Moderata Fonte and a Paradise for Women

Modesta di Pozzo di Zorzi, "Moderata Fonte" (died 2 November 1592)

Born in Venice in 1555, Modesta Pozzo, the daughter of Girolamo Pozzo, a lawyer, and Marietta dal Moro, would rename herself when she began to write. In Italian, her birth name means a “humble, unassuming [modesta] well [pozzo].” But she playfully recreates herself as “Moderata Fonte,” the “well-regulated [moderata] fountain [fonte].”*

A portrait of Moderata Fonte,
c. 1588-89

Orphaned in 1556 when she was just a year old, Modesta was raised by her maternal grandmother, Cecilia di Mazzi, and a step-grandfather, Prospero Saraceni. After several years of education at the convent of Santa Marta, she returned home, where Saraceni encouraged her to read widely in his library and encouraged her interest in writing.

Modesta Pozzo's friend, uncle, and mentor, Niccolò Doglioni, who would later write a brief biography of her, also tells a delightful story about the young girl, who would waylay her brother as he returned from school so that he would repeat his lessons to her--thus she learned Latin. It is a memorable story, but it is also one that shows how a bright girl still had to come by an education second-hand.

In her twenties, Pozzo met Doglioni, who was her uncle by marriage, and he encouraged her to write. Her earliest work, a chivalric verse romance, Tredici canti del Floridoro (Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro), was published in 1581 under her pen name, "Moderata Fonte."

Fonte's verse romance was followed by two more publications the next year. A dramatic dialogue Le feste (Celebrations), an example of a popular short dramatic form, the representazione, was performed before the Doge on 31 December 1581. She also published a narrative poem, La passione di Christo (The Passion of Christ), in ottava rima. 

In recounting the biblical narrative of Christ's Passion, Fonte focuses attention on the female figures of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene--while this work can be compared to Vittoria Colonna's 1557 Pianto sopra la passione di Christo, a prose work in which Colonna joins the Virgin Mary in weeping over Christ's body, it also calls to mind in fascinating ways Aemilia Lanyer's later Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. 

Fonte's work is also represented in a 1583 anthology of poetry praising the king of Poland, Stephen Bathory, which indicates something of Fonte's reputation in Venice.

The composition of these works dates to the period when Doglioni was Fonte's guardian. Before she joined his household, he writes, “her talent had been lying buried, but I immediately recognized it and determined, as a lover of excellence, to reveal it to the world.” He not only encouraged her, but he says he “started arranging for the publication of her works.” 

Her marriage in 1583 to the lawyer Filippo de’ Zorzi and the pregnancies that soon followed disrupted her literary career. Doglioni seems to suggest that after her marriage she no longer had the time for writing: “[Moderata Fonte] was extremely good at running her household . . . so good, indeed, that her husband scarcely needed to give it a thought and confessed on several occasions that he had no idea what it felt like to have the responsibility of a home and family, for she took everything out of his hands and did it all herself. . . .” Perhaps it is the lack of a room of her own—a room with a lock on the door—that prompted Fonte to create a private space for women as a retreat from the demands of men and marriage.

Despite Doglioni's assertions, however, there were further publications--though certainly the pace of publication seems to have slowed. In 1585, a lyric was published on the occasion of the death of the Doge; a second religious narrative, La resurretione di Christo (The Resurrection of Christ) was published in 1592, the year of her death.

The Worth of Women,
published posthumously, 1600

We know little about what in particular might have prompted Fonte to write what has now become her most most well known work, Il merito delle donne, oue chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette de gli huomini (The Worth of Women, Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men), but her daughter tells us that the book was finished on the day before Fonte’s death; it was “brought to the present stage of completion the very day before her death in childbirth, so that she was unable to reread or revise it,” Fonte’s daughter, Cecilia, writes. 

Doglioni supplies a few more details. He notes that Fonte died on the morning of All Souls’ Day (2 November, the day following All Saints’ Day) in 1592. He also says that, on the “very day before she died,” she had finished the second part of the work “which she had titled The Worth of Women.” 

Whatever the specific prompt that caused her to begin her book in the first place, Fonte’s son indicates that his mother’s purpose in writing served a larger end. She intended to write back to men for all the “undeserved abuse, both spoken and written,” that they had “long showered on women”—men who “never believed they would ever have to suffer any punishment that corresponded even partially to the severity of the offense.” What his mother accomplished is extraordinary: “here we see, contrary to all expectations, a woman restoring her sex to its rightful honor and, moreover, exalting women to the skies by the power of her pen.”

In The Worth of Women, Fonte creates something of a smaller version of the "city of ladies" imagined by Christine de Pizan nearly two centuries earlier. The space Fonte’s women occupy is smaller than the city Pizan imagines, but, like her City of Ladies, their private retreat is both in the world and yet separate from it. In this private space, the women who are privileged to gather together are protected. 

Fonte’s “city of ladies” is a walled garden inside a palazzo along the Grand Canal of Venice. The garden, which the women inside regard as their Paradise, is enclosed by the walls of the palazzo, while the palazzo is enclosed within a city which itself is well-defended. In fact, Fonte’s work begins with a paean to the “most noble city of Venice,” la serenissima, a city that “lies wondrously” on the sea that “surrounds her,” behind walls and fortresses that “guard her,” and within gates that “enclose her.”

This Venice, emphatically figured here as female, is a unique city “as everyone knows”; she is “both adored and respected, both loved and feared.” The citizens of the city are praised, both male and female: the “courage, good sense, and courtesy of the men are remarkable, as are the beauty, intelligence, and chastity of the women.” Our narrator describes Venice as a city notable for “the remarkable freedom enjoyed by its inhabitants.”

The city of Venice is undeniably real, but the women who gather together in this “truly divine city, abode of all celestial graces and perfections,” seem to occupy a kind of once-and-future moment: “there was once not long ago (and indeed there still is) a group of noble and spirited women,” our narrator begins, as if to emphasize the fantasy of what follows. 

The seven women “often steal time together for a quiet conversation; and on these occasions, safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence, they would speak freely on whatever subject they pleased.” Thus “stealing” a moment of freedom in a city that has just been described as “free as the sea itself,” the seven “noble and spirited” women we meet are emblematic of the very restricted status of women not only in the republic of Venice but virtually everywhere in western Europe.

While Fonte's published works were in genres that were more open to women writers in the late sixteenth century—verse romances, lyric poetry, and religious narrative, for example--The Worth of Women represents a genre that not only silenced women but that usually excluded them altogether. The Worth of Women is a literary dialogue, an extraordinarily popular Renaissance form perhaps best known by its preeminent example, Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. 

Like Renaissance comedy and tragedy, the literary dialogue looked back to the ancient Greeks for its model, to Plato’s dialogues, in particular, which largely excluded women. In the Republic, the characters Socrates and Glaucon debate women’s ability to act as guardians in the utopian “republic,” and although “Socrates,” of course, wins the argument (yes, some women are capable), no women are present at this debate. In Plato’s Symposium, the character Diotima of Mantinea plays a role, although it is not clear whether she is a historical figure, like his “character,” Socrates, or is the female personification of wisdom. Still, she gets to participate in the conversation. 

By comparison, there are no women present in most Renaissance literary dialogues. Castiglione does include women in his fantasy, but they are largely silent, even when the conversation takes a break from its discussion of the perfect courtier to design the perfect lady of the court, a female parallel to the court gentlemen. 

In The Worth of Women, Fonte turns the tables on her male contemporaries. Not only are men silent, they are completely absent. In the absence of men, these women don’t design a perfect man to fulfill their dreams, nor do they feel any need to defend women—women’s “worth” is a given, signaled by Fonte’s title. While the “worth of women” is not debatable, the “worth” of men is, so these friends decide to entertain themselves by debating the good and bad qualities of men. 

I could go on and on here--but, looking back over this, I think I've gone on long enough already. I will close by saying that I have taught The Worth of Women to students many times--not to literature majors, but to students taking a course to fulfill a core requirement. It is, hands down, one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking texts I've used in literature classes.

As one testament--a student last spring confided in a writing assignment that she never ready anything for fun. But she loved Fonte's work so much that, instead of just finishing the first day's reading assignment, she stayed up late and read the entire book! (Even the pages I hadn't assigned!) What better testimonial than that?

Il merito delle donne was published posthumously in 1600.

An excellent biographical essay by Virginia Cox is posted at Italian Women Writers. If you can read Italian, the site links to digitized versions of some of Fonte's published work. Otherwise, you will find Cox's English translation of The Worth of Women very affordable. Fonte's chivalric romance, Floridoro, is also available in English.

*Portions of this brief essay have been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own (Palgrave Macmillan).

Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara

Renée of France, duchess of Ferrara (born 25 October 1510)

The younger daughter of Louis XII of France and Anne of Brittany, Renée of France was orphaned while still a young child--her mother died in January of 1514, when Renée was three, her father a year later, in January of 1515, when she was four. (Renée's older sister was Claude of France).*

Renée of France, c. 1520,
drawing by Jean Clouet

After her parents' deaths, Renée was raised at the court by Marguerite of Angoulême, the sister of Louis XII's successor, Francis I. Marguerite is a woman whom we have met before, noted both as a writer and for her sympathy for religious reform.

After Marguerite married Henry of Navarre in 1527, she took the young French princess with her to the Château de Nérac, a favorite residence in Navarre. (The rebuilding of the castle in the French Renaissance style would be completed by Marguerite's daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre.)

When Renée was eighteen years old, in 1528, she was married to Ercole d'Este (the son of Lucrezia Borgia) in order to strengthen the alliance between France and Ferrara. Although the Ferrarese court was "one of the most glittering in Europe," Renée's "Italian career" as the duchess of Ferrara was a disaster, husband and wife mismatched in the extreme. 

Renée remained entirely French in her language and her sympathies. Her slowness in acquiring "even a rudimentary knowledge" of Italian "remained steadily against her, keeping her, apart from any other consideration, a very isolated person in her own establishment." She "persistently refused to identify herself with her husband's interests," clinging "with stupid pathos" even to the French manner of dress.

Thus isolated, Renée turned to other pursuits, and her court at Ferrara became a safe haven for intellectuals like the classical scholar Olympia Morata, the poet Vittoria Colonna, and the French poet Clément Marot, and a refuge for French Huguenots. John Calvin visited Renée's court in 1536, and under his influence she was converted in 1540. In retaliation, Ercole dismissed and imprisoned members of his wife's household staff. 

Although she had been granted "exemptions" for her religious views by Pope Paul III in 1543, in 1554 she was brought before the Inquisition by Julius II. Ercole separated his wife from her children and imprisoned her. "We kept her shut up for fifteen days, with only people who had no sort of Lutheran tendencies to wait upon her," he wrote, adding, "We also threatened to confiscate all her property."

Renée of France,
portrait by Corneille de Lyon

In spite of all the pressures, Renée withstood her examination by the Inquisition, and a formal sentence was passed against her. She was condemned for heresy and again imprisoned by her husband. 

A week later, she recanted, however, and those whom she had formerly befriended did not rally to her defense in her time of need. Calvin's response was shocked: "What shall I say, except that constancy is a very rare virtue among the great of this world?" Olympia Morata said she was not surprised by the recantation, since she had always believed Renée's was a weak mind (une tête legère).

Renée lived apart from her husband after her release. In 1559, after her husband's death and estranged from her son Alfonso, she returned to France after thirty years in Ferrara, settling on her estates near Montargis.

During the wars of religion that raged after her return, she was besieged by her son-in-law Francis, duke of Guise. When he threatened to destroy the walls of her fortress, Renée replied that "she would herself mount the battlements and see if he dare kill a King's daughter."

Renée and Montargis withstood the siege, and in the religious persecution that followed, she offered a haven to French Huguenots "to her own constant peril." Under the circumstances, John Calvin, who seems to have been as "inconstant" as the woman whose inconstancy he had bewailed, resumed his friendship with Renée, and his correspondence to her indicates his recognition at last of her courage. 

This courage led her to write "imploring letters" to her son in 1569, protesting his persecution of those suspected of following reformed religion and to providing a haven for Huguenots again in the same year. But her son ignored her pleas, and, under threat, she was forced to send away those who had come to her for protection. She reportedly told the king's envoy that "if she had his sword in her hands, he would deserve to die, as a messenger of death."

Both her son and the French king attempted to take control of Renée's income and possessions. Her daughter Anna, by then wife of the duke of Nemours, recovered a document by which Louis XII, Renée's father, had given her a claim to her mother's independent Brittany, which she was forced to cede; "little by little," as one biographer notes, "all her lands were being taken from her":

Gisors and Vernon were given to the Duc d'Alençon, Caen and Falaise had been seized by Alfonso [her son] for debts, Chartres and Montargis were to belong to the Duchess of Nemours [her daughter Anna], but Renée was suffered to remain as a pensioner in her own castle. Her son Alfonso was furious and wrote the most bitter letters to his mother, whom he never forgave, for yielding any possible claim to [Brittany].

In 1572 Renée was in Paris for the marriage of Henry of Navarre, who would become Henry IV of France, and Marguerite of Valois. Lodging with her daughter Anna, whose Catholic husband was the duke of Nemours, Renée escaped the bloodbath of the St. Bartholomew massacre. 

She was escorted back to Montargis, all Huguenot services forbidden. There, "broken in health and spirit," she "ruled her great castle . . . in lonely state," "neglected and forgotten by her sons and daughters, on whom she had bestowed all that remained of her possessions." She dictated her last will and testament just before her death on 2 July 1575. In proudly listing her titles, she contrasted the state to which she had fallen with the state she had been born and raised to occupy:

We, Renée of France, Duchess of Chartres, Countess of Gisors, Lady of Montargis, widow and dowager of the late Monseigneur of good memory Ercole II of Ferrara, Daughter of the lady King Louis XII and the late Queen Anne, Duchess of Brétagne.

*This entry has been adapted from The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).

And many thanks to Amy-Eloise for her correction (see below, comments)--her correct identification of an image in an earlier version of this post allowed for my correction here. The portrait she identified has been removed, and a second (correct) image of Renée of France has been added.

Sarra Copia Sulam, Poet in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Sarra Copia Sulam (16 October 1622)

As with several other posts, the date for this piece on Sarra Copia Sulam needs a bit of explanation.

Sarra Copia Sulam was born in Venice, one of three daughters of Simon and Ricca Copia, about whom very little evidence survives, except that Simon was a wealthy Jewish merchant, he and his brother Moses considered among the wealthiest Jews living in Venice. The brothers were brokers of maritime insurance. There is surviving evidence of the Copia family in Venice from the mid-sixteenth century. 

This portrait now thought to be by Antonio Laborio (c. 1660s)
is perhaps a copy of an earlier portrait
of Sarra Copia Sulam

Sarra Copia's date of birth is not certain (and I won't even begin to address the varied spellings of her name)--the year suggested for her birth ranges from about 1589 to 1601, the date accepted by Don Harrán, the editor and translator of a massive (almost 600 pages) new anthology of Copia's work.

Sarra Copia married a banker named Jacob Sulam about the year 1614 (though opinions vary on that date too). She gave birth to a daughter named Rebecca in 1615, but the child died at the age of ten months, and Sarra is known to have suffered a miscarriage in May of 1618. Sarra Copia Sulam died on 15 February 1641.

But between the years 1618 and 1624, Sarra Copia Sulam also managed to write, and that writing--her correspondence, her poetry, a religious manifesto--survives. 

As Harrán observes, "Seven years cannot be considered a life. But that is all we have for Sarra Copia Sulam": 

There are no documents for Copia in the years preceding 1618 and in those following 1624 until her death in 1641. Thus if she were born in 1600-1601, thirty-five years of her life remain uncovered. Yet the documents for 1618-1624 testify not only to the breadth of her activities but also to her impact on her surroundings.

Rather than posting about Sulam on the date of her death, however, I chose a date that relates to her life, or at least to her literary life--and that belongs to the remarkable seven-year period of creativity before she returns to silence and obscurity.

In 1618, after reading the epic poem La reina Ester, written by Ansaldo Cebà, a Genoese monk, Sarra Sulam began a correspondence with him that lasted until 1622. Sulam's last letter to Cebà is dated 30 April; before sending any letter of response, Cebà died on 16 October 1622--and thus the date for today's posting.

In his last letter to Sulam, dated 19 March, Cebà had written, "The days of my life are becoming shorter," and that he wanted to be able to "prepare to die properly." He wished to "become detached from the love of earthly things": "You are one of them by keeping me attached to the earth more than I would like."

(Cebà collected their correspondence and prepared it for publication; the work was published posthumously in Genoa in 1623.)

Having begun her literary exchange with Cebà in 1618, Sulam also established a salon, hosting a number of male intellectuals and writers. Among the men who were involved in the accademia she established in her home were a roster Venetian notables who praised her, not only for her beauty and hospitality but for her contributions to their discussions. The gathered intellectuals discussed philosophy and religion, read and exchanged poetry, and debated issues, among them the immortality of the soul. 

This latter inspired one of the members of the salon, the poet and priest Baldassare Bonifacio, to publish a treatise, Discourse on the Immortality of the Soul (Dell'immortalità dell’anima discorso), in which he claimed that Sulam did not believe in the soul's immortality, a belief basic to both Christianity and Judaism.

Sulam's reply was The Manifesto of Sara Copia Sulam, a Jewish Woman, in which She Refutes and Disavows the Opinion Denying Immortality of the Soul, Falsely Attributed to Her by Signor Baldassare Bonifacio (Manifesto di Sarra Copia Sulam Hebrea. Nel quale è da lei riprovate, e detestata l’opinione negante l’Immortalità dell’Anima, falsemente attribuitale dal Sig. Baldassare Bonifacio)--three editions were published in 1621.

Bonifacio wrote a brief reply and published all three pieces, bound together with a letter from Sulam to him. In this volume he accused her of not writing her manifesto, attributing her arguments to a rabbi.

Sulam sent a copy of her Manifesto to Cebà--who waited seven months to respond, and then only wished that she would convert to Christianity (which was, to be fair, a theme of all his letters to Sulam).

But by this point, public opinion--and the views of her literary "friends"--began to change. Further accusations of Sulam's literary theft and plagiarism followed, though she also had her defenders. Composed about 1626, the Notices from Parnassus (Avvisis di Parnaso) offered a "defense" of Sarra Copia Sulam in the form of a trial on Mount Parnassus before Apollo. 

This "evidence" offered in the trial includes several unpublished sonnets by (or attributed to) Sulam, but the most appealing defenses of her are "written" by some of the most notable women writers of Italy, including Vittoria Colonna, and another "by" Sappho of Lesbos. (The anthology, sometimes attributed to an otherwise unknown woman named Giulia Solinga, who wrote the dedication, was not published in Italian until the twentieth century.)

As Howard Tzvi Adelman notes in an extended essay about Sarra Copia Sulam:

As a Jewish woman writer who had both captivated and bested Christian clerics in public, Copia Sullam was an ideal target for accusations that would undermine her accomplishments as a woman and a Jew; they tried to make Christian men appear responsible for her attainments. Her defenders, however, saw Copia Sullam in the tradition of women writers of the Renaissance and created for her a distinguished panel of female defenders. Her Jewishness was noted regularly in their defense of her, but it certainly was not an obstacle to her receiving a fair hearing before Apollo.

Interestingly, Sulam neither mentions her Venetian contemporary Lucrezia Marinella nor is mentioned by her.

Today, you will find Sarra Copia Sulam's work in Harrán's anthology, Sarra Copia Sulam: Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice. The edition includes her correspondence with Cebà, as well as reference to her in his letters to various other recipients; the complete "controversy" over the immortality of the soul; the complete Notices from Parnassus; and all of Sulam's surviving poetry. 

Adelman's comprehensive essay from the Encyclopedia at Jewish Women's Archive is available by clicking here.

Vittoria Colonna: Poet, Poetic Innovator, and Literary Friend

Vittoria Colonna (1490/2-1547)

A 1520 portrait of Colonna,
by Sebastiano del Piombo

Today, 6 March, is actually the birth date of the famed Renaissance painter, sculptor, and architect Michelangelo--he was born on this day in the year 1475. His birthday offers us the opportunity to remember Michelangelo's passionate friendship with the poet Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547), whose work was praised and highly regarded among her contemporaries but later fell into obscurity.

As Abigail Brunden observes in her biographical note on Colonna for the Italian Women Writers website, "Colonna, certainly the most renowned and successful woman writer of her age in Italy, was widely admired by her peers for her impeccable Petrarchan verses and her public image of unimpeachable chastity and piety. Her work went through numerous sixteenth-century editions, but these tailed off after the 1560s and subsequent editorial neglect belies her status at the forefront of literary production by secular women in the Renaissance."

Colonna wrote both secular love sonnets and religious lyrics, rime spirituali; a terza-rima narrative, Trionfo di Cristo (The Triumph of Christ); literary epistles, in particular on religious figures like the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Catherine of Alexandria; and prose meditations on religious topics.

Although she achieved what editor Virginia Cox describes as an "unprecedented level of literary fame and success" before her meeting with Michelangelo in 1538, today her most well-known work is the collection of spiritual sonnets she addressed to him. Her Sonnets to Michelangelo, a manuscript Colonna presented to the poet as a gift in 1540, records their "poetic exchanges," an "explor[ation of] the spiritual issues that occupied them through the medium of the lyric."

Detail of a Michelangelo drawing of
Colonna, when she is about age 50

It's unfortunate, though perhaps not unexpected, that venerable sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica still undervalue Colonna: she is, in its estimation, "less important for her poetry than for her personality and her associations with famous contemporaries, particularly Michelangelo."*

You can judge for yourself. I recommend Cox's excellent dual-language edition of Colonna's Sonnets for Michelangelo. Colonna's meditation "On the Passion of Christ" is included in Susan Haskins's Who Is Mary?: Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary. For her analysis of Colonna and "the making of a Renaissance publishing phenomenon," you might also enjoy Abigail Brunden's Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation.

*Update, 6 March 2024: The brief Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Vittoria Colonna has been revised, as you will read if you follow the link, but I’ve left in the original language. To see the editorial changes, click here, then open the 24 September 2020 article revision.