with Francesco’s intensifying illness. Her main tool is the herb artemisia—medicine still used today. A woman who dared to practice science well ahead of her time, Bianca fights off self-doubt until she believes herself invincible. But is she? When only she stands between Francesco and death, her skill may save him or doom them both.

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My Review: The impact of culture on a woman's choices about the course her life should take is hard to overstate. Author Berardi pushes that effort to its maximum degree by centering Bianca Cappello, facyually the Grand Duchess consort of Tuscany; and here shown as an early scientist pursuing a cure for malaria.

These things sit oddly together. I'm interested all the more because they're in such immediate, and irresolvable, tension: did Bianca Cappello correctlt identify artemisia as a substance that can bring the scourge of malaria, a killer of huge numbers of humans since the genus Anopheles began spreading it before History began, under control? The trajectory of Bianca's amazing story, from poverty to the arms, heart, and home of the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, would be astounding enough. Adding onto it the story of her quest for artemisinin as a malaria treatment adds poignacy to the manner of her, and her husband's, deaths. There is doubt as to the cause of death...malaria or poisoning? Either is likely. Both are possible. Very little poison is needed to send off someone dramatically weakened by the ravages of malaria.

It's a solid, involving set-up for an Italian Renaissance tale of love, of ambition, and of an extraordinarily gifted woman's determination to chart her own course. It is inspiring to read that story set in any time period. I'm glad that it crossed my path. I'm not going to tell you Biance succeeded...her death within a day of her Medici husband's exposes the forces that will array against a woman who tries to become more than her sex has predetermined her upper limit to be. That both she and her husband might have died of poisoning, though without a body to test for arsenic we can never know for sure about her, and her husband had both arsenic and malaria in his body upon modern testing.

The story told here is clearly the result of much learning about the manners, the mores, and the culture we're introduced to. I'm glad the author's note was there at the end to outline the liberties a novelist must take with the facts to build a story that works. I strongly support the message that Author Berardi sends about women needing to involve themselves in the pursuit of knowledge. I liked how clear-sighted Bianca was presented to be. Her goals were, like the men in Renaissance-set fiction, shown to be not only worthy but to be her main focus. I don't think that's at all anachronistic; rather I suspect it's underreported due to filters in place that say woman = mother/wife, not woman = ambitious, intelligent actor on the world stage.

Of course the act of taking any action means making enemies. Bianca's dead first husband's family loathe her and use her as spitefully as they're able; her second husband the Duke has a wife when they meet, who quite understandably hates Bianca for becoming his mistress and bearing him a (bastard) son before she manages a legitimate heir; then when the wife dies and the Grand Duke marries her, Bianca's most spiteful enemy comes to light. Her husband's brother, the Cardinal, despises this "adventuress" who has seduced his brother. He resists her son's legitimation, he tries to prove she's a witch for messing about with herbs, and as he survives her and her husband (most suspicious, that!) he refuses to countenance her burial in the Medici family crypt. This effectively denies us the opportunity to test her bodily remains for traces of poison and, later, for the malarial parasites found in her husband.

It's hard not to see this as more than just a slight on an intimate enemy.

As a novel, the story has wonderful bones. As a story told, it focuses its reader's attention on actions as opposed to emotions. I think that choice keeps us reading away but in the end lets us gloss over a bit the really unplumbed depths of a mother's feelings for her son, and concern for his fate; a loving wife's deeper worries for her husband's fate not only her own struggle to cure him of malaria; in short, the underpinnings of why she does what she does. It's what prevents me from offering the fifth star this story, on its base merits, could easily have earned.

As it is, an enthusiastic four stars for feminist readers an those historical-fiction gobblers who like seeing a new angle on a familiar setting.