A new biography of Catherine de'' Medici, the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe, whose author uses neglected primary sources to recreate the life and times of a remarkable - and remarkably traduced - woman. History is rarely kind to women of power, but few have had their reputations quite so brutally shredded as Catherine de- Medici, Italian-born queen of France and influential mother of three successive French kings during that country-s long sequence of sectarian wars in the second half of the sixteenth century. Thanks to the malign efforts of propagandists motivated by religious hatred, history tends to remember Catherine as a schemer who used witchcraft and poison to eradicate her rivals, as a spendthrift dilettante who wasted ruinous sums of money on building and embellishment of monuments and palaces, and most sinister of all, as instigator of the St Bartholomew-s Day massacre of 1572, in which thousands of innocent Protestants were slaughtered by Catholic mo
