Fonte-Moderata

, is the assumed name of a celebrated Venetian lady, whose real name was Modesta Pozzo, and who was born at Venice in 1555, and lost her father and mother the first year of her life. In her younger days, she was put into the monastery of the nuns of Martha of Venice; but afterwards quitted it, and was married. She lived twenty years with her husband in great union, and then died in childbed in 1592. She learned poetry and the Latin tongue with the utmost ease; and is said to have had so prodigious a memory, that, having heard a sermon but once, she could repeat it word for word. She was the author of a poem entitled “11 Kloridoro,” and of another on the “Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Besides these and other poems, she published a prose work “Dei Meriti delle Donne,” in which she maintains, that the female sex is not inferior in understanding and merit to the male. This was printed immediately after her death. Father Ribera has made an eulogium of this learned heroine, in his “Theatre of Learned Women” and Doglioni wrote her life in Italian, in 1593. ²