Lettere di molte valorose donne,: nelle quali chiaramente appare non esser ne di eloquentia ne di dottrina alli huomini inferiori.

Venice: Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari, 1548-49. First edition. Very Good. Octavo (17cm); 161 [3] leaves (including final blank). Printer's device on title page and on verso of last leaf. Woodcut initial H on f.2 populated with racquetball players, and woodcut initial D on f.3 by the figure of a woman petting a boar. Italic and Roman type. Slight yellowing, light water stain to some lower outer corners. A very good copy in c.1750 polished vellum, gilt-lettered morocco label to spine. C16 underlining and marginalia. Occasional scattered foxing.

References: Adams, L-562; Bongi I, 213-214; BM Italian, 376; Melzi II, 115. See also, Meredith K. Ray, "Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance" (Toronto, 2009); Serena Pezzini, "Dissimulazione e paradosso in Ortensio Lando," in "Italianistica" 31:1 (2002) pp. 67-83; Natalina Bellucci, "Lettere di molte valorose donne...e di alcune pettegolette, ovvero: di un libro di lettere di Ortensio Lando," in Quondam, ed., "Le carte messaggere: rhetorica e modelli di communicazione epistolare..."(Rome, 1981) pp. 255-76.


The eccentric, peripatetic humanist Ortensio Lando was never comfortable with the noble courtesies of his Renaissance world. During his lifetime (ca. 1510-ca. 1559), he was in the top tier of Italian public intellectuals, but unlike his still-famous peers (Dolce, Sansovino, Bembo) he refused to buckle down. He attached himself to Rabelais’s circle in Lyon (he was especially close with Étienne Dolet), while he worked in Gryphius’s print shop there. He rambled on to Erasmus’s Basel, and then to Germany, and returning to Italy he drifted through various Italian university towns (from Lucca, to Pisa, to Trent). He spent about ten years in Venice, and died, probably in Naples, in the late 1550s. Sometimes he published under his own name, but he frequently used pseudonyms or indeed no name. Despite this unsettled existence, he liked to call himself “Tranquillo.”

Lettere di molte valorose donne pretends to be a collection of model letters written by women to other women, demonstrating (in the context of the “querelle des femmes”) that women are in no way inferior to men in eloquence and education. Topics range widely, embracing the commonplaces but with the addition of women’s issues such as marriage, childbirth, the struggle for education, and the attractiveness of men, or lack thereof. The text seems to provide an intimate glimpse into a female network in which advice and comfort are shared.

Authorship of Lettere di molte valorose donne puzzles scholars to this day. Published by the powerful Venetian house of Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, there is no attribution on the title page or in the front matter. Lando is only mentioned in the gratulatory verses at the end of the book, where his famous peers, Dolce, Aretino, Sansovino, and Pestalossa, celebrate him for the “copious sweat and considerable personal expenses” that he put into compiling the book. By the end of the 19th century, most scholars agreed that Lando wrote the entire text, every letter, perhaps even the gratulatory verses. Recent scholarship, less sure, takes the view that Lando wrote most of it, certainly the passages attributed to fictional women, but that some of the letters were written in collaboration with Lucrezia Gonzaga, and several others were written authentically and then edited for style and content by Lando.

Whether the text is wholly a product of a man impersonating the voices of women, or whether it consists of women’s voices filtered through a man’s literary sensibilities, the volume remains an important document of Renaissance images of women, in the guise of women speaking intimately with each other.

Ortensio Lando is shockingly underrepresented in North American academic libraries. Even his greatest success, I paradossi, which informed Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, and which Charles Estienne later translated into French and published, appears to be absent from University libraries in its first edition (Lyon, 1543). Copies of Lettere di valorose donne, despite its richly pertinent text, are hardly more numerous. This copy, in an authentic binding, is an important piece of the puzzle of our early modern heritage.