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Happy Saturday.

This episode is coming out on the 380th birthday of Hortense Mancini, who was born on June 6, 1646.

She is one of the two Mancini sisters we talk about in today's Saturday classic.

This episode originally came out on November 14, 2022. Enjoy.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

Today, we are going to talk about a pair of sisters who, along with their other sisters and their cousins, get a lot of comparisons to whatever influencer slash media celebrity is making the most headlines at any given moment.

Like, over the past few years, I've seen a lot of people call them the 17th century

Kardashians.

They are Hortense and Marie Mancini, and they tried to make a place for themselves in the 17th century in Europe, really defying all kinds of conventions along the way.

We mentioned them extremely briefly, like just a couple of sentences.

Way back when we interviewed Jason Porath about his book and website rejected princesses in

2016. So they've had not even like a six impossible episodes level of exploration. It really is

just like a paragraph. A thing to note up front with this episode is that I love a lot of these two women's stories. There are

big chunks of their lives that are a really wild ride, and they sound full of adventure and

daring and writing memoirs and hosting salons and becoming the favorites of various monarchs.

But really a lot of this was also happening as they were trying to get away from their

husbands, both of whom were controlling and abusive and just frightening.

And this was all happening in an era when women just really didn't have the right to get a

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