Letters (Volume 100) (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series) 1649590857, 9781649590855

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Andreini’s Lettere (1607) is a long-awaited resource for English readers and scholars of Renaissance and early modern studies. This monumental volume showcases De Santo and Mongiat Farina’s strong translation skills, as well as their deep knowledge of Andreini’s work and the rich trove of classical and Renaissance sources from which she drew her copious allusions. Their erudite notes contextualize the letters well for the modern reader. On the whole, the volume provides an eminently readable and enjoyable translation of this work

ISABELLA ANDREINI

Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina’s critical edition and translation of Isabella

Isabella Andreini

Letters EDIT ED AND T RANS LAT ED B Y

Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina

that found enduring fame in Italy and abroad during the seventeenth century. Julie D. Campbell Professor of English, Eastern Illinois University

The Letters of the commedia dell’arte diva Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) is a collection of epistles in fictional, anonymous, male and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender hitherto exceptional in letter writing. In her Letters Andreini reinvents the humanistic of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreini’s modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love, reminiscent of innamorati voices, and examines — from surprising perspectives — perti-

Letters

epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise

nent issues including death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes. Paola De Santo is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia. In her current book project, she examines the formation of cultural subjects in Renaissance Italy at the intersection of political and literary discourse by focusing on the ambassador and the courtesan. Caterina Mongiat Farina is Associate Professor of Italian at DePaul University. She is the author of Questione di lingua: L’ideologia del dibattito sull’italiano nel Cinquecento (Longo 2014) and the translator with Geoff Farina of Umberto Eco’s classic manual How to Write a Thesis (MIT 2015).

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The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 100 2023-07-24 9:47 AM

LETTERS

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 100

FOUNDING EDITORS

Margaret L. King Albert Rabil, Jr. SENIOR EDITOR

Margaret L. King SERIES EDITORS

Vanda Anastácio Jaime Goodrich Elizabeth H. Hageman Sarah E. Owens Deanna Shemek Colette H. Winn EDITORIAL BOARD

Anne Cruz Margaret Ezell Anne Larsen Elissa Weaver

ISABELLA ANDREINI

Letters •

Edited and translated by PAOLA DE SANTO and CATERINA MONGIAT FARINA

2023

© Iter Inc. 2023 New York and Toronto IterPress.org All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

978-1-64959-085-5 (paper) 978-1-64959-086-2 (pdf) 978-1-64959-087-9 (epub)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Andreini, Isabella, 1562-1604, author. | De Santo, Paola, editor, translator. | Mongiat Farina, Caterina, editor, translator. Title: Letters / Isabella Andreini ; edited and translated by Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina. Other titles: Lettere d’Isabella Andreini, Padovana, comica gelosa, et academica intenta. English Description: New York : Iter Press, 2023. | Series: The other voice in early modern Europe: the Toronto series ; 100 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An edition in English translation of the fictional Letters of sixteenth-century performer and author Isabella Andreini”-Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023012365 (print) | LCCN 2023012366 (ebook) | ISBN 9781649590855 (paperback) | ISBN 9781649590862 (pdf) | ISBN 9781649590879 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Andreini, Isabella, 1562-1604--Translations into English. | LCGFT: Epistolary fiction. Classification: LCC PQ4562.A72 L4813 2023 (print) | LCC PQ4562.A72 (ebook) | DDC 853/.5--dc23/ eng/20230526 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012365 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012366

Cover Illustration Anonymous etching, Isabella Andreini Comica Gelosa. Biblioteca Museo Teatrale SIAE, Rome.

Cover Design Maureen Morin, Library Communications, University of Toronto Libraries.

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Illustrations

ix

Introduction The Other Voice Life, Works, and Authorship Isabella Andreini and Women’s Writing in Early Modern Italy The Question of Genre: Pushing the Boundaries of the Letterbook Summary and Analysis of the Letters Love as the Beginning, Middle, and End of the Letters A Discordant Harmony: Paired and Thematically Grouped Letters The Actress as Writer: Thematic and Stylistic Aspects of the Letters Rhetoric and the questione della donna in the Letters Reception and Afterlife Translators’ Note

1 1 2 9 19 26 26 28 32 36 43 57

Letters of Isabella Andreini Permission Dedicatory Letter Encomiastic Verses and Anagrams Table of All the Letters Contained in the Work Letters

61 63 65 69 81 87

Appendix Comparative Table of the Letters’ Summaries: 1607 Edition and This Edition Gender Designations of Letter Writers and Recipients

277

Bibliography

293

Index

313

277 283

Acknowledgments This volume is a result of several years of collaborative work. First and foremost, we are grateful to Margaret King, whose unwavering support at every stage of the project has been vital for its completion. Our interpretation of Andreini’s Lettere was honed over a number of presentations at the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America, the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, and the Northeast Modern Language Association. We thank all the scholars in attendance for their nuanced and provocative questions and comments, as well as the organizers and chairs of the panels, including Anne R. Larsen, Konrad Eisenbichler, Elena Brizio, Simona Wright, Emanuela Pecchioli, Lucia Gemmani, Julie Campbell, and Sara Díaz. We also thank Marco Arnaudo and Massimo Scalabrini (Indiana University Bloomington) and Alexandra Coller and Amin Erfani (Lehman College, CUNY) for inviting us to reflect on our translation of Isabella’s Lettere at the beginning and toward the end of our work. Allen Grieco, Paola Ugolini, Francesco Ciabattoni, Susan Weiss, and Lucia Marchi helped us with questions on the worlds of Renaissance food, courtiership, and music and Elena Bianchelli generously reviewed our translations of the Latin encomiastic verses and anagrams. We are most grateful for their time and insights. We are indebted to the peer reviewer, the editorial board and its reader at Iter, and our outstanding copyeditor Cheryl Lemmens for their painstaking review of our work. Their comments and suggestions have been invaluable in helping us refine our translation and deepen our interrogation of the text and its sources. Any residual errors are, of course, our own. We also acknowledge the expert assistance of Margaret English-Haskin, Project Manager at Iter. We owe a debt of gratitude to Julie Campbell, Pamela Brown, and Eric Nicholson for sharing with us the proofs of their translation of Fragmenti; finding Isabella’s voice in their English version after searching for it ourselves has been thoroughly engaging and inspiring. Additionally, we are grateful to them for inviting us to collectively reflect on the translation of Andreini’s Lovers’ Debates and Letters at the conference Attending to Women, 1100–1800: Performance. We thank the conference organizing committee and Lia Markey, Christopher Fletcher, and Rebecca Fall at the Newberry Library for arranging the roundtable and performance; Peter Garino and the actors of the Shakespeare Project of Chicago for bringing Andreini’s voice in English from the page to the stage, and the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago for hosting the event. Paola De Santo would also like to thank the students at the University of Georgia who attended her course on Italian Women Writers. Their enthusiastic reading and discussion of both Isabella’s Lettere and our translation truly brought the work to life. vii

viii Acknowledgments The publication of this volume was supported by several generous grants and awards from our respective institutions. We thank the University Research Council at DePaul University and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, as well as the Nina Salant Hellerstein Professional Development Fund at the University of Georgia. We also acknowledge the Newberry Library for providing the images reproduced in this volume and the Biblioteca Museo Teatrale SIAE in Rome for granting us permission to reproduce the beautiful illustration that graces the cover. We would like to dedicate the volume to Emilio who arrived at the very beginning of the project, to Paola’s beloved father whom she lost during it, and to Alberto and Geoff who have been by our side all throughout.

Illustrations Cover.

Anonymous etching, Isabella Andreini Comica Gelosa. Biblioteca Museo Teatrale SIAE, Rome.

Figure 1.

Title page from Lettere d’Isabella Andreini . . ., Marc’Antonio Zaltieri, Venice, 1607. Newberry Library, Chicago.

60

Figure 2.

Raphael Sadeler, Isabella Andreini Padovana Comica Gelosa, 1602, engraving from Lettere d’Isabella Andreini . . ., Marc’Antonio Zaltieri, Venice, 1607. Newberry Library, Chicago.

86

ix

Introduction The Other Voice Erudition, formidable acting skills, and a shifting performance of gender brought Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) to “diva” stature in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Europe. The publication of her pastoral drama Mirtilla (1588) and Rime (1601) established her literary prowess and proto-feminist voice, which equally stunned, inspired, and challenged her audiences. After the untimely death of the commedia dell’arte actress, two additional texts were compiled and published by her husband Francesco as a labor of love that both contributed to and capitalized on Isabella’s fame: her epistolary collection, Lettere (1607), and dialogic scenes, Fragmenti (1617). Collectively, these texts eternalize Isabella’s “other voice,” a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The sui generis nature of the Letters, a collection of 151 fictional epistles written in anonymous male and female voices, complicates our understanding of the humanistic genre of letter writing. Isabella engages with the epistolary tradition by mixing Petrarchan tropes and Neoplatonic themes, particularly learned discourses of love, with dialectical reasoning; at the same time, she calls the tradition into question while displaying her literary mastery. Her “letters” lack dates, places, recipients, and signatures, thus evoking a space of performance rather than one of private correspondence, whose guise of intimacy makes way for a knowing artificiality in Isabella’s hand. The role, form, and potential of the epistolary format is itself also evoked throughout the collection. By calling attention to the asynchronous exchange of written meditations on a variety of themes, Isabella enriches and promotes her dramatic performances. And the written record offers a more permanent presence that goes beyond the ephemeral environment of the stage by offering a vehicle through which to cultivate an enduring public persona. In addition to meditating from differing vantage points on the subject of love, often in voices reminiscent of innamorati, Isabella’s Letters tackle a range of themes and offer commentaries—from often surprising perspectives—on pertinent issues such as the death of a loved one, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, successful courtiership, life in the country and the city, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes. This thematic plurality is made possible by a “hermaphroditic” voice, since that term emphasizes the quality of being both male and female, masculine and feminine—an alternation of gendered voices that was exceptional in letter writing before Isabella’s time. This performance of gender by Isabella in various roles goes beyond novelty, as her rhetorical finesse comes to the fore and she engages with the questione della donna in an indirect and unique fashion. Just as the actress 1

2 Introduction shifts roles and performs under the surfaces of her many masks, so in the Letters the author herself is difficult to identify on the page. Isabella is both absent and present in these unsigned letters; her self-presentation competes with an enactment of multiple personae. As performance space and self-revelation are blurred in the Letters, she offers a shrewd and modern critique of the gendered self, both personal and authorial, as a uniform entity.

Life, Works, and Authorship Daughter of the Venetian Paolo Canali, Isabella Andreini was born in 1562 in Padua. Very little is known about her pre-professional life, since there do not appear to be any surviving documents.1 Her writing career begins with the pastoral drama Mirtilla (1588), dedicated to Donna Lavinia della Rovere, marchesa del Vasto.2 Immediately popular, Mirtilla is especially notable for its portrait of female friendship and creative talent as well as a seminal satyr-scene in which the nymph Filli escapes rape and mocks her assailant by neutralizing his physical strength with her clever dissimulation.3 Andreini then published a collection of Rime (Milan 1601, Paris 1603, Milan 1605) inspired by the same masters who had praised her acting skills: Torquato Tasso, Gabriello Chiabrera, and Giambattista Marino.4 Legendarily, when Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, the dedicatee of Andreini’s Rime, hosted in his house in Rome a poetic battle (tenzone poetica), Andreini lost only to Tasso. Her madrigals, sonnets, scherzi, and canzonette

1. Valeria Finucci suggests that documents may “have been destroyed on purpose, a choice perhaps made in order to project the image for which Andreini became widely known and respected in Italy and abroad: that of the chaste wife and of the riveting performer.” See Finucci’s Introduction to Mirtilla, A Pastoral: A Bilingual Edition, by Isabella Andreini, ed. Valeria Finucci, trans. Julia Kisacky (Toronto: Iter Press; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018), 3. 2. Isabella Andreini, Mirtilla. Pastorale d’Isabella Andreini, comica gelosa (Verona: Girolamo Discepolo, 1588). See also the modern edition of her pastoral play, La Mirtilla, ed. Maria Luisa Doglio (Pisa: Pacini Fazzi, 1995), and two English translations: La Mirtilla: A Pastoral, ed. and trans. Julie D. Campbell (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), and Mirtilla, A Pastoral: A Bilingual Edition (2018), cited in note 1. 3. Virginia Cox, “Arcadian Adventures: Women Writers and Pastoral Drama,” in The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 100 and 110, and Alexandra Coller, “Women Writers and the Canon: Satyr Scenes and Female-Authored Pastoral Drama,” in Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 133–73. 4. Isabella Andreini, Rime d’Isabella Andreini Padovana, comica gelosa (Milan: Girolamo Bordone e Pietromartire Locarni, 1601). See also the modern edition of her poetry, Rime, ed. Nunzia Soglia (Salerno: Edisud, 2015), and an English translation, Selected Poems of Isabella Andreini, ed. Anne MacNeil, trans. James Wyatt Cook (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005).

Introduction 3 granted her membership in the Accademia degli Intenti as l’Accesa (“the burning one”).5 Secondary evidence suggests that she was also writing an epic.6 Her Lettere (Venice 1607) and Fragmenti d’alcune scritture (Venice 1617, originally entitled Ragionamenti) were published posthumously by her husband Francesco Andreini (ca. 1548–1624).7 They had married in 1578 and together developed an extraordinarily successful acting career through the Compagnia de’ Gelosi. Famed in both Italy and France, Andreini counted among her admirers Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, and Carlo Emanuele I, duke of Savoy, as well as Henri IV of France and his queen, Marie de’ Medici. Andreini captivated her audiences with indelible performances such as La pazzia di Isabella (“the madness of Isabella”), staged in Florence on May 13, 1589, for the marriage of Ferdinando I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, to Christina of Lorraine. Giuseppe Pavoni chronicled her exploit: the character of Isabella goes mad when she realizes she has been abducted by an impostor and has lost her true love; she wanders through the streets speaking Spanish, Greek, Italian, and French “without rhyme or reason,” singing songs “in the style of the French,” and imitating the languages of all the other commedia dell’arte characters, ultimately leaving Pavoni and the rest of the audience speechless.8 5. Andreini’s membership in a literary academy is notable: women members of sixteenth-century literary academies were few and far between. As an example, Conor Fahy lists the following: “Veronica Gambara (Sonacchiosi of Bologna), Laura Terracina (Incogniti of Naples), Tarquinia Molza (Innominati of Parma), Isabella Andreini (Intenti of Pavia), Eleonora di Toledo, niece of the wife of Cosimo I (Alterati of Florence).” See Fahy, “Women and Italian Cinquecento Literary Academies,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 444. This list has been expanded by Virginia Cox, “Members, Muses, Mascots: Women and Italian Academies,” in The Italian Academies, 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation, and Dissent, ed. Jane E. Everson, Dennis V. Reidy, and Lisa Sampson (Cambridge and Abingdon, UK: Legenda, 2016), 132–69. On the relationship between professional actors and actresses and academies see also Lisa Sampson, “Amateurs Meet Professionals: Theatrical Activities in Late Sixteenth-Century Italian Academies,” in The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Traditions, Texts and Performance, ed. T. F. Earle and Catarina Fouto (London: Legenda, 2015), 187–218, and Serena Laiena, “Meretrices Ergo Dive: Academic Encomia and the Metamorphosis of Early Modern Actresses,” The Italianist 41, no. 1 (2021): 23–40. 6. See Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 164 and 339n1. 7. It is unclear whether “Andreini” was Francesco’s real or professional name: “Eighteenth-century biographical encyclopedias made Francesco a member of the Cerrachi family of Pistoia (later called Dal Gallo), although the name Francesco gave his father in notarial records was Antonio Andreini.” Sarah Gwyneth Ross, “Performing Humanism: The Andreini Family and the Republic of Letters in Counter-Reformation Italy,” in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 1:142. 8. Giuseppe Pavoni, Diario descritto . . . delle feste celebrate nelle solennissime nozze delli serenissimi sposi, il sig. Don Ferdinando Medici e la sig. Donna Christina di Loreno Gran Duchi di Toscana (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi, 1589), cited by Cristina Grazioli, “La vita, l’arte, il mito: Un’introduzione alla figura di Isabella Canali Andreini,” in Isabella Andreini: Una letterata in scena, ed. Carlo Manfio (Padua: Il

4 Introduction Andreini died in Lyons in 1604—during her eighth pregnancy and likely due to a miscarriage—while returning to Italy with the Gelosi troupe, which disbanded shortly afterward. Giovan Battista Andreini, Isabella and Francesco’s eldest son and a prominent member of the Gelosi with the stage name of Lelio, had already founded his own Compagnia dei Fedeli; with his wife, actress Virginia Ramponi (Florinda), Giovan Battista carried on his parents’ legacy by becoming one of the leading seventeenth-century European dramatists.9 He memorialized his mother Isabella with the poem Il pianto di Apollo (Milan 1606).10 A solemn funeral lit by torches was arranged, and a medal was struck to memorialize Isabella, with her image on one side and Fama, the personification of fame, on the other—a fitting choice for a renowned actress who was keenly aware of the threat rumors posed to a woman’s reputation.11 Scholars have noted that while Francesco’s fame is linked to the maschera of Capitan Spavento da Valle Inferna, a sort of miles gloriosus of his own invention, Isabella becomes her own mask as she performs the leading role of the young lover, the prima amorosa or prima innamorata, a well-born, fashionable, and refined young lady.12 At a time when women could not yet pursue an acting career Poligrafo, 2014), 13. Isabella’s pazzia had a lasting influence on eighteenth-century opere buffe, which often featured a mad scene that allowed the prima buffa to exhibit her virtuosity, including her ability to imitate multiple languages; see Gianni Cicali, “Le tante pazzie di Isabella: La prima buffa,” in Attori e ruoli nell’opera buffa italiana del Settecento (Florence: Le Lettere, 2005), 141–44. 9. For an introduction to Virginia Ramponi see Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Emily Wilbourne, “ ‘Isabella ringiovinita’: Virginia Ramponi Andreini before Arianna,” Recercare 19 (2007): 47–71; and Emily Wilbourne, “ ‘Ma meglio di tutti Arianna comediante,’ ” chap. 2 in Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 51–91. On Giovan Battista Andreini see Maurizio Rebaudengo, Giovan Battista Andreini tra poetica e drammaturgia (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994); Fabrizio Fiaschini, L’“incessabil agitazione”: Giovan Battista Andreini tra professione teatrale, cultura letteraria e religione (Pisa: Giardini editori e stampatori, 2007); and Vittorio Tranquilli, La regola e la trasgressione: Dalla commedia dell’arte al Don Giovanni attraverso Giovan Battista Andreini (Rome: Aracne, 2010). 10. Giovan Battista also recognizes her in La Saggia Egiziana (1604), Teatro celeste (1625), and La Ferza (1625); see Grazioli, “La vita, l’arte, il mito,” 19. As Jon R. Snyder notes: “Isabella was only fourteen years old when Giovan Battista was born, and her career as an actress and writer lay almost entirely in front of her. Although her son was eventually sent to study in Bologna, a profound and lasting bond formed between a young mother and son extremely close in age.” See Snyder’s introduction to Giovan Battista Andreini, Love in the Mirror: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Jon R. Snyder (Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009), 2. Isabella would marry Francesco two years later. On Isabella and Francesco’s other children see the Introduction to Isabella Andreini, Lovers’ Debates for the Stage: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Pamela Allen Brown, Julie D. Campbell, and Eric Nicholson (New York and Toronto: Iter Press, 2022), 8n20. 11. See Letter 1, “The Worth of Honor,” in this volume. 12. On the innamorata and the Gelosi, see Cesare Molinari, La commedia dell’arte (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 26 and 113–22; on the stage costume and iconography of the innamorata, see also M. A.

Introduction 5 without raising suspicion of less than honorable conduct, Andreini projects “an image of actress as noblewoman, mother, wife, and poet.”13 As she performed and articulated both male and female roles on stage and on the page, Andreini was challenged to create “a hermaphroditic persona credible within both masculine and feminine authoritative spheres.”14 Andreini’s rhetoric of modesty only accentuated by contrast the erudition she displayed. Her success can be measured by her decorous and learned correspondence with the Dutch accademico intento Erycius Puteanus (1574–1646), who admired Andreini’s poetry and repeatedly praised the outstanding “masculine” quality of Andreini’s writing.15 As Sarah Gwyneth Ross notes, he “treated Andreini as a colleague, not a student. He respected her as an academician and greeted her in his first letter just as he would a male colleague: ‘Isabellae Andreinae Academicae Intentae’ (To Isabella Andreina, member of the Accademia degli Intenti [Pavia]).”16 Puteanus was by no means the only male intellectual interlocutor and admirer of Andreini. The Letters are preceded by twelve male-authored encomiastic and elegiac poems dedicated to her, the first of which is an unsigned panegyric to Isabella penned by Puteanus; her fellow academicians composed many of the other encomia, as did literary luminaries Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino, whose sonnets of praise were prominently displayed as part of this poetic requiem.17 These encomia, in addition to Andreini’s correspondence with Puteanus, centered on intellectual matters and demonstrate her avid participation in the humanistic Republic of Letters, which likely served both as part of the actress’s strategy of legitimization and as a genuine practice of intellectual refinement. By approaching acting and writing as an organic performance, Andreini built a reputation for authenticity on stage and on the page that gained her the status of a diva.18 Ironically, she bolstered her credibility by denouncing her own work as fiction or craft. The introductory sonnet of her Rime beautifully likens her Katritzky, The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 205–9. 13. “[L]’immagine di un’attrice nobildonna, madre, moglie e poetessa.” See Ferdinando Taviani, “Bella d’Asia: Torquato Tasso, gli attori e l’immortalità,” Paragone letteratura 35 (1984): 5. 14. MacNeil, Music and Women, 89. 15. “As Boccaccio had done in lauding the virile spirit of his female patron, Andrea Acciaioli, so too Puteanus gives the name ‘Andreini’ the false Greek etymology of andros (genitive, ‘of man’).” See Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 216. 16. Ross, Birth of Feminism, 216. 17. See the Translators’ Note for a further discussion of these encomia. 18. Rosalind Kerr has untangled the complex knot of texts, people, and practices involved in the “making of a diva.” See her “Isabella Andreini: The Making of a Diva,” in The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 102–46 (this chapter hereafter cited as “The Making of a Diva”).

6 Introduction poems to her performances of “feigned ardors,” “acting imagined loves with insincere affects and feigned, lying words, [. . .] weeping my false sorrows, sometimes singing my false delights, [. . .] acting now women, now men, I showed in varied style all that nature and art can teach.”19 Andreini’s variation in expressing the fictional nature of the sentiments she recounts and performs shows her predilection for the mannerist trait of peregrinità, refined elegance, rare and precious style, and original and eccentric content—a display of the writer’s tools in which style is indistinguishable from content. In the same lines, as Alexia Ferracuti notes, Andreini pursues and challenges mimesis, articulates gender difference, and unveils it as a social construction through the range of her performances.20 The dedication of Letters to Carlo Emanuele I, duke of Savoy, a patron of Isabella and Francesco before their last acting tour with the Gelosi in France in 1603,21 uniquely exemplifies Isabella’s legacy of a hermaphroditic voice and an unveiling of fiction: the letter is written in her voice and is signed “Your Most Serene Highness’s most humble and devoted servant, Isabella Andreini,” but it is dated “Venice, March 14, 1607,” three years after her death on June 11, 1604. As previously noted, Letters was assembled and/or edited, as well as published posthumously, by Isabella’s husband, Francesco Andreini. The absence of an extant manuscript renders it difficult to disentangle his contributions and modifications from those of Isabella herself, a task compounded by Francesco’s deliberate attempt to blur that distinction within the text. Critical opinion of the dedicatory letter’s date has ranged from a description of it as a “mundane” discrepancy (Isabella may have in fact composed the letter before her death, and Francesco simply dated it to coincide with the text’s publication),22 to more provocative speculation (Francesco wrote the letter, using Isabella’s signature and the letter’s posthumous date to give the illusion that she speaks from beyond the grave as a death-defying divinity).23 Daria Perocco, for instance, leans toward 19. Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 174. 20. Alexia Ferracuti, “Reflections of Isabella: Hermaphroditic Mirroring in Mirtilla and Giovan Battista Andreini’s Amor nello specchio,” California Italian Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 128–30, . 21. Siro Ferrone, La Commedia dell’Arte: Attrici e attori italiani in Europa (XVI–XVIII secolo) (Turin: Einaudi, 2014), 263. 22. Richard Andrews, “Isabella Andreini’s Stage Repertoire: The ‘Lettere’ and ‘Fragmenti,’ ” in The Tradition of the Actor-Author in Italian Theatre, ed. Donatella Fischer (London: Legenda, 2013), 31. 23. Kerr, “The Making of a Diva,” in Rise of the Diva, 132. In addition to the well-established construction of Isabella’s celebrity status and “superhuman persona” (Kerr, “The Making of a Diva,” in Rise of the Diva, 102) during her lifetime, also bolstering this latter interpretation is a passage from the letter itself that directly references Isabella’s desire to attain “a very long, if not eternal, life” (“se non perpetua, almeno lunghissima vita”) through the dissemination of her writings. Ferdinando Taviani also interprets the fabricated date as Francesco’s clever way to signal his authorship of the dedicatory letter

Introduction 7 attributing the dedicatory letter to Francesco, primarily on the basis of its rhetorical parallels with two other dedicatory letters signed by him—the dedication of his Le Bravure di Capitano Spavento to Amedeo of Savoy (“All’illustrissimo e eccellentissimo signore, il signor don Amedeo di Savoia”) and his address to the readers (“Ai benigni lettori”) of Isabella’s Fragmenti.24 Yet numerous rhetorical similarities while hinting at Isabella’s immortality (Taviani, “Bella d’Asia,” 11–12). Richard Andrews, however, objects that Francesco might have obtained this effect simply by changing the date to that of an already existing letter drafted by Isabella (Andrews, “Isabella Andreini’s Stage Repertoire,” 39n8). 24. See Daria Perocco, “Donna/uomo, attrice/scrittrice, Isabella/Francesco: Metamorfosi della scrittura di Isabella Andreini,” in Instabilità e metamorfosi dei generi nella letteratura barocca: Atti del convegno di studi, Genova, Auditorium di Palazzo Rosso, 5–6–7 ottobre 2006, ed. Simona Morando (Venice: Marsilio, 2007), 88–91. In her penetrating analysis, Perocco includes three additional reasons that are intriguing to debate. First, there is Francesco’s clarification in the letter to Amedeo of Savoy that “This work that I bring You is mine alone” (“Questa fatica, che io le arreco, è da me solo inventata”), which, according to Perocco, implies that Francesco had contributed to Isabella’s work. It is also possible that Francesco might have simply wished to claim full authorship of his Bravure, since, given Isabella’s fame and previously published books, audiences might have assumed her input in Bravure, Francesco’s first publication (the first part of Francesco’s Bravure was published in Venice in 1607; the second part was published in Venice in 1618, and the entire set of dialogues was reprinted in Venice in 1624). Second, there is Francesco’s statement in the dedicatory letter to Amedeo of Savoy that “it was the desire of my wife Isabella (of blessed memory) to dedicate the collection of her beautiful Letters’ to Your Brother, His Most Serene Highness the Duke [Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy]” (“l’animo di Isabella mia moglie (buona memoria) era di dedicare il Compendio delle sue bellissime Lettere all’Altezza Serenissima del Signor Duca suo fratello”), which Perocco interprets as Francesco’s revelation that death prevented Isabella from actually doing it and that he fulfilled her wishes. It is also possible that Francesco was stating that his dedication of Bravure was inspired by Isabella’s previous choice. Indeed, Francesco’s dedication of Bravure to Amedeo, the firstborn but illegitimate son of the former duke Emanuele Filiberto and Lucrezia Proba, seems an appropriate and shrewd homage to an important member of the House of Savoy only when considered in tandem with Isabella’s previous dedication to Carlo Emanuele, the only child of Emanuele Filiberto and his wife, Margherita de Valois. On Amedeo’s stature within the House of Savoy see Robert Oresko, “Bastards as Clients: The House of Savoy and its Illegitimate Children,” in Patronages et Clientélismes 1550–1750 (France, Angleterre, Espagne, Italie), ed. Roger Mettam and Charles Giry-Deloison (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Publications de l’Institut de recherches historiques du Septentrion, 1995), 39–67, . Third, Perocco points to a passage in the dedication of the Letters: “By the goodness of our Highest Maker I was destined to become citizen of the world, and this desire for knowledge is by chance more ardent in me than in many other women of our time, who, even after discovering that a great many women have become famous and immortal through their studies, nevertheless only wish to tend to the needle, the distaff, and the spinning wheel (with due respect to those women who have their minds set to loftier and more glorious matters)” (“or essend’io stata dalla bontà del Sommo Fattore mandata ad esser cittadina del mondo, e essendo per avventura questo desiderio di sapere nato in me più ardente che in molt’altre donne dell’età nostra, le quali come che scuoprano in virtù degli studi molte e molte esser divenute celebri e immortali, nondimeno vogliono solamente attender [e ciò sia detto con pace di quelle che a più alti, e a più gloriosi pensieri hanno la mente rivolta] all’ago, alla conocchia, e all’arcolaio”). Perocco interprets this as a criticism of women atypical of Isabella’s otherwise

8 Introduction also exist between the dedication of Letters and other letters signed by Isabella. The tropes of modesty, the desire to cultivate her natural talent, and the avoidance of idleness appear also in the dedicatory letter of Isabella’s Mirtilla; the professed reluctance to publish, the supposed humility of her gift compared to the dedicatee’s extraordinary virtues, the reference to her poems as her children and herself as their “father, mother and wet-nurse,” as well as a commonplace on a classical figure (the lawmaker Lycurgus of Sparta), are present in the dedication of Rime; the regret for lacking the time to write due to her acting commitments is mentioned in one of her letters to Puteanus;25 and, finally, the reflection on art and nature and the defense of writing as a way to eternalize one’s deeds—the same “laborious profession” of actress that ironically takes Isabella away from her writing—are echoed throughout Letters. Stefano Santosuosso has also identified in Giovan Battista Gelli’s 1549 dialogue La Circe (10.73) the common source of a phrase in the dedicatory letter and Isabella’s eclogue Mentre correr vedea (8.66–75).26 Perhaps Francesco forged the dedicatory letter by drawing on muscle memory from his compositional partnership with Isabella, or more deliberately appropriating Isabella’s previous written work;27 perhaps Isabella wrote the letter and Francesco edited it, or she discussed ideas with Francesco, who then transcribed them. Interestingly, the posthumous date is missing from the 1616 and later editions. It is possible that Francesco decided that its relevance or meaning would have been lost once Lettere began to be published together with Fragmenti.28 All this said, at the moment, there is no compelling reason to deny Isabella authorship of the dedicatory letter that bears her signature: the letter’s resonance with pro-woman stance, but it rather seems to us that Andreini is acknowledging women’s agency to make different choices whether or not to fulfill their potential. 25. See “l. Isabella Andreini to Erycius Puteanus (Ruelens, Erycius Puteanus et Isabelle Andreini, 29– 30)” (Isabella Andreini a Ericio Puteano, Torino, 14 agosto 1602), edited and translated in MacNeil, Music and Women, 321–22, and also edited in Perocco, “Donna/uomo, attrice/scrittrice, Isabella/ Francesco,” 107–8. Being a leading member of a theatre company required expertise in the mechanics of letter writing. Prominent actors, including Andreini herself, communicated with each other, with their patrons, and with the managers of performance venues through letters dealing with all aspects of booking, financing, and producing a performance. A range of these letters is also edited and translated in “Documents” in MacNeil, Music and Women, 265–323. 26. The original phrase in the dedicatory letter reads, “Chiamasi l’uomo mercè del sapere, signor delle cose inferiori, famigliar delle superiori, terreno Dio, animale celeste, e finalmente pompa, e miracolo della medesima Natura,” which we translated as “Thanks to knowledge man is called lord of lower beings and kin to superior ones, an earthly god, a celestial animal, and finally the pride and miracle of Nature herself.” Stefano Santosuosso has identified a handful of other phrases recurring in both Rime and Lettere; see his Isabella Andreini spirituale, morale e boschereccia (Rome: Aracne, 2020), 174–79. 27. Santosuosso does not exclude the possibility that the dedicatory letter is a “falso d’autore,” an oxymoron that indicates a false text produced by a renowned artist (Santosuosso, Isabella Andreini, 176). 28. Perocco noted the disappearance of the dating since 1617; see “Donna/uomo, attrice/scrittrice, Isabella/Francesco,” 89.

Introduction 9 previous work by both Isabella and Francesco, and the trace of Francesco’s hand in the postponed dating of the letter, are a testament to their enduring professional collaboration, which Pamela Allen Brown, Julie D. Campbell, and Eric Nicholson invite us to regard as mutual.29 The critical discourse on the attribution of the dedicatory letter is especially interesting if considered in the larger context of the question of the extent of Francesco’s editorial work in Lettere: did Francesco contribute passages or entire letters? Two letters have drawn scholars’ attention: Letters 137, “On the Pain at the Death of One’s Wife,” and 151, “On the Death of One’s Wife,” which, as Meredith Ray has argued, echo passages from Francesco’s Le Bravure.30 Here, too, this evidence does not exclude the co-presence of Isabella’s voice, particularly in Letter 137, which, as Perocco has noted, rests on recurrent themes of the lament for the dead.31 In conclusion, a few facts can help frame Francesco’s editing of Lettere: first, Isabella mentions that she was working on Lettere as early as November 1601;32 second, Francesco attributes the Letters entirely to Isabella, and signals his own editorial work only in the dedicatory letter, via the fictional dating of Isabella’s signature, and the last missive, Letter 151, “On the Death of One’s Wife,” by framing his editorial work as a monument in her honor; third, some mismatched letter summaries (which we describe in the Translators’ Note) indicate either a hasty redaction or a light editorial hand on Isabella’s work, which was halted by her sudden death.

Isabella Andreini and Women’s Writing in Early Modern Italy Isabella Andreini, “the first great international diva,”33 belongs to the second generation of professional Italian commedia dell’arte actresses, following Vincenza 29. In their refreshing approach to Francesco’s role with regard to the composition of the Lettere and Fragmenti, Brown, Campbell, and Nicholson have invited us to consider that “the debt ran the other way” too, given Isabella’s fame and ability to write and act in a range of voices; see the Introduction to Andreini’s Lovers’ Debates for the Stage, 13. 30. See Meredith K. Ray, “Between Stage and Page: The Letters of Isabella Andreini,” in Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 162–63 (this chapter hereafter cited as “Between Stage and Page”), in which Ray assigns to Francesco as well the dedicatory letter to Carlo Emanuele I, duke of Savoy. 31. Daria Perocco, “Isabella Andreini ossia: Il teatro non è ianua diabuli,” in Donne e Teatro: Atti del Convegno Venezia, Auditorium Santa Margherita 6 ottobre 2003, ed. Daria Perocco (Venice: Università Ca’ Foscari, 2004), 31. 32. See Isabella’s letter to Erycius Puteanus (Pavia, November 14, 1601) in Charles Ruelens, Erycius Puteanus et Isabelle Andreini: Lecture faite à l’Académie d’Archéologie le 3 février 1889 (Antwerp: Van Merlen, 1889), 25–26. Richard Andrews (“Isabella Andreini’s Stage Repertoire,” 31 and n8) suggests that with Lettere, Andreini might have referred instead to her epistolary exchange with Puteanus. 33. Kerr, Rise of the Diva, 4.

10 Introduction Armani (ca. 1530–1569) and Barbara Flaminia, or Flaminia of Rome (fl. 1565–67), who emerged in the 1560s.34 For the first time in Europe, the “virgins/maidens and virtuous women”35 of commedia dell’arte performed on stage. Women were so central to commedia dell’arte that each troupe was identified primarily with its prima donna; on a 1591 license to perform in Florence, the Gelosi were referred to as “Isabella and her company,”36 and Francesco Andreini himself in his Bravure confirms that the company itself considered Isabella as “the light and splendor of that virtuous and honored company” (lume e splendore di quella virtuosa ed onorata compagnia).37 Siro Ferrone states unequivocally that the arrival of women on the Italian stage was the most significant development in European theater of the sixteenth century, as well as an essential factor in the creation of professional theater.38 One crucial reason for this development was economic in nature: the novelty of women acting on stage generated a significant financial draw. While actresses acquired professional credibility, they were still looked upon with scorn by both the public at large and particularly the Church, with the figure of the actress representing, as Ferrone asserts, “a moral revolution incarnate.”39 The perceived equivalence of the actress and the prostitute was central to Church moralists’ condemnation of the performers, which reduced the actress to a conduit of sin.40 As Bernadette Majorana argues, however, the Counter-Reformation Church’s position on theater was complex and contradictory.41 On the one hand, it opposed professional 34. For more on the presence of women on stage in Italy, see Siro Ferrone, “La donna in scena,” in La Commedia dell’Arte, 40–61; Valeria Finucci, Introduction to Andreini’s Mirtilla, A Pastoral, 18–29; Anne MacNeil, “Celestial Sirens of the Commedia dell’Arte Stage,” in The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte, ed. Judith Chaffee and Olly Crick (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2015), 246–54; and Anne MacNeil, “Commedia dell’Arte in Opera and Music 1550–1750,” in Commedia dell’Arte in Context, ed. Christopher B. Balme, Piermario Vescovo, and Daniele Vianello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 167–76. 35. “[V]ergini e donne oneste.” See Angelo Ingegneri, Della poesia rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare le favole sceniche (Ferrara: Vittorio Baldini, 1598), ed. Maria Luisa Doglio (Ferrara and Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1989), 4–8. 36. MacNeil, Women and Music, 5. 37. Francesco Andreini, Le Bravure del Capitano Spavento (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somasco, 1607), in Stefano Mazzoni, “La vita di Isabella,” Culture Teatrali 10 (2004): 85. 38. “L’avvento della donna sulla scena italiana è la piú rilevante novità dello spettacolo del Cinquecento e uno dei fattori decisivi per la formazione del teatro dei professionisti”: Ferrone, La Commedia dell’Arte, 40. 39. “[U]na rivoluzione dei costumi incarnata.” Ferrone, La Commedia dell’Arte, 41. 40. For an example of the stance of such church moralists, see: Petri Hurtado de Mendoza, Scholasticae, et morales disputationes (1631), cited in Ferrone, La Commedia dell’Arte, 41n5. 41. Bernadette Majorana, “Commedia dell’arte and the Church,” in Balme et al., eds., Commedia dell’Arte in Context, 133–48.

Introduction 11 theater due to its perceived vanity and commercialization; on the other, it appreciated the social function of the theater, which was “integrated into the most advanced aspects of Christian life.”42 The Church thus attempted to circumscribe theatrical practice by sanctioning it solely as an instrument of moral education. Commedia dell’arte, however, was considered as distinctly incompatible with the precepts of religious theater, in which “Christian actors assumed a social function, promoting values such as holiness and virtue.” Commedia dell’arte actors were accused of “introducing sensual pleasures,” which weakened the moral resolve of the spectator.43 The supposed moral erosion arising from commedia spectacles became all the more problematic with the presence on stage of the actress, whose eroticized body was “offered to the avid gaze of the spectators.”44 Isabella, in response, endeavored to align her work as a comica with Christian virtue, even inspiring her son Giovan Battista Andreini to adopt the same stance.45 Nonetheless, the ill repute equated with the figure of the actress, however unwarranted, is likely a reason why the forging of a literary career, and its resultant respectability, was so attractive to Andreini. In addition to her performance of virtue in life and art, another aspect of her strategy to avoid moral censure was her engagement with, rather than provocation of, ecclesiastics such as the cardinals Cinzio Aldobrandini and Pietro Aldobrandini (both nephews of Pope Clement VIII), as well as prominent learned men closely associated with the Church, such as Erycius Puteanus, who was supported by Cardinal Federico Borromeo. Andreini embarks upon her literary career in a “contradictory moment in the history of Italian women’s engagement with literary culture,” as Virginia Cox characterizes the Counter-Reformation. In this period women writers produced literature of unprecedented quantity and range, yet misogynous discourses also began to resurface, creating an antagonistic literary environment and resulting in a retreat of the female secular writer after the 1620s, which lasted until the late seventeenth-century revalorization of women writers by the Accademia degli Arcadi.46 Isabella’s literary and performative triumph, her unprecedented “superstardom,”47 are testament to her ability not only to survive, but thrive, in this contentious period.

42. Majorana, “Commedia and the Church,” 138. 43. Majorana, “Commedia and the Church,” 140. 44. Majorana, “Commedia and the Church,” 134. 45. Majorana, “Commedia and the Church,” 147. 46. See Virginia Cox, “Backlash (1590–1650),” chap. 6 of Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 166–227 (this chapter hereafter cited as “Backlash”). 47. Julie D. Campbell notes that Isabella was “on her way to the Renaissance equivalent of superstardom, and her cachet as an actress was inextricably combined with her associations with courtly, academic circles, illustrating the ways in which she embodied the fascination of the age with both the

12 Introduction There are very few, if any, aspects of Isabella’s biography that are not exceptional. While she was not the first actress on the Italian stage, she became the first international diva,48 sought by the uppermost echelons of nobility, praised by both humanist cultural elites and the most respected of her fellow poets. Unlike Isabella, whose obscure origins are likely humble, most women writers of the period descended from aristocratic families which offered a literary environment for their daughters and invested in their thorough humanist education.49 The paucity of information regarding her early life and education have led scholars to theorize that Isabella, a woman “strangely refined and prepared to compose and improvise verse,”50 was trained to become a cortigiana onesta, a figure only slightly more maligned than the professional actress by ecclesiastics and other moralists.51 No records appear to exist to confirm or deny definitively such allegations, but one can reasonably surmise, as does Ross, that Isabella’s family would not have embraced her decision (if indeed it was her decision) to undertake an itinerant theater career as an unmarried sixteen-year-old.52 While theater performers generally enjoyed low cultural prestige, with actresses regarded as particularly immoral and harmful to society because of their cultural adjacency to prostitutes, Isabella Andreini represents a paradox. Instead of attracting scorn to her theater troupe, she was instead its “strongest asset,” facilitating its entrée into more respectable spaces through her “performance of normative domesticity” and her acquisition of “cultural credibility.”53 In fact, Andreini as prima donna succeeds stage and academic discourse.” See her Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A CrossCultural Approach (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 56. 48. See Kerr, “The Making of a Diva,” in Rise of the Diva, 102–46. 49. Although not named as such by Virginia Cox, Isabella Andreini certainly serves as an exception to the majority of women writers hailing from learned literary families: “Among female writers of this period for whom we have some biographical information, it is actually quite difficult to find one who did not come from a literary background, except perhaps Francesca Turina, who in one autobiographical poem laments having had her childhood energies directed to the ‘spindle and the needle’ rather than ‘spending her years in the fine studies of Pallas.’ ” See Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 12. 50. “[S]tranamente colta, preparata a comporre e improvvisare versi.” Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte: La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII, e XVIII secolo (Florence: La casa Usher, 1986), 339. 51. While it was a controversial theory when introduced, the idea that Andreini was either trained among courtesans, or groomed to be one, is now generally accepted. See Ferdinando Taviani, “La fleur et le guerrier: Les actrices de la commedia dell’arte,” Bouffonneries 15/16 (1986): 75–76 and 89–90; Rosalind Kerr, “The Actress as Androgyne in the Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios of Flaminio Scala,” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1993, 64; and Kerr, “The Making of a Diva,” in Rise of the Diva, 103. Virginia Scott, however, holds a different view in her “La vertu et la volupté: Models for the Actresses in Early Modern Italy and France,” Theatre Research International 23 (1998): 152–58. 52. Ross, “Performing Humanism,” 142–43. 53. Ross, “Performing Humanism,” 144.

Introduction 13 in ennobling and dignifying the acting profession. As Taviani and Schino argue, “it was with Isabella that, for the first time, the figure of the actress detaches from that of the ‘honesta meretrix.’ ”54 Even lesser-known figures, such as Pavian letterato Antonio Maria Spelta (1559–1632), a representative of the resurgent misogyny of the late sixteenth century, make an exception for Isabella Andreini. She is the only woman praised, albeit obliquely, and whose proper name appears, in Spelta’s “curious moral text,”55 La saggia pazzia (1607), a work otherwise quite hostile to women.56 In an ironic passage, Spelta ventriloquizes women, to whom he refers mockingly as “catonesse” or “dottoresse” (“know-it-alls,” “pedants”/“women of letters”), through whom he critiques a catalogue of the most renowned poets, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso. Regarding Isabella Andreini’s work, Spelta has these pseudo-intellectual women say, “[t]he poems of the learned Isabella Andreini are praiseworthy, though rather languid and sensual.”57 Spelta intends the reader to understand that if such women find a (disputable) flaw in Andreini’s work, it is because her genius, like that of the other universally revered poets they criticize, is too far beyond their comprehension. This rather contorted compliment of Andreini by Spelta is further complicated by his disparaging categorization of these aspiring women as “poetesse” who write “ ‘ little verses,’ ‘little letters,’ ‘little lovers’ songs.’ ”58 Isabella, of course, could be considered a prime example of such “dottoresse,” given that she actively sought admittance into academic spheres and was herself an author of the same genres as the ridiculed “poetesse.” By the end of Andreini’s life, the early humanist invention of the “learned lady”59 had begun to deteriorate into an aggressively misogynist mockery of “overly learned” women with no business engaging in “professions so dissimilar from their disposition, such as philosophizing.”60 Women viewed as usurping on male-dominated cultural spheres were reviled and ridiculed as inferior imposters 54. “[F]u con Isabella che la figura dell’attrice si staccò, per la prima volta, da quella della ‘honesta meretrix.’ ” Taviani and Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte, 340. 55. “[T]esto curioso [. . .] di argomento morale.” See Apollonio di Silva, “Spelta, Antonio Maria,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 93 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2018), . 56. Antonio Maria Spelta, La saggia pazzia, fonte d’allegrezza, madre de’ piaceri, regina de’ belli humori . . . Libro primo-secondo (Pavia: Pietro Bartoli, 1607). 57. “I poemi della dotta Isabella Andreini sono degni di lode, sebbene alquanto languidi, e molli.” Spelta, La saggia pazzia, 35. 58. “[V]ersetti [. . .] letterine, canzonette da innamorati.” Spelta, La saggia pazzia, 34. 59. For a discussion of the history of the “learned lady” trope, see Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 17–28. 60. “[T]roppo savia,” “professioni allo stato loro molto differenti, come filosofare.” Spelta, La saggia pazzia, 33.

14 Introduction by male letterati, perhaps because of the threat they posed.61 The ambiguous space inhabited by Isabella in Spelta’s text well illustrates the hostile place of intellectually aspirant women generally in this period, while at the same time evincing her exceptionality.62 Although, technically, she belongs with the ambitious intellectual and artistic women ruthlessly criticized by Spelta, she is spared the pejorative titles of “poetessa,” and “dottoressa,” seeming not even to fall into the category of “donna,” “so feebleminded a sex.”63 Isabella is instead fetishized as a wondrous aberration of the female sex rather than as its representative. Her status as an actress, a public woman, seems to confer upon her a special status, approaching that of an honorary man. In their effusive praise of Andreini, male authors tend to focus on the extraordinary nature of her talents.64 Isabella’s unique skills betray the flaws of intellectually ambitious but ultimately inferior women, while at the same time spotlighting the virtue and judgment of the astute men able to recognize and celebrate her; they congratulate themselves for admitting her into their ranks, and utilize her as a muse to their encomia, which serve to refocus attention upon themselves and their own literary ambitions. Spelta, for one, uses the myth of Andreini to further his own fame. He wishes to demonstrate that he, too, was witness to the phenomenon of Andreini, and in fact his own praise of her was so praiseworthy as to warrant the printing of two hundred copies of his “portrait” of Isabella.65 Isabella functions as a sort of a curiosity in their cabinets, a flaw of nature epitomizing that essential female virtue of “onestà” while also incarnating the supposedly more masculine province of “dottrina,” the likes of which are unlikely to appear again.

61. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 49. 62. Isabella Andreini flourished on stage and in print in a period that straddled the integration of women into literary culture, and the “backlash” when “literary misogyny was on the rise and long-established conventions of gallantry were beginning to break down.” Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 165. 63. “[U]n sesso si imbecillo.” Spelta, La saggia pazzia, 29. 64. In addition to Spelta, see Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Venice: Giovanni Battista Somasco, 1585; rpt., Venice: Herede di Giovanni Battista Somasco, 1593), 738, and Erycius Puteanus in MacNeil, Music and Women, 90–94 passim. 65. “Ed io in una pastorale avendola veduta in diversi atti compitissima mirabilmente si ne’ gesti, come nelle parole, e concetti riuscite una sera, la mattina seguente, ritrovandomi in vena, le feci questo Encomio, il quale da molti dimandatomi per levarmi la fatica di copiarlo a penna, ne feci stampar dugento copie col ritratto di essa in questa forma” (And I, having seen her perform one evening in several acts of a pastoral with such sublimity, so marvelously in gestures, words, and conceits, the next morning I found myself moved to compose this encomium for her, which so many people requested, that in order to spare myself the labor of recopying it by hand, I had two hundred copies printed along with her portrait). Antonio Maria Spelta, Historia d’Antonio Maria Spelta, cittadino pavese, de’ fatti notabili occorsi nell’universo . . . (Pavia: Pietro Bartoli, 1603), 172.

Introduction 15 Surprisingly, the celebration of Isabella by men in academic and courtly spheres speaks to Andreini’s own ability to highlight and market her rare talent.66 Andreini appears to have succeeded in assuring them of her virtue, as well as appealing to their vanity while not overtly challenging their authority.67 Additionally, as Anne MacNeil argues, Andreini’s position as an actress necessitated that she constantly seek and secure financial backing.68 While Isabella undoubtedly prioritized her own success, however, particularly in light of economic necessity, she also devoted her writing to the defense of women’s dignity and the celebration of their intellectual potential—although more obliquely than women writers such as Arcangela Tarabotti and Moderata Fonte, whose output included openly polemical texts. Although Andreini was spared the ad feminam attacks to which other women writers were subjected,69 she was neither disengaged from the struggle of intellectually aspirant women, nor did she see such attacks as irrelevant to her. Through her texts, in fact, Andreini situates herself in a critical role vis-à-vis the literary representation of women. While she is bold in her defense of women and particularly their intellectual potential, she is nonetheless strategic in her successful management of her public and private personae. Isabella openly conforms to certain established social norms while simultaneously challenging others. For instance, she accepts that perceptions of honor and chastity are important in women’s lives, and she performs as well as decorously upholds the roles of faithful (and fertile) wife and mother. Yet, in her literary creations, Andreini consistently offers innovative rewritings that celebrate women’s cleverness and eloquence. In her Mirtilla (1588), one of the first known woman-authored pastoral plays,70 Andreini adheres to the lexicon and stylistic features of Tasso’s Aminta (1573), yet progressively distances herself from the plot of her model.71 The nymph Filli, 66. For a discussion of Isabella’s achievement of “celebrity” status, see Kerr, “The Making of a Diva,” in Rise of the Diva, 102–27. 67. See Ross, “Performing Humanism,” 140–56. 68. MacNeil, Music and Women, 90. 69. See Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 49. 70. Maddalena Campiglia’s pastoral Flori was also published in 1588, yet Franco Vazzoler argues that Andreini’s Mirtilla originates earlier in the decade. See Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 92 and 314n32, and Franco Vazzoler, “Le pastorali dei comici dell’arte: La Mirtilla di Isabella Andreini,” in Sviluppi della drammaturgia pastorale nell’Europa del Cinque-Seicento, ed. Maria Chiabò and Federico Doglio (Viterbo: Centro studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascimentale, 1992), 281–99. Barbara Torelli Benedetti’s Partenia, completed by 1586, precedes both Andreini and Campiglia’s plays, although only as a manuscript which was recently published as a scholarly edition in translation as part of the Other Voice series: Barbara Torelli Benedetti, Partenia, a Pastoral Play: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Lisa Sampson and Barbara Burgess-Van Aken (Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013). 71. See Maria Luisa Doglio, “Isabella Andreini ‘scrittora,’ ” in Manfio, ed., Isabella Andreini: Una letterata in scena, 51–60.

16 Introduction a role Isabella saved for herself, does not suffer the same fate as Tasso’s nymph Silvia, who is nearly raped by a satyr only to be saved by another man, Aminta, the young shepherd who loves her.72 Through Filli, as we have noted, Andreini “rewrites ancient misogynous topoi”73 by transforming the helpless and desired nymph figure into an independent woman who saves herself by employing the power of her wits to overpower the satyr’s brute force. The defense of women through the demonstration of their intellectual potential and literary skill is present in Letters as well, if perhaps in a seemingly more “muted form.”74 A comparison between Letters and the Lettere amorose (1563) of Alvise Pasqualigo (1536–1576) showcases Andreini’s innovation in the epistolary genre. While Pasqualigo’s text insists on the “truth” of this epistolary record of a singular love story,75 for example, Andreini’s innamorati are multiple and the reader is forced to recognize their fictionality. The letters written in the voice of Vittoria, the female lover in Pasqualigo’s text, display a self-consciousness, and an acknowledgement of an innate intellectual inferiority compounded by condescension found in those written by the male lover, as evident in this excerpt: Based on the last letter you wrote me, in which you apply my own words to an opposite subject, I know that you mock me and my letters. I do not wish to believe that you did so in order to prove to me that your intellect is greater than what I already know it to be (which is to say endlessly great), but I firmly believe you wrote it to reveal to me my own ignorance.76 Pasqualigo’s Vittoria is shrewd enough to detect her lover’s mockery and confront him with it, yet her defense is not one of redemptive wit, but instead of sincerity:

72. See Julie D. Campbell, Literary Circles and Gender, 51–72, and Meredith K. Ray, “La Castità Conquistata: The Function of the Satyr in Pastoral Drama,” Romance Languages Annual 9 (1998): 312–21. 73. “[R]iscrive antichi topoi misogini.” Doglio, “Isabella Andreini ‘scrittora,’ ” 55. 74. Ray, “Between Stage and Page,” in Writing Gender, 177. 75. Jeannine Basso and Maiko Favaro discuss whether Vittoria’s letters are authentic, or a caricatural portrait of a woman letter writer penned by Pasqualigo himself. See Jeannine Basso, Le Genre épistolaire en langue italienne (1538–1662) (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 1:225–26, and Maiko Favaro, “La trasparenza e l’artificio: Riflessioni sulle lettere amorose del ’500,” Italianistica 45, no. 1 (2016): 18n30. 76. “Conosco per l’ultima lettera che m’avete scritto, che voi vi burlate di me e delle mie lettere, scrivendomi con le mie proprie parole soggetto contrario. Il che non voglio credere che sia stato per farmi conoscere il vostro intelletto maggiore di quello ch’io lo conosco (che è senza fine grande), ma crederò bene che l’abbiate scritto acciò ch’io conosca la mia ignoranza.” Alvise Pasqualigo, Lettere amorose, in Favaro, “La trasparenza e l’artificio,” 18. For the full text, see Alvise Pasqualigo, Lettere amorose (1563; rpt., Venice: Niccolò Moretti, 1587), 136.

Introduction 17 I firmly believe you write many things contrary to your sentiments for the pleasure of deceiving me with words, but—miserable me—I only write what Love dictates to me, and that which is true.77 Vittoria’s words, morally accusatory and rather sanctimonious, are not an attempt to vanquish him intellectually. Alvise, her lover, is thus not compelled to consider Vittoria as an equal or superior interlocutor, but instead is confronted only with the potential shame Vittoria hopes to elicit by her moral condemnation of his deception, and defense of her own sincerity. In contrast with Pasqualigo’s text, Andreini constructs in her Letters a bold female voice. Hers are not a vehicle by which to uphold or propagate misogynous stereotypes and condescending attitudes regarding women’s intellectual inferiority. Instead, Andreini’s female-voiced letters often display an assuredness in the capabilities of women, a confidence in their knowledge, and an unvarnished rebuke of condescension and infidelity. The letters composed in the female voice number nearly forty, while those in the male voice number more than double that amount. The curtailed representation of the female voice is an interesting, and perhaps surprising, choice by Andreini. It reflects the marginalization of the “scrittora,” the rarity of the female literary voice, as well as the silenced female voice on stage and page;78 moreover, this overrepresentation of the male voice serves to showcase her versatility and virtuosity as a writer, in addition to her protean talents as a performer. Andreini creates a surprisingly varied array of female voices, encompassing many aspects of the total female experience. These include an assertive woman in defense of her honor (Letter 1, “The Worth of Honor”); an infant daughter unwanted by her father and defended by a knowledgeable woman (Letter 21, “On the Birth of a Woman”); a young woman promised by her father to a man she does not love, and the powerless silence of her mother (Letter 113, “On Giving a Daughter in Marriage”); women pursued by insincere and unworthy suitors (Letters 31, “On Flattery”; 38, “On Audacity”; and 87, “On the Chastity of Women”); and a woman abandoned by her unfaithful lover (Letter 121, Untitled). The female-voiced letters, though fewer in number, offer a stark tonal contrast to the male-voiced letters, and thus emerge as the text’s focal point. They are among the most literarily ambitious and successful—as well as most memorable—of the collection. In her Letters, as in her revision of the pastoral genre and the love lyric, Andreini also aims squarely at the expectations regarding female epistolarity. Most 77. “Crederò bene che molte cose mi scriviate contrarie all’animo vostro per prendervi piacere dell’ingannarmi con parole, ma io misera scrivo bene quel tanto che mi detta Amore, e che è vero.” Alvise Pasqualigo, Lettere amorose, in Favaro, “La trasparenza e l’artificio,” 19. For the full text, see Pasqualigo, Lettere amorose, 176. 78. See Ray, “Between Stage and Page,” in Writing Gender, 172.

18 Introduction letters written in the female voice showcase an authoritative and clever protagonist, while only a fraction of the female-voiced letters feature a pitiable, scorned woman, a male creation that Katharine Jensen terms “Epistolary Woman.”79 Andreini consistently endows the women (letter) writers with knowledge, or at least intellectual capability, and eloquence, while at the same time confronting the notion that gender predetermines those qualities. Following are but a few selected examples of Andreini’s creation of an authoritative female voice, both in terms of command and of writerly talent. Letter 11, “On Disdain (i),” displays a mastery of the conventions of Petrarchan love rhetoric, yet, at its core, is a rebuke of male deception, and a celebration of a triumphant woman wishing to have the last word. No longer blinded by her love for an unworthy suitor, the letter writer now wishes to utilize the epistle to make her (former) lover aware of her newly gained wisdom, rather than to beg pathetically for his renewed affection. Employing a central Petrarchan figure, the blazon (“serene countenance, charming eyes, rosy cheeks, ruby lips, graceful movements and, in sum, a different kind of beauty”), the letter challenges both the literary tradition as well as its superficial praise of physical beauty. By inverting the blazon to praise male physical beauty, the female letter writer then undermines the rhetorical figure by negating the list of beautiful features of her former lover in scorn of his “spiritual ugliness.” Letter 21, “On the Birth of a Woman,” “offers an important and original approach to the so-called ‘woman question’ ”80 through its address to a father who wishes his newborn daughter had been born male. The female letter writer lists many valorous women of history and literature, and contrasts them with the many disappointing sons (“how many fathers have been and are disappointed and miserable because of their sons?”) before concluding with the hope that the newborn daughter “equals Sappho in knowledge, or Tomyris in valor, or Penelope in chastity, or maybe, to make her even more marvelous,” is endowed by the Heavens “with all these singular graces.” It is worth noting that through citing these virtuous women, Andreini privileges qualities of intellectually independent and courageous women; the first-ranked “grace” is knowledge (sapere), followed by valor (valore), and, last of all, chastity (castità), the quality that renders women most subservient to men. Letter 40, “On Youth,” gives voice to a “woman at the window”81 who objects to the undesired attention of a suitor, this time too young. This missive is both similar to and distinct from the more often cited Letter 24, “A Reproach 79. Katharine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 1–2. 80. Ray, “Between Stage and Page,” in Writing Gender, 179. 81. For more on this trope, see Jane Tylus, “Women at the Windows: Commedia dell’arte and Theatrical Practice in Early Modern Italy,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 3 (1997): 323–42.

Introduction 19 of Old Men in Love,” acting as a sort of companion piece to that letter (which caustically derides the lecherous Pantalone-like man who shamelessly chases after younger women). In both letters the voice of the witty female letter writer is nobody’s fool, mocking her suitor’s exaggerations (“ ‘Woe is me, I am lovesick!’ [. . .] Oh, please!”); moreover, instead of serving as the object of undesired advances, the female voice embodies a subject who talks back, refusing to remain silently framed in her window. The sharp-witted (and sharp-tongued) woman is wise and confident in her assessment: Do not write to me again, for I will not respond; I do not believe your fables. You say that you wish to die should you fail in obtaining my favor, and it would be too great a loss to the world if you were to follow through; but I know you will not. All you young men constantly say that you wish to die, and considering you say it so easily, you must forget it just as easily, since your tongue never seems to follow your thoughts. Letter 49, “On Intellect,” represents the opposite sentiment to the female voice expressed by Vittoria in Pasqualigo’s collection. Instead of an admission of intellectual inferiority, Andreini’s female letter writer states: “I may be unpolished and inexperienced, but I am not so ignorant that I cannot tell black from white.” The notion here is that while women often lack access to knowledge, they are not so innately ignorant as to be unable to discern truth from falsehood. The perceived “ignorance” of women, Andreini suggests, is culturally, rather than naturally, determined, due to the meager educational opportunities available to them. Andreini also morally rebukes the letter’s male interlocutor for seeking to take advantage of a woman he perceives to be intellectually inferior with specious logical arguments in order to benefit him personally.

The Question of Genre: Pushing the Boundaries of the Letterbook Over the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, vernacular letters, or Lettere, gained tremendous popularity. Grounded in classical and humanistic epistolography in Latin, the genre was “invented”82 by Pietro Aretino (six volumes, 1538–57) and adopted by the likes of Vittoria Colonna (Litere alla duchessa d’Amalfi, 1544), Pietro Bembo (four volumes, 1548–52), Bernardo Tasso (a first 82. “[C]on lo straordinario, irripetibile, exploit del 1538 [Pietro Aretino] aveva imposto, ‘inventato’, il ‘libro di lettere’ volgari, la sua stessa tipologia tipografica, il suo mercato” (with his extraordinary, unrepeatable feat in 1538 [Pietro Aretino] had established, ‘invented,’ the vernacular letterbook, together with its published format and market). Amedeo Quondam, Le “Carte messaggiere”: Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare. Per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), 39.

20 Introduction volume in 1549 and a second volume in 1560), Anton Francesco Doni (Pistolotti amorosi, three books published in 1552–58), Veronica Franco (Lettere familiari, 1580), Chiara Matraini (1595), Arcangela Tarabotti (Lettere familiari e di complimento, 1650), and many others who engaged in its various subgenres—including lettere familiari (private), facete (witty), amorose (amorous), filosofiche (philosophical), and spirituali (spiritual).83 While lettere amorose were undoubtedly inspired by the complaints and regrets of Ovid’s Heroides and the “eloquence of unrequited love”84 in Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (composed 1343–44), the subgenre was one of the most eclectic and open to both lyrical influences and the narrative structure of romanzo epistolare (the epistolary novel).85 This feature contributed to the popularity of Delle lettere amorose di diversi huomini illustri libri nove (1565), a collection authored “by different illustrious men” and edited by Francesco Sansovino, as well as letterbooks by Andrea Calmo, Alvise Pasqualigo, Girolamo Parabosco, Celia Romana, and Matteo Aldrovandi. Although Andreini denies any claim to exemplarity for her letters, she utilizes the eclecticism of lettere amorose to educate, advise, admonish, and console, much like her illustrious predecessor, Veronica Franco, “who deliberately uses the letter to exercise what she sees as ‘l’ufficio di parole’, the function and duty of words themselves.”86 Katharine Ann Jensen explains that in seventeenth-century France men exchanged and sold letters penned by women and even forged such letters, which were then published in epistolary manuals and theorized as “nonliterary” according to a dominant “doxa, which ascribed to woman an unselfconscious talent for 83. For an introduction to the practice of letter writing in premodern Italy, including but not limited to literary epistolography, see Paula Findlen and Suzanne Sutherland, eds., The Renaissance of Letters: Knowledge and Community in Italy, 1300–1650 (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). On Renaissance letterbooks, see Gianluca Genovese, La lettera oltre il genere: Il libro di lettere, dall’Aretino al Doni, e le origini dell’autobiografia moderna (Rome: Editrice Antenore, 2009), and Raffaele Morabito, Lettere e letteratura: Studi sull’epistolografia volgare in Italia (Turin: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001). On female-authored letter writing, in addition to previously cited sources, see Gabriella Zarri, ed., Per lettera: La scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia (secoli XV–XVII) (Rome: Viella Libreria Editrice, 1999); Maria Luisa Doglio, “Letter Writing, 1350–1650,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13–24; and Lisa Kaborycha, trans. and ed., A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 84. Amilcare A. Iannucci, “L’elegia di Madonna Fiammetta and the First Book of the Asolani: The Eloquence of Unrequited Love,” Forum Italicum 10, no. 4 (1976): 345–59. 85. Quondam, Le “Carte messaggiere,” 97. 86. Doglio, “Letter Writing, 1350–1650,” 21. Doglio insists that in her Lettere familiari—from the choice of the typically male titular subgenre—“Veronica Franco assumes, with full ideological and rhetorical awareness, a traditionally male role, employed for millennia by men in their genealogical, historical and cultural prerogative of educator and teacher” (“Letter Writing, 1350–1650,” 21–22). On the issue of the didactic authority of women writers see also “Authorizing Women: The Problem of Docere,” in Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 219–26.

Introduction 21 language and to man a studied acquisition of it.”87 Meredith Ray identifies in Italy a similar trend of “female impersonations,” with a prominent example in Ortensio Lando’s Lettere di molte valorose donne (1548).88 Andreini’s conspicuous display of the fictional nature of her letterbook and stylistically elevated prose countered any facile stereotypes of “naturalness” in letters penned by women. Siro Ferrone and Richard Andrews point to printed letterbooks by other early modern theater practitioners as possible models for Isabella’s Lettere. The humorous Lettere (1547) of commedia dell’arte actor and dramatist Andrea Calmo (1510–1571), written in Venetian dialect, were apparently useful for the actors playing the role of Pantalone. In addition to the amorous content, Andreini’s Lettere similarly conform in language to the cultivated Tuscan of her innamorata characters. Professional comici would likely have resorted to techniques prescribed by the discipline of rhetoric, the theory of literary and oral composition concerned with the art of persuasion, which was studied widely in sixteenth-century Europe.89 It does not seem to be the case, however, that other innamorati actors were the intended audience of Andreini’s Lettere. In fact, Andreini’s success, esteem, and fame, both in life and after death, extend beyond the stage; she forged important and sustained connections with the literary world by having written and published her own work, the only female actor to have done so.90 In her dedicatory letter, for example, Andreini seeks to distinguish her writing and publishing of Lettere from her stage practice (“my laborious profession”),91 and wishes to include them among her oeuvre of previously published works of fiction, namely Mirtilla (1588) and Rime (1601). Andreini also intimates that the Letters were consciously conceived as part of the ancient epistolary genre established by “the most learned [men]”92 with the purpose of disseminating exemplary epistolary models (although she modestly disavows this latter aspect): Then I toiled over my Rime and, not satisfied with that endeavor, I managed to steal brief stretches of time from the demands of my 87. Jensen, Writing Love, 10. 88. On Lando’s letterbook see Ray, “Female Impersonations: Ortensio Lando’s Lettere di molte valorose donne,” in Writing Gender, 45–80. For an evaluation of the nature and extent of Lando’s contribution to the letterbook of Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazzuolo (1552), see Meredith Ray, “Textual Collaboration and Spiritual Partnership in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Ortensio Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2009): 694–747, and Ray, “ ‘A gloria del sesso feminile’: The Lettere of Lucrezia Gonzaga as Exemplary Narrative,” in Writing Gender, 81–120. 89. See Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 41. 90. Richard Andrews, “Isabella Andreini and Others: Women on Stage in the Late Cinquecento,” in Panizza, ed., Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, 323. 91. “[M]io faticoso esercizio.” 92. “[G]li uomini più intendenti.”

22 Introduction laborious profession to dedicate myself to writing these letters, which I dare to release alongside my other writings more because I trust the kindness of the world than because I think they are exemplary. And to those who may say that the purpose of publishing letters has always been to provide a perfect model, let me assure you that I never held so bold a thought, knowing that only the most learned are entitled to possess and attain such a goal. This is not to say, however, that Letters serve only to add Isabella’s name to the well-established and fashionable epistolary genre. Isabella also seeks consciously to change the genre, adapting it to her own needs as a dramatic performer of fictional texts, while still operating within the general parameters and under the cover of this “ennobling” humanist genre.93 The letter format allows her to write in the voice of multiple personae, in a format reminiscent of the monologue, by various innamorati, as well as other characters. While the epistolary genre carried literary and intellectual cachet, Andreini also exploited it to display singularity, rather than pursuing exemplarity, or demonstrating an adherence to a fixed model. Andreini’s singularity does not consist of an all-encompassing point of view or unified character, but instead of the inimitable Isabella herself, who was uniquely able to channel and represent these facets of her signature innamorata role. Isabella’s stated and obvious literary ambitions must extend to the Letters as well. Can and should the Letters be reduced to an attempt to outwit the ephemeral nature of dramatic performance? Perhaps her own words in the volume’s dedicatory letter reveal such a view: “My intention has always been to ward off death as best I could.”94 Evading mortality through authorship is a theme to which Andreini returns in Letter 112, “On the Death of Torquato Tasso”: “Signor Torquato cannot be called dead; you cannot call someone dead who outlives his own ashes. Death is nothing but perpetual oblivion; thus Signor Tasso will never die, since oblivion will never overpower him.”95 The letter begins by acknowledging Tasso’s 93. Siro Ferrone considers the humanist book of letters a “modello nobilitante” (an ennobling model) for actors of the late Renaissance and Baroque periods, while also demonstrating how the epistolary genre “si addice al teatro” (is well suited to theater) because the genre demands Protean talents of the letter writer. Rather than truly confessional spaces, in this period, letters should instead be considered “piccole orazioni” (little speeches), or the publication of “un monologo, di una parte, di un ruolo” (a monologue, a part, a role), of which there is both “una rappresentazione e una ricezione pubblica” (a representation and a public reception). See Ferrone’s introduction to Comici dell’Arte: Corrispondenze, ed. Claudia Burattelli, Domenica Landolfi, and Anna Zinanni (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), 16–18. 94. “Intenzion mia dunque fu di schermirmi quanto più i’ poteva dalla morte.” 95. “[C]he morto non si può chiamar il Signor Torquato, essendo che morto non si può dir colui, che alle sue ceneri sopravive. Morte non è altro, che un perpetuo oblio, dunque il Signor Tasso non morirà mai, poiche l’oblio non gli avrà mai forza sopra.”

Introduction 23 actual death, and ends by modifying the notion of death from the cessation of life-sustaining biological functions to “perpetual oblivion,”96 conquerable through the act of writing and publishing, which grants someone the means to “outlive his own ashes.” Despite the title, Letters, it is immediately clear that the dedicatory letter is the only one of the entire collection that conforms to the reader’s expectations of a letter. Formal aspects consistent with an epistle (including the date of composition, addressee, and signature) are lacking in all of the Letters’ 151 compositions. In lieu of formal epistolary markers, the letters are given often rather generic summaries, such as “On Beauty,” “On Disdain,” and “On Thought,” which obscure their epistolary matrix; the compositions themselves, however, include discursive clues proper to the formal letter, such as a greeting, often suggesting an intimate relation between writer and recipient (for instance, “Most gracious Lady,” and, contrastingly, “cruel one”), as well as a salutation (such as “I kiss your hands”) and closing pleas for a reply or succor. There is no evidence that they were ever exchanged as correspondence, or that they were ever even meant to appear as such. In fact, the fictional character of the letters is purposely quite apparent. The conspicuous absence of most epistolary features has led scholars to conclude not only that the “letters” were not actually letters, but also that this collection was not conceived as an organic whole,97 or that the “letters” were composed not to be appreciated as written literary texts but instead as studies (“fictional exercises”), perhaps in preparation for, or approximations of, Isabella’s improvised theatrical performances.98 The apparent affinity on the part of sixteenth-century Italian theater professionals for publishing letterbooks can be understood by considering how the genre offered an easy vehicle for the translation of the actor’s craft to the page, since, as Ferrone states, “the letter is the publication of a monologue, of a part, of a role.”99 If we can consider letters in this way as modular pieces of (potentially dramatic) prose, is Letters thus a book of letters, a repository of theatrical material, a collection of scenes from Andreini’s libro generico, a nascent “romanzo epistolare” (epistolary novel), or dramaturgy under an “epistolary façade”?100 What difference is there, if any, between theatrical repertoire and written texts? The author herself makes it impossible to respond definitively to these essential questions regarding Letters by provoking that very discussion. Rather than attempting to neatly 96. “[P]erpetuo oblio.” 97. Franco Vazzoler states: “L’omogeneità del libro, cioè, risulta in alcuni casi piuttosto fittizia, garantita solo dal titolo.” See his “La Saggezza di Isabella,” Culture teatrali 10 (2004): 116. 98. Richard Andrews, “Isabella Andreini and Others,” 327. 99. “La lettera è la pubblicazione di un monologo, di una parte, di un ruolo.” Siro Ferrone, introduction to Comici dell’arte, 17. See note 93. 100. Richard Andrews, “Isabella Andreini’s Stage Repertoire,” 34.

24 Introduction categorize the text, or its author, perhaps it is more illuminating to highlight and celebrate the tensions and mysteries at the heart of both. As Franco Vazzoler suggests, the “polymorphic and changeable character” of Letters is not necessarily a defect, but instead results in “an absolutely original book,” which he goes on to explain: The originality of Isabella’s Letters, with respect to other letterbooks of the Cinquecento, resides in the fact that it is [. . .] a theater book (but not a scene book) [. . .] Such renders it original also with respect to the theater books by dramatists (comici)—for instance, Teatro delle favole rappresentative by [Flaminio] Scala and the Bravure by Francesco [Andreini], and even with respect to [Isabella’s] own Mirtilla—because it [Letters] hides, rather than exhibits, its own theatrical nature.101 It is useful to consider Vazzoler’s characterization of Letters as a libro di teatro (theater book) but not a libro di scena (scene book). A libro di scena implies that the text was conceived and written in order to be performed on stage. On the other hand, a libro di teatro indicates a text nurtured by, and indivisible from, Isabella’s experience and expertise as an actress and her stage repertoire, but modified for a reader’s consumption and intended to be considered for its literary merits. Letters thus inhabits the interstice between orality and writing, fulfilling precisely the role of “hinge” that Claudio Guillén identifies as the primitive quality of letter writing.102 Some printed letterbooks of the period were collections of actually exchanged correspondence. Andreini, however, imbues the literary with the performative in her fictional Letters, just as she violates the “central fiction”103 of lyric poetry in the proemial sonnet of her Rime by baldly denying the sincerity of the first-person authorial voice and sentiment: Should anyone ever come to read these careless verses, let him not believe in these feigned ardors: for on the stage, accustomed to acting 101. “[C]arattere polimorfico, fluttuante,” “un libro assolutamente originale,” “L’originalità delle Lettere di Isabella, rispetto agli altri libri di lettere cinquecenteschi, sta nell’essere comunque un libro di teatro (anche se non un libro di scena) [. . .] Per questo originale anche rispetto agli altri libri di teatro dei comici—rispetto al Teatro delle favole rappresentative di Scala e alle Bravure di Francesco, e rispetto alla stessa Mirtilla—, perché nasconde, piuttostoché esibire, la propria natura teatrale.” Vazzoler, “La Saggezza di Isabella,” 115–16. 102. Claudio Guillén, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 81. 103. Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry, 174.

Introduction 25 imagined loves with insincere affects and feigned, lying words, I have often expressed the poetic furor of the Muses, sometimes weeping my false sorrows, sometimes singing my false delights.104 By writing in both the male and female voice, as well as impersonating multiple subjects, Andreini further deflects any potential identification between herself and the characters of her Letters. Andreini refuses explicitly to establish the “lyrical I,” choosing instead to innovate the genre through her virtuosic representation of multiple literary personae, a technique that overtakes the fictional lettera amorosa (love letter) framework of Letters. Different from the other contemporary collections of love letters,105 such as Pasqualigo’s perhaps autobiographical Lettere amorose,106 Andreini denies her reader any semblance of “truth”: there is no doubt that the personae are dramatic and fictional creations, not the musings of “real” lovers. On the other hand, Pasqualigo’s Lettere amorose, sometimes referred to as the first epistolary novel, offers a collection of letters supposedly exchanged between two lovers which verisimilarly (and maybe even truthfully) document their adulterous affair. While these Lettere amorose could well be contrived, Pasqualigo was careful to ensure their perceived authenticity. In contrast, Andreini’s carefully constructed fictionality, essential to her literary approach and a key to interpreting her work,107 was likely not solely an aesthetic or artistic choice. As a professional actress, the art of impersonation was a talent she naturally possessed and a skill she honed through many years of stage performance, and thus easily transferred to her written texts. We can surmise, however, that Isabella’s doubly marginalized status—as both “scrittora” (woman writer), as she referred to herself,108 and actress—further demanded performative fiction as a way to safeguard her personal decorum. Isabella’s recurrent theme of virtue, a “necessary defensive component,”109 is found in all her texts, putting her squarely among those female performers who “labored to distance themselves 104. Translated in Cox, Lyric Poetry, 174. 105. Other popular love letterbooks of the period include: Andrea Calmo, I piacevoli et ingeniosi discorsi in più lettere (four books, all with numerous editions from 1547 to 1610); Alvise Pasqualigo, Lettere amorose (ten editions, from 1563 to 1607); Girolamo Parabosco, Delle lettere amorose (four books, all with numerous editions from 1545 to 1617); Celia Romana, Lettere amorose di Madonna Celia, gentildonna Romana (ten editions, 1562 to 1628); and Matteo Aldrovandi, Lettere amorose (two editions, 1568 and 1600). See Quondam, Le “Carte messaggiere,” 279–316. 106. See Ida Caiazza, “Alvise Pasqualigo e il suo romanzo epistolare: Le Lettere amorose, dalla ‘relazione’ alla ‘corrispondenza,’ ” Italica: Rivista di letteratura italiana 43, no. 1 (2014): 77–106. 107. See Andrews, “Isabella Andreini’s Stage Repertoire,” 30–40; Perocco, “Donna/uomo, attrice/ scrittrice, Isabella/Francesco,” 87–111. 108. Doglio, “Isabella Andreini ‘scrittora,’ ” 51–60. 109. Andrews, “Isabella Andreini and Others,” 327.

26 Introduction from any hint of an unsavory reputation,”110 which would have hindered, if not precluded, Andreini’s success and renown.

Summary and Analysis of the Letters Love as the Beginning, Middle, and End of the Letters “If love is the true beginning, the perfect middle, and optimal end of all of our happiness, why must I resist its power?” asks an innamorata (a female lover) in Letter 120, “In Praise of Love.” Andreini devotes most of the 151 letters in the collection to answer this question: thirty-eight are letters written by a woman and addressed to a man; ninety are letters written by a man and addressed to a woman; fifteen are written between male friends and one between female friends, and seven more letters on various topics present ungendered or androgynous voices. The majority of Letters are exchanges between innamorati that describe the phenomenology of love, but some explore other forms of love. In Letter 21, “On the Birth of a Woman,” a woman admonishes a father for the inability to rejoice at the birth of his daughter, which becomes an opportunity to extol the excellence of women; in Letter 24, “A Reproach of Old Men in Love,” a woman ridicules an elderly man in love; in Letter 31, “On Flattery,” a woman denounces her suitor’s profession of love as flattery, hyperboles, lies, and even blasphemy; in Letters 113, “On Giving a Daughter in Marriage,” and 114, “On Yearning to Marry the Woman One Loves,” a young woman, who has been engaged against her will to a man she does not love, writes to her beloved begging for his help, and he assures her that he will find a remedy; in Letters 147, “On the Wisdom of Women,” and 148, “On the Cleverness of Women,” a woman and a man debate women’s wisdom and shrewdness in love, respectively. Notably, both men and women write letters on the phenomenology of love—chills, pallor, sweat, insomnia, lack of appetite—although women appear generally more in control; both praise Love’s power and their beloved’s beauty and virtues; both beg for reciprocated love through brilliant conceits and reprimand their beloved for cruelty and unfaithfulness, thus causing jealousy. The treatment of jealousy in Letters is notable in that this feeling identified Andreini’s theatrical company, the Gelosi.111 Andreini certainly read three of the lectures on jealousy by the Florentine historian and poet Benedetto 110. Sara E. Díaz and Jessica Goethals, Introduction to The Buffoons, A Ridiculous Comedy: A Bilingual Edition, by Margherita Costa, ed. and trans. Sara E. Díaz and Jessica Goethals (Toronto: Iter Press; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018), 4. 111. The company was active between 1568 and 1604 with the motto “Virtù, fama ed onor ne fèr gelosi” (“Virtue, fame, and honor made us zealous”), which plays on the polysemy of the adjective “geloso” as both “suspicious, covetous” and “committed, dedicated, solicitous,” which in English are rendered as “jealous” and “zealous” respectively. See Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, Prototipo edizione

Introduction 27 Varchi (1502/3–1565): one, completed by 1541, on Giovanni della Casa’s sonnet “Cura, che di timor ti nutri e cresci,” which argued that love cannot exist without jealousy; another, which Varchi completed by January 1550, entitled Alcuni dubbii intorno alla gelosia e risposta del Varchi ad alcuni censori (Some questions on jealousy and Varchi’s response to some critics); and finally the third of “four lectures on questions of love” (Lezioni quattro sopra alcune quistioni d’amore), delivered at the Accademia Fiorentina in 1554.112 As Annalisa Andreoni has noted, “Varchi’s stance in favor of jealousy earned him the epithet of ‘geloso,’ so much so that he was represented championing the necessity of jealousy even in Tullia d’Aragona’s Dialogue on the Infinity of Love,” published in Venice in 1547 and a likely influence on Andreini.113 It is thus not surprising that Andreini pays Varchi an extended tribute on the topics of jealousy, and whether or not it is possible to simultaneously love more than one person, in Letters 46 to 49: “On Jealousy (i),” “On Jealousy (ii),” “On Will,” and “On Intellect.” Another substantial group are letters between friends: fifteen are written between men and one is written between women. The letters between same-sex correspondents include one of only two letters on female friendship, a topic largely overlooked by Renaissance male writers, and one intimating homoerotic love. In Letter 131, “On the Virtuous Thoughts of a Marriageable Young Lady,” a girl seeks help from a woman to avoid being promised to a man she despises; she shows modesty in reaching out to a woman older than she is and a friend to her parents, whom she dignifies as a wise mentor.114 In Letter 14, “On the Power of Friendship,” a male writer responds to a male friend’s request to intercede for him with a certain “Madam N.” Not a word, however, is spent on the supposed matter at hand, while the topic of male friendship is expounded in detail, beginning with digitale (Turin: UTET Grandi Opere; Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2018), s.v. “Gelóso,” § 7. . 112. See Benedetto Varchi, “Lezione di M. Benedetto Varchi nell’Accademia di Padova sopra un sonetto del Casa e sulla gelosia,” in Opere di Benedetto Varchi (Trieste: Sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd austriaco, 1858–59), 2:570–78; “Altri dubbii intorno alla gelosia e risposta del Varchi ad alcuni suoi censori,” in Varchi, Opere, 2:578–82; and “Lezioni quattro sopra alcune quistioni d’amore. Lezione Terza,” in Varchi, Opere, 2:548–55. 113. “La presa di posizione a favore della gelosia fece sì che Varchi si guadagnasse la fama di ‘geloso,’ tanto che fu rappresentato come sostenitore della necessarietà di tale sentimento anche nel Dialogo della infinità d’amore di Tullia D’Aragona.” Annalisa Andreoni, “All’Accademia degli Infiammati,” in La via della dottrina: Le lezioni accademiche di Benedetto Varchi (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2012), 59. See also Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, ed. and trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 114. The second missive addressing female friendship is Letter 118, “Most Virtuous Amorous scherzi (iv),” in which the female letter writer references a letter that she wrote to a female friend while she responds to a man whom she apparently offended; in this second example, women act as friends who support each other against a man’s false accusations.

28 Introduction the hope to emulate the examples of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, and Achilles and Patroclus, and ending with a plea for an exclusive friendship. In the remaining seven letters, on various topics, the gender of the letter writer or addressee is obscured. More precisely, “On the Blows of Fortune” (Letter 5), “On the Pallor of Lovers” (Letter 13), and “Scherzi of a Virtuous Lover (v)” (Letter 92) are love letters that again create a space for homoerotic desire: in Letter 5 the writer’s gender is unknown, but the addressee is a man; in Letter 13 the letter writer is a woman, but the gender of the addressee varies from female to male; in Letter 92 a male letter writer addresses someone whose gender is unknown. Finally, “On the Death of One’s Son” (Letter 97), “On Spurning Wealth” (Letter 105), “On the Death of Torquato Tasso” (Letter 112), and “On the Restless Life of Men” (Letter 124) belong to the genre of consolation and are all addressed to a man by a writer whose gender is unknown. Perhaps Letter 13, “On the Pallor of Lovers,” best exemplifies the originality of the letters in this group: within an erudite disquisition on the Galenic physiology of pallor, it hints at love between two women, one of whom is cross-dressed as a man through an original change in gender from the initial feminine address “Signora mia” (my Lady) to the masculine past participle “tolto” (taken away). This transformation evokes those of Renaissance actors on stage and harkens back to Andreini’s own performative hermaphroditism, as she declares in her famous proemial sonnet to Rime.115

A Discordant Harmony: Paired and Thematically Grouped Letters Andreini’s Letters are easily analyzed as modules, independent units of meaning, tropes, and conceits meant to be endlessly modified and recombined to entertain and edify readers. Yet the sequence of Andreini’s letters is not arbitrary: sixtyfive letters that voice opposing or evolving opinions on love, marriage, serving at court, the country and the city, and the querelle des femmes are either paired or grouped thematically, as indicated in the original summaries Del medesimo or Dell’istesso (on the same topic) or most often Simili (on a similar topic).116 Six of these letters and fourteen additional letters with different summaries are best read as a letter and its response.117 These interrelated letters loosely borrow from 115. “E come ne’ teatri or donna ed ora / uom fei rappresentando in vario stile / quanto volle insegnar natura ed arte” (And just as in the theater, acting now women, now men, I showed in varied style all that nature and art can teach). Edited and translated in Cox, Lyric Poetry, 174. 116. In our translation we opted instead to repeat the first summary and to number in parentheses each summary in the pair or series, as in Letters 35, “On Taking a Wife (i),” and 36, “On Taking a Wife (ii).” 117. The ten pairs of letters and responses that we identified are: Letters 4, “In Praise of Beauty,” and 6, “Signs of Perfect Love”; Letters 8, “On a Lover Scorned,” and 9, “On the Power of Anger”; Letters 17, “On the Constancy of Women,” and 18, “On the Fire of Love”; Letters 35, “On Taking a Wife (i),” and 36, “On Taking a Wife (ii)”; Letters 46, “On Jealousy (i),” and 47, “On Jealousy (ii)”; Letters 48, “On

Introduction 29 the exchanges typical of the contrasti, or debates, in Andreini’s Fragmenti. For instance, the series of letters “On the Power of Love” (Letters 25, 26, and 27) shows a man’s changing perspective on love: the man initially praises Love as the divine source of all beauty and happiness, then denounces Love’s “harsh and devious law,” which causes him deep “torments, sorrows, and nuisances,” before finally surrendering to his beloved and welcoming Love’s “cruelty as mercy, his war as peace, his pain as pleasure, and his death as life.” These arguments resonate with the contrasto Sopra il seguire, e fuggire amore (On Following and Fleeing from Love), in which Pirro defends the pursuit of love at all costs and Mutia advises against it.118 The contrasto ends with a discussion on marital woes and pleasures, which resonates with another pair of letters: in Letter 35, “On Taking a Wife (i),” a man advises a friend against getting married through a barrage of commonplaces from the misogynistic tradition, while in Letter 36, “On Taking a Wife (ii),” the husband-to-be responds by defending marriage with Counter-Reformation arguments—for example, as a sacred institution and as a means to perpetuate the species, but also as a partnership of mutual love and support invoked by writers such as Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte.119 According to Ferdinando Taviani, the dynamic of the contrasto shaped the commedia dell’arte, and its female roles in particular. He identifies the following hallmarks: the coexistence of the refined lovers (innamorate) and unconventional servants (zanni) which mixed tragedy and comedy; the wide range of female and male characters, performed by actresses whose strength and weakness, resilience and vulnerability on stage challenged stereotypical gender lines; the pazzia scenes, in which the performance of madness rested on the absolute self-possession of the actress; and, finally, the sprezzatura of actresses who, like Vincenza Armani, could blush or pale at will to realistically convey their characters’ emotions. Taviani argues that the simultaneity of order and disorder in these performances engendered the unique aesthetic experience of “a discordant harmony” (una discorde Will,” and 49, “On Intellect”; Letters 53, “Virtuous Amorous scherzi (ii),” and 54, “Virtuous Amorous scherzi (iii)”; Letters 113, “On Giving a Daughter in Marriage,” and 114, “On Yearning to Marry the Woman One Loves”; Letters 124, “On the Restless Life of Men,” and 125, “On Finding Consolation in Adversity”; and, finally, Letters 147, “On the Wisdom of Women,” and 148, “On the Cleverness of Women.” 118. See Isabella Andreini, Lovers’ Debates for the Stage: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Pamela Allen Brown, Julie D. Campbell, and Eric Nicholson (New York and Toronto: Iter Press, 2022), 234–243. 119. As Meredith Ray notes, by staging a powerful defense of women against misogyny as an exchange between two male friends, Andreini “enlist[s] male authority” in the questione della donna (“Between Stage and Page,” in Writing Gender, 178). She also suggests (“Between Stage and Page,” in Writing Gender, 179) that Andreini might have been inspired by the epistolary exchange against and in defense of marriage between Ercole and Torquato Tasso, published as Dell’ammogliarsi; piacevole contesa fra i due moderni Tassi, Hercole, cioè, & Torquato, gentilhuomini bergamaschi (Bergamo: Comin Ventura, 1593).

30 Introduction armonia), an expression he borrows from Horace (Epistles 1.12.19), who follows Empedocles in defining the cosmos as the battlefield of Love and Discord.120 The first and the last letter in the collection are indeed in stark contrast with each other. If the modular structure of letters defies in part the Aristotelian notion of tragedy as “a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude,”121 the first and last letter do provide a sense of wholeness and a tragic closure. Letter 1, “The Worth of Honor,” comprises two distinct parts, each of which could be considered a letter in its own right. Together they define the ethos of the collection through a veiled appearance of its author: a woman of impeccable character and a humble yet deeply self-assured writer. In the first part, a married woman is telling a male acquaintance that her honor is on the line because, although he only wishes to speak to her, he is being imprudent by lingering on her street. She explains that honor is not only an individual but a family matter; that her honor may be forever stained by rumors, and she may even die; and that honorable conduct is appropriate to both men and women, since prudence is precisely what distinguishes humans from other living beings. She backs her argument with repetition and polyptoton that vividly express her anxiety for standing at the edge of vice: “honor” appears six times, including its synonyms (honesty) and adverbs (honorably); “dishonor” and “bad reputation” appear five times, while the neutral “reputation” appears once to suggest that the scale is tipping toward safeguarding her honor. The expression “I kiss your hands” marks the conclusion of the first part of the letter. In the second part, a woman writes in response to a man’s missive expounding “numerous and most elegant topics” and, in essence, asking her to meet him. The initial bow to misogynistic tropes (silence befits a woman, and her ignorance prevents her from responding adequately) quickly turns into a mockery of the man’s prolixity and lack of self-awareness when the female letter writer states, “silence is a virtue that exalts any person”; she continues, “Just as I know my capacity for silence, I know that I know nothing,” a nod to Socratic ignorance. The letter in fact displays the sharp wit of a woman who desires (desiderare, volere), believes (credere, parere), thinks (pensare, imaginarsi, ingegnarsi), and knows (sapere, conoscere). 120. Ferdinando Taviani, “Un vivo contrasto: Seminario su attrici e attori della commedia dell’arte,” Teatro e storia 1, no. 1 (1986): 29. These similarities between the Letters and Fragmenti explain their coupled publication history and reception, which are analyzed in detail in Brown, Campbell, and Nicholson’s Introduction to Andreini, Lovers’ Debates, 34–40. Horace’s expression, “concordia discors,” refers to “the main principle of Empedocles’ philosophy that the life of the world is due to a perpetual conflict of the two principles of Love and Strife.” See Horace, Epistles, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1929), 329n. 121. Aristotle, The Poetics, in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 23, trans. W. H. Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932), 1450b, reproduced in the Perseus Digital Library, .

Introduction 31 Above all, in contrast to her male interlocutor, she knows that “Nature [. . .] gave us two eyes, two ears, and only one tongue for no other reason than to advise us to observe and listen a lot, and speak only a little.” Clearly the female letter writer provides in the collection of Letters “a suitable and convenient way” for them to communicate honorably and for her to show her wisdom through both words and silence (as previously noted, letters written in a male voice are the overwhelming majority in the collection). Notably, the letter upends arguments from one of Andreini’s letters to Puteanus, in which she declares that she prefers to respond to him despite her ignorance, rather than appear rude.122 In an eminently discreet way, Andreini carves out a space in which she can safely experiment with writing beyond traditional gender boundaries. Her insistence on portraying herself as a “donna onesta” should be interpreted in light of the social pressures of her time. As Virginia Cox argued, women writers became progressively less controversial thanks to “the emergence, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, of other femalecreative types, such as artists, professional or semiprofessional singers, composers and actresses” whose embodied virtuosity, more contentious than writerly talent, was also successfully pushing the boundaries of decorum.123 Andreini takes every measure to protect her good name, at times almost treading toward a parody of female self-deprecation: her dedicatory letter stresses modesty (“I dare to release [these letters] alongside my other writings more because I trust the kindness of the world than because I think they are exemplary”), accordance with Nature (“My intention has always been to ward off death as best I could, as Nature taught me”), and deference to a powerful protector, Carlo Emanuele I, duke of Savoy.124 The last missive—Letter 151, “On the Death of One’s Wife”—also comprises two distinct messages: a letter from a grieving husband to a male friend frames a lengthy apostrophe from the husband to his deceased wife. To describe his pain to his friend, the husband employs the conventional hyperbole (he begins 122. “My Most Illustrious and Respected Sir, / If, from my letters, the desire arises in you to write me, it is less in me because of yours—not for lack of love, but out of ignorance. There is every reason to persuade you to write, but particularly these two: that in writing you gild the paper with your infinite virtue and you teach me, who wants so much to learn. I, then, have every reason not to write, and for this principally: that the more I write, the more I show my ignorance. What then shall I do? If I write, I show myself to be ignorant, if I do not write I show myself to be ill-bred; of the two evils, I choose the lesser—that is, to write, since it is better, in my mind, to show oneself ignorant by defect of education, rather than ill-bred because of base nature. [. . .]” See “f. Isabella Andreini to Erycius Puteanus (Ruelens, Erycius Puteanus et Isabelle Andreini, 26), edited and translated in MacNeil, Music and Women, 314–15. 123. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 3–4. 124. On the many facets of Andreini’s “subversive humor” see Domnica Radulescu, “Isabella’s ‘Tricks’: Carnival and Mimicry in Sixteenth Century Italy,” in Women’s Comedic Art as Social Revolution: Five Performers and the Lessons of Their Subversive Humor (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2012), 27–68.

32 Introduction “to perpetually weep”), climax (“Oh, nightlike day! Oh, deathlike night! Oh, hellish death!”), enumeration (“sighs, tears, sobs, and screams”), and parallelism (“not only have I changed, but to me everything has changed”); the husband then imagines speaking to his wife and vows to build her “a new ‘mega-mausoleum.’ ” Although Isabella’s name is never mentioned, the position of this letter suggests that the erection of this monument without equal is Francesco Andreini’s edition of her Letters three years after her death, an effort that Francesco sees as reciprocal: “Although you were mortal, your thoughts were always immortal. I wish the same for myself, and I certainly will achieve this should your goodness grant me this favor. How will my thoughts ever approach death if I constantly think of your divine virtues? Conversely, I hope you will think of me from time to time, if earthly concerns do not perturb the greatness of Heaven.” A collection that begins with Isabella’s self-presentation thus ends with a bow from her loving husband. With his curatorial work, Francesco bets his own immortality on the excellence and eternal glory of his wife as a writer.

The Actress as Writer: Thematic and Stylistic Aspects of the Letters As an actress, Andreini naturally developed an organic visual and verbal aesthetic. Additionally, her direct references to Horace’s maxim “ut pictura poesis” (Ars Poetica 361), for example in Letters 21, “On the Birth of a Woman,” and 148, “On the Cleverness of Women,” and her understanding of the painter as artefice (creator) and maniera as style, possibly influenced by Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), show Andreini’s theoretical engagement with the trope of the commonality of the arts.125 Yet, if the Letters brim with themes, personae, and assumptions that may have originated in Andreini’s performances, they also exemplify her readings, literary skill, and writerly ambition that her words endure beyond the ephemerality of commedia dell’arte performances. As Meredith Ray writes, “many of the letters derive from Isabella’s stage practice, but the monologues and exchanges she performed onstage were equally likely to have been shaped by the pages of literary texts, commonplace books and indeed epistolary literature (especially love letters).”126 Perocco further suggests that Andreini’s Letters “could perfectly 125. On this topic see Rosalind Kerr, “Isabella Andreini (Comica Gelosa 1560–1604): Petrarchism for the Theatre Public,” Quaderni d’Italianistica 27, no. 2 (2006): 77ff. See also Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, 2 vols. (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550). 126. Ray, “Between Stage and Page,” in Writing Gender, 165. The variety of Andreini’s sources has fueled the debate on the intended purpose of her Letters. For example, Piermario Vescovo believed that the rhetoric of Andreini’s Lettere would not have worked on stage, and that therefore her letters should be read as a literary work; see his “Isabella Andreini” in Le stanze ritrovate: Antologia di scrittrici venete dal Quattrocento al Novecento, ed. Antonia Arslan, Adriana Chemello, and Gilberto Pizzamiglio (Mirano, VE: Eidos, 1991), 83–94. Richard Andrews interpreted the Letters as elegant

Introduction 33 constitute an enormous, extended ‘Dialogue’ ” in the manner of Bembo’s Gli Asolani.127 It is not surprising that a commedia dell’arte actress whose fame rested on live and largely improvised performances, memorialized only by the occasional review, was compelled to explore the genre of letter writing, which is in essence an asynchronous written communication between two people who cannot or choose not to meet face-to-face. In Letters, Andreini borrows Petrarch’s lexicon after hollowing it out and emptying its core, so to speak, to make words lighter and easier to combine. Her favorite rhetorical figures are chiefly Petrarchan: doublet, antithesis, oxymoron, climax, parallelism, and chiasmus. But they are repeated, almost catalogued in their minute variations, at times in dizzying sequences that leave the argument in the background to showcase the artificio, the skill and wit of the author—as, for example, in “On War and Love (Letter 78), “On the Effects of Love” (Letter 104), and “On Serving in Love’s Army” (Letter 109), all centered on military lexicon. Enriched by interior monologues, direct and reported speech, and deixis (e.g., here, tomorrow, this letter), Andreini’s Letters show a persistent interest in performance and in the performative power of language, exemplified by expressions such as “I promise” and “I swear.” In her dedicatory letter to Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy, Andreini expresses her desire to live beyond her death through her writing, as well as her regret for “always be[ing] far from any peace” due to the pressing obligations of her acting career. By borrowing a male persona in Letter 133, “Scherzi of Virtuous Love (v),” she declares her ambition to literary excellence: Perhaps, inflamed by those thoughts, I will praise your supreme beauty all the way to the stars, and perhaps my praises will surpass even the most celebrated writings. If others with false words and lying verses endowed many women with a renown that perhaps Heaven refused them, why cannot I (although inexpert), by virtue of so noble a subject, complete the most glorious flight ever accomplished by any feather pen? Truth shines, even in the mouth of the ignorant. Her signature self-effacement, evident in the repetition of the adverb of possibility, the rhetorical question, and the insistence on her inexperience and rhetorical exercises in preparation for a performance, collecting situations, themes, formulae, and vocabulary to be reused on stage: Andrews, “Isabella Andreini and Others,” 316–33. Francesca Romana de’ Angelis suggested that Letters can easily be both: see La divina Isabella: Vita straordinaria di una donna del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1991), 104. 127. “[P]otrebbero perfettamente formare un enorme, lunghissimo ‘Dialogo’: una di quelle teorizzazioni su questioni astratte che, dagli Asolani di Bembo in poi, prolificano per tutto il secolo presentandosi sempre in forma di dialogo.” Perocco, “Donna/uomo, attrice/scrittrice, Isabella/Francesco,” 102.

34 Introduction ignorance, hardly dissimulates her confidence as a writer. Letter 31, “On Flattery,” epitomizes Andreini’s rhetorical prowess and use of transparency to bolster her authenticity. The strong opening sets the tone for the whole letter; by exposing the male poetic vocabulary of love as lies concocted to seduce women, Andreini shows her mastery of that vocabulary even as she distances herself from it: “I promise and swear to you that I am equally exhausted and exasperated by your many lies and deliberate mistakes. How can you say you adore me without blushing? Such is a feeling better directed toward our Creator than to His creation.” The letter writer affirms her agency with a synonymic repetition of the performative verbs “to promise” and “to swear.” The two additional synonymic repetitions subvert tropes of male-authored love poetry: the male lover never grows weary of longing for and exalting his beloved, and love is a “sweet error.”128 She then chastises her flatterer with a rhetorical question that attributes to a man the reddening of the face traditionally associated with female shame. To prevent the flatterer’s anger for her censure, the letter writer turns to the safest of arguments: any praise for beauty should go to God, and her beauty is a pale reflection of God’s beauty. The following apostrophe, “Ah, lovers, you err deliberately, and enjoy doing so,” adds pathos and extends the reprimand to all male lovers. She continues with a rhetorical question that anticipates a deliberative argument: “Since women all over the world are not equally endowed with beauty, why do you falsely say that all beauty resides in me? Surely one praises what one loves, but one praises most what one longs to possess.” Her enumeration of traditional male poetic tropes of feminine beauty has both argumentative and expository function; it shows mastery of the tradition in which she participates with some critical distance as a writer and a woman: You lovers sound more like fabulists when you say that your beloved’s hair is gold and illuminates the sun, that it binds you even when it is let down, and that those knots become doubly taut when it is tied back; that your beloved’s face is the whetstone on which Love sharpens his arrows, as he lies in wait to prey upon hearts; her eyebrows are bows, her eyes stars, or the sun, or whatever else suits your purpose; her cheeks are lilies and roses, her lips rubies, her teeth pearls, her neck pure milk, her breast alabaster, her hands ivory. By telling these blatant lies, and thousands more, you make fools of yourselves and, worse, of those who believe you. 128. For example, see Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [RVF] 190.13, “gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi” (my eyes were tired by looking but not sated), and RVF 161.7, “O faticosa vita, o dolce errore” (O laborious life, O sweet error), both in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 306 and 336.

Introduction 35 Andreini then ends her apostrophe to all male lovers, and returns to her particular case with a playful polyptoton, “I would be extremely foolish and credulous (credula) if I were to give credence (credere) to things so patently incredible (incredibile).” By insisting on a literal interpretation of her suitor’s hyperboles, she denounces them as blasphemy—“Am I truly Nature and Heaven’s treasure, perfect in all respects, as you write? Ah, we all know that only God is perfect”—and she blames the falseness of her suitor’s feelings for the absurdities of his praise. The letter concludes with a reference to Alexander the Great, an example of male virtue that she encourages women to follow: just like him, no woman should trade her true honor for false praise. The comparison of equality (“your agony is as false and bogus as your praise”) and the chiasmus (“a woman’s authentic life is one of honor, and her dishonor is equal to her death”) bring order and balance to the disorderly and unbalanced relationship her unwise suitor was establishing with his lies. The letter insists on chiasmus and adds antonomasia to denounce the suitor’s hyperboles and false praise: “I know you turn a Laïs into a Lucretia, and an Angelica into a Gabrina as it suits you.” We learn that the flatterer is young, and therefore his mistakes are somewhat less grave. The chiasmus tells us conclusively that male writers from antiquity to Andreini’s present play, as they please, a dangerous game with feminine virtue (Lucretia, the Roman matron) and vice (Laïs, the Greek hetaera), beauty (Angelica, the princess of Cathay) and ugliness (Gabrina, the Servian baroness). The traditional vocabulary of love works for entertainment and for teaching a moral lesson, but not to win a woman’s heart; it is part of a male performance about which women know too well. Andreini is also interested in topical issues of natural philosophy, which she juxtaposes with mythological tropes.129 In Letter 3, “On the Brightness of the Moon,” a man explains to his beloved lady that he missed their nocturnal rendezvous because the moonlight threatened to expose them. The letter hints at the question of the source of the light of the moon, planets, and stars, a medieval debate revived among late sixteenth-century philosophers. A subsequent elegant prosopopoeia to Selene in love with Endymion leaves an aftertaste of disenchantment. Still, Andreini operates in a syncretic tradition that borrows from hermeticism

129. Andreini’s interest in natural philosophy is again evocative of Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women (1600), particularly the Second Day in the dialogue, which Adriana Chemello has described as an attempt “to decipher ‘the grammar of the universe,’ to explain in the timbre of a female voice the means of entry to the micro and macrocosm, through the study of natural philosophy” (“una decodifica della ‘grammatica dell’universo,’ l’illustrazione con il timbro di una voce femminile della chiave di accesso al micro e al macrocosmo, grazie allo studio della filosofia naturale”). See Chemello, “Letteratura di condotta e vita delle donne nelle opere di Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinelli,” in Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470–1900, ed. Helena Sanson and Francesco Lucioli (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), 137–58. On The Worth of Women, see note 133.

36 Introduction and Neoplatonism to link the microcosm of the human to the cosmos,130 as shown in Letter 33, “On Comparisons with Nature.” In it Andreini uses two of the four elements, fire and water, to argue that if a light element such as fire (characterized by an upward movement) and a heavy element such as water (characterized by a downward movement) are impeded from reaching their “natural place,” their force augments. The lover’s attraction to his beloved is framed as natural, while the beloved’s rejection is unnatural, not simply cruel. Andreini’s travels for her acting career, and her theoretical interest in performance, spectacle, and entertainment, brought her to engage with topics of civic and courtly life, as well as food and fashion. In Letter 75, “On Serving at Court,” in which a gentleman attempts to dissuade his friend from courtiership, Andreini acknowledges that she is engaging with a literary genre by quoting a line from Cesare Caporali’s “La corte” (Rime, 1582) in which he in turn quotes from Pietro Aretino’s 1538 Ragionamento delle corti.131 Andreini further adopts the trope of animal similes from political theory, but makes the significant stylistic choice of unusual examples of weakness (a chicken, a badger, and a deer) embedded in popular expressions that challenge translation: “prepare also to have the strong stomach of a chicken, sleep soundly like a badger, and have the swift foot of a deer.” Andreini then unpacks her metaphorical language and explains that her advice is to “[l]earn to withstand abuse happily and with a smile.” Her glossing shows awareness of the changing nature of language and the ephemerality of expressions, symbols, metaphors, and uses. After literary references to dissimulation (drinking from the river Lethe in order to forget one’s promises) and to swift metamorphoses (Thetys, Proteus, and Achelous), the male letter writer warns his friend that, behind a façade of propriety and elegance, the practices surrounding food and fashion at court reveal a culture of exhausting competition: courtiers must scramble for their food before others devour it, and keep their mantles on all day to always appear ready to serve. The spectacle here is courtly life, as Andreini turns the gaze away from the stage back to her audience.

Rhetoric and the questione della donna in the Letters Andreini’s Letters multiply Petrarch’s monologic Canzoniere in dozens of male and female voices, senders and receivers of these written words. While there is an 130. “[T]he Aristotelian tradition of the imagination converges with the Neoplatonic and hermetic tradition of the pneuma, the spiritus phantasticus. The stuff of dreams, prophesies, enchantment, and love, that which makes the creation of images, or phantasmata, possible in man, is the same principle that animates the cosmos, that mediates between the soul of the world and the matter. In the same way it puts man’s soul in communication with his body, reason with sensation.” See Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 134. 131. See note 206 to Letter 75, “On Serving at Court.”

Introduction 37 undeniable disparity in the fictional gendered authorial voices, Isabella the author speaks through them via the symbolic language of mythological figures to portray a multiplicity of identities and experiences, which, rather than transgressing gender boundaries, renders them irrelevant. In a rich display of erudition, Andreini shrewdly employs male and female mythological and historical figures to hint at her conviction that men and women can learn from each other. In Letter 97, “On the Death of One’s Son,” a letter writer of unidentified gender consoles a male friend grieving his son’s death. The letter writer encourages him to respect God’s will and infinite wisdom, just like Cydippe, Hera’s priestess: “One day Cleobis and Biton’s mother prayed for the gods to grant them the highest good one could desire, because she deeply loved her sons. Once the gods heard her devout prayers, the two young men fell into perpetual sleep in Juno’s Temple. They were given death because the gods could not have granted them any greater good.”132 In Letter 9, “On the Power of Anger,” a man invites his beloved lady to forget her anger by following the example of ancient military men: “Remember that anger obscures the soul’s virtue, and imitate Caesar the brave who, as is told, would never enter into battle angry. Alexander sullied all his virtues with the vice of anger because, by erupting in anger, he gave Lysimachus to the lions, ran a lance through Clitus’s chest, and caused Callisthenes’s death.” Women often escape madness and suicide, two traditional consequences of female dishonor, by identifying with wise male authority figures. In Letter 107, “On Ingratitude,” a woman cruelly betrayed by her male lover avoids Hecuba’s madness by savoring her newfound freedom from an ungrateful lover and wishing she were a Persian judge in order to seek justice: “Oh most judicious Persians, how right you were to conceive that most righteous law against ingrates. . . . Miserable me, why can I not punish you as a Persian judge would, when I am so willing to do it! Since I cannot punish you, I can at least hate you.” When Andreini addresses the questione della donna more directly, she is initially cautious, and later entrusts powerful mythological and historical figures with expressing more radical ideas. While Letter 21, “On the Birth of a Woman,” takes for granted “the worth of women,” a possible nod to Moderata Fonte’s dialogue The Worth of Women (written in 1590 but printed in 1600),133 and addresses a father’s refusal to rejoice at the birth of his daughter, it begins with the safest of 132. This is one of five letters in which writers of unidentified gender invite male recipients to stoicism and patience: “On the Blows of Fortune” (Letter 5); “On the Death of One’s Son” (Letter 97); “On Spurning Wealth” (Letter 105); “On the Death of Torquato Tasso” (Letter 112); and “On the Restless Life of Men” (Letter 124). By obscuring the gender of the letter writer, Andreini may be dissimulating her didactic role toward her readers (see note 296 to Letter 112). 133. Virginia Cox has suggested Andreini’s knowledge of Moderata Fonte’s dialogue: “That the phrase should be seen as a conscious echo of the Italian title of Fonte’s Worth of Women is the more likely given that defenders of women conventionally talked of the ‘dignity,’ ‘nobility,’ or ‘excellence’ of women. Fonte’s title, Il merito delle donne, is, to my knowledge, without precedent.” See Moderata

38 Introduction arguments: the female letter writer chastises the father for “wish[ing] for a boy against the will of God, who always makes the right choice.”134 She continues her rebuke by citing virtues traditionally attributed to women, such as selflessness, patience, frugality, modesty, and obedience, while a bleak picture of the men in their families emerges: fathers exercise “stern authority,” petrify their daughters, and commit them to convents against their will; husbands are marred by “unbearable flaws,” and brothers are bullies. She then burdens male mythological figures (Oedipus kills his father Laius and Paris causes the Trojan War) with epitomizing the male thirst for dominance that drives families and cities to ruin. The letter concludes with a compelling enumeration of female mythological and historical figures who are neither meek nor passive but rather illustrious models of knowledge (Corinna, Sappho, Erinna, Aspasia, Diotima, Praxilla, Amalthea, Manto, Arete, Carmenta), valor (Camilla, Hippolyta, Zenobia, Hypsicratea, Tomyris, Tiburna), and chastity (Penelope, Lucretia, Artemisia).135 After her survey of history and mythology, the female letter writer appeals to the father’s imagination, inviting him to rejoice at the birth of a daughter who may, with his blessing, embody all three qualities. With her historical and mythological allusions, Andreini thus affirms that women are perfectly capable of imitating both male and female exemplary figures, as well as recognizing deplorable ones by reading through the lines of a tradition  biased in favor of men; she also deliberately scours the tradition for positive female models to reclaim an obscured genealogy of excellence. We should not be afraid to recognize her effort, and the reality that, as Ross argued, Renaissance women writers felt, understood, and denounced patriarchy and knew feminism as “the desire to improve the condition of women.”136 Indeed, Andreini registers two different forms of pressure: that of proving a woman’s worth through the awe she inspired by promising to be, or by being, a wonder; and, that of finding new forms of praise within and beyond male-generated stereotypes. In Letter 68, “Amorous and Civil scherzi (i),” a gentleman compares the fateful splendor of his beloved’s eyes to the “prodigious” light of a comet, which, “with its resplendent tail, usually signifies, either the death of a king, or a change in leadership, or the loss of sovereignty.” The lady is addressed as “valorous,” a rare accolade in Andreini’s Letters—used only five times in the masculine form and otherwise always in military contexts (three times in Letter 78, “On War Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 21n32. 134. This is not to suggest that the treatment of the questione della donna in this letter is traditional; instead, we wish to underscore how Andreini addresses the question in a progressively more daring manner. 135. See note 96 to Letter 21, “On the Birth of a Woman,” for a description of the mythological and historical figures. 136. Ross, Birth of Feminism, 3.

Introduction 39 and Love”), and only once more in the feminine form in Letter 122, “Amorous and Civil scherzi (iv).” The gentleman shows rare psychological insight in understanding that the power of his lady needs to be acknowledged for her to be satisfied: “I write this letter not because you are unaware of the power of your eyes to influence others, but to let you know that among the many who understand and know you, I know and understand you even better, because I know how powerful people take pleasure in the acknowledgement of their strength and influence.” In Letter 96, “On the Crowns Bestowed by the Romans,” a man begs his beloved lady to give him a sign of her favor and references military decorations to praise her mercy: “by liberating me, a most unfortunate lover, from those scorching flames that incinerate me, you deserve a crown not of grass, or gold, or olive branches, or holly, or oak, but of the brightest of stars,” perhaps even those of Ariadne’s crown. Andreini’s own impresa (an allegorical image paired with a motto) included in the title page of the 1607 first edition of Lettere (Figure 1), is that of a flame or, as Cristina Grazioli explained, “a flame (a ‘rocket,’ that is an artificial firework) flying toward the sky, with the motto ‘elevat ardor’ (the flame rises). The detail of being ‘burning’ with an artificial rather than natural fire highlights Isabella’s careful and conscious effort to construct an ‘elevated’ self-image.”137 Her Letters reveal that honor and cultural capital rest, at least partially, on spectacle, and the knowledge that her skill in poetic fiction is also valued precisely because it is artificial. In Letter 17, “On the Constancy of Women,” a woman chastises her flattering suitor by exposing glorious mythological figures—all but one of them male—as cruel liars who used their rhetorical prowess to deceive women. Theseus becomes “cruel” in his betrayal of “naïve Ariadne” with the complicity of “her unfaithful sister Phaedra,” while Jason’s false “gentle and tender words” are opposed to Medea’s “helpful spells,” and he is held accountable for “making her the killer of her own brother and the mother of two children.” By playing on the dual meaning of Aeneas’s epithet pietoso (pious, merciful), Andreini rejects Virgil’s forgiving narrative of his betrayal of Dido and describes him as “more cruel than merciful” and “a lying Trojan pilgrim.” Andreini then uses irony to repudiate his treatment of her: “after being mercifully welcomed into her port, her city, her kingdom, her bed, and her soul [he] made the grand grateful gesture we all know.” In Letter 148, “On the Cleverness of Women,” a man takes issue with women’s unfair prejudice against all men, despite men’s best intentions. In a kind of mise en abyme, the man ridicules women as they ridicule men, through irony and antonomasia: “If someone else is able to convey through a certain aphorism, a noble 137. “[U]na fiamma (un ‘razzo’, cioè un fuoco artificiale) che vola verso il cielo, con il motto ‘elevat ardor’. ‘Accesa’ dunque, non di fuoco naturale, bensì artificiale: particolare che sottolinea l’attento e consapevole lavoro di costruzione di una immagine ‘elevata’ di sé.” Cristina Grazioli, “La vita, l’arte, il mito,” 21–22. Andreini’s motto, which she adopted on becoming a member of the Accademia degli Intenti, means “the flame rises.” See Finucci’s introduction to Mirtilla, A Pastoral, 6.

40 Introduction example, and a clever simile that he deserves a reward for his supreme loyalty, his lady unfailingly says, ‘Here goes Aristarchus, who cannot speak without quoting Plato or Aristotle. Where did he learn this figure of speech? He should go and read to young boys in school rather than converse with women in their chambers.’ ” Truly, the women in the letter, including a certain “Lady Cleverness,” come out as sharp-witted, but also keenly aware of the power and responsibility of words and proud of the extraordinary erudition of women despite their lack of access to the formal education received by men. Eight letters in the collection centering on marriage show its social importance and topicality, but also Isabella’s investment in it as a writer: Letter 34, “Pleasant and Virtuous scherzi (i)”; Letter 35, “On Taking a Wife (i)”; Letter 36, “On Taking a Wife (ii)”; Letter 113, “On Giving a Daughter in Marriage”; Letter 114, “On Yearning to Marry the Woman One Loves”; Letter 131, “On the Virtuous Thoughts of a Marriageable Young Lady”; and two additional letters on a wife’s death, Letter 137, “On the Pain at the Death of One’s Wife” and Letter 151, “On the Death of One’s Wife,” that, as previously discussed, signal Francesco’s contribution to the collection. During Isabella and Francesco’s life, marital fidelity as a trope had evolved in light of a renewed interest in marital love. Marriage was still a patriarchal affair: young women married older men chosen by their families, with their main duties being childbearing and child rearing, running the household, and pleasing their husbands. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, as evidenced by Brian Richardson, a new understanding of conjugal fidelity had emerged that stressed the husband’s shared responsibility for the failure of a marriage. This evolution culminated in Fonte’s The Worth of Women, which dissects marital love from a female perspective. Fonte’s characters include unmarried young women, newlywed women, and experienced wives who collectively stress the importance of the husband’s effort and loyalty in matrimony.138 When Fonte’s characters discuss love, they include plenty of literary and philosophical references, but also personal experiences, thus transforming marital love from loyalty toward an abstract and imposed principle into the eager and personal devotion that exists among friends and equals.139 Alexandra Coller has shown that through 138. See Brian Richardson, “ ‘Amore maritale’: Advice on Love and Marriage in the Second Half of the Cinquecento,” in Panizza, ed., Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, 194–208. With regard to Fonte, Richardson stresses that “[t]here is more than a hint of desperation in this plea. Fonte clearly felt that husbands were all too likely not to be loving” (see Richardson, “ ‘Amore maritale,’ ” 205). 139. Evident in both Fonte and Andreini are indeed “the willingness of women in this period to base their claims to didactic authority simply on their learning and experience, without recourse to the topos of divine inspiration, and, secondly, their increasing preparedness to take an instructional or polemical role in relation to men”; see Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 160. Andreini’s Letter 147, “On the Wisdom of Women,” articulates this perspective with regard to choosing one’s lover wisely, based on experience and not on promises or hopes: “The pleasures of love derive from knowing how to

Introduction 41 Mirtilla, Lettere, and Fragmenti, Isabella advances a similar ideal of marriage; in Lettere, specifically, Isabella admits “that marriage is not always beneficial for the woman who has to bear its burden silently,” and advocates “that the ‘choice’ in the selection of a husband should, ultimately, be left to the woman.”140 Isabella does not merely preach; she practices her ideals on marriage in her artistic collaboration with her husband. As Julie Campbell puts it, Isabella leverages “the protection and propriety” she has gained through her marriage to Francesco to challenge his depictions of debates on female virtue. While Francesco contrasts the familiar figures of the vicious she-devil and the virtuous mother in “Sopra del pigliar moglie” (On Taking a Wife), from his Ragionamenti fantastici posti in forma di dialoghi rappresentativi (Humorous discourses in the form of dialogues for the stage, 1612), Isabella, in her Mirtilla, Lettere, and Fragmenti, “problematizes and broadens the scope of virtuous behaviors for women,” for example, by celebrating chastity through a display of eloquence.141 Indeed, Andreini draws on her refined rhetorical skills to reflect on prostitution while safeguarding her own reputation. In Letter 93, “On the Harmful Dealings with Prostitutes,” Andreini’s judicious lexical choice of pratica (dealings) paints prostitution as a relationship, or an association, between two people. The author of the letter is a gentleman reprimanding a friend who has fallen prey to “a vile and dishonorable female.” The portrait of prostitution is then further complicated when the fallen man is said to have neglected his “pressing business” (importantissimi negozi) in Venice, evidently because he pursued less honorable business and ignored the recommendations of the letter writer while heeding a temptress’s call. As he excoriates her with a litany of injurious words, the letter writer progressively acknowledges the power of a sophisticated and skillful Venetian courtesan, initially dismissed as a femmina (Lat. femina or female), then upgraded to donna (Lat. domina or lady, mistress), and finally elevated to a powerful mythological character, Circe or Lamìa, who dominates his friend. Adopting a male persona, Andreini—in a way reminiscent of Fonte’s The Worth

choose a lover, and therefore I wish to proceed in this matter with great caution. I desire for my steady joy to be based on good and valid experience” (italics added). 140. Alexandra Coller, “Isabella Andreini’s La Mirtilla (1588): Pastoral Drama and Conjugal Love in Counter-Reformation Italy,” Italian Quarterly 46 (2009): 21. Especially notable for bringing “a certain amount of passion or ‘ardore’ ” to marital love is the speech by the shepherd Coridone extolling matrimony in Mirtilla (4.2.2313–53), based on his own experience as a happily married person (Coller, “Isabella Andreini’s La Mirtilla,” 24). We thank the reader for highlighting the importance of this passage in Mirtilla. 141. Julie D. Campbell, “Francesco Andreini: ‘On Taking a Wife,’ ” in In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Literary and Social Contexts for Women’s Writing, ed. Julie D. Campbell and Maria Galli Stampino (Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 268–69.

42 Introduction of Women—holds responsible for their actions both the courtesan and the man who solicited her services.142 In Letter 138, “In Praise of the Countryside (i),” Andreini takes us back to the atmosphere of her Mirtilla: an old man describes the peace he has found in the countryside, where the golden ears of wheat substitute for the gold that decorates palaces, and the dancing and singing of shepherdesses delights him more than court ceremony and theatrics. In Letter 75, “On Serving at Court,” another man advises a prospective courtier to “[l]earn to withstand abuse happily and with a smile, with the intention of thanking your abusers,” and thus to “surpass Thetis, Proteus, and Achelous in your transformations.” By using both male and female figures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who shape-shift to escape rape, coercion, and intimidation respectively, Andreini suggests that a culture of abuse is also deleterious for men. Much like Luce Irigaray’s “mystérique,” Andreini’s mythical figures transform the “I” and the “you” of Letters into “a living mirror” of each other that disrupts and complicates gender difference and hierarchy.143 The term specchio (mirror) occurs a total of nineteen times in the collection, making it a keyword in Letters before it becomes a Baroque motif.144 In Letter 119, “On the Suspicions of Lovers,” a male lover facing rejection from the woman he loves wishes to die to end his unbearable suffering. Because her image resides in his heart, however, he decides to spare himself in order to protect her, as Demetrius spared the entire city of Rhodes for the sake of a single portrait by Protogenes found there. The lover concludes: “I have a bigger obligation than he did, because a man and a woman are worthier than a hundred cities; and Love, who created you and placed you in my heart, is much worthier than Protogenes, since gods are worthier than humans. Attempting to measure the difference between you and that image is like attempting to measure immensity and to enumerate infinity.” We could say that the same is true of Letters, an impressive and diverse collection, but a 142. Fonte, The Worth of Women, 88–90. We thank the reader for inviting us to think of Andreini in relation to Fonte on this topic. 143. “A living mirror, thus, am I (to) your resemblance as you are mine. We are both singular and plural, one and ones, provided that nothing tarnishes the mirrors that fuse in the purity of their exchange. Provided that one, furthermore, does not exceed the other in size and quality. For then the other would be absorbed in the One (as) to infinity.” See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 197. 144. Cf. Letter 4, “In Praise of Beauty”; Letter 6, “Signs of Perfect Love”; Letter 8, “On a Lover Scorned” (two occurrences); Letter 9, “On the Power of Anger” (two occurrences); Letter 46, “On Jealousy (i)”; Letter 49, “On Intellect”; Letter 83, “On Demureness”; Letter 110, “On Liars”; Letter 116, “Most Virtuous Amorous scherzi (ii)” (two occurrences in addition to specchiano, “reflect”); Letter 127, “On Inconstancy (ii)”; Letter 134, “In Praise of a Woman”; Letter 135, “On a Portrait by Love” (three occurrences); and Letter 149, “On a Lover’s Vow.”

Introduction 43 finite one—one that can only approximate Andreini’s inexhaustible talent and her ability to console, beg, warn, challenge, charm, reprimand, thank, woo, and instruct her audience. Writing as a man attempting to dissuade his friend from a career as a courtier or begging his beloved for reciprocity, a woman turning down unwanted attention from a suitor, or reproaching a father unable to rejoice at the birth of a daughter, Andreini merges writing and acting in an original and seminal way. Much like her mythological references, she makes shape-shifting an honorable, indeed necessary, practice as a sixteenth-century wife, mother, writer, poet, and diva.

Reception and Afterlife As Virginia Cox establishes, the female writer of the later sixteenth century becomes a more normalized figure who is no longer reluctant to publish her work.145 Isabella was anything but reluctant; in fact, she actively sought patrons for the publication of her works. For Andreini, the publication of her works and their acceptance into humanist literary and cultural milieux were essential to her selfpromotional and legitimization strategies. The Letters had great fortune at the presses, enjoying a remarkable nineteen editions between 1607 and 1663.146 The demand for Isabella’s writing was so strong that, from 1617 onward, Letters was accompanied in print by another of Isabella’s posthumous texts, Fragmenti di alcune scritture (or Ragionamenti), curated by her husband, Francesco Andreini. Like her Mirtilla, Isabella’s Letters were translated (although partially, as we will discuss) into French in the seventeenth century.147 There is also evidence that her texts traveled outside of continental Europe; auction catalogues of the period demonstrate that copies of Lettere

145. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 5–10 passim. 146. The nineteen editions of the Lettere are as follows: 1607 (Venice: Marc’Antonio Zaltieri); 1610 (Venice: publisher unspecified); 1611 (Turin: publisher unspecified); 1612 (Venice: Sebastiano Combi); 1616 (Turin: Gio. Domenico Tarino); 1617 (Venice: Gio. Battista Combi); 1620 (Turin: Gio. Francesco Cavalleri); 1620 (Venice: Gio. Battista Combi); 1621 (Turin: Heredi di Gio. Domenico Tarino); 1624, 1625, 1627 (Venice: Gio. Battista Combi); 1628 (Turin: Heredi di Gio. Domenico Tarino); 1634, 1638 (Venice: Gio. Battista Combi); 1647 (Venice: Li Guerigli); 1647 (Venice: Alla Minerva); 1652 (Venice: Li Guerigli); and 1663 (Venice: Carlo Conzatti). This list is derived from Basso, Le Genre épistolaire, 2:415–20, and Quondam, Le “Carte messaggiere,” 286. 147. See Danielle Mauri, “La Mirtilla di Isabella Andreini e la sua seconda traduzione francese,” in “Il n’est nul si beau passetemps / Que se jouer à sa pensée” (Charles d’Orléans): Studi di filologia e letteratura francese in onore di Anna Maria Finoli, ed. Maria Colombo, Marina Fumagalli, and Anna Maria Raugei (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1996), 243–60.

44 Introduction appeared in (at least) two London collections. In one such collection totaling 748 works,148 Lettere was one of only six female-authored books, and Andreini was the only Italian woman writer represented; in the other, a much larger collection of more than 4,000 books,149 Lettere was one of twenty-nine written by women, and Andreini was one of only four Italian women writers represented, the others being Isabella Cortese, Lucrezia Marinella, and Catherine of Siena. Although more research still needs to be conducted regarding the potential of Andreini’s further international circulation and intellectual impact, it is clear that she was one of the more renowned women writers in Europe at that time. The reception and legacy of Letters originate in seeds intentionally sown during Andreini’s lifetime. She sought patronage from important figures such as Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, Lavinia della Rovere, marchesa del Vasto, and Carlo Emanuele I, duke of Savoy, all noted supporters of poets. Her intellectual friendship with Erycius Puteanus facilitated her admittance into the Accademia degli Intenti, a credential Isabella conspicuously displayed—as “L’Accesa” (the burning one) or “Accademica Intenta”—on her published texts. Isabella proved adept at attuning her literary and epistolary personae within the Republic of Letters by adopting strategies, including submissive student and “filial postures” seemingly at odds with the pro-woman messages of her texts. Such gestures, however, served to ingratiate and legitimize her within the humanist network, ensuring that she would receive literary attention hitherto unprecedented for a theater performer150—as exhibited by the numerous encomiastic compositions, mostly in Latin and all by men, which precede Letters. Isabella’s induction into humanist intellectual culture proved not only beneficial during her lifetime, but also provided her husband and son with cachet well after her death. Francesco Andreini published his own texts151 only after the 148. Bibliotheque de feu monseigneur le duc de Lauderdale, ou, Catalogue de livres choisis es langues Françoise, Italienne & Espagnole (London, 1690), 14. RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700 (“Isabella Andreini”; accessed May 3, 2021), . 149. Bibliotheca illustris, sive, Catalogus variorum librorum in quavis lingua & facultate insignium ornatissimae bibliothecae viri cujusdam praenobilis ac honoratissimi olim defuncti (London: Per T. Bentley and B. Walford, bibliopolas, 1687), 67. RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700 (“Isabella Andreini”; accessed May 3, 2021), . 150. Ross, “Performing Humanism,” 140–56. 151. To name the most renowned, see Francesco Andreini, Le Bravure del Capitano Spavento, published in two parts (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somasco, 1607; Venice: Vicenzo Somasco, 1618); L’Ingannata Proserpina (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somasco, 1611); and Ragionamenti fantastici (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somasco, 1612).

Introduction 45 publication of his edition of Isabella’s Letters, and therefore his renown as an author in his own right was tethered to Isabella’s literary legacy.152 Just as Isabella derived moral legitimacy from marriage and motherhood during her lifetime, Francesco, after her death, fashioned himself as a devoted and forever-bereaved husband, or “heroic widower” as Ross dubs him,153 which boosted his stature through the espousal of such humanist moral virtues. Giovan Battista Andreini also sought to legitimize his own career, as well as to launch “his project of ennobling the theatrical profession,”154 by utilizing Isabella’s reputation as a figure who fused morality and erudition. In his defense of the theater, La Ferza (The Scourge, 1625), Giovan Battista extolled his mother’s virtues (and academic credentials) with “l’ardimento filiale” (filial ardor) and quoted from her Letters to demonstrate her exemplary embodiment of “onestà” (virtue, probity).155 The impeccable reputation of Isabella, “così gloriosa donna”156 (so glorious a woman), was then exploited by Giovan Battista in defense of the actress at large,157 “the [theater’s] greatest adornment.” Andreini’s fame in France as a sought-after performer for the highest nobility158 likely engendered interest in her published texts as well. As early as 1599, the Parisian poet Roland du Jardin, Sieur des Roches, completed a prose translation of Mirtilla which survives only in manuscript form,159 and was followed by a revised version published in 1602 under the pseudonym Adradan.160 Her Rime were also printed in France in 1603.161 Isabella’s departure from Fontainebleau 152. For a discussion of how Francesco Andreini leveraged Isabella’s legacy to further his own admittance into humanist literary culture, see Ross, “Performing Humanism,” 150. 153. Ross, “Performing Humanism,” 150. 154. Ross, “Performing Humanism,” 153. 155. Giovan Battista Andreini, La Ferza. Ragionamento secondo contra l’accusa data alla commedia (Paris: Nicolao Callemont, 1625), 33. 156. Giovan Battista Andreini, La Ferza, 41. 157. “[L]’ornamento maggiore [del teatro].” Giovan Battista Andreini, La Ferza, 44. 158. Andreini was called to perform in France on separate occasions for Henri III as well as Henri IV, in addition to her legendary performance of her Pazzia as part of the 1589 wedding celebration in Florence of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christina of Lorraine. 159. Amours de Bergers (1599), trans. Roland du Jardin, Sieur des Roches (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. FR 25483). 160. Isabella Andreini, Myrtille, bergerie d’Isabelle Andreini mise en François, trans. Adradan (Paris: Mathieu Guillemot, 1602). For a succinct description of the relationship between this published translation and the aforementioned manuscript version, see the catalog entry from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, (accessed March 21, 2022). 161. Isabella Andreini, Rime d’Isabella Andreini (Paris: Claude de Monstr’oeil, 1603).

46 Introduction in 1604 for her ill-fated return to Italy inspired complimentary letters from the French regents and encomiastic poetry dedicated to her by prominent French poets.162 The 1605 posthumous edition of her Rime contains poetry of praise by French nobles, thus proving that Andreini “enjoyed a varied and vigorous interaction with, and accolades from, fellow poets, academicians, philosophers, and admirers throughout Italy and France.”163 In 1618, at a time when a new edition of Lettere was being published almost yearly, François de Rosset translated into French four of Andreini’s Lettere and included them in his compilation of Lettres amoureuses.164 Rosset’s collection of love letters, first released less than fifteen years after Isabella’s death, proved popular, with several editions published in quick succession. Isabella’s Lettere were reprinted in French translation at least until 1699, when eight letters appear in bilingual epistolary compilation in facing Italian-French text by Henri Bousanquet: Lettres choisies sur diverses matières trèsimportantes tirées des plus célèbres auteurs de ce siècle (1699).165 In 1642, François de Grenaille (1616–1680) published a collection of women’s epistolary writings, Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames tant anciennes que modernes, which included not just the first French translations of the letters of Abelard and Héloïse but a much larger selection of Isabella Andreini’s Letters than had previously appeared in French. In his short introduction to Andreini and her work, Grenaille states that “Isabella Andreini’s works have rendered her name so famous that it is unnecessary for my own writings to introduce her,”166 confirming Isabella’s continued eminence nearly forty years after her death. Grenaille is

162. Marie de’ Medici praised Isabella in a letter, as did her husband Henri IV, who also conferred upon her the title of Dame. Poet Isaac du Ryer presented Isabella with an encomiastic verse poem. See Nunzia Soglia’s Introduction to Andreini’s Rime, 32–35. 163. Valeria Finucci, Introduction to Mirtilla, A Pastoral, 11. 164. François de Rosset, Lettres amoureuses et morales, des beaux esprits de ce temps: enrichies de discours, de harangues, de consolations, de complaintes, et de devis rares et singuliers . . . (Paris: Samuel Thiboust, 1618). Subsequent editions were published in 1619, 1620, and 1625. 165. Henri Bousanquet, trans., Lettres choisies sur diverses matières très-importantes. Tirées des plus célèbres auteurs de ce siècle. Sçavoir Bentivoglio, Loredano, Gabrieli, Isabella Andreini, et autres (Zurich: David Guessner, 1699). The inclusion of eight letters by Andreini in this epistolary compilation is noteworthy not only because the title designates her as “one of the most celebrated authors of this century,” but also because the chosen letters comprise topics beyond love, including Letter 21, “On the Birth of a Woman” (Del nascimento della donna); Letter 97, “On the Death of One’s Son” (Della morte di un figliuolo); and Letter 105, “On Spurning Wealth” (Del disprezzo delle ricchezze). 166. “[L]e nom d’Isabella Andreini est trop celebre par les ouvrages pour avoir besoin de se faire connoistre par mes écrits.” François de Grenaille, Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames tant anciennes que modernes (Paris: Chez Toussainct Quinet, 1642), 2:20.

Introduction 47 so reverent of Andreini that, as Silvia Fabrizio-Costa notes,167 his remarks raise her to the level of mythic perfection, on par with the ancient Roman Cornelia.168 The inclusion and translation of a selection of Isabella Andreini’s letters, it seems, was used by Grenaille, with feigned self-deprecation, to establish his own literary notoriety by aligning himself with other admirers, such as Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino: “I thought I would offend her by praising her after Tasso, Marino, and other great people had done so.”169 On the one hand, as Bernard Bray argues, Grenaille must be given credit for the place of Isabella’s Letters, alongside Ovid’s Heroides and the correspondence of Abelard and Héloïse, as foundational texts of the French love letter genre.170 Despite Grenaille’s obsequious introduction to Andreini, however, his translation and editorial presentation of her Letters offers a glimpse into how her legacy/persona, and her text, were modified to suit more reactionary societal and cultural demands by conforming to pre-established norms governing women’s writing—particularly epistolary writing, which espoused desired essential femininity founded upon, as Jensen puts it, “an oppressively heterosexual dynamic of seduction and betrayal.”171 Jensen argues that women’s epistolary writing of the period, characterized by a woman’s “anguished and masochistic lament” to the man who had seduced, betrayed, and abandoned her, was not a natural expression of femininity, but instead a male construct.172 Anxiety in response to women’s challenging of patriarchal rules provoked a response that sought to reinforce the near exclusive masculinity of the literary sphere by restricting women’s writing to the supposedly “natural” practice of love letter writing in an attempt to reinforce this constructed fiction. Grenaille’s curation and repackaging of Andreini’s letters, which essentially violates the fictional and performative elements that render Andreini’s literary work original and enduring, is illustrative of such an impulse. Grenaille includes translations of thirty-nine of Andreini’s 151 Letters, with each letter prefaced by 167. Silvia Fabrizio-Costa, “Una traduzione (?) francese delle Lettere di Isabella Andreini: François de Grenaille (1642),” in Manfio, ed., Isabella Andreini: Una letterata in scena, 208. 168. Cornelia, famed mother of the Brothers Gracchi and daughter of Scipio Africanus, was also revered as a model of wifely devotion, as well as an exemplary epistolographer praised by Cicero and referenced by Andreini herself in Letters (Letter 36, “On Taking a Wife (ii)”). 169. “Je croirois l’offenser en luy donnant des éloges aprez que le Tasso, le Marini, & d’autres grands personnages l’ont loüée.” Grenaille, Nouveau recueil de lettres, 2:20. 170. See Bernard Bray, L’art de la lettre amoureuse: Des manuels aux romans, 1550–1700 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 14. 171. Jensen, Writing Love, 2. 172. Jensen, Writing Love, 2.

48 Introduction a brief synopsis and an alternative title of his invention. It is evident, however, that the selected letters are not chosen as a representative sampling of Andreini’s text. First, the thirty-nine letters he includes were all intended to be from the subset of letters written in the female voice.173 However, as we have already detailed, the majority of Andreini’s Letters are in the male voice. The active exclusion of Andreini’s male-voiced letters amounts to a mutilation of a female-authored text by its male editor. Grenaille essentially constructs an alternative version of Andreini and her Letters, consonant with the male-created fiction of the suffering woman epistolographer, defying Andreini’s own literary creation and ambitions. Andreini’s construction of her hermaphroditic literary voice was one important way in which she consciously created distance between her private persona and her public literary and performative one, a sign of both her modern understanding of fiction as well as her shrewd management, and protection, of her fame. Grenaille, on the contrary, sought to create (or reinforce) the fiction of a unified persona composed of the historical Isabella Andreini and her literary creations. Substituting his own titles for the original thematic ones furthers Grenaille’s intention of reconnecting Isabella Andreini’s private and public personae. The original summaries, such as “Della sagacità delle donne” (Letter 147, “On the Wisdom of Women”), along with the letters’ lack of dates and absence of their writers’ and recipients’ names, forge the fictional framework of Letters by disallowing the alignment of the letters’ contents, or the voices in which they were composed, with Andreini herself. The implication underlying Grenaille’s version of Letters is instead that Andreini’s letters are autobiographical, rather than literary, and recount her own amatory experience with “ses amants” (her lovers),174 173. Giovanna Malquori Fondi discovered that, while it appears that Grenaille intended to translate only Andreini’s female-voiced letters, his cursory reading of the text likely led him to include two male-authored letters that he mistook for female, and to omit three female-voiced letters. Bray, too, considers Grenaille’s misgendering of the letters as inadvertent. One exception seems to be Grenaille’s exclusion of the only letter exchanged between two women, Letter 131, “On the Virtuous Thoughts of a Marriageable Young Lady.” Rather than mistaking the gender of the writer, Grenaille likely omitted the letter precisely because he realized that the letter’s writer and recipient were both women friends, and such correspondence was discordant with his desire to construct a uniform collection of femalevoiced love letters. See Malquori Fondi, “De la ‘lettre-canevas’ à la ‘pièce de cabinet’: Les Lettere d’lsabella Andreini, traduites par François de Grenaille,” in Contacts culturels et échanges linguistiques au XVIIe siècle en France: Actes du 3e colloque du Centre international de rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle. Université de Fribourg (Suisse), 1996, ed. Yves Giraud (Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 1997), 137–39, and Bernard Bray, “La lettre d’amour féminine au XVIIe siècle: François de Grenaille transmetteur des Lettere d’Isabella Andreini,” Littératures classiques 71, no. 1 (2010): 157. 174. This fiction is maintained in a 2006 edition of Grenaille’s translation of Andreini’s letters: Isabella Andreini, Lettres à mes amants: Extraites du Nouveau Recueil de Lettres des Dames tant anciennes que modernes, trans. François de Grenaille, ed. Fabienne Lesage (Paris: Éditions Alternatives, 2006).

Introduction 49 as many of his titles demonstrate: “Isabella Andreini, à son amant” (Isabella Andreini to her lover), “Isabella Andreini à un ingrat” (Isabella Andreini to an ungrateful man), “Isabella Andreini à son serviteur absent” (Isabella Andreini to her distant servant), “Isabella Andreini à un amant impitoyable/audacieux/ oublieux/inhumain/presomptueux” (Isabella Andreini to a merciless/audacious/ forgetful/cruel/presumptuous lover). Bernard Bray notes that instead of praising a woman’s quality, as do many of Andreini’s original titles, Grenaille’s titles focus on a male flaw, a modification that further undercuts the pro-woman message of Letters.175 Incidentally, these titles also contradict Grenaille’s own praise of Andreini’s chastity and married status in his argument: “It is well known that her beauty matches that of Venus, but a chaste Venus; and her impressive knowledge resembles that of Minerva, but a married Minerva.”176 This amounts to an attempt, whether intentional or not, to force Andreini and her letters to conform to socially acceptable notions of femininity. By excluding the letters in which Andreini performs the male voice, Grenaille portrays Andreini as capable only of writing autobiographical love letters, a “non literary” genre that represents women as “creature[s] of emotion,” as characterized by Jensen.177 Emotion, as opposed to reason, is more akin to a natural instinctive response, whereas poetry is the fruit of an intellectual process, of which women were believed incapable.178 Through her Letters, Andreini actively challenges, and disproves, this misogynous notion. While Grenaille used Andreini’s Letters for his own reactionary ends, it was Andreini’s contemporary women writers (and readers) who honored, and were inspired by, her aesthetic innovations and ideological stance. In particular, Letter 147, “On the Wisdom of Women,” garnered published interest among Andreini’s contemporary women writers. Grenaille too seems to have sensed this letter’s powerful message, which he attempted to neutralize by substituting the 175. Bray, “La lettre d’amour féminine,” 158. 176. “[O]n di soit communement que sa beauté la faisoit passer pour une Vénus mais pour une Vénus chaste, & que sa haute suffisance la faisoit prendre pour une Minerve, mais pour une Minerve mariée.” Grenaille, Nouveau recueil de lettres, 2:20. 177. Jensen, Writing Love, 2. 178. Andreini’s literary and intellectual gifts were considered so rare in a woman that Erycius Puteanus, a fellow member of the Accademia degli Intenti, expressed wonder in a letter to her: “That such eloquence, that such learning should fall to the part of a woman! Where does that sex which is mighty in writing, which sweats in public declamation, which grows old in literary studies—where does it show itself stronger than you? Behold, now there are Amazons of learning, and they have their own Penthesilea! [. . .] It has been implanted in women by nature the ability to speak, but in you to be able to speak well, whence it arises that by correcting a feminine vice you surpass even the virtue of the male.” See “d. EPIST. V Ticinum. To ISABELLAE ANDRAEINAE, Academica intenta,” edited and translated in MacNeil, Women and Music, 309–11.

50 Introduction original pro-woman summary with a title that better aligns with patriarchal fiction, “Isabella Andreini à un ieune amant” (Isabella Andreini to a young lover). Within the letter’s fiction the addressee is a prospective male lover, yet it could be argued instead that Andreini’s peers—women readers and writers—were its intended recipients. Addressing the letter to a naïve prospective lover renders the text amusing, and one can imagine Andreini’s contemporary women readers finding the letter’s message not only entertaining, but also empowering: it permits them the vicarious pleasure of reversing traditional roles by educating (or rather chastising) a potential male lover with a litany of “wisdom.” One such reader/ writer is Isabella Sori (b. ca. 1613/15), who references Andreini’s “Della sagacità della donna” (Letter 147, “On the Wisdom of Women”) in her own conduct manual, Ammaestramenti e ricordi (1628),179 dedicated to “onoratissime donne” (most honorable women) for their edification and consolation.180 Andreini is one of only two women authors referenced by Sori (the other being Lucrezia Marinella) among a sea of quotations from male writers, canonical and less so, with particularly heavy doses of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and Castiglione, among others. Sori’s collocation of Andreini’s work within her own text, among a pantheon of contemporary male writers, aligns with the historical fact that Andreini held regular company in male-dominated literary and cultural spheres. The Benedictine nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652), “the most radical female writer in early modern Italy,”181 listed Andreini in La semplicità ingannata (Paternal Tyranny)182 as one of the women who “exalted the printing presses with 179. Thanks to Helena Sanson’s recent edition, we are aware of Isabella Sori’s praise of Andreini’s Lettere in her own collection of treatises on the female condition, Ammaestramenti e ricordi, Difese e Panegirico (1628). Sori writes that Andreini’s Lettere are ‘stupendissime’ (most stupendous), citing and quoting from some of them: Letter 75, “On Serving at Court” (Del servir in corte); Letter 113, “On Giving a Daughter in Marriage” (Del maritare una figliuola); Letter 131, “On the Virtuous Thoughts of a Marriageable Young Lady” (Dei pensieri onesti di giovanetta da marito); and Letter 147, “On the Wisdom of Women” (Della sagacità delle donne). This treatment is reserved for only one other woman writer, Lucrezia Marinella. See Isabella Sori, Ammaestramenti e ricordi, Difese e Panegirico, ed. Helena Sanson (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018), 105, 115, 166, 121, 153, . 180. “Alle onorate donne. Tra le volgari prose (a consolazione delle onoratissime donne) scritte niuna ve n’ha che da voi più debba tenersi cara della presente, ch’insegna i modi di farvi avviste nei lacci del mondo et ovviare gl’inganni suoi. Però leggetela, et voi stesse, discorrendo dell’infelicità di molte, diventate sempre più prudenti.” Sori, Ammaestramenti e ricordi, 81 (italics added). 181. Arcangela Tarabotti, Convent Paradise, ed. and trans. Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater (Toronto: Iter Press; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020), 1. 182. La semplicità ingannata (1654) was published as a scholarly edition in translation as part of the Other Voice series: Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny, ed. and trans. Letizia Panizza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Introduction 51 all types of superb compositions” and “most virtuous published writings,” which “made the entire world know of the resplendent rays of divinity that coronate the female mind.”183 While male intellectuals, such as Puteanus and Tasso, attributed Andreini’s talent to a sort of “manliness,” to her fellow women writers she was an aspirational exemplar of the “divino sesso feminile” (divine female sex), as Tarabotti asserts. The liberty and exemplarity Andreini incarnated proved inspiring to women like Sori and Tarabotti, both of whom were denied her mobility and agency. Sori’s marriage in 1631, three years after the publication of her only known text, likely ended her literary aspirations,184 while Tarabotti—outspoken and sharp critic of the practice of forced monachization—lived confined to the cloister walls,185 and despite her serious literary ambitions, had to contend with prohibitions restricting nuns from writing and publishing letters.186 Sori and Tarabotti, both writers of pro-woman polemical texts, saw in Andreini a like-minded author and fighter for their cause. Yet a distinctly different and highly prolific female literary figure, Margherita Costa (ca. 1600/1610–after 1657), “singer, poet, dramatist and rumored courtesan,”187 is also considered among Isabella’s “descendants.”188 As writers and performers, Andreini and Costa shared a theatrical background and were likely directly linked via Isabella’s son Giambattista.189 Costa found inspiration in Isabella’s crafting of a performative literary voice, and particularly her adoption of the male voice. Andreini’s “unusual 183. “In contraposto una del divin sesso feminile, cioè Lucrezia Marinelli, splendore della poesia, anima delle scene caste e modeste, e norma vera di virtù grande, fra gli infiniti parti del suo ingegno, ha dato alla luce la vita della Serenissima Principessa dell’universo, descritta con sì alto stile, e con sì elegante, soave e dotta facondia, che genera sentimenti di stupore ne’ più eminenti intelletti. Non mancano donne, ch’hanno fatte gloriose le stampe con ogni sorte di perfette composizioni. Maddalena Salveti [Maddalena Salvetti Acciaiuoli], Margherita Sarocchi, Isabella Andreini, Laura Terracina, Veronica Gambara, Vittoria Colonna, e altre infinite co’ loro virtuosissimi scritti publicati han fatto conoscere al mondo tutto, di quai luminosi raggi di divinità risplenda coronata la mente feminile.” Arcangela Tarabotti, La semplicità ingannata. Edizione critica e commentata, ed. Simona Bortot (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2007), 300–03 (the translation is ours). 184. See Sanson, introduction to Sori, Ammaestramenti, 7–8. 185. In addition to the aforementioned Convent Paradise and Paternal Tyranny, also published as part of the Other Voice series, are the edited translations of these other works by Arcangela Tarabotti: Letters Familiar and Formal, ed. and trans. Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater (Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012), and Antisatire: In Defense of Women, against Francesco Buoninsegni, ed. and trans. Elissa B. Weaver (Toronto: Iter Press; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020). 186. See Ray and Westwater’s introduction to Tarabotti, Letters Familiar and Formal, 19–21. 187. Díaz and Goethals, introduction to Costa, The Buffoons: A Ridiculous Comedy, 1. 188. Cox, “Backlash,” in Women’s Writing in Italy, 214. 189. Ray, Writing Gender, 303n88.

52 Introduction hermaphroditic voice”190 provided Costa with a creative model, which she exaggerated to full comic effect. While Isabella introduced occasional comic elements (such as her humorous ridicule of lecherous old men in Letter 24, “A Reproach of Old Men in Love”), her letters—although playfully innovative in terms of gender representation—stayed mostly within the bounds of Petrarchan themes and language. The novelty of Andreini’s fluid assumption of male and female voices, and the often surprising perspectives expressed through them, opened the door for Costa in her Lettere amorose (1639) to go well beyond gender in terms of the unusualness of the characters represented. With her embrace of “erotic wordplay and obscene double entendres,”191 which Andreini decorously avoids, Costa demonstrates an unrestrained satirical and at turns outrageous reworking of the love letter genre, furthering Andreini’s caricaturing of the tradition of bombastic love rhetoric. Among the epistolary exchanges staged by Costa, for example, are a letter from a mute lover to his deaf lady, and another from a syphilitic lover to his scabby woman. And there is a letter from a beautiful woman to a dwarf, ironically addressed as “picciolo vaso dei miei gran martiri”192 (Little vessel of my great sufferings)193 and referred to as “mio amoroso scherzo” (my loving joke)—the latter phrase being a nod to Andreini’s Letters, particularly to a subset that include “scherzo” in their summaries, namely Letter 59, entitled precisely “Scherzo amoroso.” Although Lettere went through the greatest number of editions of all of Andreini’s texts, its renown faded in the Italian peninsula after the nineteenth edition was published in 1663. At the same time, as discussed, Lettere gained new life in seventeenth-century France, particularly as a foundational text of the country’s love letter genre. Andreini’s legacy was revived generally with the advent of the Arcadian movement, a tasteful antidote to Baroque excesses, beginning in the late seventeenth century with the creation of the Accademia degli Arcadi in 1690. This cultural reform movement promoted contemporary women writers and artists, as well as creating a historical link with those from previous times. Antonio Bulifon, who reissued many works by Cinquecento women writers whose texts had become scarce, printed an edition of Rime in 1696. A remarkable eighteen of Andreini’s poems were anthologized in Luisa Bergalli’s pioneering compilation of Italian women writers across the centuries, Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, raccolti da Luisa Bergalli (1726). Importantly, Bergalli’s 190. Ray, “Between Stage and Page,” in Writing Gender, 181. 191. Kaborycha, A Corresponding Renaissance, 179. 192. Margherita Costa, Lettere amorose (Venice: n.p., 1639). 193. Kaborycha, A Corresponding Renaissance, 179–80.

Introduction 53 introduction to Andreini cites Lettere, and dispels reservations about Isabella’s virtue in a more muted manner. Bergalli includes only a single allusion to her respectable and normative status as a married woman, “Isabella Andreini wife of Francesco Andreini, the famous actor” (Isabella Andreini moglie di Francesco Andreini famoso comico), while praising her authorship and publication success as of equal importance to her stature as one of “the most celebrated actresses that ever was” (una delle più celebri comiche che mai sieno state).194 Andreini’s presence in the most important anthologies and histories of Italian literature published during the eighteenth century attests to her having been, in this period, reaffirmed and integrated into Italy’s literary history. In L’Istoria della Volgar Poesia (1731), Giovan Mario Crescimbeni extols Andreini as a talented “rimatrice” (poet, employing the titular term of Bergalli’s anthology) and “comica insigne” (actress of exceptional merit). As one would expect from an ecclesiastic and the “custode d’Arcadia” (secretary of Arcadia), Crescimbeni compensates for Andreini’s questionable theatrical vocation by providing assurance that her high virtue was in no way corrupted by such a morally “dangerous” art form.195 Crescimbeni here displays the ambivalent position of the Church regarding actresses. While the profession at large is “universally reputed as dangerous,” certain extraordinary woman practitioners such as Andreini are spared condemnation and praised as incarnating both the highest virtue and marvelous skill. Lettere and Fragmenti are absent from Crescimbeni’s discussion, which indicates Mirtilla and Rime as her only publications. Girolamo Tiraboschi, too, in his monumental Storia della letteratura italiana (1772–82), neglects to reference Lettere and Fragmenti, citing only Mirtilla and praising Andreini as an “illustrious poet” (illustre poetessa) of “singular beauty” (singolare bellezza) and “unimpeachable virtue” (onestà di costumi).196 Francesco Saverio Quadrio, however, in Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia (1738–52), devotes a lengthy discussion to Andreini’s work as both actress and writer, as well as reinforces her importance through 194. Luisa Bergalli, Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, raccolti da Luisa Bergalli (Venice: Antonio Mora, 1726), 2:284–85. “Isabella Andreini, moglie di Francesco Andreini, famoso comico ed ella pure una delle più celebri comiche che mai sieno state; compose una favola pastorale intitolata Mirtilla ed un volume di Rime, che tutto va impresso, come ancora molte graziosissime lettere. Nacque ella in Padova del 1562, ed in sua morte, che da un aborto seguì in Leone del 1604, si diede alle stampe una raccolta di rime intitolata Pianto d’Apollo.” 195. Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, L’Istoria della volgar poesia (Venice: Lorenzo Basegio, 1731), 4:154. “Fu ella comica insigne; ed andando in giro per li teatri guadagnò molto applauso; ma seppe accompagnare ad un’arte riputata universalmente pericolosa per l’onore delle donne, una somma castità, e un costume innocentissimo.” 196. Girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 7, bk. 3, Dall’anno 1500 all’anno 1600. Parte terza (Naples: Giovanni Mucci, 1781), 147.

54 Introduction reference to her status among her contemporary artists and their immense artistic response to her early, unexpected death.197 Francesco Bartoli’s Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno 1550 fino a giorni presenti (1781–82) includes an important discussion of Lettere and notably highlights Andreini’s erudition, characterizing her as a “wise philosopher” (saggia filosofa). The overlap between Lettere and Andreini’s theatrical practice positions Bartoli, an actor and playwright himself, to acclaim both the rhetorical and entertainment quality of the letters (“son sparse di’ più bei fiori della retorica [. . .] di scherzosi detti”) in addition to their “sound philosophy” (sana filosofia).198  Although Isabella by no means fell into oblivion at this time, one senses a distinct shift in literary taste in the nearly one century between the last edition of her Lettere (1663) and the printing of Giammaria Mazzuchelli’s Scrittori d’Italia (1753–63). The editions of Letters begin to trickle, from several published per decade (seven in the 1620s, for instance) to the printing of only a single edition in both the 1650s and 1660s. Mazzuchelli’s text dedicates an article to Isabella and her works, but there is already a sense that she belongs to the literary past: “We confess to have read them [Rime] with pleasure, and to have found in them a naturalness of rhyme, a cultured and noble style, and other beautiful qualities not easily found in other poets of her time.”199 While still exceptional for “her time,” Andreini’s relevance as a writer had eroded by the eighteenth century, although her work was not as completely unappreciated as that of other of her contemporaries, who were derided for, among other criticisms, excessive artificiality. Andreini’s Letters are reduced by Mazzuchelli to being “all about matters of love,”200 with the only remarkable aspect referenced being the discrepancy between the date of the dedicatory letter (1607) and that of Isabella’s death (1604). It is her stature as an actress of superlative talent and woman of impeccable virtue, “chastity of the highest order, [. . .] purest morals,” which persist for pioneering the transformation of “an art universally known to be ruinous to a woman’s reputation.”201 197. Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia, vol. 3, bk. 2, Del volume terzo parte seconda (Milan: Francesco Agnelli, 1744), 242–43. 198. Francesco Bartoli, Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno 1550 fino a giorni presenti (Padua: Li Conzatti a San Lorenzo, 1781–82), 1:31–37. 199. “Noi confessiamo di averle lette [Rime] con piacere, e di avervi trovata facilità di rime, coltura ed elevatezza di stile, ed altre bellezze che non sì facilmente si trovano negli altri poeti del suo tempo.” Giammaria Mazzuchelli, Gli scrittori d’Italia, cioè notizie storiche e critiche intorno alle vite e agli scritti dei letterati italiani (Brescia: Giambattista Bossini, 1753–63), 1:711 (italics added). 200. “[T]utte sopra argomenti amorosi.” Mazzuchelli, Gli scrittori d’Italia, 1:713. 201. “[S]omma castità, [. . .] costume innocentissimo”; “un’arte riputata universalmente pericolosa per l’onor delle donne.” Mazzuchelli, Gli scrittori d’Italia, 1:711.

Introduction 55 Even at the end of the nineteenth century, in his vast three-volume biographical dictionary dedicated to I comici italiani (1897–1905),202 actor and playwright Luigi Rasi praises Isabella’s acting talent exuberantly, yet denies her “literary merit” (valor letterario). Rasi commends Andreini’s stylistic skill in the Rime, while harshly criticizing Lettere and Fragmenti as “Petrarchism diluted with rose water,” a dismissal he extends to most of the commedia dell’arte.203 Rasi’s disparaging reproach is nonetheless “important,” as Cristina Grazioli contends,204 for it reveals not a lack of talent on Andreini’s part, but instead a lack of appreciation for her commingling of theatrical and literary conventions and compositional strategies—particularly those integral to commedia dell’arte, such as “montaggio,” or the creative arrangement of diverse sources and allusions, recognized instead as highly original by Ferdinando Taviani.205 By the early twentieth century, Isabella Andreini’s literary reputation can be summarized by the opening sentence of her Enciclopedia Italiana entry: “A most famous actress, woman of letters and a poet of not mediocre merit for her time.”206 This sentiment is echoed by Benedetto Croce in his influential work on literature 202. Luigi Rasi, I comici italiani: Biografia, bibliografia, iconografia (Florence: Bocca, 1897). 203. “[P]etrarcheggiamenti diluiti all’acqua di rose.” Rasi, I comici italiani, 100. 204. “Ma questo giudizio negativo è importante: Isabella è ‘Comica dell’Arte’; anche in veste di letterata è, prima di tutto, una grande attrice e sembra riversare nella scrittura le sue doti di interprete e ‘compositrice’ di parti, esperta in quell’arte del ‘montaggio’ che connotava le pratiche dell’Arte.” Grazioli, “La vita, l’arte, il mito,” 20. 205. As a counterweight to Rasi, Taviani offers a more admiring view of the originality of Andreini’s hybrid aesthetic of “montaggio”: “It is not in the literary material, but in its arrangement, where an original and revelatory spirit can be found” (non nei materiali letterari, ma nel loro montaggio andava ricercato uno spirito originale e rivelatore). Taviani, “Bella d’Asia,” 13. 206. “Attrice famosissima, letterata e poetessa di non mediocre valore per i suoi tempi.” Gustavo BalsamoCrivelli, “Andreini, Isabella,” in the Enciclopedia Italiana (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1929), . This view of Andreini as a merely marginally talented poet seems to have been pervasive through the 1970s. Andreini’s 1974 entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, while relatively robust, bears the odd title of “Isabella Canali”—her birth name, but one significantly less eminent than the name under which she performed, published, and marketed herself. Similarly, in relation to Benedetto Croce’s dismissal of the Lettere, the author remarks: “Postuma è la pubblicazione delle sue Lettere (Venezia 1607) e dei Ragionamenti piacevoli, opere queste che pur avendo avuto un maggior numero di edizioni delle Rime, non presentano nella forma e nel pensiero elementi di rilievo che differenzino l’autrice dai tanti scrittori minori a lei contemporanei” (Her Letters [Venice, 1607] were published posthumously, as were Ragionamenti piacevoli, works which despite having had a greater number of editions than her Rime, do not demonstrate in form or content any significant elements that distinguish the author from the many minor writers contemporary to her). See Liliana Pannella, “Isabella Canali,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 17 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1974), .

56 Introduction of the Seicento, in which he only briefly mentions Andreini as a “donna letterata” from society’s margins.207 Croce’s notion of “letteratura femminile,” which he considers incomplete and imprecise in relation to male-authored literature yet appreciates for its sentimentality and passion, as Marina Zancan argues,208 is evident in a brief article on Andreini in which he writes of the charm of studying “second order” poets, of the pleasure one can gain “reading the texts of our literature that no one reads.”209 While Croce states that he would not want to leave Isabella’s poetry without notice, since she was one of the first great Italian actresses, he nonetheless goes on to criticize Andreini through one of her own self-effacing remarks from the dedicatory letter to Rime: “Rime were Isabella Andreini’s principal literary work, which she loved as one loves her own children (as she wrote in the dedicatory letter to Cardinal Aldobrandini), ‘[about one’s children] one does not only love what is beautiful and good, but also embraces and cherishes their blemishes and defects.’ ”210 After noting how Letters had gone through many more editions than her poetry, Croce concedes that they were appreciated in their time, yet faults them for failing to “go beyond the ordinary, neither in thought nor in form, and perhaps that is the reason for their success.”211 Though doubtlessly well aware of the early modern convention of self-deprecation, especially in dedicatory letters to the work’s patron, Croce’s remarks clarify why Isabella’s work had been ignored for so long. As with other women writers of the early modern period, Andreini’s treatment by male critics and scholars smacks of misogynistic and paternalistic sentiment, which seeks once again to bind women to childbearing (“which she loved as one loves her own children”) and, at the same time, dissociates them from the intellectual sphere, delegitimizing their works as mere pastimes or passion projects instead of approaching them as serious literature. It would take until the late twentieth century for scholars to begin a reevaluation, and rightful appreciation, of Andreini’s oeuvre.212 207. Benedetto Croce, “Appunti di letteratura secentesca inedita o rara: X. Donne letterate nel Seicento,” La Critica: Rivista di Letteratura, Storia e Filosofia 27 (1929): 472. 208. Marina Zancan, “Letteratura, critica, storiografia. Questioni di genere,” Bollettino di italianistica 2 (2005): 5–31. 209. “[L]eggendo i volumi che non si leggono della nostra letteratura.” Benedetto Croce, “Studi sulla letteratura cinquecentesca: Isabella Andreini,” Quaderni della critica 17–18 (1950): 85, 86. 210. “[L]e rime furono il lavoro letterario principale d’Isabella Andreini, che amò come si amano i figli (scrisse nella dedicatoria al cardinale Aldobrandini), nei quali ‘non pur si tiene caro il bello e ’l buono, ma l’istesse macchie e difetti aggradiscono e piacciono.’ ” Croce, “Studi sulla letteratura cinquecentesca: Isabella Andreini,” 89. 211. “[N]on escono dal comune nè nel pensiero nè nella forma e in ciò forse fu la cagione della loro fortuna.” Croce, “Studi sulla letteratura cinquecentesca: Isabella Andreini,” 90. 212. To mention only a few pathbreaking works on Andreini, see Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), and “The State of the Arte in the Andreini’s Time,” in Studies in the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Memory of Arnolfo B.

Introduction 57

Translators’ Note We base our translation on the 1607 first edition of Lettere (Venice: Marc’Antonio Zaltieri). Wikisource offers a reliable transcription of this edition presented with side-by-side pages scanned by OPAL Libri Antichi at the University of Turin. We also consulted the 1607 edition at the Newberry Library. On the few occasions when the text presented issues, we compared it with the 1612 (Venice: Sebastiano Combi), 1616 (Turin: Giov. Domenico Tarino), 1620 (Venice: Gio. Battista Combi), 1621 (Turin: Giov. Domenico Tarino), and 1663 (Venice: Carlo Conzatti) editions, all of which are available on the Internet Archive. We also occasionally consulted Britta Brandt’s modern edition, Lettere (1607), vol. 2 of Das Spiel mit Gattungen bei Isabella Canali Andreini (Wilhelmsfeld: Egert, 2002). We have indicated in a note where we deviate from the first edition. The 1620 edition, in particular, offers a few valuable variants, but it also introduces altered spelling, simplified variants, and significant omissions (for example, the date in Andreini’s dedicatory letter and the ending of Letter 9, “On the Power of Anger”). We have striven to remain faithful to Andreini’s mannerist style while making her prose accessible to contemporary English-speaking readers. Most often this has meant adapting capitalization and punctuation to contemporary English usage while maintaining capitalization for personifications (e.g., Night) and metonymy (e.g., Heavens to indicate God); modernizing archaisms and reducing doublets (synonymic pairs) to a single word when redundant; eliminating litotes and double negatives in favor of more straightforward positive or negative phrases, as dictated by the context; and, finally, breaking down long sentences and rearranging tortuous ones to ensure clarity. Perhaps the most stimulating stylistic element to translate has been Andreini’s lexical experimentation. To offer only a handful of examples, pain is dissected lexically with a catalogue of life’s “trials and tribulations” in Letter 5, “On the Blows of Fortune”; polysemy offers many occasions for word play, as in Letter 41, “On Thought (i),” where “mio bene” signifies both “my beloved” and “something [that] is specifically good for us”; the Ferruolo, ed. Gian Paolo Biasin, Albert N. Mancini, and Nicolas J. Perella (Naples: Societá editrice napoletana, 1985), 263–81; Natalia Costa-Zalessow, Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1982); Robert L Erenstein, “Isabella Andreini: A Lady of Virtue and High Renown,” in Essays on Drama and Theatre: Liber amicorum Benjamin Hunnigher, ed. Erica HunningherSchilling (Amsterdam: Moussalt’s Uitgeverij, 1973), 37–49; Ferruccio Marotti and Giovanna Romei, La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca, vol. 2: La professione del teatro (Rome: Bulzoni, 1991); Cesare Molinari, “L’altra faccia del 1589: Isabella Andreini e la sua ‘pazzia,’ ” in vol. 2 of Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 565–73; and Francesco Tessari, “Sotto il segno di Giano: La Commedia dell’Arte di Isabella e Francesco Andreini,” in The Commedia dell’Arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo, ed. Christopher Cairns (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 1–33.

58 Introduction antithesis between fire and ice, among others, amounts to Andreini’s signature as Accesa or comica gelosa (e.g., Letter 46, “On Jealousy (i)”); a term’s malleability is tested through polyptoton and alliteration (e.g., pensiero, “thought,” and penare, “to suffer,” in Letter 76, “Amorous Thoughts”); and idiomatic expressions, perhaps derived from her stage performances, add levity and variation, and exemplify Andreini’s stylistic range (e.g., “io non compro gatta in sacco,” which we rendered liberally as “I am not buying ‘a pig in a poke,’ ” in Letter 36, “On Taking a Wife (ii)”). Additionally, Andreini adopts different voices in the Letters, including a composed voice driven by Aristotelian logic and a deeply lyrical voice inspired by Neoplatonism and humanistic rhetoric; varying degrees of formality; and an array of sarcastic, humorous, dejected, joyful, optimistic, and pessimistic tones. Such stylistic and tonal variety challenged us to reimagine anew and faithfully render each letter writer’s persona. We have numbered the letters’ summaries, and reassigned the summaries of Letters 4–7, as suggested by Andrews, because they were patently at odds with the letters’ content.213 For the same reason, we switched the summaries of Letters 8 and 9 and Letters 34–36. We have also made some corrections to the “Table of All the Letters”: we have corrected the summaries of Letter 17, “On the Constancy of Women,” and Letter 132, “On the Decision to No Longer Love,” to match the summaries that appear in the text; we have switched the summaries of Letters 76, “Amorous Thoughts,” and 77, “Amorous and Civil scherzi (iii),” to match the order in which they appear in the text, and we have integrated and numbered one untitled letter (121, Untitled).214 In pairs or series of letters we have made substitutions for summaries such as Del medesimo or Dell’istesso (on the same topic) or Simili (on a similar topic) by repeating the summary of the first letter in the series and assigning a lowercase Roman numeral in parentheses to each letter in the pair or series—for example, the pair of Letters 46 and 47, “On Jealousy (i)” and “On Jealousy (ii),” and the series of Letters 52 to 55, “Virtuous Amorous scherzi (i),” “Virtuous Amorous scherzi (ii),” “Virtuous Amorous scherzi (iii),” and “Virtuous Amorous scherzi (iv).” We have offered faithful translations of the letters’ summaries but maintained the original “scherzi,” a term whose ambiguity Giovanna Malquori Fondi has illustrated—referring, in particular, to its meaning, which derives from the “fictional universe” (“univers fictif ”) of literary and dramatic arts, as opposed to the (supposed) “lived reality” (“réalité vécue”) of epistolography. In such a 213. Andrews, “Isabella Andreini’s Stage Repertoire,” 33–34. 214. See notes 37–42 to the “Table of All the Letters Contained in the Work” of this volume as well as the comparative table found in the Appendix, which further illustrate these choices.

Introduction 59 context, she notes, terms such as “variations,” “fancies,” and “caprices” (“variations,” “fantaisies,” “caprices”) cast too lighthearted a shadow on the words of the letters’ distressed lovers.215 Part of Andreini’s poetic project was the interrogation of gender in literary form. We have occasionally added gendered nouns (Sir, my Lady) to translate the pervasive gender markers present in the original Italian (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, past participles), and have indicated in a note (and the Appendix) if there was any ambiguity. Almost all love letters treat love heteronormatively, with a few notable exceptions that we also discuss in the notes. Twelve encomiastic and elegiac poems precede Andreini’s Letters in the 1607 edition,216 and are only a few of the many written in praise of Andreini’s singing, acting, and writing.217 Such tributes were in line with the Renaissance practice of elevating and at the same time containing women’s writing through male-authored encomia: by equating Andreini to a goddess and praising her masculine virtue, her achievements were ultimately framed as an aberration among her sex. They are also an important element in Francesco’s editorial work on Isabella’s Letters and his construction of a symbolic mausoleum218 dedicated to his deceased wife, a project started by their son Giovan Battista Andreini in his Pianto d’Apollo: Rime funebri in morte di Isabella Andreini comica Gelosa, et accademica Intenta, detta l’Accesa (Milan: Bordone e Locarni, 1606). In the transcription of the Latin texts we separated ligatures (æ>ae and œ>oe), rendered & as et, distinguished u and v, transcribed -ij as -ii, and made some corrections that we explain in the notes. With regard to Andreini’s vernacular texts, we have normalized accents, apostrophes, and punctuation, substituted ti followed by a vowel with zi, normalized the capitalization, eliminated the etymological h, changed & and et to e/ed, distinguished between u and v, and transcribed -ij as -i. We have made occasional silent corrections to other early modern and modern texts that we quote for ease of reading. Finally, translations are our own, unless otherwise noted.

215. See Malquori Fondi, “De la ‘lettre-canevas’ à la ‘pièce de cabinet,’ ” 139–40.  216. Identical in the 1612 Combi edition, these poems are reduced to five in the 1616 Tarino edition, reappear in their entirety in the 1617 Combi edition, are again reduced to seven in the 1621 Tarino edition, and reduced to ten in the 1663 Conzatti edition. See also Basso, Le Genre épistolaire, 2: 414–20. 217. See, for example, Kathryn Bosi, “Accolades for an Actress: On Some Literary and Musical Tributes for Isabella Andreini,” Recercare 15 (2003): 73–117. 218. See note 399 to Letter 151, “On the Death of One’s Wife,” for a discussion of this poetic “mausoleum.”

Figure 1. Title page from Lettere d’Isabella Andreini . . ., Marc’Antonio Zaltieri, Venice, 1607. Newberry Library, Chicago.

Letters of

Isabella Andreini, Paduan, Comica Gelosa, and Academica Intenta, known as l’Accesa. Dedicated to the Illustrious Don Carlo Emanuel, Duke of Savoy, etc. 1 With the privilege and license of the Superiors. Venice, at the House of Marc’Antonio Zaltieri, 1607. At the request of Gieronimo Bordon.

1. Carlo Emanuele I (1562–1630), son of Emanuele Filiberto and Margherita of Valois, assumed the title of duke in 1580. The dedication is dated posthumously—three years after Isabella’s death on June 11, 1604—by Isabella’s husband Francesco Andreini (on this issue, see the Introduction to the volume). In the dedication of his own Bravure del Capitano Spavento (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somasco, 1607) to the duke’s brother, Amedeo of Savoy, Francesco reiterates that it was Isabella’s wish to dedicate her Letters to Carlo Emanuele I. In return for the duke’s admiration for her, Isabella had already dedicated to him the sonnet “Famoso Carlo e per virtute altero.” See Maria Luisa Doglio, “Isabella Andreini ‘scrittora,’ ” in Isabella Andreini: Una letterata in scena, ed. Carlo Manfio (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2014), 59.

Permission With the assurance of the Lords Magistrates of the University of Padua through the sworn statement of the two appointees, the Reverend Father Inquisitor and the prudent Secretary of the Senate Giovanni Maravegia, indicating that the book entitled Letters by Isabella Andreini of Padua, Comica Gelosa and Academica Intenta, violates no law and is worthy of publication, the undersigned Most Excellent Chiefs of the Most Illustrious Council of Ten hereby grant permission for its printing in this City. On the 13th of January 1606. Hieronimo Diedo

}

Chiefs of the Most Illustrious Council of Ten

Marco Bragadin



Secretary of the Most Illustrious Council of Ten Leonardo Ottoboni

Recorded on page 165 on 22nd January, 1606. Antonio Loredan

63

Dedicatory Letter TO THE MOST SERENE DON CARLO EMANUEL OF SAVOY, ETC. Your Most Serene Lordship, since Mother Nature, our supreme and greatest mother, cannot make each of us immortal and yet her sole purpose is to perpetuate us so that we never cease to exist, she studiously procured to fulfill her desire to the extent she could through other means; hence she wisely instilled in some of us the ardent desire for children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, through whom their departed parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents become happily immortal. So that others might also enjoy the privilege of life beyond death, she inspired them to the fine arts, which, in their imitation of Nature, often dare to compete with her. To prove this, there are painted grapes that trick birds, and sculptures that make a youth fall in love.2 This great and prudent mother thought, or rather clearly knew, that among all things that render mankind immortal the most apt one is knowledge, and thus she used her astounding power to make knowledge so universal that mankind developed an innate desire for it.3 Thanks to knowledge man is called lord of lower beings and kin to superior ones, an earthly god, a celestial animal, and finally the pride and miracle of Nature herself. When Anaxagoras was asked why he had been born, he responded, “To contemplate the stars.”4 Since this feat can only be achieved through knowledge, it reveals that each 2. Andreini is referring to the artistic contest between painters Parrhasius and Zeuxis (fifth century BCE), first recounted in Pliny’s The Natural History (35.36), and to the myth of Pygmalion, an artist who fell in love with the ivory statue of a woman he carved, which Venus transformed into a real woman (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243–97). The 1620 edition (Venice: Giovanni Battista Combi) and 1621 edition (Turin: Heredi di Giovanni Domenico Tarino) offer the variant “grapes” (uve), which we preferred to “vivid, true to life” (vive) of the original 1607 edition (Venice: Marc’Antonio Zaltieri) and the 1612 edition (Venice: Sebastiano Combi) because of the parallelism with “sculpture” (statua scolpita). In Pliny’s account, Parrhasius wins the contest, since Zeuxis’s painted grapes deceived some birds eager to eat them, but Parrhasius’s painted curtain deceived Zeuxis, who had asked to see the painted image behind the curtain. 3. A reference to the first words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1.980a), “All men naturally desire knowledge.” It is noteworthy that here Andreini refers repeatedly to Nature as a “mother,” emphasizes the role of women and mothers in perpetuating humankind, and, importantly, later in this letter includes herself, a woman and mother, as possessing the innate desire for knowledge that characterizes “mankind.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vols. 17–18, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1989), reproduced in the Perseus Digital Library, . All references and quotations from Aristotle’s Metaphysics in these footnotes are taken from this edition. 4. A reference to Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1.1216a: “Now it is said that when somebody [. . .] went on asking for what object one should choose to come into existence rather than not, he [Anaxagoras]

65

66 ISABELLA ANDREINI of us is born with a desire for knowledge. By the goodness of our Highest Maker I was destined to become citizen of the world,5 and this desire for knowledge is by chance more ardent in me than in many other women of our time, who, even after discovering that a great many women have become famous and immortal through their studies, nevertheless only wish to tend to the needle, the distaff, and the spinning wheel (with due respect to those women who have their minds set to loftier and more glorious matters).6 Since a most ardent desire for knowledge was born in me, I wanted to nurture it as much as I could. Fortune was miserly in providing me at birth with those necessary conveniences for fulfilling this desire; I have always been far from any peace, and thus unlike Scipio I could not say that I was never less idle than when I was idle.7 Nevertheless, I wished not to waste the talent that God and Nature granted me, so that my life could not be called a perennial sleep. Since all good citizens are expected to benefit their city8 to their highest potential, as soon as I could read (so to speak), I began composing, to the best of my ability, my pastoral play Mirtilla which was published and received by the theater of the world in an imperfect form, due in part to the limitations of my own knowledge (I do not deny), but even more so because of others’ lack of courtesy (I have no doubt).9 Then I toiled over my Rime and, not satisfied with that endeavor, I managed to steal brief stretches of time from the demands of replied by saying, ‘For the sake of contemplating the heavens and the whole order of the universe.’ ” Aristotle,  Eudemian Ethics, in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 20, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1981), reproduced in the Perseus Digital Library, . 5. A reference to the phrase attributed to the Cynic philosopher Diogenes by Diogenes Laertius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers 6.2.63): “Asked where he came from, he said, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’ ” See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), reproduced in the Perseus Digital Library, . All references and quotations from Diogenes Laertius’s Lives in these footnotes are taken from this edition. 6. Andreini engages this topos of the questione della donna in a way that gives agency to women to embrace or eschew these tools in favor of the pen. Richard Andrews has suggested that Andreini is referring here to “women who have taken the veil and dedicated themselves to the religious life”; see his “Isabella Andreini and Others: Women on Stage in the Late Cinquecento,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 327. 7. A saying attributed to the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus by the senator and historian Cato the Elder, and recorded in two works by Cicero: De Officiis 3.1, and De Re Publica 1.17. 8. We render here “patria” as city [of origin] given the absence at that time of a state apparatus, and Andreini’s insistence on identifying herself as Paduan. 9. With the ambiguous phrase “others’ lack of courtesy” (“ma per mancamento ancora d’altrui cortesia”), Andreini may be advocating for broader authorial agency and denouncing the fact that Mirtilla was published without her final approval.

Letters 67 my laborious profession10 to dedicate myself to writing these letters, which I dare to release alongside my other writings more because I trust the kindness of the world than because I think they are exemplary. And to those who may say that the purpose of publishing letters has always been to provide a perfect model, let me assure you that I never held so bold a thought, knowing that only the most learned are entitled to possess and attain such a goal. My intention has always been to ward off death as best I could, as Nature taught me. Hence nobody should think it strange if I did and do disseminate my writings, because through the fruits of one’s labor11 it is possible to achieve a very long if not eternal life, which we all desire for ourselves.12 To fulfill this wish more easily I decided to dedicate this work of mine (perhaps not the last) to Your Highest Lordship. Though something less than perfect should not be gifted to a Prince of such perfection, and though I realize that these letters lack perfection to the same degree You abound in it, I nonetheless wished to carry out my resolution, knowing that I would not lose as much for their infinite flaws as I would gain from Your innumerable merits. Your Highest Lordship knows that writers have different goals in dedicating their efforts to someone: some know or consider their own compositions to be of such perfection as to render them immune to the plunder and violence of time, so through their own works they believe they are immortalizing the names of their dedicatees; others aim only to follow a convention with their dedication, since nowadays nary a sentence is published without its own dedication; yet others wish to advertise the kind of patronage they enjoy; and finally others dedicate their books for many other mundane reasons. Now, if I were asked the reason for publishing my Letters under the illustrious name of Your Highest Lordship, what should or could I respond? Surely nothing but the abovementioned reason, that is, in order to secure more easily a perpetual or at least a very long life. In fact, it will doubtless be a perpetual life, since it will live perpetually among Your heroic deeds. In addition, I could not conceive of a way to let others know that I am Your true and most humble servant, other than by devoting to you the fruits, albeit tasteless, harvested in the fields of my long vigils. Should they please you, I will believe that I have reaped a considerable part of the happiness that mortals so strive to achieve. In receiving them, may Your Highest Lordship remember that 10. The original reads, “al tempo, e alla necessità del mio faticoso esercizio.” Andreini, conscious and proud of her fame as an actress, chooses not to further clarify the nature of her craft. 11. The original reads “in se stesso, e ne’ suoi parti,” with “parto” referring both to childbirth (from the Latin partus) and to one’s artistic products/creations—thus alluding to an earlier passage in the letter in which Andreini discusses the two ways Nature allows for immortality, physical reproduction and artistic creation, namely poetry. It is remarkable that here Andreini reclaims for herself both the word’s metaphorical meaning (artistic creation) as well as the literal one (childbirth), to which women were relegated by a misogynistic tradition that excluded them from artistic and intellectual labor. 12. For a feminist reading of the topos of achieving eternal life through poetry, see Letter 112, “On the Death of Torquato Tasso.”

68 ISABELLA ANDREINI being magnanimous in receiving a small gift is as generous as being munificent in offering large ones; though it is reasonable to say that you give rather than receive, since my works will no longer be mine, but yours, and prized only because of you. You thus are gifting me with what I so eagerly and tirelessly endeavored to obtain. I bow to you most humbly, and with the deepest affection of which I am capable, I pray You to consider me as much Your servant, as I hold Your Highest Lordship as my master. Venice, March 14, 1607 Your Most Serene Highness’s most humble and devoted servant, Isabella Andreini

Encomiastic Verses and Anagrams AD ISABELLAM ANDRAEINAM, SECULI SULPICIAM. Florem illibatum populi suadaeque medullam.13 Ter dilecta Iovi, cui tres tria munera quondam Contribuere Deae, Cypris, Tritonia, Iuno; Carmine te facili dicam, tua munera dicam. Cypris, natalem creperi cum luminis auram Libares, medio spumantis gurgite Ponti Emergens, vultumque tibi ciliumque, comamque Flore venustatis tinxit; Geniumque Leporum Omnibus inspersit membris: Venus altera ut esses, Alma Venus, sed casta, et casti mater Amoris Mox, ubi conspexit neglecta crepundia Pallas, Indidit Ingenii vires, et femina Fama Pierio facilem perfundens nectare mentem, Pierio facilem perfundens nectare linguam. Nectare, quo prisci duraret Suada theatri. Pennato sequitur gressu Saturnia Iuno, Nubilis indignans sine coniuge virginis annos Labi: felicem thalamum, taedasque iugales, Et tabulas ornat: carmen canit ipse Hymenaeus. Duceris à caro, et numero foecunda marito Multiplici patens Lucinae prole labores. Constans connubii vinclum! Tu coniuge digna; Te pariter coniux, cui pignora cara dedisti. Nunc ternae veterem Divae posuere furorem, Quasque Paris peperit rixas, feliciter aufers. Tu nova diceris Cypris, Tritonia, Iuno: Casto coniugio, Sophia, vultusque decore.

13. This first poem, which is left anonymous in Letters, is by Erycius Puteanus, an academician from what is now the Dutch province of Limburg. We made a few corrections to the 1607 edition of the text based on Puteanus’s Epistolarum fercula secunda . . . Adjuncta eloquentiae auspicia secunda (Hanover: Wechel Press, under Claude de Marne and the heirs of Johann Aubry, 1603) and the poem’s transcription and translation in Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 309–13. These changes include: 2 Contribuire>Contribuere; 7 leporum>Leporum; 11 Famae>Fama; 12 mensem>mentem; 17 Ladi>Labi; 21 ?>!; 25 dicaris>diceris.

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70 ISABELLA ANDREINI TO ISABELLA ANDREINI, SULPICIA 14 OF THE CENTURY, Unblemished flower of the people and quintessence15 of persuasion. Thrice favored by Jove, to whom the three goddesses Venus, Minerva, and Juno together at one time gave three gifts; I will tell of you in a simple poem, I will tell of your gifts. As you were born and tasted the breeze of the twilight, Venus, rising from the foamy sea of Pontus, colored your face, eyes, and hair with the flower of beauty, and sprinkled all your limbs with wit and charms, so that you became a second Venus, a bountiful but chaste Venus, and the mother of chaste Love. As soon as Pallas Athena16 observed the neglected rattles, she combined the strength of masculine talent with feminine reputation, imbuing your nimble mind with Pierian nectar, imbuing your nimble tongue with Pierian nectar, nectar with which the ancient theater’s art of Persuasion might endure. Juno, daughter of Saturn, follows with a winged step, displeased that your years as an unmarried virgin lapsed without a husband; she prepares the propitious bridal bed, the nuptial torches and marriage contracts; Hymeneaus himself sings the nuptial song. May you be married by a dear husband and, as you endure labor many times with Lucina’s blessing, be prolific with numerous offspring.17 Oh, the faithful bond of marriage! You are worthy of your husband; equally worthy of you is your spouse, to whom you offered the dear vows. The three goddesses have settled the ancient contest; now you felicitously resolve any dispute that Paris started.18 You will be 14. On Puteanus’s comparision of Sulpicia, the famous Roman matron and symbol of wifely heroism, and Isabella Andreini, see Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 218, 224–25, 359n74. 15. Puteanus quotes from Ennius’s Annales (9.305), “Flos delibatus populi [. . .] Suadaique medulla” (the choicest Flower of the people [. . .] and the marrow of Persuasion). Ennius, Fragmentary Republican Latin, Volume I: Ennius, Testimonia. Epic Fragments, ed. and trans. Sander M. Goldberg, Gesine Manuwald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1:260–261. The original reference is to Marcus Cornelius Cethegus, a relative and political ally of Scipio Africanus who was known for his oratorical skill. 16. Pallas Athena (also known as Athena, Athene, or Minerva to the Romans), goddess of wisdom, craft, and warfare, whose excellence combines both traditionally male and female attributes, and to whom Andreini was often compared. In the early modern period, Pallas Athena was depicted as a chaste protector of virgins, as evidenced by Andrea Alciato’s emblem featuring Pallas as guardian of virgins entitled “Custodiendas virgines.” See Alciato, Diverse imprese accommodate a diverse moralità . . .: Tratte da gli Emblemi dell’Alciato (Lyons: Mathias Bonhomme, 1551), 28. Arcangela Tarabotti discusses Pallas’s vigilant protection of chastity in Paradiso monacale. Libri tre. Con un soliloqio a Dio (Venice: Guglielmo Oddoni, 1663 [1643]), 114. See Convent Paradise, ed. and trans. Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater (Toronto: Iter Inc.; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020), 170. 17. Lucina, an epithet of the Roman goddess Juno (Juno Lucina), protector of women during childbirth. 18. The “ancient contest” refers to the myth of the Judgment of Paris. For further explanation, see note 122 to Letter 34, “Pleasant and Virtuous scherzi (i).”

Letters 71 called a new Venus, Minerva, and Juno, and in addition Sophia for the chastity of your marriage and the grace of your countenance.

DEL SIG. TORQUATO TASSO, ALLA SIGNORA ISABELLA ANDREINI, 19 Comica Gelosa, e Academica Intenta, detta l’Accesa. Quando v’ordiva il prezioso velo l’alma natura, e le mortali spoglie, il bel cogliea, sì come fior si coglie, togliendo gemme in terra, e lumi in cielo. E spargea fresche rose in vivo gielo, che l’aura, e ’l sol mai non disperde, o scioglie, e quanti odori l’Oriente accoglie. E perché non v’asconda invidia, o zelo, ella, che fece il bel sembiante in prima,20 poscia il nome formò ch’i vostri onori porti, e rimbombi, e sol bellezza esprima. Felici l’alme, e fortunati i cori, ove con lettre d’oro Amor l’imprima21 nell’imagine vostra e ’n cui s’adori.

TO SIGNORA ISABELLA ANDREINI, Comica Gelosa and Academica Intenta, named l’Accesa, BY SIGNOR TORQUATO TASSO. When life-giving Nature wove your precious veil and your mortal guise, she gathered all of the beauty by taking earthly gems and heavenly lights, just as one gathers flowers. And she scattered fresh roses on shimmering ice, which the breeze would not disperse, nor would the sun ever melt, and the full array of the Oriental scents. And so that neither envy nor zeal could hide you, Nature, who first created 19. This is a posthumous publication of the sonnet in praise of Andreini by Tasso (1544–1595), whose premature death is the subject of Letter 112, “On the Death of Torquato Tasso.” 20. “Ella che fece?” (1607) is corrected in the 1612 edition, which omits the question mark; “imprima” (1607) is also corrected in the 1616 edition as “in prima.” 21. Taviani notes that while Tasso’s original variant was “s’imprima,” with Love as the subject, Giovan Battista Licino and Francesco Andreini divulged the variant “l’imprima,” with Isabella’s name as the object. See Ferdinando Taviani, “Bella d’Asia: Torquato Tasso, gli attori e l’immortalita,” Paragone letteratura 35 (1984): 59. See also Rosalind Kerr, “The Imprint of Genius: Tasso’s Sonnet to Isabella Andreini,” Quaderni d’Italianistica 22, no. 2 (2001): 81–96.

72 ISABELLA ANDREINI your beautiful countenance, then gave you a name that could convey and amplify your honors, and express only beauty. Happy are the souls, and fortunate the hearts, where Love imprints your name with golden letters on your image, and where your name is adored. DEL SIG. GIO. BATTISTA MARINI .22 Piangete orbi teatri, in van s’attende più la vostra tra voi bella Sirena; ella orecchio mortal, vista terrena sdegna, e colà donde pria scese ascende. Quivi accesa d’amor, d’amor accende l’eterno Amante; e ne l’empirea scena, che d’angelici lumi è tutta piena, dolce canta, arde dolce, e dolce splende. Splendono or qui le vostre faci intanto pompa a le belle esequie; e non più liete voci, esprima di festa il vostro canto. Piangete voi, voi che pietosi avete al suo tragico stil più volte pianto; il suo tragico caso orbi piangete.

BY SIGNOR GIOVAN BATTISTA MARINO Weep, oh bereaved theaters, still waiting in vain for the return of your beautiful Siren; she disdains mortal ears and earthly sights, and whence she descended, there she now ascends. There the one ignited with love now ignites the eternal Lover with love; on the empyrean stage, filled with angelic lights, she sings sweetly, burns sweetly, and sweetly shines. Meanwhile here, your torches now shine, adding pomp to her beautiful funeral; may your singing no longer express happy, festive voices. You who compassionately wept many times at her tragic performances, weep for her tragic fate, weep, oh bereaved.

22. Baroque poet Giovan Battista (Giambattista) Marino (1569–1625), who is considered the greatest of the seventeenth century and one the most important of the entire Italian poetic tradition.

Letters 73 DEL SIG. GIO. PAOLO FABRI COMICO.23 Quella, che già così faconda espresse detti sublimi, ed ornamento altero fu de le scene, d’appressarsi al vero lasciando l’ombra, e di bearsi elesse; Onde, poich’ebbe di virtute impresse belle vestigia, a l’alma aprì ’l sentiero, e spedita volò dove il pensiero fermo col ben oprar la scorse, e resse. Pregò, l’udì chi sempre ascolta pio. Noi, perché in guerra noi medesmi ogn’ora tener, se ’n pace ella contenta or siede? Non è morta ISABELLA, è viva in Dio. Del mio carcer terreno uscito fuora là su di rivederla ho speme, e fede.

BY SIGNOR GIOVAN PAOLO FABRI, ACTOR She who once expressed so eloquently sublime words, and was a proud adornment to the stage, chose to approach the truth by joyfully leaving behind her shadow and joining the blessed. Having impressed virtue upon the Earth, she blazed a trail for her soul, and quickly flew to where her resolute thought and good deeds led and guided her. She prayed, and He, who always piously listens, heard her. Why are we constantly at war with ourselves, when she sits in peace and contentment? Isabella is not dead, but alive in God. I have faith and hope that once I leave behind my earthly prison, I will see her again up above.

23. Giovan Paolo Fabri (1567–1627) was a successful actor known as Flaminio who joined the Compagnia dei Gelosi in 1603 in France, authored encomiastic verses for Isabella, performed with the Compagnia dei Fedeli, and wrote the prologues for Giovan Battista Andreini’s Le due comedie in comedia (Venice, 1623), Lelio bandito (Milan, 1620), and La Turca (Venice, 1620).

74 ISABELLA ANDREINI DE ISABELLAE ANDRAEINAE NOMINE, ET COGNOMINE, Francisci Polae I. V. D. Veronensis Anagramma.24 ISABELLA ANDRAEINA, ALIA BLANDA SIRENA. Dum ISABELLA micas pleno ANDRAEINA theatro, Ingenio, eloquio nobilis, et facie; Ecce ALIA hoc SIRENA aevo tu BLANDA videris; Sic tua te lapidè nomina versa ferunt. ANAGRAM OF ISABELLA ANDREINI’S NAME AND SURNAME By Francesco Pola, Professor of Law from Verona. ISABELLA ANDREINI, A NEW ALLURING SIREN. 25 Isabella Andreini, as long as you shine noble in talent, eloquence, and appearance in a full theater—behold!—you are seen as a new alluring Siren of this age, just as your rearranged names endure on your gravestone. DE ISABELLAE ANDRAEINAE NOMINE, ET COGNOMINE, Leonardi Tedeschi Medici, ac Phylosophi Veronensis Anagramma.26 ISABELLA ANDRAEINA, LIRANE,27 AN LABRIS DEA. Tanta ISABELLA, tuam decorat facundia linguam, 24. Francesco Pola (ca. 1568–1616), Veronese jurist, academician, and writer. Pola was a noted author of epitaphs, and, in addition to this anagram, contributed encomiastic verses about the medal struck upon Andreini’s death, and the text accompanying Raphael Sadeler’s engraved portrait of Andreini, a reproduction of which is found in this volume after the Table of All the Letters Contained in the Work. Given his posthumous encomia to Andreini, it is noteworthy that Pola wrote an apology of the practice, L’epitafio overo difesa d’un epitafio (Venice: Nicolò Moretti, 1600). 25. With “a new alluring Siren” we render the original anagram ALIA BLANDA SIRENA. 26. Leonardo Tedeschi (ca. 1571–1634), Veronese physician and canon, authored in 1604 a treatise on the last observed supernova in the Milky Way, now known as Kepler’s Supernova, about which Tedeschi corresponded with Galileo. For a transcription of that correspondence, see Antonio Favaro, Galileo e lo studio di Padova, vol. 2 (Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1883), 235–246. Tedeschi’s demonstrated scientific and astronomical interests suggest the learned discourses in which Andreini engaged and which may have inspired her writing. See Letter 68, “Amorous and Civil scherzi (i)” in which she discusses the comet. 27. LIRA NE in the 1607 edition.

Letters 75 Seu laxo, stricto seu pede verba liges: Et calles tanta arte fides procurrere dulces,28 Seu malis plectro, pollice sive velis. Sis NE LIRA, AN LABRIS DEA nullus ut ambigat ordo; Cum Dea sis labris, sis et habenda lyra.

ANAGRAM OF ISABELLA ANDREINI’S NAME AND SURNAME By Leonardo Tedeschi, Doctor and Philosopher from Verona. Isabella Andreini, on whether you are a goddess of the lyre or the lips.29 Isabella, such eloquence graces your tongue as you bind words with either loose or tight metrical scheme, and you callus over your skin attending to the sweet lyre with much skill, whether you prefer to do so with the plectrum or, if you wish, your thumb; no one would contend that you are not a goddess of the lyre as well as the lips, since as a goddess of the lips, you must also be considered one with the lyre.

DE TABELLA IN QUA EX UNO LATERE EFFIGIES ISABELLAE ANDREINAE, EX ALIO PALLAS DEPICTA EST. Franciscus Pola I. C. Veronensis, et Acad. F. Quae manus artificem depinxit docta tabellam, Hinc ubi stat Pallas, hinc ISABELLA micat? Quàm benè conveniunt, et in uno hoc aere refulgent, Cernere seu formam, seu velis ingenium: Alteram in alterius poteris novisse figura, Alteri, et alterius nomina certa dare; Indiscreta etenim facies, virtusque coruscat; Utraque est Pallas, atque ISABELLA utraque est.

28. We corrected dultes (1607) as dulces, as did Giulio Cesare Capaccio, who cites the epigram in his Illustrium mulierum, et illustrium litteris virorum elogia (Naples: Giovanni Giacomo Carlino e Costantino Vitale, 1608), 208. 29. This is our translation of the original anagram LIRA NE, AN LABRIS DEA. We thank Lucia Marchi for helping us identify this musical instrument.

76 ISABELLA ANDREINI ON THE SMALL MEDAL 30 DEPICTING ON ONE SIDE THE PORTRAIT OF ISABELLA ANDREINI AND ON THE OTHER PALLAS ATHENA, 31 By Francesco Pola, Lawyer from Verona and Member of the Accademia Filarmonica. Which skillful hand crafted this ingenious small medal where on one side Pallas stands and on the other Isabella shines? You wish to distinguish either the appearance or the character, how well they conform to one another and similarly shine on this medallion; you will recognize one in the shape of the other and name with certainty one as the other; indeed, their features are indistinguishable and their worth shines; either one is Pallas Athena and either one is Isabella.

EPITHAPHIUM ISABELLAE ANDREINAE. Hoc iacet in tumulo ANDREINA ISABELLA, viator, Quae sola aeternum vivere digna fuit. Cuius si cultum spectasti, atque ora loquentis Dum turbae fremitu plena Theatra sonant; In silvis, soccove, aut esset agenda Cothurnis Fabula, visa tibi Cynthia, Iuno, Venus. Inspice sed mores, ut Iuno ficta Venusque. Sic erit haec solum Cynthia vera tibi.

Leonardi Todeschi Medici, et Physici.

EPITAPH OF ISABELLA ANDREINI By Leonardo Tedeschi, Doctor and Natural Philosopher. In this sepulchral mound lies Isabella Andreini, wayfarer, who alone was worthy of eternal life. If you watched her speak with erudition and expressiveness while the full theaters resonated with the crowd’s murmurs, as she performed in a 30. With some degree of poetic license, Francesco Pola is likely alluding to the actual medal cast to commemorate Isabella Andreini’s death, bearing on one side Andreini’s portrait and the inscription “Isabella Andreini,” and on the other, Fame and the words “Aeterna Fama.” See Cristina Grazioli, “La vita, l’arte, il mito: Un’introduzione alla figura di Isabella Canali Andreini,” in Isabella Andreini: Una letterata in scena, ed. Carlo Manfio (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2014), 9–24. Because we believe Pola is referring to this medal, we have rendered the original tabella as “medal” to correspond with the following reference to the medallion. 31. See note 16 for a discussion of Pallas Athena.

Letters 77 pastoral or comedy or tragedy, she reminded you of Diana, Juno, or Venus. If you consider her conduct, then she will no longer give you the illusion of being Juno and Venus, but reveal herself as the only true Diana. Histria iamque virum missit doctissima primum, Histrio sic nomen detulit inde suum. Verum hodiernos tam superas Isabella, putaris Histriaca, ut verè nata sis ipsa Dea, Arcanos dum in te scenis iam visus haberem, Audirem, et linguam nobilitare tuam. Obstupui, et mecum tacita tunc mente revolvi, An Dea coelestis, foemina, virque fores. Laudibus et quis te posset celebrare camenis? Te celebret musis pulcher Apollo suis. Hermes te genuit, verax nutrivit Apollo, Lactavitque suo sacra Minerva sinu. Tu mihi sola places, veteres heroidas inter Digna renceri, tu mihi sola places. Nunc tua virtuti sacret te gloria lauro, Cum sis tu superis connumeranda Deis. Inter odoratas Myrtos dum forte sederent Fessus Atlantiades, et Dea nata mari, Dulcis Amor fulva percussit utrumque sagitta, Gramineo capti concubere solo. Fit gravis alma Venus; maturi tempora partus Venerunt; menses praeteriere novem. Te foelix Isabella parit; crescentibus annis Ingenium crevit, crevit in ore decor. Si superas vultu cunctas formosa puellas, Formosa genuit te spetiosa Venus. Eloquium si dulce tibi, quo iungis32 Ulissem, Eloquio implevit pectus, et ora Pater. Indeed the most learned land of Histria yielded the first one, so “Histrio,” the first actor, derived his name from that place. Isabella, you surpass your contemporaries to such an extent that you are rightfully considered from Histria, where you were born a goddess.33 When you revealed your mysteries to me on stage and I 32. We have corrected iuncis (1607) as iungis. 33. The Oxford English Dictionary illustrates the etymology of the noun histrio as follows: “< classical Latin histriōn, histriō actor, performer in pantomime