SALVETTI ACCIAOLI, Maddalena

by Maddalena Salvetti Acciaoli

£4,750 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition of this collection of sonnets in the Tuscan language, dedicated to Cristina, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, whom they celebrate as the harbinger of much-needed change in Florence. Appended is a shorter florilegium dedicated to her husband, Ferdinand de Medici. Maddalena Salvetti Acciaioli (d.1610) was a Florentine noblewoman who wrote numerous poems published either separately or circulated within collections. Rime toscane is richly intertextual, with echoes of the leading Petrarchists of the sixteenth century, most notably Bembo, Della Casa, and Tasso, along with Veronica Gambara and Laura Battiferri, scattered across its pages. [...] Salvetti s canzoniere to Christine refashions this genre for her project of praise, repurposing Neoplatonism and deploying its unmistakable lexicon to promote the grand duchess as a new political saviour for Florence, while also incorporating the Mannerist elements then in vogue and that keep her work fresh centuries later. [...] Salvetti s canzoniere to Christine is an alluring amalgam: at first glance a love canzoniere from one woman to another, it becomes upon closer observation an impressively Mannerist, Counter-Reformation paean to the Christian glory of crusade, which is embodied in the figure of Christine herself (Wainwright, pp.133-5). The language borrows themes such as those of the angelic, immortal woman, metaphors involving the sun and the night, as well as classical deities, with Apollo, Lord of Delo, covering with a veil

• Binding: Hardcover

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