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When the wretched perceive or feel that their woes arouse compassion, their longing to give vent to their anguish is thereby increased. And so, since, from long usance, the cause of my anguish, instead of growing less, has become greater, the wish has come to me, noble ladies… to win your pity, if I may, by telling the tale of my sorrows.
— Boccaccio, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta [[Giovanni Boccaccio, La Fiammetta, trans. Brogan, p.2.]]
HAT REMAINS OF MY ACCOUNT, dear Claudio, will serve only to fill the gaps, for Fortune has decreed that the words of young Angelica shall resound for themselves. She, being a woman of learning, entertained herself for many years by recording her most private thoughts. No doubt certain pages have been lost, but many more were entrusted to me for safekeeping. Her own pen is sufficient to tell the story nearly in its entirety.
The following is a letter written at an uncertain date to her friend, the nun Lady Maura Lucenia.
My dear sister Maura Lucenia,
You asked me to tell you the story of my younger years, for, as you put it, ‘the upbringing makes the woman;’ and I will oblige if only to repay you for your kindness to me—though to do so may fly in the face of modesty.
I was born in the year of our Lord 1577, when the Sun was in the sign of Virgo—or so I am told.
My mother, Laura Aldighieri, came from Verona. She was homesick as long as she lived, and often pined for the elevated culture of that city. She was a lover of poetry, and at the time of my incubation was avidly reading Boiardo’s Orlando In Love; and so she named me Angelica, after the heroine of that epic. Poetry is in our blood: her family is related to the immortal Dante, as the Aldighieri of Verona and the Alighieri of Florence are all descend from Dante’s great-great-grandfather, Messer Cacciaguida. The Aldighieri were the original owners of my family’s residence, the Castle Contignaco, and the hell-singed Florentine is said to have lived in these halls during his exile. My mother’s great-uncle Gian Matteo was the last Aldighieri to rule the castle, and when he perished without an heir, the Duke of Milan confiscated the fief and awarded it to my paternal family. So you see, in marrying my father, my mother delivered this ancestral land back into the care of an Aldighieri.
My father is the Marquis of Corticelle, which is to say lord of the fiefs of Contignaco and Gallinella. I suppose I should thank God for a noble birth; at least I was not wanting with respect to worldly comforts. Being the only surviving offspring at that point of my parents’ union, my birth was fervently celebrated even though I was of the weaker sex. My godfather I have forgotten entirely, but my godmother was la Iolanda, a woman dear to me for her fearless virtue.
As a sickly child I often fell prey to various illnesses. I was entrusted to the care of a rustic named Celia, who had been my wet nurse, so that someone could attend to me even during the long watches of the night when my frail lungs would fail me. But I weathered these storms, thanks to this vigilant nurse and my mother’s gentle love.
My mother was a lady of liberal education and unsurpassed refinement. I don’t know if it’s natural for a child to idolize her mother, but absence makes the heart grow fonder, and to this day I preserve the most saintly image of her. She was an elegant seamstress, and began my education with the needle as soon as I could hold it between two fingers without pricking myself. Her artistic temperament shone also in her love for exotic fashions. She taught me to see the weft of linen and the stitching of embroidery with my hands, and to not be misled by tawdry jewels, but to feel deeper for the true quality in things. This lesson has proved invaluable to me—as invaluable as the discernment of true gold to an alchemist.
I happily took up the needle as it gave my mother and I an excuse to sit together in my room. Yet it was bedtime I most looked forward to, for it was there that her liveliness met my true and destined passion: the written word. She read to me widely, but especially out of mythology: of gods, heroes, beasts, and magical transformations.
These short years were the most precious of my life, though I don’t have much more than a string of images like rosary beads to remember them by, childhood memory being a neighbor to dreams. I remember Mamà’s finger pointing between my book of constellations, with their imaginative woodcuts, and the open window to where the seven Pleiades are supposed to be—we count up to six, and then stop, keeping me in a state of suspension through the night. I recall the dim light and labyrinthine mystery in the castle cellar, the feeling that a whole world lies beyond the darkness; and faceless guests of honor at our dinner table, all blurred into a single right honorable someone, always a man who laughs too loud, always in a ruff which he tears off so as to not dribble wine on the linen; Papà striking my hand for reaching toward a hot plate, then pressing it firmly and apologetically between his fingers to release the hurt. My heart pressed up against Mamà’s as she carries me through our yard and tells me of a paladin buried beneath one of these trees—I don’t know which one, though I look for it; and freshly cut roses, fragrant, my finger pricking on the thorn. Those modern chapbooks with little feast day plays for the saints, and the the smell of new paper when Mamà receives them back from the binder sewn into a single volume, the snap of flexing board when she lets me crack it open for the first time. Sheer linen drapery hanging from her marriage bed, drifting on the summer night’s breeze. Celia’s laughter, completely unrestrained, as she peels cracked chestnuts into a pot at her feet, and each one hits the bottom with a ding while the shells crumble out of her hands to the ground.
This time of childhood idyll was not to last. It was clear to my mother that I was well-suited to learning, being particularly bright with respect to the vernacular, so she petitioned the Marquis to have me properly schooled. My father, indifferent to my presence, arranged for my entry into a prestigious abbey. No doubt my mother sacrificed her own feelings in sending me away, but there was no question where I belonged. So at the age of six I was sent to the Benedictine Convent of San Paolo in Parma, where I met you.
It seems silly to describe a place where you lived for many more years than I, Lady Maura, but you said I should tell my story as if to a room of literati, and so I shall.
The Abbey of San Paolo sits in the heart of Parma north of the Cathedral and east of Lungoparma by the river. This convent, despite having a number of nobleman’s daughters within its stone enclave just off the Strada al Theatro, was hermetically sealed from the rest of the world by high walls and gardens. To this day I know little of Parma or its customs, except how the Parmenese conduct themselves on Feast Days, since every Christmas and Easter some of the lay sisters took all of us girls in guardianship to the Cathedral for Mass—though afterward we were swiftly ushered back into our enclosure like hens. Every door in that place had a lock, and the Abbess carried so many keys with her that her belt sagged with the weight of them.
Being precocious with my letters as well as odious to the other girls on account of my intemperate tongue, I kept close to the Sister Librarian, who oversaw my education personally. This sister, a Prudentia of Torrile, was naturally endowed with a prodigious memory, and knew the contents of every single book in the abbey’s library. We would often spend her free moments seated on stone benches in the gallery, reading works in Latin—for she trained me assiduously in Latin grammar, and wouldn’t permit me to speak to her in the vernacular.
The Abbess also favored me occasionally with her attention. I would try to contrive excuses to meet with her—even if that meant getting into trouble—if only to catch another glimpse of her chamber, which was truly magnificent. The room was covered by a great dome, which a famous local artist had painted expertly to seem like a closed arbor in the midst of some hidden Arcadian garden.∗Angelica here means Correggio, the famous early 16th century painter from Parma. There was something indescribable about standing in this inner chamber, yet peeking in on a blue sky full of angels, and knowing that outside those walls grew real gardens of paradise. It was like being in Plato’s cave where shadows on the walls prefigure the world of truth outside.
Beneath festoons and blue portals, near the base of the arch, the painter had rendered lunettes which gave the impression of alcoves. In these illusory niches, mystical figures enacted their eternal dramas. I was certain to memorize the entire room to serve as a Memory Palace. I remember in the north and southeast corners a priest and priestess poured out libations to the altars of life and death. Between them a reclining woman held a scorpion in her hand, and Andromeda hung in chains, both suspended at the brink.
The fireplace of those quarters was crowned by a fresco of the goddess Diana, rampant and crowned with the Moon. The architrave of that hearth bore a Latin inscription: IGNEM GLADIO NE FODIAS, or ‘Disturb not the flame with the sword.’ Once I asked the Abbess why the mantle bore this epithet.
“Because,” she said, “rather than take the Kingdom of Heaven by force, we would light the divine fire within us.”
I couldn’t help myself, and asked why her mantle was graced by this lunar goddess and not the Virgin Mary instead.
“Pagan images prefigure our own redemption,” she replied.
“Our redemption in Christ?” I rejoined.
She shooed me from her room rather than answer me. For some reason the incident lingered with me, though I don’t know why.
From ages six to eleven I lived in the abbey with Sister Prudentia as my tutor and dear friend, though she was nearly four decades my elder. In that time I learned not only Latin Grammar, but some Greek as well.
Following Pentecost in my eleventh year I was suddenly called back to my father’s estate. My mother, it seems, was gravely ill. She had been pregnant—of which I knew nothing—and both the gestation and labor were exceedingly difficult. My younger brother, Sandrino, survived the ordeal unscathed, but afterward my mother languished and seemed unable to recover.
I cannot tell you how transformed I found that dear woman when I ran to her bedside. Though her hair was still lustrous, fanned out as it was across her shoulders and pillows, the marks around her eyes and mouth showed she had become acquainted with pain.
She knew she was going to die, though I, being not yet twelve years of age, knew nothing of the kind. It comforts me in hindsight to believe she had been waiting for my return.
She bid me read to her from those same books which had supplied the fables of my childhood. The bedroom was even the same: she had moved to my old quarters so as to not disturb her marriage bed.
I read to her from Ovid; I recited her favorite story: the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto, and the worried search of her mother Ceres.
Meanwhile, the heartsick Ceres seeks her daughter:
She searches every land, all waves and waters.∗Ovid, _Metamorphoses_, trans. Mandelbaum, lines 438-39, p. 164.
She began to weep as I read this stanza. To this day I don’t know if she cried for me, her daughter; or if it was Proserpine she identified with, young Proserpine crying out for her mother from the realm of the dead.
When the tale was told, she fervently drew me to her side:
“Dearest daughter,” she said, her words striving through tears, “I will always love you. Soon the world will ask that you grow up even though you are still a child. You will be given off to a man as his wife, or you will be shut away in a cloister for the rest of your days. Whichever is your fortune, remember your mother’s love. And whether God make husband or abbess to rule over you, remember it is God who rules over them. So do not hand over your heart to any but God. Love the one in whose charge God places you, but remember: to love someone is not the same as to yield to them your innermost chamber.”
I begged her to hold on a little longer, but she collapsed into her pillow, brought near to Pluto’s threshold by exhaustion. I kept vigil in the corner of her room, embroidering a weeping Ceres.
In the morning I found she had passed sometime in the night, quietly, as if she did not want to disturb anyone by her going. All my happiness departed with her for the realm of the shades. If she reaches the gates of Paradise, I hope she will bear my happiness with her, so at least some part of me might dwell in that blessed realm.
I haven’t spoken yet of my father. There is little I can say of him in Christian charity, except that he loved my mother more than this life or the next. He loved her too much, in truth, and was so covetous of her that he constrained her from society, even though she was a liberal-minded woman with a love for literary company. I cannot deny that men have been set at the head of households, and in Christian places we do not live like the Amazons—but so much more is the responsibility upon men to be good kings, and not tyrants. I have not found a good one yet in Christendom, though I admit my experience thus far is limited by my ill fortune.
My brother’s care was entrusted to the nursemaid Celia, but I was kept home from that point on, called upon early to fulfill my mother’s wifely duties around the estate. Sandrino, too, fell under my care, for between Celia’s age and my undeniable youth, the work was only just done, and poorly. My unhappy brother suffered unavoidable neglect.
But I fear I am overburdening you, dear Sister, with my woes. I have spent far too much time dwelling on those unfortunate years, and I would spare you more. Yet you instructed me to be thorough, so I will try your patience a little longer.