A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire
Amy Butler Greenfield, 2005
HarperCollins
352
ISBN-13: 9780060522766
Summary
In the sixteenth century, one of the world's most precious commodities was cochineal, a legendary red dye treasured by the ancient Mexicans and sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors.
Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune.
As the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans joined the chase for cochineal—a chase that lasted for more than three centuries—a tale of pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies unfolds.
A Perfect Red evokes with style and verve this history of a grand obsession, of intrigue, empire, and adventure in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969
• Raised—Adirondack Mountains of New York State, USA
• Education—B.A., Williams College; graduate studies, University of Wisconsin and Oxford
• Awards—PEN/Albrand Award, Veolia Prix du Livre Environnement, Beacon of Freedom Award
• Currently—lives in the English Cotswolds, UK
Amy Butler Greenfield was on her way to a history Ph.D. when she changed course to became a writer. She has written four young adult novels, including Virginia Bound (2003) and the Chantress trilogy (2013-2015). She has also written a work of historical nonfiction entitled A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (2005).
Amy grew up in a small town the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. Her family lived in a old Victorian house heated mainly by a wood stove in the kitchen. They raised chickens in the barns off the backyard. Of her childhood, Amy recalls roaming with her friends through the mountains, swimming in nearby lakes in the summer, and skating on them in the winter.
I also spent many afternoons reading my heart out in our local Carnegie library. In the summer I wrote plays, and my brothers and friends performed them in a theater we rigged up in one of the barns. I also wrote stories and poems, and I was a passionate diary-keeper. I've loved books and writing as long as I can remember.
In addition to literature, Amy fell in love with history and decided she wanted to teach at the college level. She headed to Williams College for her B.A. and later to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her Ph.D. She also became a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University where she studied Renaissance Europe, imperial Spain, and colonial Latin America.
A few months into her doctoral dissertation, Amy developed Lupus, which led to the revelation that she wanted devote her life to pursuing a long-deferred dream. So rather than complete her Ph.D., she turned to writing novels and "the sweeping histories" she had come to love.
Amy's first two books grew out of research while studying at Oxford. Virginia Bound was inspired by historical accounts she read of young English people who were essentially kidnapped and sent to the new world as indentured servants. Were they lonely? she wondered. Did they yearn for home and family? What happened to them?
Then, while in Spain researching the history of chocolate, a product introduced to Europe from the West Indies, Amy came across documents about another kind of product entirely—the red die that came from the cochineal, a tiny cactus parasite found in Mexico.
Gradually I realized that tons of cochineal had crossed the Atlantic and poured into Seville, where the dark red dye was unloaded on the city docks. I have a visual imagination, and I love color, so this fascinated me. It also amazed me that something so precious could have been forgotten by the modern world. I thought that someday I'd like to write a book about it.
More remarkably, the love of color and textile dyes is part of Amy's heritage. Her Scottish great-grandfather came to the U.S. where he studied dyes and worked in textiles. Eventually, he joined the faculty of Drexel University in Philadelphia as a professor of textile chemistry. His son, Amy's grandfather, worked for dye companies and married a woman who owned a yarn shop. Amy's mother also studied textiles and married a man who worked in physics and chemistry. Out of what would seem a genetic attraction to color came Amy's 2005 history, A Perfect Red.
Amy met her husband David while studying at Oxford. After living for a number of years outside of Boston, Massachusetts, the couple and their children now live on the edge of the Cotswolds in England. There Amy writes, reads, and bakes double-dark-chocolate cake.
She loves music, romantic adventure, history, quirky science, and suspense, which explains how she came to write her first YA novel, Chantress. (Author bio adapted from various web-based sources, including the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[An] intricate history.... Greenfield paints a broad historical panorama, never neglecting the intimate, eccentric, and often absurd human details.
Boston Globe
Greenfield does what the best historical authors do—follows the thread of a story through history without missing a stitch.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
With A Perfect Red, she does for [red] what Mark Kurlansky in Salt did for that common commodity.
Houston Chronicle
A gem of accessible history.
San Diego Union-Tribune
Delightful, rollicking history.... A fun read, well-supported by extensive research.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Elusive, expensive and invested with powerful symbolism, red cloth became the prize possession of the wealthy and well-born, Greenfield writes in her intricate, fully researched and stylishly written history of Europe's centuries-long clamor for cochineal.
Publishers Weekly
Pirates! Kings! Beautiful ladies! Daring spies! Elements essential for a page-turning action/adventure thriller, yes, but who would think they'd turn up in a scholarly examination of a little-known substance called cochinea?... [E]minently entertaining and educational. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
Greenfield...brings a practitioner's knowledge to her study of cochineal, a dyestuff that the Spanish conquerors discovered in the great marketplaces of Mexico and soon brought to a world hungry for things red.... A smart blend of science and culture.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why did attitudes toward dyers begin to change in Europe in the thirteenth century, and in what ways did that shift reflect the changing social organization of dyers at the time?
2. How did the shades of red worn by Renaissance Europeans serve as markers of class, and what do these divisions reveal about the general appetite for the color red in this era?
3. How would you describe the process by which female cochineal insects produce the "perfect red"?
4. What role did the Spanish conquistadors of the New World, led by Hernán Cortés, play in the introduction of cochineal to Europe?
5. Which group do you think was more responsible for the popularization of cochineal -- Renaissance Europeans or indigenous Mexicans, and why?
6. What do Spain's efforts to preserve its global monopoly over cochineal suggest about the significance of cochineal to its economy and its national pride?
7. How do historical figures as diverse as the poet, John Donne; the English pirate, Francis Drake; the French explorer, Samuel de Champlain; the Dutch inventor of the microscope, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte factor in the history of cochineal and the European fascination with the mystery of its origin?
8. To what extent was the 19th-century cultivation of cochineal in Spain seen by the Spaniards as a way of salvaging some of the wreckage of their vast empire?
9. How did the advent of synthetic dyes and chemical production of color affect producers of cochineal around the world?
10. How have politics and class influenced the status of the color red in contemporary times?(Questions issued by the publisher.)