Ritratti femminili nelle lettere di Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi. Portraits féminins dans les lettres d'Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi

In addition to providing extensive information on the political and social history of Florence and female literacy, the letters sent by Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi to her exiled sons between 1447 and 1470 help to outline the strategies relating to marriage alliances, a delicate aspect of city life. Engaged in the search for wives for her two sons, Alessandra enriches her correspondence with realistic female descriptions, which, through the use of a precise and constant lexicon, on the one hand outline the 'canon' of the qualities required for a good wife, on the other hand betray cultural and stylistic consonances with familiar and popular literature. These consonances are analytically studied in the contribution through the comparison with previous or contemporary literary texts and, in particular, through the precise analysis of the lexicon used, supported, from a philological perspective, by the frequent use of historical dictionaries of the language and by the study of Macinghi Strozzi's usus scribendi.