"Me son missa a scriver questa letera ...": Lettere e altre scritture femminili tra Umbria, Toscana e Marche nei secoli XV-XVI.

Maria Grazia Nico Ottaviani. "Me son missa a scriver questa letera ...": Lettere e altre scritture femminili tra Umbria, Toscana e Marche nei secoli XV-XVI.

Critica e Letteratura 64. Naples: Liguori Editore S. R. L., 2006. 200 pp. index. append. tbls. bibl. [euro]16. ISBN: 88-207-3891-0.

Maria Grazia Nico Ottaviani's overview of women's writings in the archives of Central Italy is a recent addition to the growing literature on early modern letter-writing and female epistolarity. Once overlooked, epistolary production by women is now recognized as an important source for understanding the range of their social, political, and cultural activities. The subject has received perhaps the greatest attention among scholars of early modern England, but the Italian context--which saw an incredible profusion of letterbooks and epistolary manuals throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--is slowly starting to catch up, thanks to volumes like Gabriella Zarri's Per lettera: La scrittura femminile tra archivio e tipografia (1999) and Adriana Chemello's Alla lettera: Teorie e pratiche epistolari dai Greci al Novecento (1998), to name just a few. Ottaviani's study takes its initial inspiration from these collections, most particularly from Zarri's description of the letter's unique ability to grant access to female voices that would otherwise remain unknown to us (5). Ottaviani narrows her focus to letters that are preserved in the archives, rather than the published variety, but expands her study to include other types of archival documents as well, such as women's testaments and account-books. Her basic premise will be familiar to all scholars working in the archives: that the documents contained in all those dusty filze contain precious insights into the lives and roles of women in early modern Italy (although they are not always easy to track down). By examining documents written by (or, in some cases, to) women, we can find traces of women's experience that would otherwise escape us. In particular, letters--what Armando Petrucci terms "ordinary," practical correspondence, as opposed to the Latin correspondence of the cultural elite--record not only complex networks of relationships, but also the real ways in which women transcended conventional notions of women's roles to exert different kinds of influence.

Ottaviani's archival work is extensive and her book is most valuable where it describes documents she has looked at in Florence and Perugia, many of which have never been published before. Part 1 focuses specifically on letters, beginning with the carteggio Alfani at the Perugia State Archive, which consists of 356 letters relating to the merchant Alfano di Francesco and his descendants. Ottaviani characterizes the correspondence as both "domestic" and "public" (40), in that more than half of the letters pertain to political affairs, while the others concern the family, particularly its female members. Most important here is the intricate web of familial relationships that is revealed by the letters as well as the range of contexts in which the women letter writers act, making recommendations and petitions, offering condolences and congratulations. Ottaviani makes a valiant effort to provide the reader with sufficient biographical and cultural contexts for each letter and letter-writer she discusses, but the network is vast and the reader will be relieved to find a genealogical table at the end of part 1 to help keep the various branches of the family tree straight.

Part 2 of the study is called "Scritture di donne." The first section again deals with letters, but focuses specifically on their use as "strumenti di governo" (89), or political tools, as, for example, in the case of Caterina Cibo Varano, who governed her state after her husband's death. Ottaviani carefully contextualizes Caterina's correspondence with her son-in-law Guidobaldo II della Rovere during the years following her departure from Camerino for Florence, and also describes letters written by Caterina's daughter Giulia to her husband. Throughout, she notes various graphic characteristics of the letters and what they suggest about the writer's training: Caterina's hand, for example, is sure and demonstrates a "buon grado di capacita scrittoria" (108).

The sections on testaments--"spia della parola femminile" (166)--and account books in Perugia highlight two other important places to look for women's traces in the archives, but neither goes as far as it might, nor does the brief summary of the donne illustri tradition that comprises the final pages of the book. More descriptive than analytical, Ottaviani's book is strongest where she focuses on letters, and most valuable where she provides documents that would be otherwise difficult to access, as in the appendix of selected letters from the carteggio Alfani. Here, Ottaviani transcribes thirty-three letters exchanged between mothers and daughters, daughters and fathers, and sisters and brothers: letters of greeting, petition, and reminder. Whether interested in questions of gender or early modern epistolarity, the reader will find in these pages the most eloquent explanation of the myriad ways in which letters served the women who wrote them.

MEREDITH K. RAY

University of Delaware