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Olympia Morata. The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic. Edited and Translated by Holt N. Parker. [The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.] (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xxxiii, 275. $22.50 paperback.)
The short life of Olympia Morata, the literary prodigy who died in Heidelberg late in 1555, not yet twenty-nine years of age, far from the court of Ferrara, where she was raised and educated, has never ceased to amaze. It caught the imagination of contemporaries and continues to spark the interest of modern scholars. Olympia, a member of the entourage of the sometime Calvinist Duchess Renée, the French wife of Duke Ercole II Este, became deeply steeped in classical languages and culture thanks to the instruction she received from her father, Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, an admired humanist teacher in Ferrara, Mantua, and Vicenza, and his learned friends, Celio Calcagnini and Celio Secondo Curione, among others. But from her father and from Curione Olympia also imbibed Erasmian ideals and the doctrines of the Reformation. After her marriage to a young medical student at Ferrara, Andreas Grunthler, she returned with him to his native Germany. In Schweinfurt, his hometown, they experienced a siege by imperial forces where the young couple lost all their belongings, including Olympia's few writings, mostly...