SACRED EPIC POETRY FROM SOUTHERN ITALY
DELL’UVA, Benedetto.
Le vergini prudenti.
Florence, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1582.
[bound with:]
—. Il pensier della morte. Florence, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1582.[and:]
—. Il Doroteo. Florence, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1582.Three works in one vol., 4to, I: pp. [viii], 198, [2]; II: [viii], 40; III: 17, [1], without final blank; woodcut printer’s device to each title-page, second title within an architectural woodcut border, woodcut initials, typographic borders and headpieces; first title-page torn and repaired at time of binding with some text on recto supplied in manuscript and loss of a few words to verso, some foxing or browning, else good copies; bound in eighteenth-century Italian vellum over boards, unidentified armorial blocked in blind to boards, gilt red morocco lettering-piece to spine, edges stained blue, front free endpaper with watermark of a bird within a circle surmounted by the letter F (not found in the standard bibliographies); front hinge partially split at foot; nineteenth-century library shelflabel pasted to front pastedown.
First editions of three religious poems in ottava rima by the Capuan monk Benedetto dell’Uva, representative of Counter-Reformation poetry in southern Italy.
Dell’Uva (1540–1582) was a Benedictine monk of the Cassinese congregation; ‘in the last decades of the 16th century, Cassinese authors played a key role in the formation of a new, sophisticated and influential model of vernacular religious imaginative literature, both narrative and lyric, very different in character from their earlier production… Important figures in this tradition are the narrative poets Felice Passero and Lucillo Martinengo, and the lyric and narrative poet Benedetto Dell’Uva’ (Cox, p. 256).
Dell’Uva devised the first work in this volume to be a sacred epic poem, in the manner of heroic epics; edited by the Neapolitan scholar Scipione Ammirati, it contains the martyrdoms of Saints Agatha, Lucia, Agnes, Giustina, and Catherine of Alexandria. Il Doroteo describes the temptations of worldly passion and Il pensier della morte contrition and penitence, the latter written not long before his own death. Ammirati moved to Florence in 1569 as historiographer to the Medici court, hence the works were all printed in Florence (later printings contained all three works together).
Hagiographic epics were thought to be suitable subjects for women to read, particularly if the subject matter was the virtuous behaviour of exemplary women, and two of these three works are dedicated to women: Felice Orsini, wife of the viceroy of Sicily, and Girolama Colonna, Duchess of Monteleone (the third work is dedicated to Luigi Carafa, Prince of Stigliano, by Camillo Pellegrino, a fellow Capuan poet).
I: USTC 862478; EDIT16 CNCE 16627; II: USTC 826477; EDIT16 CNCE 16626; III: USTC 826476; EDIT16 CNCE 16625. See Cox, ‘Birgitta in the verse, thought, and artistic commissions of Angelo Grillo’, in The legacy of Birgitta of Sweden (2023).
