Ginevra Sforza helped poison her husband Sante so she could marry his young cousin Giovanni—since they had secretly been in love. She acted viciously in the Malvezzi vendetta and alone ordered the slayings of the Marescotti brothers. She was impious, maligning, avaricious and wicked. Her mother had been a Jew. Like a termite, she gnawed at and eroded Palazzo Bentivoglio. Savonarola called her the devil who disturbed the word of God; in retaliation she sent out men to kill him. She demanded to discuss politics directly with the pope. She was a cruel and ambitious woman, the evil genius of the Bentivoglio family. Her proud boiling sforzesco blood made her commit cruel acts. Against her husband's knowledge she tried to pull together an army to retake Bologna. He wrote her a nasty letter, blaming her for the ruin of his family—and after she read it, she dropped dead. Her corpse was abandoned in the nettles. She is the first of the four most damned souls of Bologna's past and one of the most troubled characters in history. When the Bentivoglio palace was destroyed, the family papers all perished, and there are no surviving contemporary documents about her—so it's impossible to know anything more about Ginevra Sforza. She was such a terrible woman, who would want to study her anyway?

The above paragraph summarises the dominant historiographical tradition about Genevra Sforza de’ Bentivoglio (ca. 1440–1507), a tradition that has endured for over five centuries. It is the purpose of this book to show how flawed that tradition is and how it stems from a deeply misogynistic perspective, one that has hidden the real Genevra who dedicated herself and succeeded in fulfilling the gendered role demanded of her by society. Genevra's story has been easily masked as the records of her life have been scattered over dozens of archives, museums, and libraries. My aim is to reconstruct the real Genevra from those documentary fragments and to analyse how and why her story has been so maligned, beginning around the time of her death, and why the damnatio memoriae of her achievements has been sustained even in modern historiography.

The chapters of this book display a historical and thus revisionist view of a previously unexamined fifteenth-century woman who lived a long life at the apex of Bolognese society.