ABSTRACT
Olympia Fulvia Morata was one of the most learned women of her age.1 The time is ripe for a scholarly edition and a full biography of this remarkable woman whose letters so impressed Goethe.2 Born in Ferrara and raised at the court of Ercole II d’Este (1508-59) and Renée de France (1510-75), she was educated by her father, Fulvio Pellegrino Morato (c. 1483-1548), tutor to the d’Este heir and an early convert to Calvinism, and later by Caelio Calcagnini (1478-1541), as well as Johann Sinapius (1505-61, doctor to Renée and later bishop of Würzburg) and his brother, Chilian (Kilian Senf, 1506-63). She gave proof of her talent by writing a panegyric on Scaevola in Greek at the age of thirteen and giving declamations on Cicero’s Paradoxa at sixteen. She flourished in the Protestant atmosphere of Renée’s court and was selected in 1540 to be a companion to Renée’s daughter, Anna d’Este (Letter 45), while making lifelong friends with the noble Lavinia della Rovere, later the wife of Count Camillo Orsini (1491-1559; Letters 13, 21, 23, 35).
