ABSTRACT
Antonia Pulci, Italy’s earliest woman vernacular playwright, is absent from the Cambridge History of Italian Literature published in 1996, while her more famous contemporary, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo de’ Medici, although present, is referred to not as an author in her own right but purely as the patroness of the poet Luigi Pulci, Antonia’s brother-in-law. We have an accurate family name for Antonia, however, we can explore the possibility that she had connections with the Medici other than those determined by her husband’s family history. Chastity, the recurring theme of Antonia’s plays, is not inappropriate for them but the emphasis in her Domitilla of 1483 on the heroine as a bride of Christ makes particular sense for nuns, whether as actresses or as audience. The context, or rather the interlocking contexts of Antonia Pulci’s life, her domestic, social, cultural, religious and even political circumstances, afforded the necessary space for her to fulfil her aspirations towards authorship.
