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Updated 01-08-08
Olympia
Fulvia Morata /Olimpia (1526-1555)
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"...SO ON FIRE WITH LOVE FOR LEARNING."
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Olympia (or Olimpia) Morata was born in Ferrara, the eldest child of Fulvio Morato, a humanist scholar who was tutor to the younger sons of Alfonso d'Este, duke of Ferrara. In 1528 Alfonso's heir, Ercole, married Renee of France, sister-in-law of the French king, Francis I. Renee brought with her to the Este court advisors who, like Renee, held views on religious reform still permissible in France but less so in Italy. Olympia's father shared these views, and in 1532 was forced to leave Ferrara. For six years the family lived in other northern cities, where Morato lectured on the teachings of Luther and Calvin.
Ercole succeeded his father in 1534, and Renee was allowed to continue her patronage of reform, so in 1539, Fulvio Morato returned with his family. Soon, Olympia went to court to study with Ercole's and Renee's daughters, the eldest of whom, Anna d'Este, was five years younger than she. She soon came to be praised for her scholarship, especially in Latin and Greek, and to be put on show in public lectures. For seven years she lived the life and wrote the things expected of a young humanist scholar and courtier, "exalted to the skies," as she later described it.
In 1547, her father became ill, and Olympia left court to help her mother care for him until his death the following year. Morata then returned to court, but things had changed there: Anna had left to be married, and Ercole had finally succumbed to pressure from Rome to purge the court of religious reformers.
In Ferrara, Morata met a young German follower of Luther, Andreas Grunthler, who was finishing a medical degree. In late 1549 or early 1550, they married. By the end of 1550, the couple, accompanied by Morata's 8-year-old brother, was at Grunthler's home in Schweinfurt, in central Germany (Morata's mother and sisters remained in Italy). There Morata continued her writing: the second of two Latin dialogues; Greek poems; and letters --- written in Latin to fellow scholars (male and female) and in Italian to non-scholarly women. Two of her letters and one poem were published in 1553.
But in the spring of that year, life changed. In a war between mercenaries, the city of Schweinfurt was besieged for 13 months and then destroyed, and the Grunthler household left the city as refugees, having lost everything, including most of Morata's written work. They went eventually to Heidelberg, where Andreas got a position at the university while Morata, although ill since their flight from Schweinfurt, taught Greek in her home. In failing health she continued to try to help friends and fellow reformers through letters, but within a year she was dead; her husband and brother died less that two months later of the plague.
Although most of Morata's writing had been lost, her friends
gathered up all they could find and in 1558 one of them, Celio Curio, published the first edition
of her work, along with letters to her from others and laudatory
poems; other items were found and added in later editions. From
these, we can hear the voice of a woman trying to balance her
humanist ideals with her religious beliefs, and trying both to
live in an uncertain world and to help her friends to do the
same.
On this page you'll find:
Links to helpful sites online.
Excerpts from translations in print.
Information on secondary sources.
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1. In English:
(a) A link to the text of the 1834 book, Olympia Morata: Her Times, Life and Writings, Arranged from Contemporary and Other Authorities (attributed here to Caroline Bowles Southey, but written by Amelia Gillespie Smyth); some of the details of Morata's life have been made outdated by later research, but Part 3, on her writings (about two-thirds of the way down the page), gives Smyth's translation of 15 of Morata's letters from 1550, and of the 1551-52 "Dialogue between Theophilia and Philotima." You can also download the work ad a PDF file.
(b) After passages from Holt N. Parker's introduction to The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic (2003), the translitererated Greek and Parker's translation of one of Morata's early poems, "Never did the same thing please the hearts of all" (for more from Parker, see below, under "In print").
(c) Use your browser's search function to go to "Morata" for a translation made in the late 1500s or early 1600s of two letters sent from Heidelberg in 1554: one to Morata's sister, living in Rome; and one to Celio Curio. Both letters describe her family's flight from Schweinfurt (for a modern translation of part of the letter to Curio, see "In print").
(d) In an 1851 essay on Morata by Thomas Macorie, passages from a dozen letters are given from page 224 to the end. You can link to individual page images or to a scanned text of the whole.
(e) A brief passage from a 1554 letter from Heidelberg to Morata's best friend, Lavinia della Rovere, about relying on God rather than on man.
2. In the original languages:
(a) Links to the individual pages of Curio's 1562 edition of Morata's Orationes, Dialogi, Epistolae, Carmina, tam Latina quam Graeca: cum eruditoru[m] de ea testimoniis & laudibus (with a detail of a contemporary portrait). The orations are public lectures Morata gave as a teenager; those letters originally written in Italian were translated by Curio into Latin for publication. (Elsewhere, another way of accessing this edition; here you can link directly to the first pages of the "Orationes," the "Dialogi," the "Epistolae," and the "Carmina.")
(b) At the bottom of the page, links to eight pages of the earlier 1558 edition, Olympiae Fulviae Moratae mulieris omnium eruditissimae Latina et Graeca (only the second last link is to Morata's own words, the opening of a psalm in Greek).
3. The second image given here is the complete portrait of Morata of which a detail is given in #2a, above.
4. Essays:
(a) A biography of Morata by Jennifer Haraguchi (which begins with an alternative version of the last half of the poem given in #1a. above: "I, a woman, have dropped the symbols of my sex"), followed by a 2003 bibliography of editions and secondary sources.
(b) "An Introduction to Olympia Morata, a Forgotten, Feminist Voice from Sixteenth Century Italy" (2001), by Val Webb, focuses chiefly on the treatment of Morata's work over the centuries.
5. A review by Patricia Phillippy of Janet Levarie Smarr's 2005 study, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (for information on the book's treatment of Morata, see "Secondary sources").
6. At a German site, a map of Morata's travels, with a link, "Lebenstafel," to a timeline of her life; and at the link "Heidelberg," the Latin original of the inscriptions on her and her husband's tombs.
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[Holt N. Parker has translated all of Morata's extant original writing: 52 letters, 2 dialogues, 16 poems, and 3 public speeches, as well as letters to and about her by others, and other relevant documents. He does not include her early translations into Latin of the first two tales of the Decameron. For most of the poems Parker gives the original as well. The introduction gives detailed information on the historical background, and the bibliography includes the few earlier English-language studies on Morata. (See the book's table of contents online.):]
Morata, Olympia Fulvia. The complete writings of an Italian
heretic; edited and translated by Holt N. Parker (The other voice
in early modern Europe). Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003. (xxxiii, 275 p.)
LC#: DG540.8.M7 M67 2003; ISBN: 0226536688, 0226536696
Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-243) and indexes
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"I have closed my ears against these women's spells."
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[From a 1540 letter to the Greek tutor at Ferrara, temporarily away from the court. (This letter is in Latin; by the following year, Olympia was confident enough to write to him in Greek.) The tutor had apparently wondered if the 14-year-old Olympia would be distracted from her studies by the other young women of the court (references in later letters suggest that the young Morata had not been quite so detached as she claims here):]
I have always borne in mind that immortal God has given nothing better and more useful to the human race than these studies....
Therefore, since letters surpass all human affairs, what women's spindle and needles (as you say) will be able to call me away from the gentle Muses? I have closed my ears against these women's spells just as Ulysses did at the Sirens' rock. What? Will distaff and spindle be able to persuade me about a matter in which they have nothing to say? Or do perhaps these cheap gifts exhibit a certain enchantment in themselves? But my soul recoils so much from the women who wish me, as the saying is, to "lose the mainbrace to grab at the sheet," that I have decided to consider them to be the ones who are lost. [pp.90-91]
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"What dreams you would have heard me recite!"
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[Morata could laugh at herself as well as at others. In the next year she gave a public Latin lecture on Cicero: she opened with a conventional plea of being unworthy to address learned men and women, but then directly addressed the 10- year-old Anna d'Este:]
...[S]ince there will never be anything, no matter how arduous, that I would refuse to do if you impose it on me, princess Anna, I have chosen obedience over silence.
...I thought that Cicero's Paradoxes would be easy because it is a short work. But after I had put my shoulder to the burden, I realized that it was heavier that Aetna, and that not even Hercules, or even Atlas could lift it....
But at least it turned out well for me that I did not choose the Dream of Scipio, judging the work not from the greatness of the subject matter but the small number of its pages! What dreams you would have heard me recite then as I dreamed! And what snores! But perhaps we will fall asleep here too, and if it does not happen, that will be a miracle among other paradoxes. [p.76]
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"But I don't want to bother you...."
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[By the spring of 1550, Morata had married the German Andreas Grunthler, who soon left Ferrara for Germany to look for a position as a doctor. The new bride wrote to urge him to hurry; she certainly wouldn't nag, but:]
You can't believe how madly I love you.... So I beg you, I beseech you by your faith, that you do everything in your power to make sure that we're together in your country this summer, just as you promised. If you love me as much as I love you, you'll do it, I know.
But I don't want to bother you, so I won't say any more. I just mentioned the matter, not to nag you, but to remind you of your promise, when you've already got enough to do. [p.99]
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"Flatterers... don't just flatter the princes."
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[Throughout the 1540s Lavinia della Rovere, an older married woman, had been Morata's closest friend at the Este court. This is from a Latin dialogue written in 1550, as Morata waited for Grunthler to send for her:]
Olympia: If only I hadn't wasted time in... ignorance of what's really important! I used to think that I was most learned because I read the writers and scholars of all the liberal arts and was wallowing in their works like mud. But even as I was exalted to the skies by everyone's praise, I realized that I lacked all learning and was ignorant....
Lavinia: But everyone said that you were endowed with remarkable piety and virtue.
Olympia: That was the story and what you heard.... Flatterers, because they want to get close to princes, don't just flatter the princes but their friends too, or at least the ones they think are especially close....
Lavinia: I heard from your teachers how much work and labor you put into your studies.... But what I especially admire is that when you were a girl you never deviated from your resolve, despite the urgings of silly women and the attacks of men that you were going to waste all your other gifts and that you'd never find a man who would prefer you to be educated than to be rich.
Olympia: For my part, when I considered the matter over and over again as diligently as possible, I could find no other reason for me to work at these studies other than "it lay at the feet of God." He gave me the mind and talent to be so on fire with love for learning that no one could keep me from it. [pp.101-102]
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"God has given me... the leisure to give time to literature."
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[Morata had in fact found a man "who would prefer you to be educated than to be rich," and in Germany by the fall of 1550 she was able to write to Celio Curio, an old friend of her father's, of her peace after the tumult of her last years in Ferrara (the illness and death of her father, her alienation from the court):]
...I have returned to divine studies, in testimony of which there are some poems which I made last year. I'm adding them below and sending them to you, so that you can see that God has given me, after I was overwhelmed by misfortunes, the leisure to give time to literature. He has also given me as a bride to a man who greatly enjoys my studies. And that's how things are with us. [p.108]
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"The king of great Olympus and the much-bearing earth...."
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[Among the poems sent to Curio in 1550 was at least one of her Greek versions of the biblical psalms that Morata's contemporaries considered her greatest work. We know that she was still working on them in 1554 (her husband apparently set some to music); only seven were found after her death. Her version of Psalm 23 (the familiar "The Lord is my shepherd") illustrates Morata's biblical humanism, the incorporation of classical (here Homeric) learning with religious devotion:]
The king of great Olympus and the much-bearing
earth
shepherds me. What shall I want? For in a soft
meadow He seated me, where flows beautiful streaming water
with which He refreshes me, whenever labor has overcome my heart.
He Himself leads me to the straight path of justice
for the sake of great mercy and His glory.
And if I go through the misty gloom
of monstrous Hades,
nevertheless the mind in my breast will be untrembling.
For You have always gone before me as a helper,
And your rod and staff support me when I have fallen.
You set forth for me a beautiful and well-polished table
which gave me great and mighty strength, when I am overpowered
by hostile hands in mighty combat.
You anointed my head richly with oil, and a cup
You gave me, preparing it full of honey-sweet wine.
You always pity me in Your heart, so that all the days
I may dwell in your high-roofed great and beautiful house. [p.188]
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"Don't be afraid."
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[From the "Dialogue between Theophilia and Philotima," written in 1551-1552 to console and counsel Lavinia della Rovere, whose marriage had not brought her the happiness she had sought. Near the end of the dialogue, the two women speak of the much-debated topic of predestination: whether the doctrine should bring hope or despair to sinners:]
Philotima: I desire to to seek God.... But I'm afraid that because of my many sins my way to Him is obstructed. You just said that he cannot bear the foul odor of sinners.
Theophilia: Don't be afraid. ...[N]o odor of sinners can be so foul that its force cannot be broken and weakened by the sweetest odor that flows from the death of Christ, which alone God can perfume. Therefore seek Christ.... "He who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved".... And so He promises to everyone in general, lest anyone doubt that these things were done for him. Or rather if you merely desire to get knowledge of faith, then know for certain that you will get it. [pp.125-26]
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"...allowed to profess ourselves openly as Christians."
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[In 1552, Morata, her husband, and her brother were in Andreas' hometown of Schweinfurt, a free imperial city which had joined the Reformation ten years earlier, and where they were free to live according to their religious beliefs. However, Grunthler was offered a better position at the court of the Catholic King Ferdinand at Linz. Grunthler found the offer attractive; Morata was more hesitant. She wrote to a friend who was one of Ferdinand's counselors:]
Since he longs to go there, it pleases me too, for it is right for me to conform myself to his will, and I am unable honorably to disagree with him. "Any earth is home for the brave," but we will hasten with oar and sail to the place where we are allowed to profess ourselves openly as Christians and not have to use the ceremonies of the popes.... [P]lease let us know about this matter.... [p.128]
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"I should write about... what's certain."
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[The family did not go to Linz; Morata's life might have been longer if they had. In Schweinfurt they were caught up not in a religious conflict (the leaders on both sides had fought for both Catholic and Protestant rulers) but in a war of territorial aggrandizement fought by mercenaries. Just before the city came under siege in 1553, Morata wrote to a friend still in Ferrara:]
I don't think it's important for me to write my observations on the war that's currently hanging over Germany. Others will tell you the news, and rumor will bring even more. I don't think I should write about anything except what's certain. [p.132]
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"Death was the result for half the city."
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[The siege lasted for over 13 months; it was followed by the destruction of the city by the invading troops. A month after the family had escaped to Heidelberg, Morata wrote to Curio, following her own rule to describe only what she knew:]
As soon as Margrave Albrecht quartered his army at Schweinfurt because of its strategic location, his enemies, who were many, laid siege to the town. They began to assault it and to pound the walls on all sides day and night with siege machines. At the same time, inside the walls we were afflicted with many injuries at the hands of the Margrave's troops, and no one was safe in his own house. Besides, since the money they were owed was not being disbursed, they [the troops] kept threatening that they would take everything from the citizens, as if we had invited or brought them here.
The city was already completely exhausted from feeding so many soldiers, and then from close contact with them a dire plague invaded nearly all the citizens, so severe that most were deranged from the pain. Death was the result for half the city. My most loving husband was affected by the disease, so that there seemed to be no hope for his life, but God, having pity on me in my utmost affliction, cured him without any medical intervention (there were no medicines in the town)....
Once the plague had been driven back by God, immediately we were besieged by an even bigger enemy army, which kept hurling fire into the the city day and night. Often at night you would have thought the whole town was was about to go up in flames, and at that time we were often forced to hide out in a wine cellar.
At last, when we were hoping for a happy outcome to this war due to the Margrave's departure..., we fell in the greatest misery. For scarcely had he left the city with his army than on the next day the soldiers of the two bishops and of the men of Nurenberg invaded the city, and after pillaging it, had it burned.
Truly God snatched us from the midst of the flames, when one of the enemy soldiers himself warned us to get out of the city before it was burning in every quarter, because it was about to be burnt to the ground. We obeyed him and left, stripped and denuded of everything---we were not allowed to take even a penny. In fact, our clothes were ripped off us in the middle of the town square and I was left with nothing to cover my body except a linen tunic. [pp.139-40]
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"I looked like the queen of the beggars."
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[Morata goes on to describe the flight: her husband was captured twice and threatened with death, the people of the towns through which they passed were afraid to take them in. Writing a month later, she can look at herself with some humor; but she also mentions the illness that would lead to her death a year and a half later:]
Among the refugees I looked like the queen of the beggars. I entered the town with bare feet, unkempt hair, torn clothes (which weren't even mine but had been loaned me by some woman).
I was so exhausted from the journey that I developed a fever, which I could not get rid of in all of my wanderings. [p.140]
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"Ignore the fact that I am a woman."
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[In Heidelberg, although never fully recovered from her illness, Morata continued her correspondence. In a 1554 letter to a woman in the Roman household of Lavinia della Rovere (but not a scholar, so the letter is written in Italian), Morata does what she never does in her letters to men: she calls attention to her place as a woman writing. After exhorting her reader to study scripture:]
I know for certain that if you obey my admonitions, you will see that the Lord will strengthen you. Ignore the fact that I am a woman when I advise you. Rather be certain that God is graciously inviting you to Himself with words spoken through my mouth.
[And again:]
Don't consider the person who talks to you; rather consider if she speaks her own words or those of God. [pp.162-53]
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"It is you clear duty to show how you feel."
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[The young Anna d'Este with whom Morata had studied at Ferrara but whom she had not seen for seven years was now in France as the Duchess of Guise; her husband was the leader of those imposing harsh penalties on French Protestants. Less than four months before her death in 1555, Morata wrote to Anna, begging her to intercede with her husband:]
Although we have been separated for some time now by a great distance, most Illustrious Lady Anna, nevertheless your memory has never left my heart. If I had dared (and I had many reasons), I would have sent my letters to you.... You know how closely we lived together for all those years, even though you were my lady and mistress, and how we shared the study of letters, which rightly ought to increase more and more a mutual kindness between us, uniting us closer day by day....
[After offering Anna any service she could provide in Heidelberg and urging the younger woman to read scripture, Morata continues:]
Therefore, my sweetest lady, since God has blessed you with such kindness in order to open His truth to you, and since you know that all the men who are being burned there are innocent and are undergoing so many tortures for the sake of the gospel of Christ, it is you clear duty to show how you feel, either by pleading for the, to the king [Henry II of France] or by praying for them. If you are silent or connive, allow your people to be tortured and let them be burned, and fail to show at least with words that this displeases you, you will seem by your silence to conspire in their slaughter and to agree with the enemies of Christ.
Perhaps you will say,"If I do that, I may make the king or my husband angry with me and make many new enemies." Think that it is better to be hated by men than by God, Who is able to torture not just the body but also the soul in perpetual fire....
See that you think on these things. If only I know that you were seriously cultivating piety and fearing God!...
I have written this to you prompted by the deepest love. For when God calls me to the highest heavenly kingdom, my greatest wish is that you will be a sharer in the same eternal joys. [pp,169-70]
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[In Janet Levarie Smarr's study of Italian and French writers between 1450 and 1600, the chapter "Dialogue & Spiritual Counsel" includes a discussion of Morata's two Latin dialogues written between 1550 and 1552 for her friend, the noblewoman Lavinia della Rovere. The book's first chapter explains Smarr's conception of "dialogue," and the last looks at the relationship among the writers discussed. (See the book's table of contents online.):]
Smarr, Janet Levarie. Joining the conversation: dialogues
by Renaissance women. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
c2005. (312 p.)
LC#: PN1551 .S55 2005; ISBN: 0472114352
Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-303) and index
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[John L. Flood's 6-page entry on Morata in this reference work discusses both her life and her work. Flood give both the original and his translation of relevant documents, including part of a letter by Morata, as well as a detailed bibliography:]
German writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, 1280-1580
/ edited by James Hardin and Max Reinhardt (Dictionary of literary
biography; v. 179). Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. (xxx, 427 p.:
ill., ports.; 29 cm)
LC#: PN451 .D52 v.179; ISBN: 0787610682
Includes bibliographical references and index
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[This earlier reference work includes
a 11-page entry on Morata by Albert Rabil, Jr, which discusses
not only her life but her major themes, as well as her critical
reception. Rabil pays special attention to the two 1550-51 dialogues;
he sees the "Dialogue between Theophilia and Philotima"
as her most significant work. (See
the book's table of contents online.):]
Italian women writers: a bio-bibliographical sourcebook / edited
by Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
(xxxi, 476 p.)
LC#: PQ4063 .I88 1994; ISBN: 0313283478
Includes bibliographical references (p. [447]-452) and index
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[This collection of biographical essays by Roland Bainton includes one on Morata, in which Bainton summarizes her writings and gives his translation of some passages:]
Bainton, Roland Herbert. Women of the
Reformation in Germany and Italy. Minneapolis: Augsburg Pub.
House, 1971. (279 p.: ill., facsims, geneal. table, maps, ports)
LC#: BR317 .B3 1971; ISBN: 08066111612
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Updated 01-08-08