Medici Women: Marriage, Sex, and Power in the Renaissance

The Renaissance Italian Medici family are known today for their ruthless pursuit of power and wealth and their incomparable art collection, now housed in the world-famous Uffizi Museum Galleries in Florence. This lecture reveals the previously hidden roles of the Medici women in the family’s acquisition and preservation of wealth and power, especially through marriage. By going back to the archival sources to read the women’s own words, we can better understand what it was really like to be a Renaissance woman navigating wedding nights, badly behaved husbands, mistresses, the dangers of childbirth, infertility, and more. Medici women did not merely survive these challenges, but actively strategized and even profited. Their stories enrich our understanding of the Medici family legacy and the development of Italy’s most renowned museum collection.

About the speaker: Suzanne Sutherland is a Professor of Early Modern European History at Middle Tennessee State University near Nashville where she teaches about the Renaissance and Reformation. She has published articles and books about early modern war, diplomacy, letter-writing, and Jesuit knowledge networks. Her first book, The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe (Cornell University Press, 2022), explored the history of military contracting during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). She is currently writing a book about Renaissance Italian diplomatic marriages.