Una figura del dialogo interculturale nella Venezia primosecentesca: la «bella Hebrea» Sara Copio Sullam

The essay reflects on the significance of a writer such as Sara Copio Sullam in relation to gradually more extensive and complex contexts: early–seventeenth–century Venice, the contemporary Italian literary «milieu», and the extent and quality of its survival in later periods, with their increasing variety of voices and opinions, first lined up in opposing factions of detractors and supporters, and then brought together under the «tópos» of the «femme savante».
Throughout her literary career, her main activity was that of cultivating poetry in the Italian language, after the example of another fundamental exponent of intercultural and inter–religious dialogue in early–seventeenth–century Venice, the Rabbi Leon Modena.
In accordance with her natural attitude of dialogue with what was other then herself, whether religiously, culturally or humanly, Sara’s most frequent correspondent was a Catholic man of letters with a “restrained baroque” poetics, the Genoese Ansaldo Cebà, whose correspondence with her can only in part be reconstructed from the «Lettere […] scritte a Sarra Copia», and those written by the author to other recipients (both sets collected and printed in 1623).
Involved despite herself in a theological controversy on the immortality of the soul with the priest Baldassare Bonifacio, and in a moralistic–literary controversy with her tutor Numidio Paluzzi and the painter Alessandro Berardelli, Sara responded both in verse and prose, denying the accusation that she was not the author of her own writings, an accusation that was also levelled at her as a critic.
The essay is followed by an Appendix containing extracts from Bonifacio’s «Risposta» to Sara’s «Manifesto» (both works published in 1621), with notes and commentary.