Abstract
Can an 'exceptional woman' of the past be a model for contemporary women and the subject of analysis of a gendered historiography? What were the norms which regulated the life of an exceptional woman such as Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel (1752–1799)? How do the social, political, and cultural context and the ideological circumstances of those who write about her affect their representations? This article examines three texts on this historical figure who was a poet, an intellectual, a journalist, a revolutionary and a 'martyr' of the 1799 Neapolitan revolution: Annarita Butta fuoco's 1977 biographical-historical article 'Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel: una donna nella Rivoluzione', Enzo Striano's 1986 historical novel Il resto di niente, and Maria Antonietta Macciocchi's 1993 'narrative essay' Cara Eleonora. I attempt to answer the questions set out above, by looking at Eleonora's ambiguous position in eighteenth-century Naples and the degree of 'normalization' to which the three texts subject her.
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