The cultural history of Siena is often discussed within the context of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art and religion. Konrad Eisenbichler, in his meticulous study of female poets, turns instead to the waning sixteenth-century city, poised upon the eve of conquest. Although small and threatened, the Sienese republic was no backwater, but home to a group of gifted noblewomen whose works reveal a vigorous engagement with the challenges of their time. Once praised and eulogized, now forgotten or neglected, they participated in wide circles of literary exchange, as writers, recipients, dedicatees, and admired icons. As if holding a diamond in the twilight, Eisenbichler examines each facet of their lives, including intellectual friendships, heresy, political intrigue, and even a lesbian romance.
He begins, elegantly, with Alessandro Piccolomini’s pilgrimage in 1540 to Petrarch’s tomb. His sonnet exchange (tenzone) with other writers, including several Sienese women, highlights the finely spun web of sociability among Italian poets of both sexes. One of the women, Virginia Luti Salvi, may even be preaching reform to Piccolomini. Eisenbichler teases out, with considerable delicacy, the possible implications of their poetic exchange, by discussing the heterodox religious background of sixteenth-century Siena. Literary scholars and historians will admire his method here, as elsewhere in the book: despite sparse and fragile evidence, his nuanced readings of the poems are always accompanied by a deep contextualization of the historical setting.
The opening section on the tenzone and its cultural resonance is followed by three chapters, each devoted to a particular noblewoman-poet. Aurelia Petrucci (1511–42) is the most elusive, although she was the granddaughter of Siena’s former (unofficial) lord, Pandolfo Petrucci. Archival sources reveal little about this intellectual beauty, but several important works were dedicated to her, including Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’Amore, and she was widely praised after her death. Petrucci herself seems to have written little, but one of her two surviving poems reveals her political acumen, as she pleads with the factious Sienese: “Where is your valor, beloved Homeland, / That, wretched, you forget the servile yoke / And in your breast you nourish only discordant thoughts?” (73).
The centerpiece of chapter 3 is the enigmatic life of Laudomia Forteguerri (b. 1515). She appears in a 1538 dialogue as the unorthodox speaker in a refined discussion on beauty, nature, and free will, and she also had an important treatise on astronomy dedicated to her. Along with her apparent theological and scientific interests, Laudomia is noteworthy as the first female Italian poet to celebrate same-sex love. Five of her six surviving poems are written to Margaret of Austria, the daughter of Charles V, whom she probably first met in 1533, when they were both still young girls. It isn’t clear whether this was a case of true love or literary lesbianism for political ends, but the scenario is fascinating. Forteguerri is best known, however, for her active political patriotism as one of the heroic women who helped organize the defense of Siena during the siege. In some of the best pages in the book, Eisenbichler sifts through later mythmaking and errors in his search for the real Laudomia.
Virginia Maria Salvi (exact dates unknown) was also remarkable. Several composers, including Palestrina, set her poetry to music, thus circulating it throughout Europe. And, like Forteguerri, she was a profound patriot who responded to Siena’s political dilemmas. Her satirical poems, now lost, resulted in a brief but dramatic arrest for sedition in 1546. Even after the fall of the Republic Salvi kept up a poetic campaign from Rome, exhorting Italian cardinals and members of the French royal family not to forget her lost country. But a poignant exile was the survivors’ fate: “Mournful and downcast beside the high banks / Of proud Tiber, the dear sons of my homeland / Wander, and the bitter, grave distress / Each in his heart with aching pain does hide” (195–96).
Eisenbichler concludes with a biographical epilogue of eight other Sienese women, along with an invaluable appendix of more than fifty pages of poems and graceful translations. The Sword and the Pen is a major contribution to our understanding of female poets in the Renaissance and the glittering cultural climate of a proud but doomed city.
