Gabriele Simeoni (1509–1570?): Un Florentin en France entre princes et libraires. Silvia D’Amico and Catherine Magnien-Simonin, eds. Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 568. Geneva: Droz, 2016. 640 pp. $106.80.
Savorgnan (Monica Farnetti) addresses her love letters with Pietro Bembo, Farnetti emphasizes the importance of the vernacular letter for women of Savorgnan’s cerebral qualities to assert themselves in intellectual and courtly circles. The author cites, among others, Cassandra Fedele, Veronica Franco, Isabella Andreini, and Lucrezia Gonzaga, all of whom engaged with elite networks through the letter and, indeed, created a female tradition of literary epistolography distinct from the epistolary canon of female mystics. This theme is echoed in excellent essays on Veronica Gambara (Laura Fortini), Tullia d’Aragona (Julia L. Hairston), and Vittoria Colonna (Concetta Ranieri), the latter of which explicitly treats the confluence of the literary and spiritual in Colonna’s writing. These essays contribute to the already vibrant Italophone scholarship on female letter-writers and further encourage its growth through delineating the spiritual and literary as distinct genres for women, but also as sites of experimentation for figures like Colonna who engaged with both spaces in distinctly feminine ways. The essays collected here encourage a variety of ways to approach sixteenth-century vernacular letters as their own genre distinct from, albeit as descendants of, the Latin letter. The collection is fundamentally an invitation for scholars to engage with the vernacular letter as a source capable of astounding insight into many avenues of historical inquiry. This volume is a welcome addition to the historiography and encourages further scholarship and engagement with Renaissance vernacular epistolography in all its forms.