THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LUCREZIA BORGIA (343 pp.)Mario Bellonc!Harcourt, Brace ($5).
Who was Lucrezia Borgia? To the incurable readers of melodrama and Sunday supplements, a woman of glowing and undimmed evil, literally the great femme fatale (usually poison) of the Italian Renaissance.* To modern historians, who have been quietly rehabilitating her, Lucrezia was a good deal less lurid but still deplorable: a woman who probably poisoned no soup herself but weakly watched the other Borgias doing such things.
Now comes a woman's brief for Lucrezia. Author Maria Bellonci's argument: Lucrezia was no...