Cream Tea with Sarah Dunant: The Marchesa

Name: Cream Tea with Sarah Dunant: The Marchesa
Start: 2025-11-14T14:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-11-14T16:00:00+00:00
Location: Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Schedule

Fri Nov 14 2025 at 02:30 pm to 04:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Derby Museum and Art Gallery | Derby, EN

Sarah Dunant’s novels, including The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, brilliantly evoke the Italian Renaissance. Her latest focuses on Isabella d'Este, the first female art collector and patron of her time. Her famed collection has long since been dispersed or lost, but what remains is her correspondence - thousands of letters preserved in a deconsecrated church and convent in the archive of Mantua.
The Marchesa is Renaissance history at its most vivid, mixing historical fiction with biography, scholarship and imagery. It is also a meditation on our attitude to history itself, challenging how far we can set aside our own values and certainties when it comes to understanding those who grew out of very different cultural soil.