At the Court of the Borgia

This English presentation of the diary of Johann Burchard, papal master of ceremonies at Rome, covers the pontificate of Alexander VI and the years around it in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Burchard records liturgies, consistories, embassies, conclaves, and the public scandals of the Borgia household: Cesare and Lucrezia, the pope's banquets, and the violence that attended papal politics. The voice is that of an official who notes costume, precedence, and rumour with equal care. It is a court chronicle rather than a biography: the daily machinery of the Vatican seen from the master of ceremonies' stall.

Bound in darker brown buckram and had a black slipcase.