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The Honored Court esan 7

Tuscan writers of the fourteenth century. Rather than follow these norms exclusively, the Venier group also focused on the capitolo, a verse form used by thirteenth-century Provenęal poets for literary debate. This was a poem of variable length, written in eleven-syllable verse. It had been resuscitated by early-sixteenth-century satirists such as Francesco Berni, Luigi Grazz-ini (II Lasca), and Giovanni Gelli, who had given it a colloquial force and informality very different from the decorous norm recommended by Bembo. One use of the capitolo was the tenzone, a poetic debate in which one poet answers anothers poem in a combative dialogue. This pro-posta/risposta (challenge/response) pattern was of particular interest to Domenico Venier, who, although he never appears by name in Francos capitoli, is often invoked as a literary counselor in them (5, 18, 23, 24). Franco sharpens and foregrounds the proposta/risposta element of the ten-zonę in the outrageously amusing capitoli in which she eąuates her sexual prowess as a courtesan and her verbal prowess as a poet with the armed battle of a duel (13, 16), a playful use of the form that is unique to her. But her Capitolo 16 also picks up the potential seriousness of the debate im-plicit in the tenzone. In this poem, a fierce and persuasive response to three obscene poems written against her in Venetian dialect by Maffio Venier, the quality of direct address, that is, the dramatization of speech from the poet to an interlocutor, is evidence of her engagement with actual rather than imagined readers: with the person to whom the capitolo is written (Malfio Venier), with the Ca Venier audience, and with Venetian readers beyond the Venier circle. The tenzone form was designed precisely for this kind of public debate, and Franco used its traditional subject matter—the attack on specific people and on poetic practice—to defend herself against Maffio s attempt to humiliate her in public.

In addition to Dante s Commedia (Divine Comedy) and the myths col-lected in Ovid s Metamorphoses, a major source for Franco s capitoli was the Venier group s project of translating and writing commentary on the themes, figures of speech, and rhetoric of ancient Roman elegy—that is, love poetry. First, the return to the Latin clegists Catullus, Ovid, Proper-tius, and Tibullus provided the basis for Francos adaptation to a female voice of their first-person laments about infidelity, jealousy, and loss. Sec-ond, Ovid’s Heroides, letters attributed to such classical heroines as Sap-pho and Dido in which the małe author ventriloquizes the complaints of abandoned women to their loyers, provided Franco with an epistolary model, while the poems Ovid wrote after he was exiled from Romę, the Epistulae ex Ponto₉ dealt with physical separation from a beloved country, a theme Franco adapted to her own absences from Venice. Elegiac themes were scen by the Venier literary theoreticians as well suited to the capitolo as a form. In treatises on the writing of poetry, members of the group ar-gued that the capitolo s chain of interlocking rhymes, creating a suspended