We are not amused

Christina was the ruling queen of Sweden from 1644 to 1654. She was the daughter of the Lutheran warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus. It therefore created a major sensation when Christina resigned her position, left Sweden and converted to Catholicism! She is buried in Rome, in St. Peter's Basilica.

Since Christina was a well-educated person who founded several academies, reading her "Maxims" was a real disappointment. Most of the maxims are bland common-places. "We should always be on the side of truth and justice", "we should pay evil with good but without wronging justice" and "war makes all nations warlike" are but three examples. There is an undertone of Stoic resignation in many of the maxims, but never to the point of denying rulers their royal prerogatives. At one point, Christina even exclaims that the patience of Epictetus is equally unsupportable as the brutality of his master. The former queen also had an obvious admiration for Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus and Alexander the Great. Hardly Stoics!

Occasionally, Christina does manage to say something interesting, as when she praises the Turks for abstaining from alcohol or permitting freedom of worship, or when she expresses sympathy for animals. She also points out: "All religions would be holy, if those that were dissatisfied with them were at liberty to leave them. No doubt few would remain, but these few would be holy according to their own rules". There are also maxims attacking hypocritical priests. However, the text also contains fanaticized and almost irrational panegyrics to the Catholic Church, so much that the Protestant editor of this particular edition suspected a forgery of some kind!

The other text by Christina included in this book, "Reflections on the life and actions of Alexander the Great", is an unfinished piece of praise to a person who was obviously one of the queen's personal heroes. This text, too, is quite uninteresting.

This particular edition is a reprint of a 1753 British translation of the French original. It's quite hard to read, due to the unusual fonts. The letter "s" looks like "f", so brace yourself for sentences such as this: "Human frailty is unable to fupport fuch a ftate, we return to our miferies and fuffer them, for fo God willeth". Another problem is that the book lacks a modern introduction. It would be good to know what exactly Christina meant by "merit" and "fortune", two notions central to many of her maxims, or what she meant by "bigots".

Queen Christina may have been a fascinating person, but at least these texts don't show her from her best side...