Tra le carte della Marchesa. Inventario delle lettere di Isabella d'Este, con un'analisi testuale e sintattica

My research focuses on one of the most significant female figures of the Italian Renaissance, Isabella d'Este. During the years she spent at the court of Mantua (1490-1539), at the beginning as wife of the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, then acting as regent of the State for her son Federico, and finally as "Marchesa madre", the noblewoman entertained friendships with writers and artists. Nevertheless, she held diplomatic relations with European monarchs, emperors, princes and lords of the Italian Courts. These relationships can now be reread in a new light, thanks to her dense collection of letters, one of the most important of the Renaissance both in terms of quantity and quality. The "Archivio di Stato di Mantova" preserves and safeguards this treasure. The "serie F.II.9" of the "Archivio Gonzaga" includes all the "copialettere" of the Gonzaga family. These are books written by an official secretary who supervised the recording of the missives that the members of the family sent to many recipients, especially since the fifteenth century. The "copialettere" reserved to Isabella’s letters are 53, and they are divided into 10 "buste" (from 2991 to 3000). The work I have done during my PhD can be divided into two parts: on the one hand it has been investigated the linguistic aspects of these documents, on the other hand the archival side. These two areas of interest can be read independently, but they can also be connected, in order to provide a broader perspective on the possible research fields that the correspondence itself offers. Syntax Important linguistic studies on letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth century have been published since the Sixties. Still fundamental are the works of Angelo Stella on Ariosto, Domizia Trolli on Niccolò da Correggio and Massimo Prada on Pietro Bembo. However, these studies do not focus on syntax, and this gap have been filled only recently, thanks to the contributions of Paolo D'Achille on the oral speech and of Massimo Palermo on the Carteggio Vaianese. These studies are the main models for the analysis of certain linguistic peculiarities of Isabella's correspondence. Ample space was dedicated to the most common syntactic and pragmatic strategies in epistolary writing: dislocations, focalizations and use of the particle "che" as pronoun and conjunction. Both right and left dislocation are presented in the corpus with a good number of occurrences; this solution is related to the textuality, and it does not belong to Isabella’s writing style. The contexts were analyzed following the standards previously used by D'Achille and Palermo. In order to put in relief one element of the sentence, it is often sufficient to move a single phrase. In the correspondence, it is also remarkable the use of the gerund, which proceeds the matrix clause. This structure is a premise that highlights the circumstances and the situations; additionally it denotes a mixture of causal and temporal semantic value. The use of absolute constructions with the past participle is particularly recurring and it is functional to summarize the informational background or to guarantee the textual cohesion. The structure named "Che polivalente" is very important, and the particle "che" is used as a relative pronoun as well as a generic conjunction. The omission of "che" is a construction rather limited in these letters. The use of "cui" as relative pronoun is also not very attested. It is hard to recognize the semantic value of a subordinate clause introduced by "che", because of the brevity of this conjunction. The final value is certainly assumed when the verb is a subjunctive, as well as in presence of verbs semantically connoted to express purposes. Nonetheless, "che" is also widely used to introduce causal propositions. Finally, "che" is attested after conjunctions or adverbs and it works as a subordinating mark; this is one of the characteristic features of a spontaneous writing. Inventory The aim of the archival research, which is the second field of investigation of my thesis, is the creation of a complete inventory of the letters of Isabella d'Este. More than 15,500 letters preserved in the "Archivio Gonzaga" (buste 2991-3000) have been recorded in this inventory. The census is necessary to make these documents accessible not only for researchers who study the history of the Italian literature, but also for scholars of arts, history and humanities in general. So, the archival signature put on each letter makes easier the retrieval of the documents, overcoming many difficulties offered by the works of Luzio and Renier. These two scholars, according to their times, did not report in their studies the archival information and this omission enabled the chance to find easily the documents and to compare the transcriptions (which was often very arbitrary) with the autographs. The inventory is also the first step in order to face a much more demanding task: the full transcription of the epistolary corpus. The IDEA project (Isabella d'Este Archive), born in 2013 with the creation of a digital platform that presents letters and documents preserved in the "Archivio Gonzaga", has also set an ambitious goal: make Isabella's letters known to scholars around the world.