MARINELLI, Lucretia

Second edition of this allegorical poem and critique of love, dedicated to Caterina de’ Medici Gonzaga, Duchess of Mantua. The first, 1598, appears absent from all major bibliographies and only mentioned by some scholars; it may be a ‘ghost’. The Venetian Lucrezia Marinella (or Marinelli, 1571-1653) was daughter of Giovanni Marinelli, a physician who wrote popular works on women’s illnesses. She never married and lived a secluded life devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and literature, whilst encouraging other talented female writers of her time. A key theme of her works was the defence of women. ‘Amore innamorato’ is a Christian allegorical poem, so much so that Marinelli felt the need to add, pre-emptively, a ‘profession of obedience to the Roman Church’ for her use of
religious vocabulary and themes for such a secular topic. Each ‘argument’ compresses the following canto into an allegory based on classical iconography, featuring, for instance, Cupid, Jove, and so on. The poem criticises those who boast to be madly in love, ‘with tears, sighs, pains’, being prey to the ‘big horrid fire’, ill with a heartbreak which ‘to heal the like one requires the knowledge and valour of physicians and witches’. Marinelli’s astounding poetic skills and her beautiful Italian rhetoric paint vividly the inner life of people that are in love as ‘burning rage’, ‘mad desire’, ‘enduring hate’, ‘painful thoughts’, ‘insane fury’, and so on, adapting traditional poetic tropes reaching back to Ariosto and beyond into a more personal, vivid style. A most interesting, scarce, and understudied Renaissance poem.