For their meeting in September 2017 the Bolton Branch requested a talk on Renaissance Italy. What they heard dealt with the Italian portion of the Borgia family, led by Pope Alexander VI, though the topicality of Catalan nationalism meant that the principal figures were introduced with comment on the Italian, Spanish and Catalan spelling of their names and titles.

The more significant political events of Alexander’s pontificate (1492–1503) were explained, after which the talk traced the development of fictional representations of the Borgia from the seventeenth century to the current decade. The present text focuses on those literary afterlives...