, is the assumed name of a celebrated Venetian lady, whose real name
, 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