ABSTRACT
Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati (1523-89) is a rarity among Renaissance women writers for her forays into the rustic world of the eclogue.1 Her corpus of over four hundred poems, mostly sonnets, includes three eclogues, all in Italian. The first, 'Europa,' is attached to the final section of her first book, Ilprimo libro dell 'opere toscane (Florence, 1560).2 The second, 'Dafne,' has disappeared, except for the tantalizing traces of its title and first verse recorded in a late manuscript anthology that, luckily, preserves the full text of the third, labelled simply 'Terza ecloga.'3 It was to be her last effort in this form and, for reasons that shortly will be revealed, it has remained completely unknown since the sixteenth century. In this third eclogue Battiferra imagines an inner circle - Cosimo and his wife Eleonora de Toledo, Laura Battiferra and her husband Bartolomeo Ammannati, and a fifth person with a more elusive identity - as they gather for a day in the countryside, all masked under pastoral alias, to praise in song Cosimo and Eleonora. These forgotten verses, an elegant tableau of ephemeral court entertainment, hint at manoeuvrings for patronage as they praise the Medici at an apex of their political history.
