ABSTRACT
The life of learned Venetian women between the end of the sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth was marked by isolated, domestic solitude. 'Remaining enclosed between narrow walls', as Nicolo Doglioni wrote in the encomiastic sonnet preceding Moderata Fonte's poem Tredici canti di Floridoro; 'remaining confined in her room', confirmed Stringa of Lucrezia Marinella. Her rhetorical plan, conforming to the epideictic model, sets up a fairly brief exordium, followed by a propositio which announces the demonstrative aim of the discourse, and an argumentatio, developed in a series of proofs. The propositio, using an interrogative rhetoric, states in an elliptical manner that the ratio of the discourse will turn on the 'forza de' nomi'. The tangible proof of Lucrezia Marinella's 'valour' was to have a woman's name printed on the title pages of a number of works published in Venice during the first four decades of the seventeenth century.
