Moderata Fonte's Floridoro: Invoking Dante to Refashion the Myth of Circe

Abstract

In Floridoro (1581), Moderata Fonte exposes literary tropes that undermine women. She revises the narrative of Ulysses so that the original misdeed comes not from Circe but rather from Ulysses himself, who seizes the sorceress's powers and abandons both her and their daughter Circetta. In refashioning the myth, Fonte relies on Dante's representation of Ulysses as fraudulent and cunning in order to challenge the trope of the heroic knight, and she presents the island of Ithaca as another locus of hell, purgatory, and paradise. Her aim is to raise consciousness about the subjugating mechanisms that oppress women, and thus possibly break an ever-repeating infernal cycle.