Humanism and Reform in the Renaissance Court of Isabel de Vilamarí: Escipión Capece and its Female Readers

Abstract

During the first half of the 16th century and in the Salerno court of the last prince of the Sanseverine house and his wife, Isabel de Vilamarí (the noble lady of Catalan origin), an intense intellectual climate developed. Italian and Spanish artists and humanists gathered there. In this atmosphere of cultural exchange, attentive to participating in the ideas of the Reformation that spread in Naples thanks to B. Ochino and Valdés, was born the poem De principiis rerum by the last Pontanian academic: Escipión Capece. In this work, not only Lucretian and Virgilian motifs are traced, but also the influence of Pontano's cosmological treatises. In this study, the author proposes the analysis of the figure and work of Capece through her female readers: Isabel de Vilamarí and the cultured women of her court.