ABSTRACT

Siblings, especially twin boys or fraternal twins of opposite sex, are a stock feature of Renaissance romance and comedy. Thus, when Italian women writers started to write romances of chivalry in the sixteenth century, they had a ready-made topos to explore. Given their particular interests, they soon started to examine the dynamics that the relationship between female twins could produce in a woman-friendly fictional world. Moderata Fonte (1552–92), for example, although apparently concerned with the adventures of the knight Floridoro in her Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro (Tredici canti del Floridoro, 1581), gives more space and depth of characterization to the woman warrior Risamante, whose quest to recover the inheritance she is due as the daughter of the king of Armenia leads her to fight her identical twin, Biondaura, the ruler’s sole heir.