The Canonization of Italian Women Writers in Early Modern Britain

Transcript

Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2011, vol. 6
The Canonization of Italian Women Writers
in Early Modern Britain
By Diana Robin
P
amela Benson’s keynote lecture on the reception of Italian women writers in early modern England, delivered in 2008 at the meeting of the
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, was the inspiration for this
paper. We learned from Professor Benson that, far from being influenced
by the works of the celebrated women writers of the Italian Renaissance,
British women writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had no
first-hand knowledge of the works of their female counterparts in Italy.1
And yet, by 1823 the works of these early modern Italian women writers
formed a significant part of the holdings of the British Museum. In this
sequel to Professor Benson’s paper, I have attempted to posit some of the
circumstances under which the lost writings of the Italian Renaissance
women poets were recovered in eighteenth-century Britain, after more
than two centuries of oblivion.
The Sale of Consul Joseph Smith’s Library to George III
and its Entrance into the British Museum
In 1756, following the Seven Years War, a tsunami of bank failures left
not only Venice but the rest of Europe under water. The British Consul
in Venice, Joseph Smith, perhaps the greatest art patron of his day,2 was
facing bankruptcy. At the urging of friends and business associates in
Venice and London, the Consul entered into negotiations in 1759 with
King George III and his agents, the Earl of Bute and his brother, the
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British envoy to Turin, for the sale of his entire art collection and library.3
At the time, Smith owned contemporary Italian paintings by Canaletto,
Rosalba Carriera, Cignani, Tiepolo, and Marco and Sebastiano Ricci.
Among the Italian Old Masters, he had pictures by Michelangelo, Titian,
Raphael, Reni, and Palladio. He also had some Dutch and Flemish paintings, including a Rembrandt and a Vermeer. His library of incunables,
rare printed Italian first editions of the classics, manuscripts, and atlases
was one of the finest in Europe. By January 1763, Bute and his brother,
representing the King, settled on a sale price of £10,000 for Smith’s entire
library and another £10,000 for his paintings and drawings. It was Consul
Smith’s library of over 6,000 rare books and manuscripts — including
numerous editions of women writers of the Italian Renaissance and many
contemporary Italian women poets, as well — that would form the core of
the library of George III.
This collection of rare books and manuscripts, known as the King’s
Library, would enter the British Museum in its entirety sixty years later. In
1823, sixty-one early modern Italian women writers — fifty-eight of them
from Consul Smith’s library — officially joined the rolls of the world’s most
famous writers, entering the British Museum among the historical treasures of the King’s Library to become part of the British nation’s heritage.
In sum, the entrance of Italian women writers into the British Museum
and into the literary canon of early modern Britain came about through
three inaugural events: first, the founding of the British Museum itself in
1753 by an Act of Parliament; second, the founding of the King’s Library,
upon the purchase by George III of the Consul’s library in 1763; and third,
the donation upon the death of George III by his son, George IV, of the
King’s Library in its entirety — with its rich collection of Greek, Latin,
and Italian classics and its trove of early modern printed books by Italian
women writers — to the British Museum in 1823.4
In the appendix to this article, I have provided an index of the Italian
women’s books listed in Consul Smith’s library catalogue, the Bibliotheca
Smithiana seu Catalogus librorum Josephi Smithii Angli per cognomina
authorum dispositus (Venice: Pasquali, 1755), and those included in the
five-volume, folio-size King’s Library catalogue, the Bibliothecae Regiae catalogus (London: Bulmer and Nicol, 1820–29).5 The index lists fifty-seven
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Italian women writers found with entries under their own names in the
Bibliotheca Smithiana. Every woman author listed in Smith’s Bibliotheca is
included in the King’s Library catalogue. However, rather than listing each
woman whose work appears in an anthology as a separate entry, as Smith
did in his Bibliotheca, the King’s Library catalogue simply lists the name
of the anthology or its editor.6 Nonetheless, sixteen Italian women writers
have entries of their own in the King’s Library catalogue, while a further
forty-five women writers listed in the Smithiana are included in the King’s
Library catalogue under the anthologies in which they appear.
Joseph Smith and the Founders of the British Museum
The story of the inclusion of Italian women writers into the Library of the
British Museum begins not only with the inauguration of the institution
itself in 1753, but also with the donations of its founders. The first question that arises is how did Smith’s library, with its unusually large number
of women authors, fit into the project that the founders of the British
Museum had originally conceived? The founders and donors of the British
Museum were a formidable group, different in every respect from Joseph
Smith. Among them were the world-renowned scientist Dr. Hans Sloane,
the global explorer Sir Robert Banks and his sister Sarah Banks (also a
noted collector), the barrister Sir William Musgrave, and the classicist and
rare book collector Clayton Cracherode.
The donation by Dr. Hans Sloane (1660–1753) of his library
of some 50,000 books and manuscripts, which came into the British
Museum upon his death, reflects his enormous international prestige and
wealth.7 Royal physician to Queen Anne, George I, and George II, Sloane
was a doctor of medicine with expertise in natural philosophy and physics, botany and zoology, alchemy and chemistry, astronomy and optics,
mechanics and engineering, and geometry and mathematics. He followed
Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society and held memberships
in learned academies in France, Prussia, Spain, and Germany.
From Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) came books on botany and
natural history into the British Museum.8 Already a pioneering naturalist in his early twenties, Banks joined James Cook aboard the Endeavour
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on the captain’s first voyage around the world in 1768. President of the
Royal Society for forty-two years and a world-renowned animal and plant
breeder, Banks left some 11,000 titles in the sciences alone to the British
Museum, representing what has been called one of the finest collections of
scientific books of the time.
Banks’s sister, Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818), left a sizeable collection of her own to the British Museum on her death.9 The printed and
engraved ephemera she willed to the Museum totaled 19,000 separate
items, including coins, portraits, satires, and a collection of nine volumes
of broadsides and news cuttings. She also bequeathed her own collection
of manuscripts and books, many of them on numismatics, heraldry, and
archery, to the Museum.
Sir William Musgrave (1735–1800), who came from a distinguished
County Durham family, was educated for the bar though he never practiced.10 A baronet, known for his extensive collection of engraved portraits,
Musgrave began his lifelong career in the civil service as a Commissioner
in the Customs Office. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1774 and
a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1778, he was named a Trustee of
the British Museum in 1783.
Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode (1730–1799), elected a Trustee of
the British Museum in 1784, came from a well-established family whose
origins went back to the fourteenth century, though he himself possessed
neither landed estates nor wealth.11 Educated at Westminster, a school that
produced a long line of Regius Professors of Greek at Oxford University,
Cracherode took his M.A. at that university. He was ordained an Anglican
priest, and he spent the rest of his life collecting rare editions of Pindar,
Aristophanes, Euripides, and Callimachus, among other Greek poets. On
his death, he left the British Museum 800 rare editions of the classics,
including Aldine and Juntine imprints bound in vellum, and a Greek grammar published in 1495 by the great Byzantine scholar Theodore Gaza.
Among these proper and pedigreed founders of the British Museum,
Consul Joseph Smith (1673–1770) was the odd man out.12 He had neither
a university education nor the lineage or privilege of the British Museum
Trustees. He had settled in Venice as the junior partner in the London
banking firm of Williams and Smith in 1700. Eventually heading the firm,
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he secured the appointment of British Consul in Venice, holding that position from 1744 to 1760. In Venice he met and married the wealthy and
successful British opera diva, Catherine Tofts, who had come to Italy in
1710.13 In the 1720s, Smith began collecting contemporary Venetian artists’ paintings both for his own pleasure and for other English art lovers for
whom he acted as an agent.14 By the end of that decade, Smith was the leading dealer in the sale of Canaletto’s paintings to British buyers, and among
his clients were the Duke of Richmond, the Duke of Norfork, the Duke
of Beaufort, the Duke of Northumberland, and the Earl of Warwick.15
Smith also managed the sales and negotiated commissions for British collectors of Sebastiano Ricci and Rosalba Carriera.16 During his early years
in Venice, he also purchased paintings by the Italian Old Masters. The
Consul’s library and collection of paintings and prints made the house he
purchased on the Grand Canal,17 the Palazzo Balbi, a destination for travelers from Britain making the Grand Tour. There he entertained Venice’s
elite, as well as titled men and women from London, Paris, and Rome. The
Consul was known to have “an eye” for the best work, he was a talented and
shrewd businessman, and, to all appearances, he was becoming fabulously
wealthy in his role as a dealer.18
In the 1720s and 1730s, Smith also began to indulge his interest in rare books. He could now afford to do so, and as a graduate of
Westminster, the premier school in England of the day and one that had
nurtured Clayton Cracherode’s passion for Pindar and the Greek grammarians, Smith had the taste and education to do so. He bought incunables, sixteenth-century editions of the Greek and Latin classics, historical
works, and books of modern Italian poets, among whom numerous women
writers were represented. In the 1730s, he became a partner in the publishing house of Giambattista Pasquali, a firm ranked with Albrizzi and Zatta
as one of the three most important Venetian publishers of the period.19
Nonetheless, Smith’s obscure origins and extravagant tastes for books and
pictures continued to make him a subject of gossip and innuendo among
the English. Horace Walpole, for one, referred to him facetiously as “the
Merchant of Venice.”20
When the markets collapsed in the mid-1750s, Smith, now the
British Consul in Venice, was forced to seek a buyer for his books and his
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art in order to save himself from further losses. In 1759, on the eve of the
accession of George III to the throne and four years after the publication
of Smith’s library catalogue, Lord Bute, who for years had served the young
George III as his tutor and mentor,21 called the future king’s attention to
this chance to acquire a collection of art and books that was without parallel.22 The Consul’s 900-page library catalogue published by Pasquali would
have caught the King’s eye under any circumstances. Pasquali’s lavish presentation of the Bibliotheca Smithiana, in a red morocco and gilt-trimmed
volume, bristling with Italian incunables of the classics and thousands of
rare imprints of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century Greek,
Latin, and Italian books, was a work of art in itself. The Consul, for his
part, was anxious not to sell off his library piecemeal.23 Active negotiations
proceeded through Bute’s brother James Mackenzie, who corresponded
regularly with Smith throughout the three years prior to the closing of the
deal, from April 1759 to July 1762.
At the conclusion of the sale of his books and paintings to the King,
Smith wrote that he was pleased that the library he had worked for forty
years to assemble would be kept together in its entirety; the library was “the
Work of my Life,” he had written.24 The Consul’s books by ancient Greek
writers were elegantly bound in white kid volumes with gold tooling; editions of Homer, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Plutarch were each represented
in the double digits in his library. He had also collected multiple editions
of Demosthenes, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Pindar, Herodotus, and
Sappho, among other authors. And Smith’s rare editions of Cicero, Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, Livy, Seneca, and other Latin authors numbered in the hundreds. Editions from the famed early presses operating in fifteenth-century
Venice and Milan, imprints from the Venetian houses of Nicholas Jenson
and Vindelin and Spire and the Milanese printers Zarotus and Lavagnia
were well represented among Smith’s literary treasures.25 The classics
of Italian literature — Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione, Ariosto,
and a surprising number of women writers, soon to enter the British
Museum26 — were also prominently displayed in the Consul’s Library.
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Italian Women Writers in Britain before 1700
But how and when were these women’s books first discovered in England?
Certainly throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the works
of Italian women authors remained unknown in Britain.27 The prolific
fifteenth-century Italian women writers Cassandra Fedele, Laura Cereta,
and Isotta Nogarola, whose books of letters did not appear in printed editions during their own lifetimes,28 were known in England solely through
the early printed encyclopedias of women, such as those in Jean Tixier de
Ravisius’s De memorabilibus et claris mulieribus aliquot diversorum scriptorum opera (1521) and Jacopo Filippo da Bergamo’s Liber de claris scelestisque mulieribus (1497).29 One would expect to find evidence of the direct
influence of the humanist education of Italian girls in England since the
schooling of learned girls in sixteenth-century England mirrored that of
elite girls and women in Italy a century earlier; female classicists in England
such as Margaret More Roper, Mary Clarke Basset, Mildred Cooke Cecil,
Anne Bacon, and Elizabeth Hoby published letters in Latin just as had
their Italian predecessors Fedele, Cereta, and Nogarola. 30 But no influence from early Italian women writers to British women writers has been
found.31
Prior to the eighteenth century, Vittoria Colonna and other Italian
women writers were widely known through second-hand references and
hearsay. Baldasar Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (the Courtier) and Ludovico
Ariosto’s Orlando furioso had both been available in Britain, in Italian editions, since the early 1530s. The Courtier was first published in an English
translation by Thomas Hoby in 1561,32 and the work found its way into
England in numerous early Italian editions after 1528. Italian editions of
the Furioso were equally plentiful in England after 1535, and in 1591 the
work came out in an English translation by Sir John Harrington. It was
through these two popular works that British readers were first introduced
to Vittoria Colonna. Castiglione’s playful castigation of “signora Colonna”
in the prefatory letter to the Courtier was well known.33 And Ariosto’s effusive praise of Colonna’s poetry in Canto 37 of the Furioso had made her
practically a household name in British literary circles.
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The seventeenth-century British playwright Thomas Heywood
provides us with an idea of the generally second-hand knowledge about
Italian literary women in England in his Gynaikeion.34 The idiosyncratic
spellings of Italian women writers’ names and the anomalous coupling of
“Isota de Nugarolis” (sic) with “Modesta a Puteo” (sic) and the Queen of
Sweden suggest that Heywood and his contemporaries still had not been
exposed first-hand to the best known of the early Italian women writers,
but instead, were pulling Italian women’s names randomly out of handbooks and book catalogues.35
Consul Smith’s Social and Intellectual Coteries
Yet, once English tourists began to make the Grand Tour to see Italy, or
even to settle there, as Joseph Smith had done at the turn of the eighteenth
century, they, too, came to the peninsula in search of treasure, whether of a
literary, artistic, or archaeological sort.36 What then led Consul Smith — a
man attuned to his times — to acquire so many books by early modern
Italian women and also so many anthologies in which Italian women writers were published? To answer this question, it is necessary to consider two
of the social and intellectual orbits in which Smith moved.37
First, there was the London-Venice axis of men and women — artists, poets, musicians, writers, theatre people, art collectors, and bibliophiles — who frequented Smith’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. Smith’s
visitors included a growing number of Englishmen from the highest echelons of society, for whom the consul had negotiated the purchase of works
by Venetian artists.38 Most notable was the tight-knit circle of art and book
lovers who were close to John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, who would play a
key role in the Consul’s sale of his library and art collection to King George
III.39 Among Bute’s inner circle, the earl’s architect Robert Adam and also
Bute’s portrait painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, had been honored guests at
Smith’s palazzo.40 Bute’s wife, Lady Mary, was the daughter of the eccentric professional writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had been the
Consul’s friend and neighbor in Venice for many years.41
A number of other successful women involved in the arts took part
in Smith’s London-Venice circle, among whom were Smith’s British wife
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of thirty years, Catherine Tofts, an opera singer who had performed in
London and Venice before her marriage. Through his interest in poetry,
opera, drama, and the stage, Smith was well-acquainted with the theatre
manager, avid translator, and poet, Luisa Bergalli.42 But the Consul was
perhaps most closely connected with one of the most sought-after portrait
painters in Europe, Rosalba Carriera, the Venetian artist who had painted
Luisa Bergalli, and whose work the Consul had actively promoted both
in Italy and England.43 After the death of his wife, Consul Smith married
another woman who was a public figure in Venice, this time as a patron of
the arts: Elizabeth Murray, sister of the British Resident John Murray.
At the same time, the Consul kept himself informed regarding the
woman-centered avant-garde literary movement that had first taken off
with the founding of the Accademia degli Arcadi in 1690 in Rome. Soon,
Arcadian academies were established in Venice, Milan, and other cities.
The rise of the Arcadian movement in Italy, on the heels of the founding
of the new Roman academy, was the signal event that contributed perhaps
more than any other to the unprecedented participation of women writers
in literary venues and their appearance in book catalogues, anthologies, and
literary histories as authors in the early decades of the eighteenth century.
While Queen Christina of Sweden is credited with having inspired the
movement when she arrived in Rome in 1655, it was not until the Queen’s
death some thirty years later that Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, the first
president of the Accademia degli Arcadi, launched the movement.44 The
Arcadians called not only for the revival of a “militant classicism,” but also
for a return to the proto-feminist poetics of such sixteenth-century writers
as Moderata Fonte and Laura Terracina, as Virginia Cox has characterized
the movement.45 Whereas women had largely been excluded from literary
academies during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Arcadian
movement and its academies brought male and female writers together in
collaborative communities that were reminiscent of the literary salons of
sixteenth-century Italy.46 The Arcadian movement rapidly spread throughout Italy, with the result that almost every city in Italy had at least one such
academy.47 Thus, by the 1730s, the inclusion of numerous women in any
serious bibliography of Italian writers was to be expected.
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Figure 1. Rosealba Carriera, Self-Portrait Holding a Portrait of her Sister.
1715. Florence: Uffizi. Photo courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
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Figure 2. Portrait of Luisa Bergalli by an unknown artist. 1733.
Reproduced courtesy of the Newberry Library from Maria Bandini Buti,
Donne d’Italia: Poetesse e scrittrici, vol. 1 (Rome:Tosi, 1946). Bandini
Buti gives the provenance of this portrait of Luisa Bergalli as the frontispiece of Bergalli’s published translation of Terence’s comedies, Le commedie di Terenzio tradotte in verso sciolto col testo latino a fronte (Venezia:
Cristoforo Zane, 1733). No artist attribution is given. This same published portrait of Bergalli from the same Venetian edition can also be
seen online.
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Figure 3. Title page and frontispiece with bust of King George III from the British Museum
Library catalogue, Bibliothecae Regiae catalogus, vol. 1 (London: Bulmer and Nicol, 1820-29).
Reproduced courtesy of the Newberry Library.
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Figure 4. Title page of Joseph Smith’s Library catalogue, Bibliotheca
Smithiana seu Catalogus Josephi Smithii Angli (Venice: Pasquali, 1755).
Reproduced courtesy of the Newberry Library.
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The Arcadian Movement, the New Anthologies, and the
Age of the Woman Writer in Italy
The discovery of Italian women writers could never have happened in
Britain without the numerous catalogues, bibliographies, anthologies,
and literary histories that publicized Italian women’s books in the early
decades of the eighteenth century. The Bibliotheca Smithiana seu Catalogus
itself shows that, by the time of its publication in 1755, the Consul owned
a substantial number of such literary reference works, each heralding the
published works of anywhere from a handful to hundreds of women writers.48 Smith’s purchase of books by Italian women writers and the anthologies in which they were published was no doubt stimulated by the flood
of catalogues, literary histories, and anthologies that came out in print
between 1708 and 1757, many of them spawned by the Arcadian academies. The Consul’s indexing in his catalogue of every one of the thirtyeight Italian women poets whom Giam Battista Recanati had published in
his Academy-boosting anthology, Poesie italiane di rimatrici viventi raccolte
(1716), demonstrates the palpable investment the Consul had in contemporary Italian women writers and in the brand of proto-feminism being
promoted by the new academies.49 Many of the new bibliographical works
and anthologies that Smith purchased for his own library called attention to the gender of their authors by grouping the women under such
separate subheadings as “Poesie di Donne” and “Poesie di Donne illustre.”
Some of the popular Italian anthologies of the eighteenth century, such as
Recanati’s Poesie italiane and Luisa Bergalli’s two-volume Componimenti
poetici, published the works of women only.50
From a publisher’s point of view, the first half of the eighteenth century appears to have been the age of the woman writer in Italy. In assembling
his own library, Consul Smith was clearly well aware of this trend. Prior
to 1700, all-women bibliographies existed in Italy, but they tended to be
short on reliable bibliographical data.51 The new Italian catalogues served,
among other things, as sale catalogues. They provided exact titles of works,
their publishers, the place and date of their publication, and often the size
of the volume (octavo, quarto, or folio). As a result, the authors of these
new catalogues and literary histories — Crescimbeni, Bergalli, Fontanini,
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Recanati, and Gobbi, among others — played leading roles in the promotion and dissemination of Italian women’s writings.
Three Influential Bibliographers of Italian Women
Literary guidebooks by three Italians, published between 1726 and 1757,
were especially influential in promoting Italian women’s books in England:
Giuseppe Baretti’s Italian Library, Nicola Francesco Haym’s Notizia de’
libri rari, and Luisa Bergalli’s Componimenti poetici, though less directly in
her case. Baretti’s and Haym’s works were published in London, Bergalli’s
only in Venice. All three writers were well-known public figures in the
cities in which they worked, and all were actively involved in the theater,
though Baretti’s connection to the stage was only as a critic and translator. None of the literary guidebooks of these three Italians is listed in the
Bibliotheca Smithiana, despite the fact that the Consul was well acquainted
with Bergalli and Baretti socially. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that one
of the Trustees of the British Museum, Sir William Musgrave, had not
only consulted but even annotated both Haym’s Notizia de’ libri rari and
Baretti’s The Italian Library for his own use.52 And it is likely that prior
to the King’s purchase of the Consul’s library, his advisers — Lord Bute,
James Mackenzie, and the King’s librarian, Richard Dalton — consulted
the bibliographies of Baretti and Haym, taking note of their emphatic
foregrounding of Italian women writers.
Luisa Bergalli’s two-volume anthology, the Componimenti poetici
(1726), presented the most exhaustive catalogue to date: it included
poems, bibliographies, and biographies of over two-hundred female poets
whose works dated from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Born
in Venice, Bergalli studied literature with Apotolo Zeno and painting
with Rosalba Carriera. Inducted as a member of the Arcadian Society in
Rome and given the academy name Irminda Partenide, Bergalli translated
Terence, Racine, Molière, Destouches, and Du Boccage for the Italian
stage. The five plays she wrote, of which two were set to music, were performed in Venice at the San Moisè Theatre and the theatre she managed
during the 1747–1748 season, the Sant’Angelo.53 She and her husband,
Count Gasparo Gozzi,54 hosted a circle of artists, poets, and intellectuals
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at their country villa in Vicinale, and they also frequented Consul Joseph
Smith’s palazzo on the Grand Canal, as did their mutual friends Giuseppe
Baretti and Rosalba Carriera.
The Turin-born literary critic and protégé of Dr. Johnson, Giuseppe
Baretti, was one of the most flamboyant characters in Smith’s circle.55 Like
Bergalli, Baretti had originally been drawn into the Arcadian movement by
Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, the president of the Roman Accademia degli
Arcadi. But he later dismissed the poetry and proto-feminist program of
the Arcadian movement as “trivial” in the literary journal he published, the
Frusta letteraria.56 Toward Bergalli and her work, he later expressed similar
hostility, alluding to her sneeringly in his Frusta by her academy name only,
“Irminda,” rather than by her real name. In London, Baretti courted such
luminaries of Dr. Johnson’s circle as Bute’s protégé, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
whom he persuaded to paint his portrait, and Johnson’s longtime friend
and confidant, Mrs. Hester Thrale (later Piozzi), though he would ultimately attack her savagely in print.57 The fourteen women writers58 whom
Baretti lionized in his Italian Library represent a canonical group who were
all well published and well known in Italy. Among the other Italian books
Baretti recommended for inclusion in his ideal library were the popular
sixteenth-century Italian poetry anthologies which had been published
by such renowned Venetian presses of the sixteenth century as Giolito,
Valvassori, and Sessa, and featured the works of both men and women.
The Drury Lane Theatre impresario and the librettist of Handel’s
operas, Nicola Haym, came to London from Rome, his native city, in
1700, the same year the young Joseph Smith had arrived in Venice. Bound
early to Consul Smith and the British establishment in ways Baretti and
Bergalli were not, Haym published Del Tesoro Britannico in 1720, a book
Smith would add to his library and one that would be among the first
numismatic catalogues to enter the British Museum. In 1726, Haym, who
was Secretary of the Royal Academy of Music at the time, published a
four-volume handbook of Italian books, Notizia de’ Libri Rari, devoting
a separate section specifically to early women writers, titled “Poesie di
Donne.”59 Here he added two seventeenth-century writers not listed in the
Bibliotheca Smithiana or Baretti’s Italian Library: Arcangela Tarabotti and
Sara Copio Sullam. Haym’s historical interest in the emerging public role
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of women writers was surely indebted not only to his own marriage to a
professional opera singer but also to his lifelong immersion in the world of
opera and the theatre.
British and Italian Women Writers in the
King’s Library Catalogue
The new bibliographies and book catalogues published in Rome, Venice,
and London introduced European readers and collectors to a growing number of modern and pre-modern Italian women writers in the eighteenth
century. But it was the purchase of Consul Smith’s library by George III
and its entrance from the King’s Library into the British Museum Library
in 1823 that made a large body of work by Italian women writers available
to the British public for the first time. If their publication in the anthologies is taken into consideration, the number of Italian women listed in the
five folio-size volumes of the King’s Library catalogue (1820–29) almost
equals the number of British women writers listed in the catalogue,
A comparison between the two national groups, however, suggests
a growing divergence between Italian and British women in terms of the
genres in which they published. The sixty-one Italian women writers in
the King’s Library catalogue fall neatly into two groups. In the first group
are the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian women writers who
were listed under their own names in the Bibliotheca Smithiana. For the
most part, these women comprised the canonical “greats” of the Italian
Renaissance. These women either published in solo-authored books under
their own names, or their poetry was well represented in the anthologies of
the period. The second group represented in the King’s Library catalogue
includes thirty-eight women who published in the early eighteenth-century anthologies under their own names and were edited by Crescimbeni,
Gobbi, and Recanati (“Ciparissiano”). Born for the most part after 1690,
these are women who participated in one or more of the Arcadian academies in Rome, Venice, Milan, or in one of the other cities where the movement flourished.
By comparison, the British women represented in the King’s Library
catalogue differ chronologically, generically, and culturally from their
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60 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
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Italian counterparts. Sixty-three Englishwomen writers, none of whom
appear in Smith’s Bibliotheca, are listed under their own names in the King’s
Library catalogue.60 With the exception of the seventeenth-century writers
Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish, nearly all the British women listed
in the King’s Library catalogue belong to the eighteenth century. Poetry
is still the largest genre for British women authors, but only twelve of
the sixty-three women who are listed as English are poets. Among them,
the noted African-born poet Phyllis Wheatley, who had been brought to
America as a slave, is listed simply as a “Negro servant.” Drama is the next
most prominent genre: Margaret Cavendish, whose twenty plays are listed
by title, is indexed under her own name, as are eight other British women
playwrights in the King’s Library catalogue.61 Letters and travelogues were
also popular genres judging by the non-noble women writers included in
the catalogue. Fanny Burney is listed under her married name, Frances
d’Arblay, with her bestselling novels Evelina (1783) and Cecilia (1782), and
she is the only female novelist in the catalogue. The most distinctive genre
represented by eighteenth-century English women in the catalogue is that
of the scholarly treatise or history. Under this rubric, Catherine Macaulay’s
history of England in four volumes (1769), Elizabeth Montagu’s study
of Shakespeare and the Greek and French tragedians (1777), Susanna
Dobson’s history of the troubadours (1779), Elizabeth Elstob’s AngloSaxon grammar (1713), and Elizabeth Carter’s English translation of the
Greek philosopher Epictetus with commentary and notes (1758) are found
in the King’s library. Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Montgomerie’s Urania
is also included in the catalogue, while missing are such prominent early
modern British writers as Mary Sidney Herbert (Countess of Pembroke),
Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen, among others.
Conclusion
By 1823, the emergence of early modern Italian women writers as canonical literary figures in England was well under way. This event was prefigured by several key developments. In 1753, amid Britain’s imperial
ambitions and its opening of new markets around the world, an Act of
Parliament established a national museum where knowledge about the
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61
entire world could be collected, exhibited, and examined. As the Grand
Tour became de rigueur for eighteenth-century English ladies and gentlemen, travelers to the continent were especially drawn to Italy, since its
cities offered two emporia for the price of one: antiquity and its ruins and
the Italian revival of Greek and Roman art and culture. At the same time,
while the public’s consumption of books and reading material of all kinds
increased in Britain, an interest in women writers, women’s education, and
women’s rights grew exponentially in the eighteenth century. The production of library catalogues, literary histories, and anthologies promoting
Italian women writers as a group — as we saw in the catalogues of Bergalli,
Fontanini, Haym, and Baretti — was also a feature of the period. The
birth of the Arcadian movement, and with it, the re-emergence of women
as a culturally significant class in Italy was yet another hallmark of the
era. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the first half of the eighteenth
century saw the emergence of such Italian women as Luisa Bergalli and
Rosalba Carriera as powerful cultural entrepreneurs in their own right.
To all this was added the element of chance: the sale by the British
Consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, of his library to the King of England in
1763, and the entrance of the Consul’s extraordinary library, with its unique
collection of Italian women authors’ books, into the British Museum.
Epilogue
And yet, as Victoria Kirkham and Pamela Benson have noted in the
introductory essay to their recent book, Strong Voices, Weak History,62
the reception of women writers in national histories has long been variable and unstable, “their memory more quickly occluded by time” than
those of their male compatriots. As we have seen, the celebrated women
writers of early modern Italy entered the public sphere for the first time
as treasures of the British Museum in 1823. Yet, some forty years later,
when Jacob Burckhardt and John Addington Symonds published their
blockbuster histories heralding the arrival of “the Renaissance” in Italy, the
once-renowned Italian women poets of that era were again passed over in
silence.63
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Diana Robin
But the disappearance of the celebrated women writers of early
modern Italy is not a thing of the past. It goes on — even now, in our own
time. In 2009, Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor, curators of the British
Museum Library, published Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the
British Library’s Printed Collections, an elegant and meticulously researched
volume of essays, tracing the provenance of the Library’s acquisitions from
the moment of the Museum’s founding. The volume also includes two
essays that deal specifically with the British Museum’s accession of Consul
Smith’s library.64 While I could not possibly have researched and written
this article without having the Libraries within the Library at my fingertips,
I was nonetheless startled to find no mention in this volume of the storied
early printed books of poetry, plays, letter collections, and other writings
by Italian women that came into the Museum from Consul Smith’s library.
This is all the more surprising since the British Museum Library has one
of the finest collections of early modern Italian women’s printed works in
the world.65
Notes
1. Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, Pamela
Benson’s lecture “Was There an Italy for Elizabethan Women?” was delivered at the
annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference on Saturday, October 25,
2008, in St. Louis, Missouri. A revised version of her lecture was published in “Italian in
Tudor England: Why Couldn’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” in A Companion to Tudor
Literature and Culture, ed. Kent Cartwright (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 261–75. I want
to thank the members of the Executive Committee of the Society for the Study of Early
Modern Women for their invitation to present the keynote lecture at the meeting of the
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women in Montreal on October 14, 2010. This
paper is a revised version of my talk. I owe many thanks also to Paul Gehl, curator of the
Wing Collection at the Newberry Library; Jill Gage, curator of eighteenth-century British
books at the Newberry Library; and Stephen Parkin, curator of early printed Italian
books in the British Library, without whose generous advice and continued assistance
I could not possibly have written this essay. I am especially indebted to Al Rabil, Anne
Larsen, Julie Campbell, Jane Donawerth, and the other editors of EMWJ for their many
corrections and suggestions.
2. Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy (New York
and London: Harper & Row, 1971), 299–316; Haskell states unequivocally that Joseph
Smith was the greatest art patron of his era (299).
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63
3. See esp. Francis Russell, John, 3rd Earl of Bute: Patron and Collector (London:
Merrion Press, 2004) on John Stuart’s long and close relationship with George III as his
mentor. Both John Stuart and his brother James Stuart Mackenzie were frequent visitors to Venice; they considered themselves friends of Consul Smith, and they were well
acquainted with both his book and art collections. On the sale of Smith’s library to George
III, see, also, Lotte Hellinga, “The Bibliotheca Smithiana,” 261–79; and Philip R. Harris,
“The King’s Library,” 296–317, both in Libraries Within the Library: The Origins of the
British Library’s Printed Collections, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: The
British Library, 2009): hereafter Libraries. On Smith’s library and its contents, see, also,
Haskell, Patrons and Painters, 299–310, and 393–94.
4. On their acceptance of the donation by George IV the British Museum’s
Trustees recommended that the King’s Library be housed in a separate, newly constructed
central gallery within the British Museum. The King’s Library was moved from that central gallery in 1998 to the new British Library. It is still housed separately there, in the
six-story tower of bronze and glass at the center of the new library.
5. The massive Bibliothecae Regiae catalogus, 5 vols. (London: Bulmer and Nicol,
1820–29), will be referred to here as the King’s Library catalogue. It constitutes an official
record of all the books in the library of King George III (including the King’s acquisition
of Consul Joseph Smith’s library in 1763).
6. Two all-women anthologies, Luisa Bergalli’s Componimenti poetici delle piu’ illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, 2 vols. (Venice: Antonio Mora, 1726), and Lodovico Domenichi’s
Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuissime donne (Lucca: Busdragho, 1559) are excluded
from both the Bibliotheca Smithiana and the King’s Library catalogue. It should be noted,
however, that Antonio Bulifon’s Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse (Naples 1695), which
is listed in the King’s Library catalogue, is an unacknowledged reprint of Domenichi’s
1559 anthology of women. These three early anthologies served as directories of most
of Italian women’s poetry published before 1740. Luisa Bergalli writes that the two chief
sources from which she culled the more than 200 Italian women poets in her anthology
were Lodovico Domenichi’s 1559 anthology of women poets and Giambattista Recanati’s
Poesie italiane di Rimatrici Viventi (Venice: Coleti, 1716) (detto Ciparissiano) collection of
women writers. It is important to note that four of the most celebrated writers in early
modern Italy — namely, Maddalena Campiglia, Lucrezia Marinella, Arcangela Tarabotti,
and Veronica Franco — who were not included in Smith’s or the King’s Library catalogues
are included in both Bergalli’s Componimenti poetici and another premier eighteenthcentury bibliography of Italian books: Niccola Haym’s Notizia de’ Libri Rari nella Lingua
Italiana (London: G. Tonson and G. Watts, 1726).
7. See Alison Walker, “Sir Hans Sloane’s Printed Books in the British Library:
Their Identification and Associations,” 89–97; and Giles Mandelbrote, “Sloane and
the Preservation of Printed Ephemera,” 146–68, both in Mandelbrote and Taylor, eds.,
Libraries.
8. Rüdiger Joppien and Neil Chambers, “The Scholarly Library and Collections of
Knowledge of Sir Joseph Banks,” 222–43, in Mandelbrote and Taylor, eds., Libraries.
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64 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
Diana Robin
9. Joppien and Chambers, “The Scholarly Library,” 241–42, 400–1, in Mandelbrote
and Taylor, eds., Libraries.
10. Christopher J. Wright, “Sir William Musgrave (1735–1800) and the British
Museum Library,” 202–21, in Mandelbrote and Taylor, eds., Libraries.
11. Paul Quarrie, “Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode,” 187–201, in Mandelbrote and
Taylor, eds., Libraries.
12. On Smith’s life, see note 2 above. See, also, Haskell, esp. “The Foreign
Residents,” 299–331, in Patrons and Painters; Frances Vivian, The Consul Smith Collection:
Masterpieces of Italian Drawing from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, Raphael to
Canaletto (München: Hirmer, 1989); Stuart Morrison, “Records of a Bibliophile: The
Catalogues of Consul Joseph Smith and Some Aspects of his Collecting,” Book Collector
43 (1994): 27–58; Lotte Hellinga, “Il console Joseph Smith, collezionista a Venezia per il
mercato inglese,” La Bibliofilia, 102 (2000): 109–21; Frances Vivian, Il console Smith, mercante e collezionista (Vicenza, 1971); Lotte Hellinga-Querido, “Notes on the Incunabula
of Consul Joseph Smith: An Exploration,” in The Italian Book, 1465–1800, ed. Denis
V. Reidy (London: British Library, 1993), 335–448; Stuart L. Morrison, “Smith, Joseph
(1673–1770),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 51:233–35.
13. Morrison, “Smith, Joseph,” 51:234, says that she “became mentally deranged,”
but gives no further details; see, also, Vivian, Il console Smith.
14. Charles Beddington, Canaletto in England, 1746–1755 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), 9–10, notes that Smith secured contracts for Canaletto with
English buyers throughout the 1730s. Among these patrons were the 4th Duke of
Bedford, the 3rd Duke of Marlborough, and perhaps Thomas Hollis, among many others. On Smith’s relationship with Canaletto, see also Joseph G. Links, Canaletto and his
Patrons (New York: New York University Press, 1977), esp. 31–36. On Smith’s relationships with Rosalba Carriera, Sebastiano Ricci, and Carlo Cignani, see Haskell, Patrons
and Painters, 299–331.
15. Beddington, Canaletto in England, 6, 9.
16. See Giuseppe Pavanello, ed., Rosalba Carriera “prima pittrice de l’Europa.”
(Venice: Calleria di Palazzo Cini, 2007); Bernardina Sani, Rosalba Carriera Lettere, Diari,
Frammenti, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschski, 1985).
17. Morrison, “Smith, Joseph,” 51:234; his villa is now known as the Palazzo
Mangilli-Valmarana.
18. Beddington (Canaletto in England, 14) has suggested that Smith got rich on the
commissions he made through his sales of Canaletto.
19. Haskell, Patrons and Painters, 334; Morrison, “Smith, Joseph,” 51: 234.
20. Haskell, Patrons and Painters, 301.
21. Russell, Earl of Bute, 22.
22. Ibid., 55–59, details the proceedings of the sale and the parts played by his
brother James Stuart Mackenzie, the King’s envoy in Turin, and Richard Dalton, the
King’s librarian, in the final purchase contract drawn up by them and Bute.
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65
23. Ibid., 56 n.2, refers to a passage from Smith’s will of 5 April 1761 as cited by
Vivian, Il console Smith, 34: the Consul specified there that he was anxious to preserve
the integrity of his library so that “some entire classes” of his collections, he wrote, “might
remain united.”
24. Russell, Earl of Bute, 56. On 28 January 1763, Richard Dalton traveled to
Venice to put in writing the conditions of the sale and signed receipts in copies of the
Bibliotheca Smithiana for both Smith and the King; both copies are preserved in the
British Museum.
25. Harris, “The King’s Library,” 296–309. Among the rarities in this library were
a vellum copy of Cicero’s De Tusculanis disputationibus (Venice: Nicolas Jenson, 1472), a
1480 imprint of Plutarch’s Moralia, and an edition of Plautus’s Comoediae illustrated by
the “Putti Master” (Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1472).
26. Harris, “The King’s Library,” and Hellinga, “The Bibliotheca Smithiana,” have
well documented the treasures in Smith’s library. But neither has said a word about his
extensive collections of books by Italian women authors.
27. See note 1 above: Benson, “Italian in Tudor England,” 261–75.
28. Consul Smith’s library did not contain the posthumous editions of the
famous fifteenth-century Italian women writers, Cassandra Fedele, Clarissimae feminae
Cassandrae Fidelis, venetae. Epistolae et orationes, ed. Jacopo Filppo Tomasini (Padua:
Franciscus Bolzetta, 1636); and Laura Cereta, Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis Feminae
Clarissimae Epistolae iam primum e MS in lucem productae, ed. Jacopo Filippo Tomasini
(Padua: Sebastiano Sardi, 1640). Isotta Nogarola’s works did not appear in print until
the nineteenth century: Isotae Nogarolae veronensis opera quae supersunt omnia, accedunt
Angelae et Zenevrae Nogarolae epistolae et carmina, ed. Eugenius Abel (Vienna: apud
Gerold et socios, and Budapest: apud Federicum Kilian, 1886). A single volume of fourteen pages by Cassandra Fedele, Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto (Modena 1487, Nuremberg
1488, and Venice 1489) was published during her lifetime.
29. Other such catalogues include Giacomo Alberici’s Catalogo breve de gl’illustri
et famosi scrittori venetiani (Bologna: Zoppini, 1605); Giuseppe Betussi, Libro di M.
Giovanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri tradotto per Messer Giuseppe Betussi (Venice:
Arrivabene, Al Segno del Pozzo, 1545); Giovanni Battista Egnazio, De exemplis illustrium
virorum venetae civitatis (Venice: Nicolaum Tridentium, 1554); Battista Fregosa, Factorum
dictorumque memorabilium libri IX (Venice: n. p., 1483); Francesco Quadrio, Della storia
e ragione d’ogni poesia, 2 vols. (Bologna: F. Pisarri, 1739).
30. See Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991); Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and
Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005); and Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance
Italy and England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
31. Jane Stevenson finds no sign of influence between Italian and British women
writers in her magisterial Women Latin Poets, and in a private email message to me she
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reiterated that she has not to this day found any evidence that British women Latin poets
had read or seen the Latin writings of their Italian female counterparts.
32. The first English translation of the Courtier was produced in London by the
printer William Seres.
33. Castiglione had blamed Colonna for having broken her promise not to circulate drafts of the Courtier.
34. Heywood, Gynaikeion or Nine Books of Various History Concerning Women
(London: Adam Islip, 1624). Praising the “late composer of our extant Urania” (meaning
Lady Mary Wroth), Heywood notes that Sir John Harrington, in his translation of the
Furioso, commends “the great Italian Ladie, called Vittoria, who writ largely and learnedly
in the praise of her dead husband,” and compares Colonna to “the beautiful and learned
Lady Mary Countess of Pembrooke” (sic) (398).
35. A second edition of Heywood’s work, was published under the pseudonym
T.H. Gent, The Generall History of Women, Containing the Lives of the most Holy and
Prophane, the most Famous and Infamous in all ages (London: At the Sign of the Blew
Anchor, 1657). Folios A3r-A4v contain a new preface signed only with the initials “E. B.”
The preface extols “Isotta de Nugarolis” (sic), “Laura Cereta, the brave Venetian Lady,
Modesta a Puteo [sic], Madam Maria Shurman [sic], the ornament of this age . . . and to
sum up all in one the most accomplished both for learning and spirit, Christina Queen
of Sweden.”
36. Research remains to be done in this area. We know next to nothing about
British buyers and collectors of Italian women writers’ books and anthologies before
Smith. Note also that many of the best known women writers in Italy were published
in poetry anthologies before 1600, if not in solo-authored volumes. Print-runs of 1,000
copies of their works were not uncommon. See Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons,
the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), xvii–xxvi; 102–23.
37. See again, Haskell, Patrons and Painters, 301. Smith had a wide circle of friends
and acquaintances; among those most influential in the development of his intellectual
and literary interests (though we don’t have space to explore them in this brief essay)
were his learned friends at Padua whom he often visited: Abate Facciolati, professor of
history, and Marchese Giovanni Poleni, also a professor at Padua, as well as an engineer
and an architect.
38. For a list of Canaletto’s illustrious patrons, see, above p. 000.
39. Interestingly, Russell, Earl of Bute, 83, notes that while Bute corresponded with
the Consul for many years he never went to Venice until 1768, when he was fifty-five.
Russell also reports that although Smith was at the time a very old man, Bute and he got
on very well and spent a great deal of time together.
40. Haskell, Patrons and Painters, 301.
41. See Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999); and Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 262, 265–66. Lady Mary had always been
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67
on good terms with her neighbor Consul Smith until his marriage to the sister of John
Murray, the Resident of Venice, whom she hated, strained their relations; she wrote that
Murray was “a scandalous fellow . . . despised by this government for his smuggling . . .
and always surrounded with pimps and brokers, who are his privy councillors” (Halsband,
266).
42. See Claudio Mutini, “Luisa Bergalli,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome:
Istituuto dell’ Enciclopedia italiana, 1967), 9: 63–68; see also Pamela Stewart, “Luisa
Bergalli,” in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Rinaldina Russell
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 50–57. Stewart cites three biographies I have
not seen: Maria Mioni, Una letterata veneziana del secolo XVIII (Venice: Pellizato, 1908);
Alfredo Panzini, La sventurata Irminda! (Milan: Mondadori, 1932); and Carlotta Egle
Tassistro, Luisa Bergalli Gozzi: La vita e l’opera sua nel suo tempo (Rome: Bertero, 1920).
See, also, Stuart Curran, “Recollecting the Renaissance: Luisa Bergalli’s Componimenti
Poetici (1726),” in Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, eds., Strong Voices, Weak
History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2005), 263–86. Curran’s article is useful but contains
errors: he writes, for example, that Bergalli’s Componimenti was “never pursued beyond
its first volume, whose scope ended in 1575” (264). As we know, Bergalli’s Componimenti
anthologized female poets in two volumes from the year 1290 to 1726.
43. See Giuseppe Pavanello, ed., Rosalba Carriera “prima pittrice de l’Europa”
(Venice: Marsilio, 2007); Bernardina Sani, ed., Rosalba Carriera: Lettere, Diari, Frammenti
(Florence: Olschki, 1985).
44. On the beginnings of the Arcadian movement after 1690 see Russell, ed.,
Italian Women Writers, xx-xxi; Stewart, “Luisa Bergalli,” 50; Antonio Francheschetti,
“Faustina Maratti Zappi (1679?-1745),” in Italian Women Writers, 226–28; and Virginia
Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008), 228–32. On the Arcadian movement’s values see, also, Haskell, Patrons and Poets,
317–18.
45. Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 228–32.
46. On sixteenth-century salon culture, see my Publishing Women.
47. Russell, ed., Italian Women Writers, xx-xxi.
48. As listed in the Bibliotheca Smithiana, the Italian bibliographies and anthologies
of women authors that Consul Smith collected include Agostino Gobbi, Scelta di Sonetti
e Canzoni de piu` eccellenti Rimatori di’ ogni secolo, 4 vols. (Bologna: Constantino Pisarri,
1708, 1711); Giam Battista Recanati, Poesie italiane di Rimatrici Viventi Raccolte da Teleste
Ciparissiano (Venice: Coleti, 1716), which contains works by thirty-eight women; two
editions of Giusto Fontanini, Della eloquenza italiana, ed. Apostolo Zeno, 2 vols. (Venice:
Angelo Geremia, 1728); and Della Eloquenza, 4 vols. (Rome: Rocco Bernabò, 1736),
which lists ten women under the rubric “Poesie di Donne illustri,” 126–27; Giovan Mario
Crescimbeni, Dell’ istoria della volgar poesia, 4 vols. (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1714);
Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, Rime degli Arcadi, 9 vols. (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1716,
1722); Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, Prose degli Arcadi, 3 vols. (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi,
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Diana Robin
1718); [no editor] Istoria, e commentarii della volgar Poesia (Venice: Baseggio, 1730);
Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Della perfetta Poesia Italiana, 2 vols. (Venice: Cristoforo Zane,
1734). Smith undoubtedly had seen Baretti’s bibliography in draft before its publication;
see Giuseppe Baretti, The Italian Library (London: A. Millar, 1757), which lists fourteen
women’s books by title, plus the anthologies that contain women’s works.
49. Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, as we noted previously, has called attention to
the “resurgent gynephilia” of the Arcadian movement (181), noting in late seventeenthcentury Arcadian academies a “feminist revival” following the misogyny of the earlier
Seicento (229–32).
50. Componimenti poetici delle piu’ illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, 2 vols. (Venice:
Antonio Mora, 1726), as cited in note 6, above.
51. Francesco Agostino della Chiesa’s Teatro delle donne letterate con un breve discorso della preminenza e perfettione del sesso donnesco (Mondovì: Giovanni Gislandi and
Giovanni Tommaso Rossi, 1620) listed hundreds of women, but it is riddled with biographical and bibliographical errors and omissions.
52. Wright, “Sir William Musgrave,” 211. British Library curator Stephen Parkin
tells me that there are no marks or annotations in the sections on women’s books. I haven’t
yet seen the annotated copies.
53. Stewart, “Luisa Bergalli,” 50.
54. Ilaria Crotti and Ricciarda Ricorda, eds., Gasparo Gozzi: Il lavoro di un intellettuale nel Settecento (Padova: Antenore, 1989); Giulia Conti, “Gozzi, Gasparo,” Dizionario
biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 2002), 58:247–56;
Mutini, “Bergalli,” 9:63–68.
55. Lacy Collison-Morley, Giuseppe Baretti and His Friends. With an Account of
his Literary Friendships and Feuds in England in the Days of Dr. Johnson (London: John
Murray), 1909; Mario Fubini, “Baretti, Giuseppe,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani
(Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1964), 6: 324–35; Desmond O’Connor, “Baretti,
Marc’Antonio (1719–1789),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 3:798–802.
56. Collison-Morley, Baretti, 38. When Baretti returned to Venice, he joined the
academy of the Granelleschi, in which Luisa Bergalli’s husband Gasparo Gozzi was the
leading light.
57. Baretti’s volatile behavior toward Bergalli, her gynocentric Arcadian Academy,
and Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi) suggest that like many men of his generation and milieu he
wavered between the proto-feminist, post-Wollstonecraft attitude of Johnson’s circle
(and Johnson’s blue-stocking friends) and a deep-seated mistrust of women. He was later
almost convicted in London for his accidental killing of a man in the Haymarket. The
incident had begun with Baretti’s slapping a woman in the face (Collison-Morley, Baretti,
202–24).
58. Also among the fourteen women poets Baretti singled out for praise in his
Italian Library were Laura Battiferra, Luisa Bergalli, Maddalena Campiglia, Vittoria
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69
Colonna, Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Chiara Matraini, Isabella Morra, Isabella
Sforza, Gaspara Stampa, and Laura Terracina.
59. Haym, Notizie, 2:104–5; see, also 3:48, under “Dialogo,” references to Tullia
d’Aragona, Lucrezia Gonzaga, Celia Romana, Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Sara
Copia Salam, Isabella Sforza, and Arcangela Tarabotti. For full bibliography see note 6,
above.
60. This number does not include anthologized British women poets. A survey of
pre-1800 anthologies of British poets is beyond the scope of this study.
61. Cavendish’s plays are listed as such in the King’s Library catalogue, though
there is no evidence that her plays were either written for the public theater or were even
performed in her lifetime.
62. Benson and Kirkham, Strong Voices, 1.
63. Jacob Burckhardt and John Addington Symonds were the first to introduce
the public to the concept of the “Italian Renaissance” as a cultural epoch. See Burckhardt,
Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860); in English, The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore
(London: C.K. Paul, 1892); Symonds, The Renaissance in Modern Europe (London,
Thomas Scott, 1872); Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy: Revival of Learning (London:
Smith, Elder, 1875–86); see, also, Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
(London: Macmillan, 1873). On the invention of the Renaissance, see, J. Barrie Bullen,
The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994); Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries
of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948); and John Hale, England
and the Italian Renaissance (London 1954), among others. Burckhardt mentions only two
Italian women writers: Cassandra Fedele and Vittoria Colonna, naming Isotta Nogarola
only in a footnote. Symonds mentions only two women — Catherine of Siena and
Alessandra Strozzi — as Italian Renaissance writers, naming Vittoria Colonna, only as a
friend of Michelangelo. Pater mentions no women at all in his study of the period.
64. In this article I have made copious use of Lotte Hellinga’s essay, “The Bibliotheca
Smithiana,” and P. R. Harris’s “The King’s Library,” the two works that focus on Consul
Smith’s library and the library of George III, yet these writers make no mention of the
Italian women writers’ works in those libraries.
65. I asked Stephen Parkin, the curator of Italian books at the British Library,
who first introduced me to Mandelbrote and Taylor’s Libraries within the Library, why
none of the contributors to the volume had mentioned Consul Smith’s large collection of
books written by Italian women. He answered that apparently no one had ever noticed
the large presence of women in the Bibliotheca Smithiana seu Catalogus librorum Josephi
Smithii Angli. My book, Publishing Women, which describes those very sixteenth-century
editions of Italian women’s books and anthologies that came into the British Library via
the purchase of Smith’s library, has been accessible to the public in the open reference
shelves of the British Library’s Rare Books Room and has been so since its publication in
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
70 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
Diana Robin
2007. Unfortunately, when I wrote my Publishing Women, I knew nothing about the provenance of the sixteenth-century Italian women’s books in the British Library that I had
described in my book, and I had never heard of Joseph Smith or his amazing Bibliotheca
Smithiana!
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
71
An Index of Italian Women Poets
in Bibliotheca Smithiana (Venice, 1755) and the King’s
Library Catalogue (London, 1820-29)
Acciaiuoli, Maddalena Salvetti
Not in Smithiana
See the King’s Library Catalogue1
under Acciajuoli, Maddalena Salvetti
Fiorentina, 1 entry:
—Rime Toscane in lode di
Cristina di Loreno, Gran
Duchesse di Toscana. Florence,
1590. n.p.
Alessandri, Maria Buonaccorsi
See Smithiana under her name, 1 entry:
—Works in Recanati,
Giambattista. Patrizio Veneto,
fra gli Arcadi Teleste Ciparissiano.
Poesie italiane di Rimatrici
Viventi Raccolte da Teleste.
Venice: Coleti, 1716. Hereafter
Recanati
See KLC under Recanati.2
Alessi, Maria Felice
works in Recanati
See KLC under Recanati
Ambra, Elisabetta Girolami
works in Recanati
Andreini, Isabella
See Smithiana under her name, 2 entries:
—Works in Rime in lode di Sisto
V. . .nelle Racc[olta] del Costantini
—Rime varie in Gobbi,
Agostino. Scelta di Sonetti e
Canzoni de più eccellenti Rimatori
di’ogni secolo. Tom. III. Bologna:
Constantino Pisarri, 1709, 1711.
4 vols. Hereafter Gobbi
See KLC under Andreini, Isabella, 3
entries:
—Rime: parti due. Milan, 1605 n.p.
—La Mirtilla, Pastorale. Milan,
1605 n.p.
—Lettere. Venice, 1612. n.p.
Anguisciola, Ippolita
—Lettera a Sforza Pallavicino.
Sta nella nuova Scelta di Lettere,
lib. II.3
See KLC as cited below, in my note 3.
This letter appears to have been in
the collection cited by Smith under
the heading Sforza Pallavicino as
“Lettere raccolte da Giov. Battista
Galli Paccarelli. Roma . . . 1668.”
Aragona, Tullia D’.
See Smithiana under her name, 5
entries:
—Dialogo della infinità di amore.
Venice: Giolito, 1547
—Rime della la stessa. Venice:
Giolito, 1547
—Rime in Gobbi, Tom. I; in
Raccolta delle Rime del Dolce
[n.d., n.p.]
—Raccolta delle Rime Scelte di
diversi Autori. Tom. I (n.d. n.p.
but see this title in my list of
Poetry Anthologies below, under
Dolce)
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
72 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
See KLC under her name, 4 entries:
—Dialogo della infinità di amore.
Venice: Giolito, 1547
—Rime. Venice: Giolito, 1547
—Il Meschino. Venice: Sessa,
1560
—translation of Il Meschino
into French by J. Decuchermois.
Romain Morin: Lyons
Ardoini, Anna Maria
—Works in [G.B. Crescimbeni,
ed.] Rime degli Arcadi. Rome:
Antonio de’ Rossi, 1716–1722.
9 vols. Hereafter Rime degli
Arcadi.4 [Ardoini’s academy pen
name is Getilda.]
See KLC under Arcadi
Azzi, Faustina
works in Recanati
Baffa, Francesca
entry: works in [Rime diverse di . . .
autori . . .] Racc[olte] del Domenichi.
Tom I. [Venice: Giolito, 1546].
Hereafter Raccolta del Domenichi
See KLC under Domenichi, Lodovico
Ballati Orlandi, Emilia
—Works in Rime degli Arcadi,
Tom. VI; and Recanati. [Ballati’s
academy pen name is Eurinda]
See KLC under Arcadi; and Recanati
Balletti, Teresa
—Works in Recanati
Battiferra, Laura degli Ammanati
—Le Opere Toscane. Florence:
Diana Robin
Giunti, 1560
—Traduzione de’ Salmi
Penitenziali. Giolito, 1564
—Rime in Gobbi. Tom II
See KLC under Battiferra, Laura, 1
entry:
—Opere Toscane, Florence:
Giunti, 1560
Bergalli, Luisa
No entry under Luisa Bergalli or
Bergalli Gozzi in Smithiana
See KLC under Bergalli, Luisa, 1 entry:
—Le comedie di Terenzio, tradotte.
2 vols. Venice: 1727–29. [KLC
also gives her Arcadian academy
pen name, Irminda Partenide]
Borghesi, Flaminia
See Smithiana under her name, 2 entires:
—Works in Gobbi, Tom. III
Borghini, Maria Selvaggia
—Works in Gobbi, Tom. IV
—Rime degli Arcadia
—Recanati [Borghini’s academy
pen name is Filotima]
See KLC under Recanati; and Arcadi.
Bruni, Rosa Agnese
Calcagnini, Caterina negli Obizzi
Caraccioli, Giovanna
—Rime degli Arcadi. [Caraccioli’s
pen name is Nosside]
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
Carafa Cantelmi, Ippolita
Catelani, Virginia.
Cavazzoni, Verginia Bazzani Mantovana
Caterina da Siena
—Le Epistole adunate insieme da
F. Bartolomeo d’Alzano. Venice:
Aldus Manutius 1500]
See KLC under Caterina da Siena, 7
entries:
—Opere, nuovamente publicate da
Girolamo Gigli, 4 Tomi. Tom. I
La vita della Santa. Siena: 1707
—Tom. II. L’Epistole scritte a
Pontefici, Cardinali, Prelati, et altre,
2 vols. Siena, 1713 e Lucca, 1721
—Tom.III. L’Epistole scritte a Re,
Regine, Reppubliche, e diverse persone secolari. Siena, 1713
—Tom. IV. Il Dialogo; con le sue
orazioni, ed con alcuni de’ suoi
particolari documenti. Lucca,
1726. n.p.
—Epistole adunate insiemi con
alcune orationi della medesima,
col ritratto di S. Caterina. Venice:
Aldo Manuzio, 1500
—The Orcharde of Syon,
Revelations of Seynt Katherine of
Sene; translated by Dane James.
London, 1519. n.p.
—The Lyf of St. Katherine
of Sene; translated by Friar
73
Raymond, with the revelations
of Saynt Elysabeth. London:
William Caxton. n.d.
Celia [Romana]
—Lettere Amorose. Venice:
Giacomo Simbeni, 1572
See KLC under Celia, 1 entry:
—Lettere amorose, scritte al suo
amante. Venice: Jacomo Simbeni,
1572
Cervoni, Isabella
Not in Smithiana
See KLC under Cervoni da Colle,
Isabella, 1 entry:
—Canzone sopra il battesimo
del Gran Prencipe di Toscane.
Florence, 1592. n.p.
Colonna, Vittoria
See under her name in Smithiana, 10
entries:
—Rime. Parma, 1538 n.p
—Rime, con esposizione di
Rinaldo Corso, pubblicate da
Girolamo Ruscelli. Venice: Fratelli
Sessa, 1558
—Le Rime, ricorrette per
Lodovico Dolce. Venice: Gabriel
Giolito, 1560
—Works in Rime scelte raccolte
dal Dolce, Tom. I, n.p., n.d.
—Works in Stanze raccolte dal
Dolce, par. I, n.p., n.d.
—Stanze in Gobbi, Tom. I
—Stanze in Rime raccolte dal
Domenichi, Tom. I
—Lettere x. nella nuova scelta di
Lettere, lib. 1 e 2
—[Lettere] nella raccolta del
Manuzio, Tom. I
Porcacchi
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
74 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
See KLC under Colonna d’ Avalo,
Vittoria, Marchesa di Pescara, 4
entries:
—Rime. Parma, 1538
—Rime. Sonetti spirituali et le sue
stanze, et uno triumpho de la croce
di Christo. Venice: Bartolomeo
detto Imperador, 1544
—Tutte le Rime. Con l’esposizione
di R. Corso, ed. G. Ruscelli.
Venice: G. B. e Melchior Sessa
Fratelli, 1558
—Rime con l’aggiunta delle rime
spirituali, ed. Lodovico Dolce.
Venice, 1560. n.p.
Credo Fortini, Elisabetta (Cretti;
Lisabetta Credi)
See in Smithiana under Cretti, 1 entry:
—Works in Recanati; Rime degli
Arcadi. [Credo Fortini’s academy
pen name is Alinda.]
Forteguerri, Laodamia
entry:
—Works in Domenichi,
Lodovico. Raccolta [di Rime
diverse di molti eccellentissimi
autori]. Tom. 1. Venice: Giolito
1546. Hereafter Raccolta del
Domenichi
See KLC under Domenichi, Lodovico,
Raccolta di Rime diverse. 1546
Gabrielli-[Capizucchi], Prudenza.
See under Smithiana, 1 entry:
—Works in Rime degli Arcadi.
[Gabrielli-Capizucchi’s academy
pen name is Elettra]
Gambara, Veronica
entries:
Diana Robin
—Lettere . . . nella nuova scelta
di lettere, lib. I, II, III
Manuzio, Tom. I & II
—Sonetti XI nelle Rime raccolte
dall’ Atanagi, Tom. I
—Sonetti due, e stanze . . . in Rime
scelte di diversi Autori, Tom I
—Stanze in Stanze raccolte dal
Dolce, Tom. I
—Works in Raccolta delle Rime
dal Dolce
—Works in Rime raccolte dal
Domenichi, Tom. I e II.
—Works in Gobbi, Tom. I.
[Note that none of the Smithiana
entries above give publishers or
dates of publication]
See KLC under Gambara, Veronica, 1
entry:
—Rime e Lettere con due ritratti.
C. G. Brescia 1759
Gonzaga. Leonora d’Austria
—Lettera all’ Imperador in Lettere de’
Principi n’ Prenc. Tom. III
See KLC under Delle Lettere di
Principi . . . , o a Principi . . . , 3
vols. Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1581
Gonzaga, Lucrezia
See Smithiana, under Lettere, 1 entry:
—Lettere di molte valorose Donne
(di Ortensio Landi). Venice:
Giolito, 1548; see crosslisting
under Landi, Ortensio, Lettere di
molte valorose Donne. . .
See KLC under Gonzaga, Lucrezia, da
Gazuolo. Crosslisted under Landi,
1 entry:
—Landi, Ortensio: Lettere in
nome Landi di Lucrezia Gonzaga.
Venice: Scotto, 1552
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
Lopez, Teresa Francesco
Lusingnani, Maria Elena
Malipiera, Olimpia
—Works in Sonnetti due nella
Raccolta [di Rime di diversi Poeti
Toscani Autori del] Atanagi.
Venice: Lodovico Avanza, 1565.
Hereafter Atanagi
See KLC under Atanagi
Matraini, Chiara
—Works in Gobbi. Tom. I
—Lettera ad Annibale Tusco
nella nuova scelta di Lettere
See KLC under Matraini, Chiara,
Lucchese, 2 entries:
—Works under the titles
Consideratione sopra sette penitentiali psalmi de Re Davit. Lucca,
1586
—Lettere con la prima, e seconda
parte delle sue Rime. Venice,
1597. n.p.
Mantova, Anna.
Morata, Olympia Fulvia
Not in Smithiana
See KLC under Morata, Olympia
Fulvia, 2 entries:
—Orationes, Dialoghi, Epistolae,
Carmina, tam Latina quam
Graeca. Basel: Petrus Perne, 1562
75
—Opera omnia. Basel: Petrus
Perna, 1570
Morra, Isabella di
—Works in Rime [di diversi
illustri signori napoletani . . . nuovamente] raccolte . . . Tom III del
Domenichi [sic]. Venice: Giolito
1552. [Lodovico Dolce is the
editor of this volume which was
renumbered by Giolito as Tom. V]
See KLC under Dolce, Lodovico: see
Morra in his Rime di diversi illustri
signori napoletani, Tom. III (subsequently Tom. V). Venice: Giolito,
1552
Minutola, Cecilia Capece (Capece
Minutola, Cecilia)
Tom. VI. (Capece Minutola’s
academy pen name is Egeria)
Negrisoli, Angela Bulgarini
Nicolini, Teresa
Odaldi, Mary Elisabetta Strozzi
[Orlandini, Emilia Ballati. See above
under Ballati, Emilia]
Paleotti, Cristina di Nortumbria
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
76 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
Panfila, Teresa Grillo
Paolini, Petronilla (Petronilla Paolini
Massimi)
Tom. I
—Discorso, che Amore non è atto
a prefezionare l’animo umano
—Works in Prose degli Arcadi
1718 (Paolini Massimi’s academy pen name is Fidalma.)
See KLC under heading Arcadi;
and Crescimbeni 1718 (Prose
degli Arcadi: also listed under
Crescimbeni, Giov. Maria)
Passerini, Gaetana
—Works in Gobbi; also in
Recanati; also in Rime degli
Arcadi. (Passerini’s academy pen
name is Silvia)
See KLC under Recanati; and under
Arcadi
Pellegrini, Giulia Serega
Poggiolini, Orsola Maria Trioni
Pozzo, Modesta
Not listed in Smithiana
See KLC under Pozzo, Modesta,
Veneziana; crosslisted under Fonte,
Moderata: her work,
1 entry:
—Il Floridoro tredici canti in
ottava rime. Venice, 1581. n.p.
Diana Robin
Premarini, Giulia
—Works in Raccolte del Atanagi.
Tom. II
See KLC under Atanagi
Rangoni, Clarina
Tom.VI. (Rangoni’s academy pen
name is Ialia)
Rusca, Caterina
Sforza, Isabella
—Della vera tranquillita`
dell’animo. Venice: Aldine, 1544
See KLC under her name, 1 entry:
—Della vera tranquillita`
dell’animo. Venice: Aldine, 1544
Stampa, Gaspara
—Rime . Venice: Francesco
Piasentini (sic), 1738
See KLC under her name, 1 entry:
—Rime di Gaspara Stampa con
altre. Venice: Piacentini, 1738
Terracina, Laura
—Rime. Venice: Gabriel Giolito,
1548
—Discorsi sopra tutti li primi
canti del Furioso. Venice:
Valvassorio, 1550
—Works in Domenichi. Raccolta
di Rime diverse di molti eccellenti
Autori, Tom. I. Venice: Giolito,
1546
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
See KLC under Terracina, Laura: 3
entries:
—Rime 1548
—Le Seste Rime 1560
—Discorso sopra tutti. 1550
Tosini, Eutropia
Tracanelli, Elena Maria
Viali, Maria Pellegrina Rivancoli
77
—Rime degli Arcadi. Tom. VI.
(Viali’s academy pen name is
Dafne)
See KLC under Recanati and Arcadi
Zani, Teresa
Zappi, Faustina Maratti
entries:
—Works in Rime degli Arcadi;
and Recanati. (Zappi Maratti’s
academy pen name is Aglaura.)
See KLC under Recanati and Arcadi
Anthologies of Women Writers Cited in the Index
Atanagi, Dionigi. Raccolta di Rime di diversi Poeti Toscani. 2 vols. Venice:
Lodovico Avanza, 1565.
Bulifon, Antonio. Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse. Naples: Antonio
Bulifon, 1695.
Crescimbeni, Giov. Mario. Prose degli Arcadi. 3 vols. Rome: Antonio de’
Rossi, 1718. This title is listed under Crescimbeni and also Arcadi in
KLC .
Crescimbeni, Giov. Mario. Istoria della volgar poesia. 6 vols. Venice:
Basegio 1730–1731.
Dolce, Lodovico. Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani nuovamente
raccolte. Tom. III [retitled Tom. V by Giolito]. Venice: Giolito,
1551/2 (5a); 1552 (5b); 1555 (5c).
Dolce, Lodovico. Rime scelte da diversi Autori. Venice: Giolito 1553.
Domenichi, Lodovico. Raccolta di Rime diverse di molti eccellentissimi
Autori. Tom. I. Venice: Giolito 1546, 1549.
Gobbi, Agostino. Scelta di Sonetti e Canzoni de’ piu` eccellenti Rimatori di’
ogni secolo. 4 vols. . Bologna: Constantino Pisarri 1709, 1711.
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM
78 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
Diana Robin
Recanati, Giambattista (his pseudonym: Ciparissiano). Poesie italiane di
Rimatrici Viventi Raccolte da Teleste Ciparissiano. Pastor Arcade.
Venice: per Sebastiano Coleti, 1716.
Rime degli Arcadi. 9 vols. Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1716–1722. [This
title is listed in KLC with no author or editor under the heading
Arcadi and also Poetae italici.]
Ruscelli, Girolamo. Lettere di Principi. Venice: Ziletti, 1570.
Notes to the Index
1. The first edition of the King’s Library Catalogue (Bibliothecae Regiae catalogus.
London: Bulmer and Nicol, 1820–29) will be hereafter referred to as KLC.
2. Maria Buonacorsi Alessandri and the majority of the women who are listed in
Smithiana under their own names are cited in the KLC only through references to the
anthologies that contain their works. I have checked all Smithiana’s references to make
sure that in every instance the anthologies cited in Smith contain the works of the female
subjects named.
3. Anguisciola’s Lettera might be found in the collection that Smithiana lists under
the author entry “Pallavicino, Sforza”: Lettere raccolte da Gio. Battista Galli Paccarelli.
Roma: per il detto, 1668. The KLC lists this same item under the heading Pallavicino,
Sforza, Cardinale, Lettere discorsive materia erudite raccolte da Giambattista Galli Pavarelli.
4. I have crosslisted the numerous women poets cited by Smith as published in the
nine-volume poetry series Rime degli Arcadi (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1716–1722) in
the KLC under the heading Arcadi. All of these women are included in Giovan Mario
Crescimbeni, Dell’ istoria della volgar poesia, 6 vols. (Venice: Lorenzo Basegio 1731). I have
added the women’s academy pen names in italics to make it easier to locate them both in
Crescimbeni’s numerous works and in the unattributed Rime degli Arcadi, which I have
not yet seen.
6/27/11 4:05:41 PM

The Canonization of Italian Women Writers in Early Modern Britain

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