Enes de Castro, Passion Duplicity Death, uncovers the myth-shrouded life of a most remarkable woman from the 14th Century. The forbidden love story between Ines de Castro of Castile and Leon, and King Pedro I of Portugal, has inspired poems, plays, novels, ballets, ballads and operas. Their grand, enduring and tumultuous love involved years of duplicity and subterfuge, and has been documented by chroniclers and historians, embroidered upon by bards and fixed in popular mythology. However, Ines de Castro has come down through history as the meek, murdered victim of Pedro’s father, King Alfonso.
Finding 11 still legible pages of Ines’s diary set me on a quest, researching in ancient Portuguese and Spanish archives and in the castles, monasteries and medieval universities of Portugal and Spain. I found that Ines de Castro was anything but meek. She was a well-educated medieval woman, a skilled seductress and committed spy, and a complex and influential protagonist in the convoluted dynastic maneuverings between Portugal and Castile in the 14th Century.
This 84-page book is printed in letterpress, with 11 pages in Gothic script calligraphy, hand illustrated on Capellades paper produced the way paper was made when introduced into Europe by the Moors in 1150 in Xàtiva, Al-Andalus. Enes de Castro is presented in a handmade medieval pouch, contained in a box uniquely made to hold the veil that covered Ines when crowned queen after death, a lock of her hair and a copy of her crown.