First of all, as the header said, I've got a little guest comic over at Skepchick featuring Christina and one of the other great minds of the seventeenth century, Anna Maria van Schurman, along with a little essay about the strange meeting the two of them had in 1654, just after Christina's abdication. So, read that, many times, and bombard them with pleasant notes about your enjoyment of it so that they'll ask me back again!

As to this one, Christina burnt a large part of her post-abdication years chasing the dream of ruling Naples. She was to be basically the pawn of France in the endeavor, which was to work against the interests of Spain, but her steady bombarding of Mazarin with letters to make good on the scheme only made him doubt the wisdom of the idea more, and eventually, with peace between Spain and France, the need evaporated, and after that she turned her attention back for a while to Sweden, offering it some salient and entirely unsought advice before conceding that a private life might be best and settling down in Rome at last.

- Count Dolby von Luckner