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  • The Sword and the Pen. Women, Politics and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena by Konrad Eisenbichler
  • James W. Nelson Novoa
Konrad Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen. Women, Politics and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2012) 371 pp.

In The Sword and the pen. Women, Politics and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena Konrad Eisenbichler has produced an original study which offers scholars of sixteenth-Century Siena and of women’s literature in the Renaissance. In his book he has done an invaluable service for those who study the cultural life of the Tuscan city-state in the Renaissance period, for its literary circles, its religious life and, above all, the life of its women. Establishing the correct balance between extensive archival scholarship and theoretical approaches Eisenbichler has authored a book which breaks new ground, suggests new readings of texts and places a number of Italian language texts into the hands of English language readers for the first time. On account of these and a host of other merits which can be evinced throughout the book the author is to be commended. Eisenbichler brings to life female voices which were often obscured [End Page 239] by the male Cinquecento counterparts, sometimes even publishing works which had previously been held in manuscripts.

The book begins with an account of a collective exercise in literary celebration, dedicated to the memory of Petrarch, initiated by that sixteenth-century Sienese humanist and man of letters Alessandro Piccolomini. His 1540 visit to Petrarch’s tomb and his composition of a sonnet in honor of the Tuscan poet gave way to a tenzone, a sonnet exchange in which at least five Sienese women took up Piccolomini’s invitation to reciprocate with poems based on the celebration of Petrarch’s literary legacy. From the outset the book presents the reader with female authors who are generally forgotten or eclipsed. Their response in verse to Piccolomini’s initial tribute to Petrarch are a fitting beginning to a study which aims at fleshing out the story of figures whose voices are often virtually unknown among those who study Italian Renaissance literature. Eisenbichler presents the biographical portraits of three fascinating Sienese women who were also the authors of poetry: Aurelia Petrucci (1511–1542), Laudomia Forteguerri (1511–ca. 1555) and Virginia Martini Salvi (ca. 1510–ca. 1570). He dedicates a chapter to each. These women are, of course, exceptional in the cultural landscape of sixteenth-Century Siena, something which the author reminds us of constantly. Born into some of the most privileged and prominent families in the city-state they were privy to exceptional educations which allowed for their poetical production. Each of the three figures is quite different and though united by common origins they each have a distinctive voice which Eisenbichler evokes drawing on their backgrounds, styles and circles. As such they constitute, in a certain sense, a mirror of the literary world there in what was one of the most tumultuous period for Siena, a century which saw it torn between the passing leadership of several oligarchs, Spanish domination and finally Tuscan domination.

Given the paucity of records for these woman the author does a commendable job of fleshing out his portraits based on archival information, literary accounts and the evidence of their poetical production itself. Aurelia Petrucci only left two poems of her own yet she was lauded by some of Siena’s most important cultural figures, residing both in and outside the city, on account of her beauty and her literary gifts, alluding to her prowess in this regard. Eisenbichler depicts her as a cultivated Sienese noblewoman, linked to one of the city’s most important families, genuinely concerned with the state of her homeland and Italy as a whole and an important cultural figure, actively involved in many of the important cultivated literary gatherings in the city. Forteguerri extant poetic works are limited to six sonnets, five of which have the particularity which made of her a decidedly singular figure in the sixteenth-century and, indeed, Italian, cultural world: they explicitly express her love for one of the most important Italian female figures of the period: Margaret...

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