An Aeneid for the Grand Duchess Vergilian Heroines and the Chivalric Tradition in Barbera Tigliamochi’s Ascanio errante (Florence, 1640)

Ascanio errante, a little-known mid-seventeenth-century Italian poem, stands out in the landscape of Virgilian rewriting for its distinctive gendered perspective. Written for the Medici Grand-Duchess Vittoria della Rovere by the Florentine noblewoman Barbera Tigliamochi degli Albizzi (1610–1696), it recounts the deeds of Ascanio at the time of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy in the form of a chivalric romance, while systematically reshaping Virgil’s heroines. Classical female figures are recast according to the chivalric models of Ariosto and Tasso, yet always under the overarching concern—for both Tigliamochi and her patron—with the institution of marriage. This strategy reflects the dual pressures of genre and context. Drawing on both the popularized genre of Trojan-themed poetry and the higher models of Italian chivalric epic, Tigliamochi uses Virgilian women to address contemporary anxieties about marriage and dynastic succession, with an eye to her dedicatee. At the same time, her work complicates expectations: a woman writer reworks the most canonical of male-authored epics to construct a gallery of female figures—both exemplary and condemnable—in dialogue with court culture. Read in this context, Ascanio errante is not an anomaly but a revealing witness to women’s writing and the persistence of Trojan romance in seventeenth-century Italy.