ABSTRACT
By the last decade of the fifteenth century, the writer Cassandra Fedele was probably the best-known female classical scholar living in Europe. Kings and queens courted her. Poets, university professors, and men of the church sought her imprimatur for their work. Celebrity came to her before she was twenty-five, yet by the time she was thirty-three her days in the limelight were over. Renaissance biographical encyclopedias document her fame and productivity as a writer1 though little of her work survives. Her book The Order of the Sciences (Ordo scientiarum) and her Latin poetry, well attested in the biographical tradition, are lost. Her Latin letters and orations are extant in two early editions: a fourteen-page book containing one oration and letters from admirers2 and a 228-page edition of her letters published posthumously in 1636.3
Fedele was born in Venice in 1465. She counted among her living kin a physician, a bishop, a lawyer, and a banker convicted of forgery.4 Her father, Angelo Fedele, appears not to have enjoyed steady employment,5 though no detailed information has come down to us about her parents’ precise status in Venice. Emigrants from Milan at the beginning of the century, the Fedele were members of the citizen class in Venice, not the nobility. Cassandra was one of five children, four girls and a boy. She speaks fondly of her siblings in her letters, though she never mentions her mother, Barbara Leoni, or any other women in her family. Her silence on the subject of her mother is consonant with her distancing of herself from women as a group in her letters, with the exception of her aristocratic female patrons. Her father, who seems to have seen Cassandra as a vehicle for furthering his own career,6 pushed her to learn Greek and Latin at an early age. At the age of twelve she was sent to Gasparino Borro, a Servite monk and scholar of classical literature and rhetoric. With him, she studied Greek and Latin literature,
philosophy, the sciences, and dialectics, struggling in particular with Aristotle, whose language and ideas she found more challenging than any other author.
