The Catalan poet Benedicto Gareth (ca 1450–1515), known as il Cariteo, left Barcelona to follow the Aragonese kings to their court in Naples. With his poetry, he highly contributed in erecting a glorious monument in celebrating the powerful dynasty in Italy. Cariteo, one of the most erudite humanists of the Accademia Pontaniana, chose to write in vernacular, rather than Latin or Catalan, in order to follow the example of other great Italian poets, such as Petrarch, and most of all, in order to create a bond with Italians in and outside the kingdom of Naples, thereby strengthening the Aragonese claims to its ruling. Cariteo's political poems in the Endimione, and their powerful remarks about his kings constitute an extraordinary diplomatic and poetic propaganda for the Aragonese regime, and intersect with its major historical events.
In his Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (1559), Lodovico Domenichi publishes the poetry of fifty-three women authors across borders of nation, city, politics, religion, profession, class, and genre. Among them, thirty-five dedicate or address their compositions to another woman, thus constructing their own female audience and community. Through the analysis of the sonnets of two well known writers, Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna, and two almost unknown writers, Lucrezia Figliucci and Cassandra Petrucci, this article seeks to establish why and how so many Renaissance women authors dedicated poems to, or addressed another woman author, and how these poems inform our understanding of their authors’ relationships. These texts reveal the importance of literary friendships which encouraged and promoted reciprocal admiration and respect, and show that, although these women poets did abide by sixteenth-century conventions of language and imagery, they also drew consciously from each other’s writings, following closely each other’s cues, style, and preferences, thus establishing a meaningful dialogic mode.
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