Sarah Bradford
Educated at St. Mary’s Convent, Shaftesbury Dorset, where she won a State Scholarship and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she won a College Scholarship in History, Sarah Bradford is an historian and biographer who has travelled extensively, living in the West Indies, Portugal and Italy. She speaks four languages which have been invaluable in her research for her various books, particularly The Englishman’s Wine, the Story of Port (the first book on the subject written by a woman), Portugal and Madeira. She worked in the Manuscript Department of Christie’s London, travelling for the Department and valuing manuscripts from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, an experience which enabled her to write Cesare Borgia (used by the BBC as the source of their series ‘The Borgias’, for which she wrote the novelisation of the scripts) and, most recently, Lucrezia Borgia
“Elisabetta Gonzaga de Montefeltro, Duchess of Urbino, was one of the most celebrat women of her age. . . She was much praised for her saintliness in enduring a sexless marriage to Guidobaldo who was both impotent and for much of his life crippled by what was described as 'gout' but was probably rheumatoid arthritis, which deformed his body from a young age. According to the archivist Luzio, despite his impotence Guidobaldo was extremely erotically inclined, so that Elisabetta was in a state of suspense every day in case he might fall upon her and have a relapse.”