Item #6106 Rime della sig. Tullia d'Aragona. Women / Poetry, Tullia D’ARAGONA.
Rime della sig. Tullia d'Aragona.
Rime della sig. Tullia d'Aragona.
Poetry of Tullia d’Aragona, “Intellectual Queen of a Literary Salon”
Published by the Chief Promoter of Female Poets in Seventeenth Century Italy
Naples, Antonio Bulifon, 1693.

Rime della sig. Tullia d'Aragona.

12mo (15 x 8.5 cm), pp. (1-10) 1-72. Bound in tan calf; edges speckled blue. Some soiling on the covers and pastedowns; worm holes on pastedowns; foxing throughout. Overall, very good.

The second posthumous edition of Tullia d’Aragona’s collection of poetry, published by Antoine Bulifon, who was “fundamentally important for the diffusion of women’s poetry” (Rabitti, p. 50). One of the most famous Italian sixteenth-century female poet-courtesans, Tullia d’Aragona (1501/1505-1556) has received considerable scholarly attention in the last decades, resulting in the publications of several English translations of her works. She has been called “the intellectual queen of a literary salon” (Masson, p. 88) due to her great success in entertaining the guests not only with her poetry, but also singing and playing the flute.

Innovative in nature, Rime della sig. Tullia d'Aragona [Poems by Tullia di Aragona and by Others to Her] is comprised of poems (mostly sonnets) written by d'Aragona or addressed to her by Italian men of letters and elite in Florence, Siena, and Rome. “D’Aragona’s canzoniere differs from other sonnet sequences, in that her text includes sonnets by a wide range of other authors, thus embodying and enacting the social nature of Petrarchism… Moreover—and this is d’Aragona’s true novelty—she is the first to publish the sonnets side by side, thus reinforcing their diaologic nature” (Hairston, p. 4). Among the people mentioned in the poems are Cosimo I de Medici, Eleonora di Toledo, Maria Salviati de Medici, and Cardinal Ippolito de Medici.

The book was first published in 1547, with a corrected edition appearing in 1549, and the first posthumous edition eleven years later. This edition reproduces the first one almost in its entirety, omitting, however, Tullia d’Aragona’s dedication to Dutchess Eleonora.

The same year as this book was first published, D’Aragona produced a work in prose, translated to English in 1997 as Dialogue on the Infinity of Love. In the words of the translators of the latter, “[the book] displays its true significance as the attempt on the part of a woman, who was sexually liberated and accustomed to economic independence, to fight back the forces that were restratining her freedom and denying her very sense of self” (Russell, p. 22).

The editor of this volume, Antoine Bulifon (1649-1707) was a native of France, who became one of Italy’s most prolific seventeenth-century printers. A champion of Italian female poets, in addition to Tullia d’Aragona’s poetry, Bulifon published the works of Vittoria Colonna, Laura Terracina, Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gambara, Isabella Morra, Maria Selvaggia Borghini, and Laura Bettiferri. He dedicated this edition of D’Aragona’s poetry to Isabella Mastrilli, the daughter of the Duke of Marigliano.

*Masson, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance (1975); Casella, “Tullia d’Aragona” (2017); Rabitti, "Lyric poetry, 1500–1650," in Panizza & Wood, eds., A History of Women's Writing in Italy (2000); Hairston, The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others (2014); Russell, “Introduction,” in Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, ed. and trans. by Russell and Merry (1997).

Price: $1,850.00