2023 Theses Doctoral

Moderata Fonte’s Tredici canti del Floridoro: Epic Means, Political Ends

Colleluori, Tylar Ann

This dissertation explores Moderata Fonte’s Tredici canti del Floridoro from a new critical perspective, by taking into consideration Fonte’s authorial positionality, situating the text within its literary and historical contexts, and devoting sustained attention to its extradiegetic and structural components. Through this framing, this study highlights Fonte’s innovation as an author of chivalric epic and reveals the Floridoro to be a text with political motivations.

The first chapter examines Fonte’s authorial persona and her metapoetics, both as they are written about by her contemporaries and as they are made manifest within the Floridoro. The remaining two chapters are devoted to an analysis of the two ekphrastic sub-narratives found within the Floridoro, and how they mirror Fonte’s dual dedication of the poem to Francesco I de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello: chapter 2 considers Fonte’s Medici genealogy as a response to a specific political moment and to the unique anxieties of her first dedicatee, while chapter 3 explores how Fonte’s history of Venice functions as a civic genealogy for her second.