Lucrezia Marinella

Lucrezia Marinella (b. 1571–d. 1653) was a widely known author in Venice and throughout Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Her poetry and prose works were printed (and even reprinted), attracting notice and renown. Despite her subsequent fame as a proto-feminist, most of her writing is devoted to religious topics, in which her personal, pro-woman stance is present but expressed in ways that are in keeping with the constraints of genre and the culture of her time. She was daughter, sister, and wife to physicians. Marinella’s knowledge emerges as varied and extensive in her writings. Her published texts fall between 1595 and 1605 and then 1617 and 1648; this hiatus is usually explained by the date of her marriage (1607). As remarkable as the length of her career is the span of topics her works engage: lives and stories of the Virgin and of several saints, the struggle of man to defeat sin under the guise of classical mythology, the role of women in society and culture, and the Fourth Crusade are but a few. From her will we know she had a son and a daughter, as well as a granddaughter from the latter. Her diverse topics, choice of form, wide-ranging selection of dedicatees, individual voice, and long career make her an important point of reference for exploring post–Council of Trent literary production by women in Italian.