Giulia Bigolina. Urania.

Ed. Valeria Finucci. (Biblioteca del Cinquecenro, 104.) Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2002. 196 pp. index. 20 [euro]. ISBN: 88-8319-705-4.

Although up until recently their very existence was a well-kept secret in Italian curricula both in America and abroad, the rediscovery of early modern women writers such as Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco, and Moderata Fonte has been one of the most exciting developments of Italian and Renaissance Studies in the past decade. Now, Valeria Finucci--who published the first-ever edition of Fonte's epic fragment, I tredici canti di Flaridoro in 1997 (Mursia)--has uncovered another gem: Giulia Bigolina's unpublished prose romance, Urania nella quale si cantiene l'amore d'una giovine di tal name, composed about 1556-58. The story of a female poet's chaste yet relentless love for a man who has turned from her intellectual gifts to the greater beauty of another girl, Urania contains most of the expected elements of the ancient and early modern romance traditions (separation of lovers, love triangles, cross-dressing, both comedic and tragic episodes, and a final resolution in marriage), but with greater emphasis on the protagonist's psychological experience and a feminist inflection that presages the treatises of Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella written several decades later.

Bigolina wrote the only prose romance by a Renaissance Italian woman (at least as far as we know), as well as the period's only female-authored novella, Giulia Camposampiero e Tesibaldo Vitaliani, yet little is known about her life. Indeed, the proclamation declaring a Paduan street to be named after her in 1951, "praising her for having done for the novella what another Paduan woman, Gaspara Stampa, had done for poetry" (14, my translation), confuses the writer with a relative born in 1563. The author of Urania was born some time after 1516 (probably about 1518), was married in 1534; and still married in 1555 when she wrote a treatise on love featuring herself and three male interlocutors, A ragionar d'amore; she was widowed prior to 1559 and herself died earlier than 1569.

Urania is dedicated to Bartolomeo Salvarico, a young lawyer, to present him with an image of herself and to demonstrate how women often make better choices in love than do their male counterparts. Certainly the values at the core of Bigolina's text are worthy of emulation by both men and women of the twenty-first as well as the sixteenth century, for the poet Urania is admired and desired by many in Salerno "by reason of her many virtues, rather than for great beauty" (87). This clear correction of petrarehismo underscores the text's central theme: Urania and Urania successfully prove that intelligence rather than beauty is not only best for men in love, but ultimately what they desire.

Yet that Urania will achieve her own desires by finding a man who understands this truth is not immediately apparent. Despondent after discovering that Fabio, with whom she has long shared intellectual intercourse, is now infatuated with the beautiful and vacuous Clorina, Urania abandons Salerno to traverse the country, dressing as a man (for safety's sake) and taking the name of her beloved.

If this plot summary seems the typical material of romance, Urania contains numerous elements that distinguish it from other exponents of the genre. Most significant is the psychological dimension of the female characters, which anticipates the development of the modern novel. As Finucci rightly argues, "Urania is chaste because she has a goal and possesses the strength to remain true to herself. [Her] profound melancholy ... doesn't negate her self-esteem and determination to make others respect her freedom of choice" (64).

Perhaps it is not surprising that such a text would be left unpublished. As Finucci explains, "about 1559-60, when the Inquisition began intervening heavily in Padua in order to eliminate unorthodox works from the intellectual and bookselling market... a romance written by a woman [especially from a prominent family] about a cross-dressed young girl traversing Italy and contemplating suicide" (66) would not have been appreciated. It is precisely these qualities, however, that make the work appealing now.

But if Urania is a good read, it is also an important one, and Finucci's erudite, engrossing, and clearly-expressed introduction does a wonderful job presenting Bigolina's life and work in the context not only of Renaissance views of women, but the full scope of the complex Italian literary tradition from which this text emerges. Urania is informed by the romance and novella tradition of Boccaccio--most clearly his Fiarnetta (although unlike the beautiful and married Fiametta, Urania is never seduced) and Filocolo, a key text for its peregrinating protagonist as well as for the questioni d'amore that are a clear model for the cross-dressed Urania's crossexamination in the forest. Equally significant is the author's engagement with the Neoplatonic and pastoral traditions (notably Sannazaro's Arcadia) and with the treatises on conduct of which Castiglione's Courtier is but one notable example.

That the first Italian prose romance authored by a woman bears the same title as the first such work written in English is more than likely an intriguing coincidence, given the mythological significance of Urania as muse of astronomy, and thus, through Platonism, as the heavenly Venus contrasted in both Plato and Ficino with her earthly counterpart, or as the fixed and constant star metaphorically linked (in Philip Sidney, at least) to the matrimonially-inclined woman. Nevertheless, scholars of both English and Italian will no doubt find much of mutual interest; surely the response to Lady Mary Wroth's publication of the English Urania (she became the object of satire and was denounced as a hermaphrodite) retrospectively illuminates Bigolina's choice to leave her own text in manuscript.

Readers of Italian are lucky indeed to have available such a legible, affordable, and attractive edition, including an excellent critical apparatus, of this delightful and historically significant text. Equally fortuitously, those without Italian will not have long to wait: Finucci is just completing an English translation of Urania, to be published in the University of Chicago's outstanding (and similarly affordable) OVIEME series. Whether read in Italian or English, its engrossing narrative, relative brevity, and clear but unpolemic expression of feminist concerns should render this romance popular with both scholars and their students, for after waiting almost four and a half centuries for publication, Urania is an important entry into contemporary discussions of gender, genre, and voice in the early modern period.

NAOMI YAVNEH

University of South Florida