Product details
- ISBN 9780715653142
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 22 Aug 2019
- Publisher: Duckworth Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The story of poison is the story of power...
For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots.
Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications and filthy living conditions. Women wore makeup made with lead. Men rubbed feces on their bald spots. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes and the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on private parts; and worms nesting in the intestines.
The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.
Eleanor Herman is known as the “Sherlock Holmes of history” and is the author of several works of popular history including Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queens. She has hosted Lost Worlds for The History Channel and The Madness of Henry VIII for the National Geographic Channel. Herman, who happily dresses in Renaissance gowns any chance she gets, lives with her husband, dog and her four very dignified cats.
