Alessandra Scala

Alessandra Scala (1475–1506) was a Florentine humanist and scholar of Latin and Greek in the late fifteenth century.

Biography

Alessandra Scala was the fifth daughter of the chancellor of Florence at the time, Bartolomeo Scala, and was born in 1475.^[1] Scala was taught in part by her father and Angelo Poliziano, and also studied Ancient Greek under Janus Lascaris and Demetrios Chalkokondyles.^[1][2]

In 1493, Scala participated in a Florentine performance of Sophocles's Electra as Electra, and was highly praised for her acting in a letter from Poliziano to Cassandra Fedele.^[3] She also corresponded with Fedele in Latin about marriage and scholarship between 1492 and 1493,^[4][5] and replied to love poems written in Greek that Poliziano sent her around 1493.^[6][7] Poliziano's praise of Scala's dramatic performance and his poetry addressed to her have been interpreted differently by scholars. While Pesenti views Poliziano as expressing genuine if unrealizable affection,^[6] more recently Feng and Jardine have argued that Poliziano's language draws upon previously established portrayals of a "beloved" in Renaissance love poetry, and that his portrayals did not treat Scala as an intellectual or scholarly equal to Poliziano.^[3][7] The only two pieces of Scala's work that survive, at least as far as Pesenti was able to find, are one of Scala's letters to Fedele and her poem in Greek replying to Poliziano.^[4]

In 1494, she married the Greek poet and soldier Michael Tarchaniota Marullus.^[8] Six years later Marullus died, and Scala then entered the Florentine convent of San Pier Maggiore^[1] – Strocchia notes that it was the oldest and richest convent in the city, whose nuns were traditionally drawn from what Miller terms "the ruling class" of Florence.^[9][10] She died there in 1506.^[1]

References

1. Robin, Diana (2007). Robin, Diana; Larsen, Anne R.; Levin, Carole (eds.). Encyclopedia of women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 332–333. ISBN 978-1-85109-772-2.
2. King, Margaret L. (1988). Rabil, Albert (ed.). Renaissance humanism : foundations, forms, and legacy. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 435. ISBN 0-8122-8066-0. OCLC 16227152.
3. Jardine, Lisa (1985). "'O Decus Italiae Virgo', or The Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance" (PDF). Historical Journal. 28 (4): 807–810. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00005070. S2CID 159761599.
4. Pesenti, Giovanni (1925). "Alessandra Scala: Una figurina della Rinascenza fiorentina". Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana. 85: 249–250. ProQuest 1310285417 – via ProQuest.
5. King, Margaret L.; Rabil, Jr., Albert (1992). Her immaculate hand : selected works by and about the women humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. pp. 87–88. ISBN 0-86698-124-1. OCLC 26096179.
6. Pesenti, Giovanni (1925). "Alessandra Scala: Una figurina della Rinascenza fiorentina". Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana. 85: 252–254. ProQuest 1310285417 – via Proquest.
7. Feng, Aileen A. (2017). Writing beloveds : humanist Petrarchism and the politics of gender. Toronto. pp. 94–103. ISBN 978-1-4875-1179-1. OCLC 970693924.
8. Stevenson, Jane (2005). Women Latin poets: language, gender, and authority, from antiquity to the eighteenth century. Oxford University Press. p. 164. ISBN 0-19-818502-2.
9. Strocchia, Sharon T. (August 2007). "When the Bishop Married the Abbess: Masculinity and Power in Florentine Episcopal Entry Rites, 1300-1600". Gender & History. 19 (2): 351. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00479.x. ISSN 0953-5233. S2CID 143907245.
10. Miller, Maureen C. (October 2006). "Why the Bishop of Florence Had to Get Married". Speculum. 81 (4): 1060–1063. doi:10.1017/S0038713400004280. ISSN 0038-7134. S2CID 163412470.