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Cassandra fedele biography

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Fedele, Cassandra (1465–1558)

A renowned scholar, born in Venice and educated in classical literature, rhetoric, science, philosophy, and the new humanistic tradition. While still a young girl, she learned to speak Greek and Latin and started to gain a reputation as a skilled, persuasive public speaker. She won notice throughout Italy with a stirring speech she gave at the University of Padua, on the graduation of her cousin, praising the study of the arts and sciences. This speech, the Oratio pro Bertucio Lambert, was printed in Italy and Germany. She corresponded with the leading scholars of Europe as well as the nobility. In 1488, she was invited by Isabella, the future queen of Spain, to join her court. She refused this invitation—some historians believe the Doge of Venice deliberately wished to keep her as an ornament of his city and prevented her from moving to Spain. After her marriage to Giammaria Mapelli in 1499 she traveled to Crete—then a possession of Venice—with her husband, a physician. On returning to Venice in 1520, the couple lost their po

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Cassandra Fedele
by
Diana Robin
  • LAST REVIEWED: 28 November 2016
  • LAST MODIFIED: 28 November 2016
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0339

  • Allen, Sister Prudence. The Concept of Woman. Vol. 2, The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250–1500. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, UK: W. B. Eerdmans, 2002.

    Historian Sister Prudence Allen argues that Cassandra Fedele, like her fellow female humanists Laura Cereta and Isotta Nogarola, joined the new philosophical discourse on the formation of identity (pp. 1045–1047). Fedele, like Cereta and Nogarola, was accepted in elite circles of learned men because of her knowledge of the ancient philosophers. Her writings, however, undercut Aristotle’s philosophy of gender polarity and the inferiority of women.

  • King, Margaret L. “Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Italian Renaissance.” Soundings 59.3 (1976): 280–305.

    Margaret King’s inaugural article on six early humanist women writers who struggled against barriers to learned-women advancement, among them Cassandra Fedele, Isotta Nogarola, a

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    Cassandra Fedele

    Italian humanist writer

    Cassandra Fedele

    A portrait of Cassandra Fedele

    Bornc. 1465

    Venice, Italy

    Died1558

    Venice, Italy

    Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465 – 1558 CE) was an Italian humanist writer.[1] She has been called the most renowned woman scholar in Italy during the last decades of the Quattrocento.[2]

    Early life

    Fedele was born in Venice in 1465 to Barbara Leoni and Angelo Fedele.[1] While Fedele does not mention her mother in her writings, we have evidence that her father was respected among the aristocracy and took a great interest in his daughter's learning, however he himself seems not to have been employed in a particular trade.[1] The Fedele family, who were citizens, rather than nobles, of Venice, had originally had come from Milan.[1]

    When Fedele reached fluency in Greek and Latin at the age of twelve, she was sent by her father to Gasparino Borro, a Servite friar, who tutored her in classical literature, philosophy, the sciences, and dialectics.[1][

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