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Chapter 3: Laudomia Forteguerri: Constructions of a Woman
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T H R E E Laudomia Forteguerri Constructions of a Woman I arrived at Siena the iiijth of September. This citie standethe upon hilles as the citie of Roome did in the olde time. It is counted vj miles compasse abowt the walles. The countrey abowt verie frutefull. The people are much given to entertaine strangers gentlie. Most of the women are well learned and write excellentlie well bothe in prose and verse, emong whom Laudomia Fortiguerra and Virginia Salvi did excell for good wittes. —Sir Thomas Hoby, The Travels and Life of Sir Thomas Hoby One of the most fascinating and possibly controversial women poets of Siena was Laudomia Forteguerri. She was born in 1515 into an old and prestigious Sienese noble family. She married twice, bore three children , composed a number of sonnets, and disappeared from the records around 1555. In the late 1530s she appears as a speaker in a theologically dangerous dialogue by the Sienese erudite Marc’Antonio Piccolomini . Then, in 1541, in a lecture delivered in Padua and published within a few months in Bologna, the young scholar Alessandro Piccolomini “outed” Laudomia as a woman who loved another woman. In the 1550s, the Venetian polygraph Giuseppe Betussi da Bassano praised her as one of the thirteen most beautiful women in Italy and made her an emblem of vera fama, “true fame.” And to this day in Siena, Laudomia is reputed 101 to be one of the three courageous “women of Siena” who, during the preparations for the expected attack from Imperial forces, organized and led a troop of three thousand women to work in defense of their city. A wife, mother, poet, lover, lesbian, beauty, and leader Laudomia Forteguerri remains, in many ways, a complex and mysterious figure. Part of the mystery comes from the dearth of reliable information about her, but part also comes from previous scholars who tried to fill the lacunae with their imaginings rather than with facts. For this reason , previous scholarship on Forteguerri needs to be read with great caution. Scholars from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries repeated a few basic fragments of information and sequentially enlarged upon them. In the twentieth century scholars have tried to be more responsible , but previous grievous errors have persisted and a few new ones have been introduced into the mix. My hope in this chapter is to provide more reliable information on Forteguerri, to correct at least some of the misconceptions that have crept into her story, to analyze her poetry, and to present a woman who, even in her own time, was clearly seen as a complex and multifaceted figure. The only archival information discovered so far for the historical Laudomia Forteguerri is her baptismal record, the baptismal records of her three children, and the contract for her second marriage. It seems that Laudomia hardly left a trace of her historical self as she passed through this world, even though she was born into one of the oldest noble families of Siena, married into two other powerful clans of the old feudal nobility, corresponded with an Imperial princess, was the toast of contemporary poets and academicians, had a number of books dedicated to her, and gained lasting fame not only in Italy but also in France for her patriotic deeds during a time of extreme political and military tension in Siena. In place of the “historical” Laudomia we have, instead, an “imagined” Laudomia, one that is more a construct than a true likeness of the individual in question. This, in itself, is indicative of cultural and historical factors that worked, both during and after her time, to erase the historical person and replace it with an imaginary figure designed to suit the needs and ideals of the men who wrote about her. Before we consider the different portraits that emerge, it would be advisable to try to capture at least part of the “historical” Laudomia by focusing on the few surviving archival records that refer to her. 102 T H E S W O R D A N D T H E P E N The Historical Laudomia Forteguerri Laudomia Forteguerri was born in Siena on, or just before, 3 June 1515, the daughter of Alessandro di Niccodemo Forteguerri and his second wife, Virginia di Giulio Pecci. On 3 June she was baptized Laudomia Barthalomea Maria, and her godfather was the Abbot Federico della Rosa.1 A marginal note in a later sixteenth-century hand in the margin of the...