Una selva luminosa: The Second Day of Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne

Abstract

c 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2004/10102-0006$10.00 While many women took up the pen in sixteenth-century Italy, literary critics consider Moderata Fonte’s career to be unconventional because she embraced two genres traditionally dominated by male authors: the chivalric epic and the literary dialogue.1 One of the most original and versatile female voices in early modern Italy, Fonte was born Modesta Pozzo in 1555 in Venice to parents of the privileged, if not aristocratic, class of cittadini ordinari and began writing as a young woman.2 Her varied oeuvre includes a drama performed for the doge entitled Le feste (1582); two religious poems in ottava rima, La passione di Cristo (1582) and La Resurrezione di Gesu (1592); as well as occasional verse written and published throughout her lifetime. Interestingly, she began and ended her literary life with forays into “masculine” genres. She published her chivalric epic Il Floridoro in 1581; her earliest biographer Niccolo Doglioni informs us that she completed her literary dialogue, Il merito delle donne (1600), in 1592, a day before dying from complications of the birth of her fourth child.3