Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, and: Scanderbeide: The Heroic Deeds of George Scanderbeg, King of Epirus, and: Zayde: A Spanish Romance (review)

While women lyric poets of early modern Italy have long occupied a respectable position in the Italian literary canon, women's heroic and chivalric poetry is less well-known. Two of three new publications of The Chicago University Press's Other Voice series mark a significant step in illuminating Italian women's interpretations and adaptations of this masculine genre par excellence.

Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, first published in 1581, appeared the same year as Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. The poem by Fonte (pen-name of Modesta Pozzo, 1555–92, an upper-class Venetian) "represents the first sustained effort on the part of a woman writer to pen a Renaissance epic romance on the model of Ariosto and Boiardo" (22). Thirteen cantos comprise this work, perhaps sent to press unfinished so as not to follow too late the 1579 marriage of the Venetian Bianca Cappello and Francesco de' Medici, to whom Floridoro is dedicated. The poem is set in ancient Greece, and its purported protagonist, the fictional Floridoro — together with his destined mate Celsidea — are the forebears of the founders of Venice, while the descendents of another main character, Risamante, will become the Medici.

The comprehensive and engaging introduction of Floridoro by Valeria Finucci, also editor of the Italian version (Tredici canti di Floridoro, 1995), gives a complete background, not only in historical and literary terms but also with regard to gender and the role of women, to this remarkable work, examining its convergences with and divergences from tradition. As Finucci points out, of the various intertwining narrative threads in the poem, it is a cast of female characters, not Floridoro, that takes center stage. First there is Risamante, a warrior woman in the Ariostean tradition, who fights for her inheritance of an Armenian kingdom. Her identical twin sister Biondaura emblematizes a more courtly and subdued model of femininity. In a twist on the Circe archetype, the enchantress Circetta, daughter of Ulysses and Circe, is a virgin aiming to help others with her magical powers. An eloquent praise of the worth of women, modeled after the beginning of canto 20 of Ariosto's Orlando furioso, comes early in Fonte's text, at the beginning of canto 4.

Julia Kisacky's prose translation deftly evokes the original poetry's rhythm and syntax. The notes give succinct but adequate references to elements of the classical and Renaissance epic traditions, to works by other women writers, and to Fonte's other publications, in particular the polemical treatise Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600) for which she is primarily known today. (This text was edited and translated for the Other Voice series by Virginia Cox, 1997). In addition to the wealth of bibliographical information furnished, an appendix provides aptly chosen excerpts in Italian from six of the thirteen cantos. The result is a thorough, informative, and enticing treatment of this epic poem.

Unlike Moderata Fonte, Margherita Sarrocchi was a noted public figure in her time and had ties to many important poets and scientists. As Rinaldina Russell explains in her edition and translation of Sarrocchi's Scanderbeide, although this "first historical epic authored by a woman" (1) may have been neglected by posterity, Sarrocchi was admired by contemporaries as a donna illustre. Born in Naples...