ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the presence of women on the literary scene during the late Quattrocento and the early Cinquecento in Italian literary society. The courts of Renaissance literature played therefore a fundamental role in the making of an Italian vernacular literature and in the progressive establishment of a literary canon. The role played by women as the public of vernacular literary production in Italian Renaissance courts can hardly be overestimated. Women's presence affected the literary scene in a radical way because, for the first time during the history of Italian literature they were organically included as the potential public of the most popular vernacular production. Women occupy a key position in the two greatest monuments to courtly literature, the Cortegiano and the Orlando furioso. Courtly reading had been therefore traditionally a leisure activity engaged in by both men and women; in fact, more often undertaken by women.
