LUCREZIA MARINELLA
(1571-1653)
Nel presentare la sua ultima fatica, Marinella dice di non aver
“ imitato coloro, i quali nello scrivere le loro compositioni vanno
cercando nuovi vocaboli, parole stravaganti, e di falso sapore,
trasportate, e trasformate dal suo naturale, credendo, e
aspettando, di acquistarsi la Tirannide di Parnaso, e occupare con
parole poco buone il senso a Lettori; ma si ha eletto un
ragionamento schietto, puro e historico. E non ha voluto che la
corteccia attragga gli animi loro; ma il midollo della scienza, e
della dottrina somministri allo intelletto documenti filosofichi,
morali, e tali, che portino virtù, bontà, e onestà al animo, al
viver nostro. Se sieno piene di sapere queste poche Essortazioni
potranno assicurarsi dalla perfettione di tante opere poste da lei
in luce in diversi tempi in prosa e in rima, ma piu dalle due
ultime sue opere, una intitolata le Vittorie di S. Francesco,
piena, e ornata di molti concetti, e autorita aristoteliche e
platoniche, e molte di teologia; l’altra un poema di 27 canti, il
soggetto del quale e la gloriosa impresa, fatta da Enrico Dandolo
sotto Costantinopoli, una delle maggiori, e stupende attioni,
c’habbia fatta la Republica nostra, intitolato l’Enrico, overo
Costantinopoli acquistata, il quale dir si puo contenere quanta
scienza e ne’ poeti dell’arte militare […] Se sara considerato
questo poema da persone intendenti dell’arte militare, non potranno
se non con gran maraviglia ammirare, e laudare tanta arte, e
scienza in questo poema .”
“Questa e la cagione, che le opere donnesche non hanno ne gloria ne
buon volto; anchorchè di perfettione forse avanzino, o almeno pari
alle loro sieno […] Ond’io essortero la Donna che vuol viver
contenta, lieta, e lontana dall’invidia amar, e seguir la propria
virtù […] Se desiderate fama, non vi mancherà fama senza ponervi
a consumar lo’ntelletto in cose, ch’a voi sono piu tosto di danno,
che altrimenti. E non affliggervi la mente, e il corpo, e farvi
divenire livide, magre, pallide, e piene di malinconia, simili in
tutto a quelle Arpie, che venivano, secondo l’Ariosto, a
contaminare la mensa del re Etiopo”
 Nacque a Venezia da un padre filosofo e dottore, impegnato in studi sulle malattie e sugli ornamenti femminili. Della madre non si sa invece nulla.Lucrezia Marinella è stata una delle scrittrici più prolifiche della sua epoca, tanto che ci si chiede come abbia fatto, vivendo in un’epoca in cui la maggior parte del tempo delle donne era occupato dai doveri familiari. Una delle spiegazioni potrebbe essere rintracciata nel matrimonio, avvenuto in età molto avanzata, e, di conseguenza, ad un soggiorno prolungato nell’abitazione paterna. Le notizie sulla vita di questa donna sono molto frammentarie, si sa che ricevette una forte educazione umanistica, sfruttando la ricca biblioteca di famiglia, e che sposò Girolamo Vacca, il quale probabilmente morì prima di lei. I suoi meriti letterari sono però chiarissimi. Lucrezia Marinella è l’autrice di un’opera imponente, il trattato La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, co’ difetti, e mancamenti de gli uomini (1600), in cui elencò le ragioni della superiorità delle donne sugli uomini. Questa scrittrice fu anche una delle poche donne ad affrontare il genere epico. Il suo poema epico L’Enrico (1635), infatti, le ha dato fama attraverso i secoli. Molti dei suoi lavori, che spiccano per la loro lunghezza, hanno un contenuto religioso, fatto dovuto probabilmente all’ondata di misticismo che invase Venezia, tra il 1560 e il 1630. Una particolare attenzione è data alla vergine Maria, sulla cui vita Lucrezia scrisse L’imperatrice dell’universo. Di questa scrittrice, citiamo anche Amore innamorato ed impazzato (1598), Arcadia felice (1605), e De’ gesti heroici e della vita meravigliosa della serafica Santa Caterina da Siena (1624), unica sua opera interamente in prosa. |
http://www.italiadonna.it/public/percorsi/biografie/f107.htm
The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men
Edited and Translated by Anne Dunhill
With an Introduction by Letizia Panizza
227 pages | 6 x 9 | © 1999
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe
A gifted poet, a women’s rights activist, and an expert on moral and natural philosophy, Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) was known throughout Italy as the leading female intellectual of her age. Born into a family of Venetian physicians, she was encouraged to study, and, fortunately, she did not share the fate of many of her female contemporaries, who were forced to join convents or were pressured to marry early. Marinella enjoyed a long literary career, writing mainly religious, epic, and pastoral poetry, and biographies of famous women in both verse and prose.
Marinella’s masterpiece, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men was first published in 1600, composed at a furious pace in answer to Giusepe Passi’s diatribe about women’s alleged defects. This polemic displays Marinella’s vast knowledge of the Italian poetic tradition and demonstrates her ability to argue against authors of the misogynist tradition from Boccaccio to Torquato Tasso. Trying to effect real social change, Marinella argued that morally, intellectually, and in many other ways, women are superior to men.
Introduction to the Series by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Translation by Letizia Panizza with Anne Dunhill
The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men
Part I: The Nobility and Excellence of Women
Chapter 1: On the Nobility of the Names Given to the Female Sex
Chapter 2: The Causes That Produce Women
Chapter 3: Of the Nature and Essence of the Female Sex
Chapter 4: The Reasons for Men’s Noble Treatment of Women and the Things They Say about Women
Chapter 5: Of Women’s Noble Actions and Virtues, Which Greatly Surpass Men’s, as Will Be Proved by Reasoning and Example
Chapter 6: A Reply to the Flippant and Vain Reasoning Adopted by Men in Their Own Favor
Part II: The Defects and Vices of Men
Chapter 4: Of Wrathful, Eccentric, and Brutal Men
Chapter 12: Of Obstinate and Pertinacious Men
Chapter 13: Of Ungrateful and Discourteous Men
Chapter 14: Of Fickle, Inconstant Men
Chapter 15: Of Evil Men Who Hate Others Easily
Chapter 22: Of Men Who Are Ornate, Polished, Painted, and Bleached
Chapter 30: Of Men Who Kill Their Mothers, Fathers, Brothers, Sisters, and Grandchildren
Bibliography
Inde
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3643268.html
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“IF WOMEN… WAKE THEMSELVES FROM THE LONG SLEEP THAT OPPRESSES THEM….”
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We know more about the publishing history of Lucrezia Marinella’s works than we do about the details of her life. When other women were publishing anonymously or under a pseudonym, Marinella’s name was on most of her books and she was known by all Venice as the author of the rest. She apparently used the feminine form of her last name; some editors have used the family form, “Marinelli.”
Lucrezia was the daughter of a physician living in Venice who wrote works on medicine (two on women’s health) and on philosophy. We know nothing of her mother nor of when her father died (we do know that he was dead by 1600). Someone saw to it that Lucrezia was given an education that included philosophy and classical as well as vernacular literature.
In 1595 Marinella’s first work was published, La colomba sacra, poema eroico (The holy dove, a heroic poem), a biographical epic in ottava rima on an early Christian martyr. Two more poems followed in the next three years, a life of Francis of Assisi and an allegory on the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Her one prose treatise was La Nobilta et l’eccellenza delle donne, co’ difetti et mancamenti degli uomoni (The nobility and excellences of women, and the defects and vices of men), printed in 1600 and enlarged in 1601.
Between 1602 and 1606 five more works were published: Vita di Maria Vergine Imperatrice dell’universo and Arcadia felice, both combinations of verse and prose; works on St. Peter and on St. Justina (another early Christian martyr); and a collection of verse.
In 1607 Marinella married a physician, Girolamo Vacca. With the marriage, there is a gap of 12 years before her next publication, a poetic biography of Catherine of Siena. Her husband died in 1629, and in 1635 she published what some historians of Italian literature consider her masterpiece, L’Enrico overo Bisanzio acquistato (Henry, or Byzantium gained).
By the 1590s, the Roman influence that we call “Baroque” had come to Venice. It grew, in part, out of the Catholic Church’s need to reach out to people, to instruct and to arouse them more directly than it had done before. For literature, the result was an emphasis on vernacular writing with a strong emotional appeal. All of Marinella’s writing reflects the Baroque, but in different ways and from a feminine perspective. She usually wrote in the heroic verse form, but sometimes in a combination of verse and the “poetic prose” that she saw as capable of the same elevation as poetry.
Many of Marinella’s books were lives of religious figures, but almost always about women and then always with the emphasis on their heroism rather than on more passive virtues. She wrote of the heroic resistance of the women Columba and Justina; her book on Catherine of Siena was on the “heroic deeds and marvelous life”; her life of Mary (apparently the most successful during her lifetime) was on Mary as “empress of the universe”; in a later edition of an early poem on Francis, Clare of Assisi’s “glorious passion” receives equal billing.
Her secular writing also fused the extravagance of the popular chivalric tales and heroic epics with a Christian, but feminine, view of morality. One satirically allegorizes the myth of Cupid and Psyche as a conflict between body and soul; another is a pastoral verse drama that makes fun of human love. L’Enrico overo Bisanzio acquistato is an epic in the style of Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata, but with stronger, more self-reliant women.
The most popular English translation of Marinella’s is part of her Nobilta et l’eccellenza delle donne. It differs from her other writings in being a polemical treatise, a genre in which extravagant statement and personal attack were acceptable. Forty-five years later, Marinella would write Essortationi alle donne et a gli altri (Exhortations to women and others), which recants some of the more extreme views expressed in Nobilta.
But in 1600, Marinella would say whatever she needed to say in order to refute the misogynist statements of earlier writers, particularly the treatise of Giuseppe Passi, who had published Dei donneschi defetti (The defects of women) in 1599. Although it differs in purpose from her other works, Nobilta shares with them Marinella’s Baroque qualities of intensity, extravagant rhetoric, and emotional appeal; it also shares their confidence in women’s ability.
On this page you’ll find:
Links to helpful sites online.
Excerpts from translations in print:
Nobilta et l’eccellenza delle donne, co’ difetti et mancamenti degli uomoni
Vita di Maria Vergine Imperatrice dell’universo
L’ Enrico overo Bisantizo acquistato: poema heroico
Essortationi alle donne et a gli altri, se a loro saranno a grado
Information about secondary sources.
http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/marinell.html Sintesi
Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered
A Heroic Poem
Edited and Translated by Maria Galli Stampino
506 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2009
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe
Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.
Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella’s other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.
Acknowledgments
Series Editors’ Introduction
A Singular Venetian Epic Poem
Volume Editor’s Bibliography
Glossary of Principal Characters
Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered: A Heroic Poem (Prose Translation)
To the Readers
Canto 1 and Summaries of Cantos 2–3
Canto 4
Canto 5
Canto 6
Canto 7
From Canto 8
From Canto 9
Canto 10
From Canto 11, from Canto 12, and Summaries of Cantos 13–14
Canto 15
From Canto 16
From Canto 17
From Canto 18 and Summaries of Cantos 19–20
Canto 21
From Canto 22 and Summary of Canto 23
From Canto 24, from Canto 25, and Summary of Canto 26
Canto 27
Appendix
Cantos 6 and 7, and Excerpts from Cantos 8, 12, 22, 24, and 27 in Italian
Series Editors’ Bibliography
Index
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo6764001.html
Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato, poema eroico
Quest’edizione critica riporta alla luce un poema epico unico nella tradizione letteraria italliana: scritto da una donna, per di più a Venezia (città refrattaria per motivi storici ed idiologici a questo genere), e volto a rievocare gli avvenimenti della Quarta Crociata, cruciale quanto problematica per
la storia, i possedimenti territoriali, le rotte mercantili e l’immagine di sé della Serenissima. Nell’introduzione Galli Stampino sottolinea la posizione ideologica di Marinella di fronte alle vicende duecentesche, che videro contrapposti due campi cristiani, ma che in filigrana lasciano trasparire contrasti religiosi, politici, strategici e mercantili con l’Impero ottomano, i Musulmani, gli Ortodossi, e i Riformati. Lungi dall’essere testo minore, l’Enrico è cruciale per comprendere la poesia post-tassiana, la temperie veneziana del tempo, e l’enorme contributo di Marinella alla cultura a cavallo del Cinque e Seicento.