The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman

And I say, with all the things that really happened, who needs to make stuff up?” Sometimes people ask me if I plan to write novels. “These were flesh and blood people, just like you and me, facing war and plague, falling in love, living among splendid art and gut-wrenching poverty. “History is so fascinating that it never has to be presented in a boring way,” she explains.

Herman offers a rare combination of skills for a historian – her research is intensely scholarly, yet she writes the story in a colorful, witty manner. Think royal palaces were beautiful places to live? Think again! New York Times best-seller Eleanor Herman's new non-fiction book, The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul, is set to come out in June 2018. The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes and the stench of unwashed bodies the lice feasting on private parts and worms nesting in the intestines. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications and filthy living conditions. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots.

To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. The story of poison is the story of power.įor centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy.

The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman