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8 \ntroduction

yet controlled sense of uncertainty, was a good vehicle for the dramatiza-tion of conflicting and shifting emotions, especially the emotions of love.¹²

Franco picks up two different strands from the Roman poets in her capitoli. Like Ovid, she writes some in the painful present tense of exile (3, 9, 11, 17, 20); like the elegists, she describes the effects of the betrayal, in-difference, or cruelty that have led to her flight (21,22). Although most of the themes of the Roman poets are easily adaptable to a womans text, Franco s elegiac capitoli transform the male-gendered voice of Latin love poetry through a shift in the position of the speaker. Whereas the Roman poets present themselves as helpless victims of courtesans (Lesbia, Cyn-thia, Corinna), whom they represent as powerful, talkative, and frankly sexual, Franco, as a courtesan herself, enacts those qualities—unavailable to either decorous Roman or Venetian women—in the forthright, active voice of her poems.

A third literary model that Franco took from the past was the familiar letter, a letter written to a friend but intended for eventual publication. Familiar letters had a complex origin: Cicero s and Senecas letters, ancient Roman debates about oratorical practice, and Renaissance reworkings of the epistolary genre. When Franco writes in Letter 37 that she will imitate her correspondent by using a style that is laconica rather than asiatica, she is referring to (though not, in fact, using) the brevity and plain speech of Cicero’s letters, as opposed to the highly stylized, intricate prose style con-demned by Quintilian in his book on the ideał orator, in which he equated a man using such elaborate style to “a dressed-up whore.” ¹³ Piętro Aretino, who claimed to be the first to bring classical epistolary writing into Italian, similarly denounced the artifice and reverence for classical style of his contemporaries, claiming that his own energetic, convoluted syntax was closer to naturę than their decorative refinements.¹⁴ The members of Ve-niers academy translated a number of volumes of Latin letters, including those of Seneca and Pliny, in the 1540s, and handbooks on letter-writing multiplied rapidly after Francesco Sansovino’s 1565 guide to epistolary models, 7/ Segretario (The Secretary).¹⁵ By the end of the 1560s, in the

12.    On the uses of the capitolo in terza runa for love poetry, sec Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 204-13.

13.    Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, translated into Italian by Orazio Toscanella and dedicatcd to Domenico Venier in 1566. On the equation of a man who uses an elaborate rhetorical style and a “dressed-up whore,” see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity,^,, Representations 20 (1987): 77-87, especially 79-80. See also Rosenthal, The Honcst Courtesan, 314 nn. 36, 37.

14.    Piętro Aretino, Lettere, ilprimo e ilsecondo libro, in Tutte leopere, ed. Francesco Flora and Alessandro del Vita (Milan: Mondadori, 1960). See Letter 1: 156 (Venice, 25 June 1537), 193-94.

15.    On volumes of letters printed in Venicc in the mid-to-late sixteenth century, see Amcdeo