During an age of heightened religious conflict, Catherine de' Medici lived her life at the center of sixteenth-century European and French politics. Daughter of Lorenzo II, the Medici ruler of Florence-and then wedded to a French prince by papal decree at the age of fourteen-Catherine first became queen consort of France and then mother to three French kings (Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III) who reigned in an era of almost continuous civil and religious strife.

A lavish promoter of the arts, Catherine patronized poets, painters, and sculptors; lavished ruinous sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces; and masterminded spectacular entertainments and tournaments that prefigure the splendor and ritual of the court of Versailles. Catherine maintained eighty ladies-in-waiting at court; it was rumored she used these women as bait to seduce courtiers for her political ends. Her admiration for the seer Nostradamus fueled claims of her love for the occult and the dark arts. Posterity has condemned her as the epitome of the scheming royal matriarch, her reputation tainted forever by her role in instigating the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants in 1572. Catherine de' Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen is Mary Hollingsworth's evocative, authoritative biography of the most extraordinary woman of the sixteenth-century.