Antonia Tanini Pulci (7 May, the feast of St. Domitilla)
Although an English translation of Antonia Pulci's sacre rappresentazioni (literally "holy performances," or one-act sacred plays) has sat on my bookshelf for nearly thirty years, I somehow never got around to posting an essay here about the fifteenth-century Florentine writer.
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| Opening images in Bartolomeo de' Libri's 1495 edition of Antonia Pulci's Rappresentazione di santa Guglielma (from the Biblioteca Europea di Informaziow e Cultura digital library) |
In 1425, some 140 years after Guglielma's death in 1281, a friar living in Ferrara, Antonio Bonfadini, wrote her vita, a saint's life. This work, filled with incredible and entirely made up detail, does not seem to have been widely read--only one manuscript copy survives.
But this vita or some version of it somehow found its way to the Florentine writer Antonia Pulci. Her sacra rappresentazione about Guglielma, The Play of Saint Guglielma (Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma), preserved and popularized the story of Guglielma.
Antonia Tanini, later Pulci, was born around the year 1452, nearly thirty years after Bonfadini composed his life of Guglielma. She was the daughter of a Florentine merchant, Francesco d'Antonio di Giannotto Tanini, and his wife, Jacopa da Roma. The couple had seven children, including Antonia--six daughters and one son.* Francesco also had two children born out of wedlock, a son born before his marriage and a daughter born during his marriage.
Francesco Tanini's children were all well educated, Antonia and her sisters as well as her brothers. In their edition of Antonia Pulci's plays, James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook note that Antonia received a "careful literary and religious education." Her plays demonstrate both the extent of her learning and "her mastery of several sorts of Italian verse." Later in her life, continuing to educate herself, she hired a tutor to instruct her in Latin.
Some three years after her father's death, when she was about eighteen years old, Antonia Tanini was married to Bernardo Pulci, a member of a distinguished Florentine family. Unfortunately, Bernardo's older brother bankrupted the family--while Bernardo may have been rich in literary aspirations and political patronage (he was supported by the Medicis), he was not a wealthy man. As a banker and speculator he was unable to retrieve the family's fortunes, and the couple lived in straitened circumstances.
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| The title page of of Pulci's Rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla: "INCOMINCIA La rapresentatione di san- cta Domitilla uergine facta & compo- sta in uersi per mona Antonia dōna di Bernardo pulci lāno [l'anno] M CCCC LXXXIII" |
But as Elissa B. Weaver notes in her biographical essay on Antonia Pulci, "All of the Pulcis were writers." By 1483, Pulci herself had also begun to write, and at least three of her sacre rappresentazioni were printed in a two-volume collection of thirteen plays published in Florence in that year: Rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla, Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma, and Rappresentazione di San Francesco. A fourth play in this collection, on Joseph, the son of Jacob, may also have been written by Pulci.** (One of her husband's plays is also printed in this anthology.)
In 1488, Bernardo Pulci died, leaving Antonia a widow. After her husband's death, Antonia Pulci became a tertiary, a "third order sister"--that is, while she continued to live in the secular world, she lived a religious life, as if she were inside a convent.
Antonia Pulci did spend some of her time in the Dominican convent of San Vincenzo, known as Annalena, and some of the time at her mother's home. It was during this time that she sought out Francesco Dulciati to instruct her in Latin.
In 1500, after securing the return of her dowry from the Pulci family (evidently she was entitled to the return since she and Bernardo had not had children), she seemed to have taken "more formal vows" and founded a house for Augustinian tertiaries, Santa Maria della Misericordia. She was enclosed there on 26 February 1500. It was there that she died on 26 September 1501.
Her foundation survived for three decades after Pulci's death, but it was eventually dissolved, seemingly because it was located outside the walls of the city of Florence, a somewhat dangerous location. The tertiaries moved inside the city, to the convent of San Clemente, near the friary of San Gallo, where Pulci's Latin teacher had become prior.
Francesco Dulciati wrote a brief biography of Antonia Pulci some years after her death. In this, he attributes to Antonia Pulci a play about Joseph, the son of Jacob (likely the sacra rappresentazione on that subject in the 1483 anthology). He also says she wrote a play on the topic of the Prodigal Son and another on Saul and David. Two plays on these subjects survive in later publications and are likely Pulci's. Dulciata also claims that, after her husband's death, Antonia Pulci continued to write, but religious poetry rather than plays, including a poem on the body of Christ, a copy of which, signed by Pulci herself, he says he has in his possession.
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| Opening text pages in Bartolomeo de' Libri's 1495 edition of Antonia Pulci's Rappresentazione di santa Guglielma (from the Biblioteca Europea di Informazione Cultura digital library) |
I've linked to several accessible sources above, including Cook and Cook's edition of Antonia Pulci's plays. Interestingly, this 1996 edition, published as a volume in the University of Chicago's The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, was revised. In 2010, as part of the Toronto Series of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, a bilingual edition, with a "fresh translastion" by James Wyatt Cook and edited by Elissa B. Weaver, published the "five plays securely authored by Antonia Pulci." (The earlier Cook and Cook volume had included "seemingly later plays" relying on "a tradition of attribution and internal correspondences with the plays of unquestioned provenance.") For this later volume, Saints' Lives and Bible Stories for the Stage: A Bilingual Edition, click here.
I have not addressed the performance issues of Pulci's plays in my post. For a larger discussion of convent theater, you may also enjoy Elissa B. Weaver's Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women.
*In their 1996 edition of Pulci's rappresentazioni, editors James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook write that Francesco had five children born "in wedlock," but they list seven. (See Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival, Seven Sacred Plays, trans. James Wyatt Cook, eds. James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook, 11).
While Cook and Cook note that Antonia "was the daughter of a Florentine family whose fortunes as bankers were beginning to rise," Elissa B. Weaver's 2004 entry on Pulci for Italian Women Writers indicates that Antonia's father was a Florentine merchant. Because of Weaver's detailed archival work on this subject, I've followed her identification of Antonia's father as a merchant.
There has also been some confusion about the surname of Antonia's father, as noted by Weaver:
Confusion regarding Antonia's name entered into literary history in the late nineteenth century, and from that time on she was thought to have belonged to the Giannotti family. This was the result of a misinterpretation of her father's name, undoubtedly based on a document from the period when he did not use a surname but two patronymics, the second of which was 'di Giannotto'. He appears in early tax records as Francesco d'Antonio di Giannotto in order to distinguish himself from others in his gonfalone (district of the city) named Francesco d'Antonio. When the family began to use a surname they took it from an earlier ancestor named Tanino.
Antonia Pulci's name is still noted as "Antonia Giannotti" in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, for example (available here). In her biographical essay (2000), Anna Laura Saso claims that the surname Tanino "appears to be erroneous" (erronea appare).
**On the complicated history and understanding of this collection of plays, widely attributed to the printer Antonio Miscomini, see Nerida Newbigin's "Antonia Pulci and the First Anthology of Sacre Rappresentazioni (1483?)," La Bibliofilia 118, no. 3 (2016): 337-62. There are different opinions about the date of publication of this volume, but Newbigin reasons that the volumes were likely published in 1483, and I've accepted her date of publication here.
