Abstract Summary
How did women learn Ancient Greek in the Renaissance? My paper will address this question by discussing two Greek grammar books written for Ippolita Sforza, the eldest daughter of the Duke of Milan Francesco I Sforza and a highly intelligent woman who produced numerous Latin letters, orations, and poems.
Abstract :
When the language and literature of ancient Greece were being rehabilitated during the Renaissance, the students were first and foremost learned humanists, almost as a rule men. An early exception was Ippolita Maria Sforza (1446–1484), the eldest daughter of the Duke of Milan Francesco I Sforza and a highly intelligent woman who produced numerous Latin letters, orations, and poems. Two versions of the Greek grammar by the Byzantine émigré Constantine Lascaris (1434–1501) are dedicated to the young Ippolita, the one partly an autograph by Lascaris in the original Greek from the years 1462–65, the other a Latin verse translation of Lascaris’ grammar by the humanist Bonino Mombrizio (1424–ca. ?1478/82), dedicated to Ippolita in the years 1463–65. It is moreover not inconceivable that Lascaris tutored Ippolita in those years. Yet the principal evidence for Ippolita as a student of Greek is presented by the two aforementioned manuscripts. In my paper, I aim to address two questions starting from this body of evidence. Firstly, how did the grammarian Lascaris and his translator Mombrizio envisage Ippolita as a learner of Greek? Secondly, in what ways did this differ from the default didactic approach focused on (groups of) male students? I will answer them by thoroughly analyzing the (partly unedited) grammatical manuscripts, both their dedicatory prologues and the contents of the grammars. I will relate this to traces of Greek learning in Ippolita’s extant writings.
