Watched:
No Time To Die, the Definitely Last of the Daniel Craig era Bond movies. I have mixed feelings, not least because I'm 99% sure that with Craig, we'll also lose his era's supporting cast, Eve Moneypenny, Wishaw!Q, Kinnear!Tanner, Fiennes!M(allory). (Having already lost Dench!M in
Skyfall and now *spoiler* in this movie.) I mean, I didn't think
Spectre was as good as
Casino Royale and
Skyfall, which were my favourites of the Craig era, but it would have been a way more optimistic and downright lighthearted exit - basically it would have been the TNG finale, whereas this one is, no, not the
Blake's 7 finale, definitely not, but the DS9 finale.
On the positive side of "mixed", I have to say Craig gave it his all. Mind you, he always did. And that's not self evident; in a lot of franchise movies, you get the impression of the actors just going through the motions and earning the pay check because they consider the silly premise to be beneath them, or something like that. Not Daniel C., and that's definitely one reason why his Bond became my favourite; he always felt like a three dimensional human being to me.
No Time To Die also is chock full of references, both within the Craig era (up to and including Vesper, big time), but also to the novels (hello, poison plant garden/island from
You only live twice the novel!) and the earlier movies
In Her Majesty's Secret Service (both novel and movie, hello, Louis Armstrong's
We have all the time in the world). It's unabashedly a sequel which does not want to be a standalone entry at any point. Including being the first Bond film to use the same "main" Bond Girl twice, and giving Madeline, Leah Seydoux' character, even more angsty backstory than the one she got the last time. It also continues the welcome reverse from
Spectre that
both Bond Girls
( spoiler! Strong spoiler! ) Alas, though, the main emotional relationship of the film (Bond/Madeline) still doesn't really work for me, which is why the big emotional climax doesn't really, either. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't bored for a minute by the film, but I doubt I'll have the urge to rewatch, and basicalyl I think that if the producers wanted an angsty finale, they should have gone with
Skyfall (because Bond/Dench!M OTP, admittedly), and if they wanted an optimistic one, they should have left it at
Spectre, but this mixture doesn't really do it for me.
Read: Ursula Tamussino's two biographies of Margaret of Austria and Mary of Hungary, respectively, a collection of Mary of Hungary related essays, and Catherine Fletcher's biography of Alessandro de' Medici,
The Black Prince of Florence. All very readable and informative; first three books are in German, so I can only rec them to German readers. I'm also relatively relieved the Renaissance Habsburgs corrresponded with each other in French (due to having grown up as cultural Burgundians), which means most of the letter quotes are translated into modern German, because every now and then if some of them do write in Renaissance German Tamussino tests me by providing only the original. Like when Margaret of Austria's Dad, future Emperor Maximilian, writes as a young man about his new wife Mary of Burgundy home to a friend:
Sie ist von leib klein viel kleiner denn die Rosina und schneeweis; ein prauns haar, ein kleins nasl, ein kleins häuptl und antlitz, praun und grabe augen gemischt, schön und lauter. Der Mund ist etwas hoch doch rein und rot. Sonst viel schöne jungfrowen alls ich all mein taag be einer gesehen hab und frölich. And about Margaret of York, Mary's beloved stepmother (sister to Edward IV and Richard III of England): Die alt fraw unser mutter ist eine feine schöne fraw zu ihr maß und listig viel. Back to Mary again:
Mein gemahl ist eine gantze Waidtmännin mit valckhen und hundten. Sie hat ein weiß windtspil, daz laufft fast bald. Daz liegt zu meisten theil alle nacht bey uns. (Frederick the Great would empathize on the last point, Maximilian.)
Anyway, the take on Margaret and Mary is pretty similar to that of Sarah Gristwood in
Game of Queens, except on one point - Tamussino doesn't think Margaret was serious about Charles Brandon (as in, actually attracted), she thinks Henry VIII was pushing his buddy on her and Margaret was trying to extricate herself from this dicy situation as diplomatically as possible without jeapordizing her English trade which as governess of the Netherlands was a serious considration. Otoh, she does think Margaret in her long widowhood did fall in love again at least once, with one Antoine de Lalaing, Comte d'Hoogstraten, wo was a member of Margaret's private council and her minister of finances. She made him executor of her last will and seems to have trusted him implicitly. However, he was married. The reason why our author thinks Margaret was in love with him is that some her love poetry play around the letters AL and CH, which doesn't fit either of her husbands. Both biographies are of course more detailed than Gristwood's book can be on either of them, including such stuff as Margaret's green parrot, who was the only animal she was allowed to take with her from the Netherlands to France when she got there as a little girl and which survived for decades, through her time as Dauphine, as Princess of Asturias, as Duchess of Savoy. Or her father Maximilian's excentric French when writing long chatty letters to his
très amée fille and apologizing for having been rude in the previous letter by including jewelry because:
Car i me semble que vous émés bien les charbunkles ("because it seems to me you love gemstones well"). BTw,
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
liraen, Tamussino can only guess why Margaret didn't like Dürer's portrait of
le bon père Maxi as he signed himself in his letters to her as well and doesn't have a quote from her on this. (She, the author, thinks it's uncontestedly the best Max portrait eve, which, duh. It's a Dürer.)
Speaking of qutoes, there's an entertaining passage of Erasmus where he provides a fictional dialogue between a stupid egomaniac abbot and a witty and wise lady named "Magdalia" getting the better of him which our author says could have been inspired not just by Thomas More's daughter Margaret Roper but also by Margaret and/or possibly Mary, since Erasmus was a fan of both ladies in his lis letters, calling them "the two most refined princesses of our age". Luther definitely had hopes on winning Mary over (the PR value of having the Emperor's sister among his admirers would have been gigantic), and Mary was interested enough to have read some of his writings and later write a letter with some theological questions to him, but basically she was an Erasmian rather than a Lutheran, seeing the need for reform but thinking Luther was going way too far and after a certain point was a plain heretic. (Her reply when brother Ferdinand wrote an indignant "WTF??!???" letter to her after Luther dedicated a book to her was a masterpiece in diplomacy, though: she wrote that well, firstly, she had no idea he would do that, so she couldn't reject the dedication in advance, and secondly it had been
eons since she had read anything of Luther's, and now that she knew Ferdinand was feeling that strongly about it would of course not read anything new again. This cunningly avoids agreeing or disagreeing with anything Luther actually claims in the book (or elsewhere).
Fun fact from the book of essays about Mary of Hungary: Sacher-Masoch, Austrian author who after his death became the trope namer due to Kraft-Ebbling naming the inclination after him, wrote a historical novel in which she's the hardcore domina with whom the novel's male characters, incuding the Turkish sultan, fall hopelessly in love. Since Sacher-Masoch also wrote a novel where it's Maria Theresia dealing out the discipline, one can say he he had a thing for Habsburg Queens of Hungary, clearly, across the safe distance of centuries. While her aunt Margaret of Austria was praised for her charm (which camouflaged a lot of her laying down the law), Mary was consistently ciritiqued as "masculine" and too sharp tongued by traditional historians but in the recent half century has come into her own. The essay volume has one on her correspondence alone and reveals the interesting fact that brother Charles V. wrote more letters in his own hand to her than to anyone else, including his wife who was the love of his life (he even brought a portrait of her to his monastary retreat after his abdication). Granted, Mary lived longer than Isabella, but she still is the person who got the most hand written letters from him, which is a point because most letters were dictated to secretaries and just signed by him. So a case can also be made she was the person he trusted most. Not just with government business; they also cheered each other up in between bouts of depression to which they were both prone. (Given the fate of their mother Juana, to which Charles was of course no innocent party, it does make me speculate whether they also wondered whether they would cross the line between depression and madness, too, one day, heightening the confidentiality of those letters.) (Tamussino's take on the "was Juana mad in the clinical sense or wasn't she?" is that she might not have been at first, but by the time Charles and Eleanor first saw her again as adults she was at the very least - and understandably so - emotionally unstable, that Charles deciding to keep her prisoner (which definitely killed any chances of recovery) wasn't just personal power hunger as much as the sincere conviction she was not capable of ruling (not out of general sexism - Charles had no problem installing female regents in various parts of his Empire, including Castile, which was ruled by his wife as regent and later by one of his legitimate daughters when son Philip was in England - but the specific idea that
Juana couldn't do it. This is of course debatable, but it's her take on the question. Mary of Hungary, btw, never met her mother again at all, since she only came to Spain for the first time after Charles' abdication, and said abdication happened five months after Juana's death. But it is worth noting that she and Charles were the two siblings prone to depression (not just "melancholy" but the kind of depression where you stay in bed for days staring at the wall) and the least easy going (as opposed to brother Ferdinand, who was supposed to have inherited their father's charm without their father's selfishness, and the mild mannered Eleanor and Isabella.
Lastly, one anecdote I was partially familiar with from when Henry VIII after Jane Seymour's death was looking for a new wife, and got a lot of rejections before Anne of Cleves. What I had known was that one of those rejections came from Christina of Denmark. ("If I had two heads to offer...") What I hadn't known was who this Christina was. She was Charles' and Mary's niece via their sister Isabella, Margaret of Austria's great niece. Isabella's husband, King Christian of Denmark, had been such a louse that his nobility had successfully driven him out of the country and into exile in the Netherlands. Where after Isabella's death Margaret successfully basically "bought" the guardianship of Isabella's kids from Christian the louse (who in addition to having been a bad King had also been a terrible husband of the "lives openly with his mistress, treats wife solely as breeding machine" type). After Margaret's death, it thus fell to Mary who succeeded her aunt as governess of the Netherlands at Charles' request. Charles and Mary clashed about marrying Christina to the Duke of Milan (Mary thought she was too young), but in the end the Duke turned out to have been a good guy, who didn't touch her in the two years they were married and generally behaved like a benevolent uncle, so Christina was still a 15 years old virgin when he died. And
then Henry VIIII. proposed. No one was impressed; not Christina, see above, not Mary, see my review of Gristwood's book for her take on his marital adventures in general, and not Charles. (Who thought Henry was useful against his arch nemesis Francis, but otherwise...)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
