Word: simonal
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...Dole (R.-Kan.) declared yesterday that his Republican presidential campaign is not over, despite indications of a big Illinois victory for Vice President George Bush, but Sen. Paul Simon (D.-Ill.) admitted, "I have no plans beyond tomorrow"--and the home-state primary he needs...
Even earlier, the lives of Mantua's rich and famous had grown so excessive that Cardinal Ercole, a Gonzaga, ordered controls. "His new rules," writes Simon, "called for severe restrictions in the consumption of peacocks, pheasants, and other game birds; only two kinds of roast and poultry were to be served at one time; no fish or oysters were to be offered with meats; dishes were not to be ornamented with figurines, fine inlays, bits of gold, as was the court custom." Women were limited to wearing "only one conspicuous gem" at a time...
...crackdown failed. Life was literally too short to skimp on pleasure and display. Untreatable diseases made 50 years an advanced age. The slow plague of syphilis is one of the smoldering subtexts of Simon's brimming narrative. Prostitutes gave the contagion to their customers, who passed it on to their wives. If women were not rendered barren by the bacterium, there were always the risks of childbirth and puerperal fever. Women were meant to provide heirs and cement profitable agreements through wedlock...
...autobiography, Simon recalls her father's efforts to thwart her own intellectual curiosity. Here she writes with scarcely disguised bitterness of one promising Gonzaga daughter: "Her impressive knowledge of Virgil, every line, didn't matter, nor did her command of Greek, and so what if she could explain the propositions of Euclid? Her vocation was marriage...
...poet Vittoria Colonna, the medical experimenter Caterina Sforza and Renee of France, who married into the court of Ferrara and founded a distinguished academy there, appear to have been the equal of their male counterparts in everything but the arts of war. But, as the determined faces in Simon's glittering tapestry suggest, many important victories were won in alcoves and bedrooms...