Cassandra Fedele

Cassandra Fedele (b. 1465–d. 1558) was the most renowned female scholar of Latin and Greek in Europe by 1500. On her death she left a book of 121 Latin letters and three orations, published posthumously in 1636. She was born to citizen-class parents Angelo Fedele and Barara Leoni in Venice, neither of them scholars. Her father hired a Servite friar, Gasparino Borro, to teach her Latin and Greek. She delivered her first public oration in Latin at the University of Padua in 1487: published in Modena in 1487, Nuremberg in 1488, and Venice in 1489. Fedele delivered her second Latin oration before the doge Agostino Barbarigo and the Venetian senate in 1487. After her marriage to the physician Gian-Maria Mappelli, she disappeared from the public arena until 1556 when she delivered an oration in honor of Queen Bona Sforza of Poland on her arrival in Venice. The biographical tradition attests to her having written poetry and a book titled Ordo scientiarum (The order of the sciences) but no trace of this work survives.