First edition. One of the first chivalric romances composed by a woman, and a strident response to the Renaissance querelle des femmes. Moderata Fonte was born Modesta Pozzo in the Republic of Venice in the plague year 1555. Her parents succumbed to the Black Death in 1556, and Moderata was transferred to a convent for upbringing and education. She astonished the mothers and sisters there by memorizing long poems at a glance and reciting the lines with a theatrical flair. She was returned to the care of her grandmother in 1564, and under the tutelage of her uncle and eventual biographer, Nicolò Dogliono, Moderata began her education in Latin and rhetoric. Her earliest compositions were short plays and musical dramas. In her mid twenties, she became a favorite cortigiane oneste at court. It was in this milieu she composed her first major work, Tredici canti del floridoro, which was published by the heirs of Francesco Rampazetto in 1581. It's a fine edition, printed in a slender italic, and illustrated with thirteen woodcuts, each prefacing a canto. It was dedicated to the unwitting provocateuse Bianca Capello, mistress of Francesco I de' Medici, and a hero to Moderata, who models the heroine Risamanti on Capello. The book bears a number of encomia, but none so glowing as that by Moderata's champion, Doglioni, who remarks in a sonnet that his charge's poetry astonishes even Nature Herself:

Che d'amor canti it ben esperto amante, / D'armi il soldato, it marinar de venti, | L'architetto di fabriche, e di genti / Varie e d'usanze it peregrino errante, / Maraviglia non è; quando di tante / Fè prova à giorni suoi gioie, e tormenti, / Gli edifici, e i costumi hà sempre inante. / Mà che tu non esperta verginella, / Stando rinchiusa in frà l'anguste mura / Di tutto ciò perfettamente canti; / Non pur stupisce il Mondo, e la Natura. […]

The Floridoro, a chivalric romance in rhyming octaves that essentially tells the Medici origin story, with antagonistic if indistiguishable sisters Risamante and Biondaura as central characters. Some historians and literary critics call this the first chivalric romance written by a woman, but it was more likely the third, after Laura Terracina's 1551 Discorso, and Tullia D'Aragona's Il Meschino, published in 1560, four years after the author's death. This latter was more arguably the first true chivalric romance, and Moderata's Floridoro the second. (It was in Enrico's Celani's 1891 edition of Tullia's poems where unsupported doubt was first cast on Tullia as the author of Il Meschino, a notion seized upon by male bibliographers and historians ever since.) But, according to Valeria Finucci, "Fonte's Floridoro 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." Moderata's original submission in thirteen cantos was only the beginning of the complete epic cycle, and the young author promised 37 more cantos. None materialized; it is unknown why she never finished. This first edition of the Floridoro appeared in two issues, without established priority; one without a colophon, and the other, of which our book is an exemplar, bore the Heirs of Rampazetto colophon on the last page. The unusual full-page images comprise two large woodcut factota, each occupying the top and bottom halves of a page; the top containing the typeset argomento, and the bottom a small inserted woodcut illustrating the salient canto, evidently cut for this edition. The total visual effect is suspiciously similar to emblemata. The Floridoro was reprinted in modern times, and an English translation, part of the series titled The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. The preface to this magisterial edition, by the translator Julia Kisacky, provides a detailed summary of Floridoro, and a study of the book's position in the early modern history of feminist literature.

Full title: TREDICI CANTI | DEL FLORIDORO, | Di Mad. Moderata Fonte. || ALLI SERENISS. GRAN DVCA, ET | GRAN DVCHESSA DI THOSCANA. || [Woodcut ornament] || CON PRIVILEGIO. | [Heirs of Rampazetto's woodcut device] IN VENETIA, M.D. LXXXI

Quarto, 204 x 153 x 12 mm (binding) 202 x 151 x 9 mm (text). *⁴ A-O⁴ P⁶; [4], 62 ff. Later vellum over pasteboard, later endpapers, faint titling to spine in ink in a modern hand. Covers with some staining, small gouge to head edge of lower board. Interior: Title with tear to tail margin, just touching woodcut border; mend to head fore-corner verso (slightly yellowed); margins a bit precious, with woodcut border at fore-edge of title just trimmed by the binder's plough, and versos of last five leaves with first letter of some lines cropped, and a few other versos trimmed at fore-edges, touching a few letters; last leaves toned and lightly foxed; a small worm gallery to tail margins of first nine leaves (not near text); closed marginal tear to tail of H₁.   

Provenance: Acquired by W. S. Cotter Rare Books from Libreria Pontremoli, Milan, January 2023. Valid export license on file. 

EDIT16 15890; BMSTC Italian p. 272. Malpezzi Price, Paola, Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-century Venice, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003; Malpezzi Price, Paola; Russell, Rinaldina (ed.), Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994, pp. 128–137; Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo). Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, Finucci, Valeria (ed.), Kisacky, Julia (tr.), Finucci & Kisacky (annot.), The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (series), Chicago: UCP, 2006, intro and passim; Erdmann, Axel, My Gracious Silence, No. 108 (asserting without source that the authorship of Tullia D'Aragona's Il Meschino had been "seriously questioned"); McLucas, John C., "Renaissance Carolingian: Tullia D'Aragona's Il Meschino," Oliphant, New Series, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (2006), pp. 313-320.

Venice: Eredi di Francesco Rampazetto, 1581.

Item #316