Antonia Pulci: Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays

Medium Aevum, Spring, 1998 by Maja Mikula

Antonia Pulci: Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival.' Seven Sacred Plays, trans. James Wyatt Cook (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1996). xxx 282 pp. ISBN 0-226-68567-9. $33.00; 26.50 [pounds sterling] (hard covers). $15.00; 11.95 [pounds sterling] (p/b).

Antonia Pulci (1452--1501) was a gifted Florentine poet and playwright, whose sacred plays were mainly written for performance in confraternities and female convents. They reveal Pulci's familiarity with the hagiographic and didactic literature popular at the time, as well as with the great Florentine vernacular poets Dante and Petrarch. The refined composition of her drama also illastrates her mastery of the principal forms of Italian verse, especially ottava rima, terra dina, and rima baciata.

In four of the plays, the principal female characters display singular intelligence, rationality, constancy, compassion, and emotional stability. Thematically, the plays often focus on the issues relevant to the author's female contemporaries, such as the choice between marriage and religious life, abusive husbands and admirers, the hazards of childbearing and the frustrations of motherhood. The unique strength of Pulci's female characters as well as her choice of typically female themes have prompted the editor and translator, James Wyatt Cook, to compare the author with Christine de Pizan, as one of the major representatives of the `other voice' in European culture, challenging the dominant misogynist tradition.

Five of the seven plays in the book (St Francis, St Domitilla, St Guglielma, The Prodigal Son, and St Anthony the Abbot) are undoubtedly of Pulci's authorship, while the remaining two (St Theodora and Rosana) have been convincingly attributed to her by the editor and translator. He has chosen to represent the Italian rhymed hendecasyllabic line and stanza with English blank verse. The translation is remarkably readable, as well as faithful to the Original texts, on both a conceptual and tonal level.

The publication of Pulci's sacre rappresentazioni in English translation is a valuable and timely contribution to Renaissance scholarship. The book will appeal equally to the intellectual historian, historian of women, and literary theorist. For the intellectual historian, Pulci's plays will provide more insight into the literary and intellectual pursuits among the Florentine merchant and religious circles of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. For the historian of women, they will reveal more information about the concerns of middle-class Florentine women in the Renaissance period. Finally, for the literary theorist, they will represent precious exemplars of the genre of sacred plays or representations nearing the peak of its poetic and dramatic excellence.