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Lucrezia Marinella Poet Writer Defender of Women! Rare Books

Lucrezia Marinella Vacca /Marinelli (1571-1653) A rare and wonderful book available now on our online at Calixbooks. This rare book is the only one we have located. Only one library in the world has a copy of this extremely rare book.

Lucrezia Marinella Vacca /Marinelli (1571-1653)

We know more about the publishing history of Lucrezia Marinella's works than we do about her life. When other women were publishing anonymously or under a pseudonym, Marinella's name was on most of her books and she was known by all Venice as the author of the rest. She apparently used the feminine form of her last name; some editors have used the family form, "Marinelli." Lucrezia was the daughter of a Venetian physician who wrote works on medicine (two on women's health) and on philosophy. We know nothing of her mother nor of when her father died do (we know that he was dead by 1600). Someone saw to it that Lucrezia was given an education that included philosophy and classical as well as vernacular literature. At some point she married a physician, Girolamo Vacca, and had at least two children, a son and daughter. When Marinella was 24 years old, her first work was published, La colomba sacra, poema eroico (The holy dove, a heroic poem), a biographical epic in ottava rima on an early Christian martyr. Her next publication was the Nobilta et l'eccellenza delle donne, co' difetti et mancamenti degli uomoni (The nobility and excellences of women, and the defects and vices of men), printed in 1600 and enlarged in 1601. Between 1603 and 1606 six more works were published (although some appear to have been written earlier): a heroic poem and a prose work on Mary; poems on Francis of Assisi and on Justina (another early Christian martyr); a collection of Marinella's sonnets and madrigals, and a pastoral verse novel, Arcadia felice. After 1606 there is a gap of 12 years before her next publications --- an allegory based on the story of Cupid and Psyche, and a poetic biography of Catherine of Siena --- and then another 11 years before she published in 1635 what historians of Italian literature consider her masterpiece, L'Enrico overo Bisantio conquistato (Henry or Byzantium gained). We don't know the connection between these gaps and her life as a wife and mother. By the 1590s, the Roman influence that we call "Baroque" had come to Venice. It grew, in part, out of the Catholic Church's need to reach out to people, to instruct and to arouse them more directly than it had done before. For literature, the result was an emphasis on vernacular writing with a strong emotional appeal. All of Marinella's writing reflects the Baroque, but in different ways and from a feminine perspective. She usually wrote in the heroic verse form, but sometimes in a combination of verse and the "poetic prose" that she saw as capable of the same elevation as poetry. Many of Marinella's books were lives of religious figures, but almost always about women and then always with the emphasis on their heroism rather than on more passive virtues. She wrote of the heroic resistance of the women Columba and Justina; her book on Catherine of Siena was on the "heroic deeds and marvelous life"; her life of Mary (apparently the most successful during her lifetime) was on Mary as "empress of the universe"; in a later edition of her early poem on Francis, Clare of Assisi's "glorious passion" receives equal billing. Her secular writing also fused the extravagance of the popular chivalric tales and heroic epics with a Christian, but feminine, view of morality. One satirically allegorizes the myth of Cupid and Psyche as a conflict between body and soul; another is a pastoral verse drama that makes fun of human love. L'Enrico overo Bisantio conquistato is an epic in the style of Torquato Tasso's La Gerusalemme liberata, but with stronger, more self-reliant women. To date, the only work of Marinella's that has been translated into English is part of her Nobilta et l'eccellenza delle donne. It differs from her other writings in being a polemical treatise, a genre in which extravagant statement and personal attack were acceptable. Forty-five years later, Marinella would write Essortationi alle donne et a gli altri (Exhortations to women and others), in which she would qualify some of the more extreme views expressed in Nobilta. But in 1600, Marinella would say whatever she needed to say in order to refute the misogynist statements of earlier writers, particularly the treatise of Giuseppe Passi, who had published Dei donneschi defetti (The defects of women) in 1599.