Recommend a good book on the Borgias?

Cafe Society
1

I’m almost done with Showtime’s series “The Borgias” (I’m behind the times).

I’ve done some very cursory online reading on the Borgia pope Alexander VI and family; opinions seem to be rather polarized.

Can anyone recommend a good, even-handed book? Scholarly or popular?

2

I recommend:
*
Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy*
by Sarah Bradford

I bought a copy of this two years ago and like it very much. Sarah Bradford, who has one foot in the scholarly camp and one foot in the popular, is a well-regarded biographer in the UK known for being fair and even handed. She paints a well-researched portrait of Lucretzia and dispels the canard of her as an incestuous whore and a poisoner.

Here’s a review from The Guardian: The bad girl of Rome | Books | The Guardian

There’s another book, The Borgias by Christopher Hibbert, that I haven’t read yet, though I’ve been meaning to get to it. Hibbert is a first-rate biographer. Like Bradford, he pens well-researched and entertaining works. I admire several other biographies he’s written, especially his life of Queen Victoria, and have every reason to expect his Borgias to be excellent.

3

This one was mentioned in the above post. I’ve read it and its very interesting:
The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519
by Christopher Hibbert

Borgia’s: The Hidden History by G J Meyer

The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped
by Paul Strathern

The Borgias
by Ivan Cloulas

These are all classified as non-fiction. There are many fiction books written about the Borgias in particular Lucretzia Borgia.

4

Whatever you do, don’t buy the cookbook.