Heiress of Fiction: Marfisa and the Macabre Legacy of Chivalric Ferrara
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2024
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<jats:p>This essay traces parallel developments in the myths and legends associated with the historical noblewoman Marfisa d’Este (1554–1608) and her literary counterpart Marfisa, the warrior knight from chivalric romance epic poetry. Through the Este princess’s embrace of her cross-dressing fictional double in courtly performance, alongside the evolution of the figure “Marfisa bizzarra” in Italian mock epic, the intermedial afterlives of these two figures reinterpreted the women’s brazen, autonomous agency as nefarious, destructive desire. Fantasies of decadent-turned-grim Ferrara, Marfisa’s native city in poetic and historical terms, guided overlapping acts of reception and transmission between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries.</jats:p>
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Driscoll, K (2024). Heiress of Fiction: Marfisa and the Macabre Legacy of Chivalric Ferrara. Renaissance Quarterly, 77(4). pp. 1134–1183. 10.1017/rqx.2024.432 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32379.
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Kate Driscoll
Kate Driscoll is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her research centers on early modern Italian literature, chivalric epic poetry, women's writing, classical reception, gender studies, performance history, and opera studies. She focuses especially on literary communities, patronage politics, formal and informal republics of letters, author-reader connections and dynamics, literary hospitality, voice and the spectacle of speech, and musical translations of literary works.
Her first book, Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in Fall 2026. This study was awarded the 28th annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association and the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library.
She is currently collaborating on three projects:
- with Angelica Duran, she is editing The Edinburgh Companion to Renaissance Women and the Arts.
- with Beatrice Fazio, she is editing Gender and Geography in Early Modern Italy: Knowledge Production and Transmission (1400-1700).
- with Jessica Goethals, she is editing and translating Margherita Costa's epic-turned-libretto Fertile Flora (Flora feconda, A Mediterranean Epic) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.
Her most recent articles (published and forthcoming) include:
- "Laboring in the Library-Gold Mine: Citational Kinship in Luisa Bergalli's Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d'ogni secolo (1726)," forthcoming in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21.2 (2027)
- "Vexed Expectations in a Pregnant Genre: Epic, Maternity, and Empire in Margherita Costa's Flora feconda (1640)," ITER - Immagini e testi per l'Europa del Rinascimento 3 (2026): 109-26; forthcoming summer 2026.
- "Utopia incognita: Tasso's Atlantic and the Decolonial Imagination," Journal of Early Modern Studies 15, special issue on “Material Space and Literary Production in Early Modern Europe” (2026): 167-189
Essays currently in production study female ambassadors in Tasso and Vivaldi; the intersections between acoustics and affect in Tasso and Monteverdi; and the overlap among genealogical, gendered, and racial constructions in Pulci's Morgante.
Before arriving at Duke, Dr. Driscoll was Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Colorado College and a postdoctoral research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin’s Cluster of Excellence, “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.”
Her research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the German Excellence Initiative, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
From 2022-2025, she served as co-editor of the Italian Studies Channel on the New Books Network. Her conversations with authors can be found here.
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