Bestselling author Deborah Swift introduces Giulia Tofana, infamous poisoner in Renaissance Italy #WomenInHistory #Renaissance #HistoricalFiction #WomensHistoryMonth

The POISON KEEPER

Book 1 of the Giulia Tofana Series

by Deborah Swift

Wishing Shelf Book of the Decade

BookViral Book of the Year

Naples 1633

Aqua Tofana – One drop to heal. Three drops to kill.

Giulia Tofana longs for more responsibility in her mother’s apothecary business, but Mamma has always been secretive and refuses to tell her the hidden keys to her success. But the day Mamma is arrested for the poisoning of the powerful Duke de Verdi, Giulia is shocked to uncover the darker side of her trade.

Giulia must run for her life, and escapes to Naples, under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, to the home of her Aunt Isabetta, a famous courtesan. But when Giulia hears that her mother has been executed, and the cruel manner of her death, she swears she will wreak revenge on the Duke de Verdi.

The trouble is, Naples is in the grip of Domenico, the Duke’s brother, who controls the city with the ‘Camorra’, the mafia. Worse, her Aunt Isabetta, under his thrall, insists that she should be consort to him.

Based on the legendary life of Giulia Tofana, this is a story of hidden family secrets, and how courage and love can overcome vengeance.

Praise for The Poison Keeper:

“Her characters are so real they linger in the mind long after the book is back on the shelf.”

~ Historical Novel Society

“The Poison Keeper takes place in Naples in 1633. Deborah Swift easily brings us into this world. The descriptions, characterizations, the inner thoughts of the people, the passion that drives a person forward, the hurdles they have to overcome... I could go on. It's all so well done. Deborah Swift's storytelling kept me glued to this book.”

~ Heidi Eljarbo, author of the Fabiola Bennett Mysteries, 5* Amazon Review

“A rich and colourful novel to immerse yourself in - I loved it.”

~ Terry Tyler, bestselling author, 5* Amazon Review

The Three Lives of Giulia Tofana, Renaissance Poisoner

Giulia Tofana was an Italian professional purveyor of poisons, and the inventor of the deadly poison Aqua Tofana, which is named after her. One of the difficulties with her history is that she is easily confused with her mother – Theofania d’Adamo, and also with her daughter, Girolama Spara. We have no pictures or portraits of Giulia Tofana, and the few sources that exist attribute her life and death to differing dates.

Banner (c) Deborah Swift

There is much legend associated with her life as a poisoner, and like all novelists do, I have taken the aspects of the story I liked best, and used a combination or research and imagination to fill the gaps. For the most succinct and detailed analysis of the real facts of Giulia Tofana’s life, I suggest this excellent article by Mike Dash.

Wikipedia’s rather bald entry for Giulia Tofana, Theofania d’Adamo’s daughter, states she was born in 1620, but as she supposedly confessed she had killed six hundred men with her poisons in Rome alone between the years 1633 and 1651, this would give her an age of only thirteen when she began the poisonings and invented Aqua Tofana. This is possible, but not probable. For a novelist, this is both a problem and an opportunity.

It was of course essential to pin down time and place. Early on, I made the decision to keep to the legend and have Giulia Tofana as one person rather than three. Compressing two more legendary lives would certainly have been much more of a conundrum than compressing the one that already existed. For the purposes of this pair of novels I made my character of Giulia ten years older, born in 1610, so more neatly dovetailing with existing records of her activities in Palermo, Naples and Rome in the early seventeenth century. However, I did include her mother Theofania, in the novel, and her well-documented execution in 1633. Giulia’s name ‘Tofana’ was probably taken from a contraction of her mother’s name.

The first recorded mention of Aqua Tofana (literal meaning – Tofana Water) is from 1632–33. The poison itself probably contained arsenic, belladonna and lead, though many other ingredients have been ascribed to it. Colourless and tasteless, it was potent enough to kill with a few drops. Legend has it that it was disguised as the ‘Manna of St Nicholas’, a cure-all that was supposed to drip from the reliquary bones of St Nicholas. The ‘elixir’ was also concealed as perfume and could be displayed openly in the bedchambers of women of the time.

Manna of Saint Nicholas

A Tradition of Poison

Italy has a long tradition of poison, reaching back as far as the Borgias, and before that to ancient Rome.

Women in the Renaissance era were constrained by the laws of matrimony, and particularly by the extortionate nature of dowries, which meant many families could only afford to ‘dower’ one daughter. The power was all held by men and like many times in the past women were seen as property, and their main purpose was to provide heirs to their husband’s fortune. As some women perished in childbirth, many men married several times. The younger and more innocent the bride, the better. Women were oppressed, and married off to men sometimes three times their age. With the only alternative being a convent, is there any wonder they might seek escape with what were euphemistically termed ‘inheritance powders’?

In this world where men often ruled as tyrants over their wives, and daughters were sold off to build powerful business alliances, the crime of poison was common. It is likely that Giulia Tofana received many word-of-mouth referrals for her services.  I suspect it was also tempting to ascribe all poisonings to the same woman once Giulia Tofana had gained notoriety, and her name became a by-word for the crime. Penalties were severe for women who challenged the acceptable societal order, and for those suspected of poison, executions by what we might call torture (burning, pressing, drowning) were common. But one of the things I wanted to emphasize in the novel is that women were never entirely powerless, they drew upon their sense of community, on their sisterhood for support, and this enabled them to achieve more than they could ever do alone. For more about women in this era, I highly recommend Women in Italy 1350 -1650: Ideals and Realities by Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli.

As Giulia Tofana’s history was what I might call ‘slippery’, my main concern was to make her environment and the context as accurate as it could be. I made extensive use of 17th Century maps and of academic research papers on the JStor website and a huge heap of books about women of Italy in the mid 17th Century.

I set the companion novel to The Poison Keeper in Rome because Rome was one of the places best associated with the name of Giulia Tofana and where she is believed to have poisoned many wealthy men. The Silkworm Keeper continues her story once she leaves Naples and gets to Rome.

For this part of the story, I focussed on a more hopeful strand of the legend (from the Victorian source of Alessandro Ademollo) that maintains that Giulia Tofana wasn’t executed for her crimes, but lived on in a convent until 1651 and then died there, unsuspected of any crime. But according to a diary written by physician Salvatore Salomene-Marino, Giulia Tofana recruited several other female poison makers and dispensers in Rome, including Laura Crispoltii and Graziosa Farina, and these women do make an appearance in the novel.  Few facts are known about them, so we can only speculate how they met Giulia Tofana. According to Ademollo, it is Giulia’s daughter, Girolama Spara, that carried on the family tradition of poisoning. In 1657 she was responsible for the death by poison of the nobleman the Duke of Ceri, at the insistence of his wife, Maria Alsobrandini.

The Ill-fated Convent of San Nicolo

Part of the inspiration for The Silkworm Keeper came from a true history of nuns in Reggio, Calabria. In 17th Century Italy a woman had few choices, commonly marriage or the nunnery. When Signor Strozzi of Calabria died, he had many female relatives that needed support – an unmarried sister and half-sister, plus a sister-in-law, and a married sister with four granddaughters. Such a family of women was considered a misfortune and a burden. Strozzi’s will stipulated that after his wife’s death his palazzo would become a convent, a neat (and cheap!) way of dealing with all the other unmarried women in his life.

These women were incarcerated in the convent against their wishes, and took up sericulture (silkworm breeding) as a means of livelihood. But their convent life became so wearisome that they took their revenge by torching the convent. I hit upon the entirely fictional idea of sending Giulia Tofana to this convent, as penance for her sins, which filled a gap in the historical narrative nicely, and provided plenty of tension and some lovely female characters – until of course the convent burns down. As a novelist I am always straddling the fence between fact and fiction, inhabiting that strange borderland between what is real and what my imagination can produce.

Unsurprisingly, in the real history, when the convent was burned down, the Church was outraged by this event, and a trial of the Sisters took place. At the end of the lengthy trial, and with the idea of keeping this heretical transgression out of the public eye as much as possible, the fire was deemed accidental, and no one was found guilty. Unfortunately, the reluctant nuns still could not escape; they were all taken back into a neighbouring convent whilst they awaited the rebuilding of the doomed Convent of San Nicolo. No sooner had the refurbishment been completed than the convent was destroyed again, but this time by an earthquake. The real-life Sisters remained in the neighbouring convent for the rest of their lives.

You will find a fully annotated account of this real history in the rather luridly titled Nuns Behaving Badly by Craig A Monson, but this is an excellent piece of academic writing and I am grateful to him for his in-depth research.

I chose a different fate for my Sisters, for I needed to integrate the story with that of Giulia Tofana, the poisoner. For a novelist, skirting around the unpleasant facts of the torture and execution of your main protagonist is never going to be easy. I chose to end the second novel with the birth of Giulia’s daughter, Girolama. History never stands still – new information is always being unearthed.

The third and fourth novels, The Fortune Keeper and The Cameo Keeper, are out now too, and include updated history of this extraordinary family.

Article (c) Deborah Swift.

Banner (c) Deborah Swift

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This series is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

Deborah Swift

Deborah used to be a costume designer for the BBC, before becoming a writer. Now she lives in an old English school house in a village full of 17th Century houses, near the glorious Lake District. Deborah has an award-winning historical fiction blog at her website www.deborahswift.com. 

Deborah loves to write about how extraordinary events in history have transformed the lives of ordinary people, and how the events of the past can live on in her books and still resonate today.

Her WW2 novel Past Encounters was a BookViral Award winner, and The Poison Keeper was a winner of the Wishing Shelf Book of the Decade.

Connect with Deborah:

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Award-winning author Judith Arnopp introduces Margaret Beaufort, remarkable matriarch of the Tudor dynasty #WomenInHistory #Tudors #BiographicalFiction #WomensHistoryMonth

The Beaufort Bride

Book 1 of The Beaufort Chronicle

by Judith Arnopp

'Wonderfully written book about Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII.'

As King Henry VI slips into insanity and the realm of England teeters on the brink of civil war, a child is married to the mad king’s brother.

Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, takes his child bride into Wales where Margaret must put aside childhood, acquire the dignity of a Countess and, despite her tender years, produce Richmond with a son and heir.

As the friction between York and Lancaster intensifies, 14-year-old Margaret is widowed and turns for protection to her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor.

At his stronghold in Pembroke, two months after her husband’s death, Margaret gives birth to a son whom she names Henry, after her cousin the king.

Margaret is small of stature but her tiny frame conceals a fierce and loyal heart and a determination that will not falter until her son’s destiny as the king of England is secured.

The Beaufort Bride traces Margaret’s early years from her nursery days at Bletsoe Castle to the birth of her only son in 1457 at Pembroke Castle. Her story continues in Book Two: The Beaufort Woman.

Praise for The Beaufort Bride:

“Ms Arnopp has cleverly crafted a character whose innocence and lack of understanding as to why she has to marry when she is still in the nursery, shines from the pages as elegantly as the illumination in the Book of Hours.”

~ The Coffee Pot Book Club, 5* Editorial Review

“The reserve of her character is shown as a front which masks a deeply emotional being, a person of great sensitivity and intelligence. This book made me think again about Margaret Beaufort. Great work. Beautiful period detail also, and excellent storytelling.”

~ Gemma, 5* Amazon Review

“Judith Arnopp creates a vivid mid 15th century world, full of fascinating detail.”

~ Morag Edwards, 5* Amazon Review

Margaret Beaufort:
Survivor and Victor in the Wars of the Roses

Fifteenth century England was dominated by what we now term the wars of the roses, but for the vast majority daily life continued as usual. While the peasantry fought the twin perils of pestilence and penury, the nobility battled for the English crown.

The constant fluctuation between York and Lancaster unbalanced the upper classes, and monarchy and allegiance became fluid. The fall of one’s preferred king could mean loss of status, financial ruin and even death. One had to tread very cautiously; a careless word or a smile in the wrong quarter could spell the end of prosperity, the loss of property, or the stripping of a title. The wisest kept their heads down and hoped the ‘right’ monarch would come out on top but for most, this was not an option. Margaret Beaufort was given no choices and as a result learned to think before speaking, to consider the consequences of her actions before carrying them out and to place her trust cautiously.

Even for the era she was born into, Margaret’s upbringing was remarkable. During her infancy, her father, John Beaufort, Earl and later Duke, of Somerset, took his own life while awaiting the pleasure of the increasingly unstable / inefficient King Henry VI. Margaret became the ward of one of the most powerful men of his day, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk (later Marquis and Duke) but she was allowed to remain in the home of her mother, Margaret Beauchamp, at least for the first decade of her life. She was just eight years old when Suffolk, taking advantage of Margaret’s wealth and status, married her to his young son, John, but since neither had yet reached their teens, the marriage remained unconsummated. Suffolk’s subsequent disgrace and ignoble death saw the marriage hastily annulled and Margaret’s future was placed in the hands of the king, Henry VI.

Margaret’s early years were spent learning the graces required of an heiress of high status. We know she was well educated, more than one historian noting that her French was ‘first rate’ but it is unlikely she would have completely mastered many of the required skills by the time of her second marriage at approximately eleven years of age. It is my feeling that her education continued long after she left the schoolroom at Bletsoe. Margaret set great store on knowledge and in later life endowed many places of learning. After she was married to the half-brother of the king, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond she accompanied him to a wild and unstable Wales. She would have needed to learn hard and fast, with lessons in politics and survival taking precedence over languages.

Even in the early days of the conflict, war had a direct effect on Margaret. The homes she shared with Edmund at Caldicot and Lamphey were strongholds. The castles would have rung with the boots of soldiers, the coming and going of messengers, and her husband was constantly away fighting for the king. She was widowed just one year later when Edmund Tudor died at Carmarthen in 1456 in the act of defending Henry’s holdings in Wales. He left Margaret six months pregnant and vulnerable. She quickly turned for protection to her brother in law, Jasper Tudor, who housed her for the duration of her pregnancy at Pembroke Castle where she gave birth to a son, Henry Tudor. Shortly after his birth, keen to avoid another arranged marriage, she took matters into her own hands and with Jasper’s aid, arranged a betrothal to Henry Stafford, the younger son of the Duke of Buckingham.

Margaret Beaufort portrait by Meynart Weywyck.
National Portrait Gallery.
Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

After the accession of Edward IV, despite Stafford’s change of allegiance from Lancaster to York, the marriage appears to have been successful. We can only surmise how comfortable Margaret was with her husband’s shift in loyalty, but her blood and heart lay with Lancaster, and this tolerance is perhaps the earliest evidence of Margaret’s fortitude.

She and Henry Stafford lived largely at Woking, making improvements to their properties and striving for acceptance at Edward’s court. At first, Margaret was not invited into the royal circle but eventually, as Stafford proved his loyalty, she was invited to join Elizabeth Woodville’s household. Calm seems to have settled on Margaret around this time, the only fly in her ointment being the exile of her son, Henry, who had fled overseas with his uncle Jasper when Edward took the throne. Margaret never ceased to petition for Henry’s return but was continually denied. In the unrest that surrounded the defection of the Earl of Warwick to Lancaster, the Staffords continued, at least outwardly, to support York. It was while fighting for Edward IV at Barnet in 1471 that Henry Stafford sustained wounds, dying a short time afterwards.

By 1472 Margaret had married again, this time to the powerful northern magnate, Thomas Stanley. Largely due to her husband’s relationship with King Edward, Margaret remained on good terms with the king and queen. She was on the verge of securing the return of her son’s rights and properties when Edward IV died unexpectedly at Easter in 1483.

During the period of unrest that followed, the juvenile King Edward V’s throne was denied him and the crown instead placed on the head of his uncle, Richard of Gloucester. There is no evidence that Margaret made any objection to this but perhaps her silence is further evidence of her endurance.

Stanley swore allegiance to King Richard while Margaret displayed loyalty, enjoying the honour of bearing Anne Neville’s train at the coronation. To all intents and purposes, Margaret had reconciled herself to Gloucester’s rule, it is only in hindsight we realise she was perhaps not as content as she seemed.

Despite her apparent acceptance, the denouncement of Edward’s heirs and Gloucester’s accession to the throne rekindled Margaret’s political ambition, and shortly after the first reports of the disappearance of the princes in the tower, she began to conspire with the dowager queen against King Richard.

Lady Margaret Beaufort. Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

Treason is an ugly word and to move against an anointed monarch is always a perilous act. Margaret was all too aware of the consequences of her actions if they were discovered but something, be it blind ambition or moral outrage, drove her on. She played a major part in Buckingham’s rebellion and when her role in it was discovered Richard III’s leniency probably surprised Margaret as much as everyone else.

A man caught red-handed at the same crime would have faced a traitor’s death but the king showed unprecedented clemency and placed Margaret under house arrest in the charge of her husband, Thomas Stanley. Margaret, never one to be daunted, continued her intrigue from within her plush prison. She worked determinedly against Richard’s regime, but this time her goal had shifted. Now she worked not just to bring her son home but to crown him King of England.

Life in the time of Margaret Beaufort was both unstable and dangerous. Her role in the events during the years 1483-5 would be less remarkable had she been ignorant of the possible consequences but Margaret Beaufort was raised amid bloodshed. She knew the price of treason. Before she was born her father died as a direct result of failing his king, and during the war that followed she lost husbands, uncles, cousins and friends, as well as suffering separation from her only son during his fourteen years of exile.

Margaret was indefatigable in her efforts, she negotiated her unstable world as assuredly as if she were playing a game of chess. Utilising her considerable acumen, she rose from a relatively insignificant position in the House of Lancaster to becoming, not just the most powerful woman in England, but the ultimate victor of the wars of the roses.

A short excerpt from The Beaufort Bride. Freshly widowed, the pregnant fourteen-year-old Margaret prepares to write to her mother.

She gave no thought to what I might encounter once I left her household and she sent me into the world unschooled in the nature of marriage. Only by chance was Edmund a worthy man, a young man with enough kindness in his heart to treat the child he married well. He was a good husband, but that good fortune owed no thanks to my mother.

My outraged pen rushes across the page in a scrawl of misery. Afterwards, when I read the words I have written, I realise my own bitterness and do not send it after all. But the exercise does me some good, as if the act of scratching my broken hopes and dreams onto a piece of parchment and sealing it with self-pitying tears provides a kind of healing. I have no idea how or why the act of writing it down is so soothing, but although I am still broken and afraid, having purged my mind, I am able to function again. With a little more courage than I had before, I agree that plans should be laid in place for my coming confinement.

Article (c) Judith Arnopp.

Universal Buy Link

This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

Judith Arnopp

Judith Arnopp at Pembroke Castle

Judith Arnopp is best known for her award-winning novels set in the Medieval and Tudor period, focussing on the perspective of historical women but recently she has written a trilogy from the perspective of Henry VIII himself and a non-fiction book about Tudor clothing, How to Dress like a Tudor, was published in 2023 by Pen and Sword.

Her novels include:

A Song of Sixpence: the story of Elizabeth of York

The Beaufort Chronicle: the life of Lady Margaret Beaufort (three book series)

A Matter of Conscience: Henry VIII, the Aragon Years (Book One of The Henrician Chronicle)

A Matter of Faith: Henry VIII, the Days of the Phoenix (Book Two of The Henrician Chronicle)

A Matter of Time: Henry VIII, the Dying of the Light (Book Three of The Henrician Chronicle)

The Kiss of the Concubine: a story of Anne Boleyn

The Winchester Goose: at the court of Henry VIII

Intractable Heart: the story of Katheryn Parr

Sisters of Arden: on the Pilgrimage of Grace

The Heretic Wind: the life of Mary Tudor, Queen of England

Peaceweaver

The Forest Dwellers

The Song of Heledd

The Book of Thornhold

A Daughter of Warwick: the story of Anne Neville, Queen of Richard III

Marguerite: Hell Hath no Fury

Connect with Judith:

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