Wellington 2013 – Ippolita rinascimentale: le Amazzoni americane nell’epica italiana

This paper analyses the mythography of ‘New World Amazons’ as it appears in Renaissance Italian epic poems, tracing perceptions of the myth from the discovery of America to the first half of the seventeenth century. The first part of the article documents the literary history of such legends, focusing in particular on the delayed advent of American Amazons in Italian verse. One reason for this, I argue, is that poets were unable to distance themselves from the classical tradition that identified Asia and Africa as the homeland of the Amazons. At the same time, they felt incapable of integrating the supposedly authoritative accounts of the New World into their poems without quoting them almost word for word. In the second part I analyse Giovanni Giorgini’s "Mondo nuovo" (1596) and Tommaso Stigliani’s "Mondo nuovo" (1617, 1628), the first two complete Italian poems entirely dedicated to the discovery and conquest of America. The Amazons who appear in these works are lent an unprecedented depth of characterisation since the poets are able to reject, in part, the total subordination to historical sources that had dogged previous depictions of them. They use them, instead, as a pretext for engaging with matters of contemporary concern, in particular, the hotly debated querelle des femmes. In the final analysis, I argue that in the New World poems, Amazons are used more to comment on the political and cultural realities of the Italian peninsula than to paint a ‘reliable’ picture of the newly discovered lands. They appear not so much in the New World as in the Old World projected, as it were, onto the new territories of America while maintaining the social categories and concerns of the world at home.