Florentine writer of popular mystery and miracle plays published in numerous editions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Antonia Pulci was born sometime between 1452 and 1454, the daughter of Francesco d’Antonio di Giannotto Tanini, a merchant; her mother was a Roman woman, Jacopa di Torello di Lorenzo Torelli, whose family was from Trastevere. There were five sisters and a brother as well as a half brother and sister (her father’s natural children). Francesco died in 1467, and his eldest (and natural) son Guilio provided him with a splendid marble floor tomb in Santa Croce. Giuseppe Richa, who included a biography of Antonia in his history of the Florentine church, reported that four of the Tanini sisters married well, three in Florence and one in Pisa. Girolama, the firstborn, married Roberto Visdomini; Antonia married Bernardo di Jacopo Pulci. At least one Tanini sister entered a local convent. Antonia’s brother Niccolo married Girolama di Battista di Francesco Strozzi.
Antonia’s marriage took place in 1470 or 1471. Bernardo Pulci was a well-known literary figure and later an important administrator of the Florentine University. Antonia seems to have brought Bernardo a dowry of a thousand florins. The noble Pulci family had suffered serious financial difficulties and were ultimately bankrupted by the eldest brother Luca’s unwise investments. Luca died in 1470, leaving his brothers in dishonor and responsible for his family. Antonia’s dowry, very good at the time for a merchant’s daughter, was a boon to the Pulcis.
Antonia’s first play, a sacra rappresentazione, or miracle play, entitled the Rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla (The Play of Saint Domitilla), is dated 1483. She published it in the 1490s, if not before, together with two, possibly three others, in the important two-volume anthology of sacre rappresentazioni that has been called the “Raccolta Miscomini” because Antonio Miscomini is thought to be the publisher. The other plays attributed to “Antonia donna di Bernardo Pulci” in the anthology are the Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma (The Play of Saint Guglielma) and the Rappresentazione di San Francesco (The Play of Saint Francis). The collection also includes another play possibly written by Antonia, the Rappresentazione di Giuseppe figlio di Giacob (The Play of Joseph, Son of Jacob), and Bernardo Pulci’s Rappresen-tazione di Barlaam e Giosafat (The Play of Bar-laam and Josafat). Antonia’s close friend, Fra Antonio Dolciati, attributed a play on the Joseph story to Antonia in a work written some years after her death. He also mentions that she wrote other plays, including one on the Prodigal Son and another on Saul and David. The plays to which Dolciati refers seem to have been the Rappresentazione del figliuol prodigo (The Play of the Prodigal Son), known today only in sixteenth - and seventeenth-century editions, and the Destruzione di Saul e il pianto di Davit (The Demise of Saul and the Tears of David), the only extant Florentine sacra rappresentazione on that biblical subject, and one whose earliest known edition was published in the 1490s.
In 1488, Bernardo died. The couple was childless, and Antonia became an ammantellata, a third-order sister living in secular society. She resided for a while at San Vincenzo, the Dominican convent known as Annalena, and also at her mother’s home near Piazza della Signo-ria. She studied Latin with a student from the cathedral school, Francesco Dolciati, whom she convinced to enter the religious life. Francesco took Fra Antonio as his religious name in her honor and referred to her as his maestra (teacher), in religion. According to Dolciati, while waiting for her dowry to be returned, Antonia spent most of her time secluded on the upper floor of her home, studying Scripture and doing penance. She continued to write, but laude, religious poems of praise rather than plays, one on the corpus domini, of which Dolciati had an autographed copy that he treasured in her memory.
When she obtained her dowry from the Pulcis, Antonia purchased property outside the gate of San Gallo, between the monastery known as Lapo and the Mugnone River, to which she retired with a small group of Augus-tinian tertiaries to establish there a convent. Her will, written in 1501, the year she died, provided the funding for the house, to be known as the convent of Santa Maria della Misericor-dia (it was also called the Assunta). She built the chapel of Santa Monica in the church of San Gallo, where she wished to be buried. The church and friary of San Gallo, where Fra Antonio Dolciati was prior for several years, was destroyed in the 1530s. The nuns of Santa Maria della Misericordia soon moved from their dangerous position outside the city walls to the convent of San Clemente, just inside the wall in Via San Gallo.
Typical of many Florentine mystery and miracle plays of the time, Antonia’s plays generally remain rather close to their sources. However, her Destruzione di Saul e il pianto di Davit contains an original episode, not found in the Bible, that depicts the martyrdom of the wife of Saul. Her Saint Francis play is also somewhat unusual and seems to contain autobiographical references to her family: for example, when Francis’s good friend Jacopa da Settesoli, called Jacopa da Roma, appears at his deathbed, the scene is surely also an homage to Antonia’s mother, another Jacopa from Rome.
Antonia plays are very well written in pleasant, recitable verse. They were published repeatedly throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, probably because they were texts that could serve nuns well for convent theater and devotional reading. Of the early editions, the Santa Domitilla, the San Francesco, and the Santa Guglielma were the most often published, and the latter two have been included in nineteenth - and twentieth-century anthologies.
There has been confusion regarding Antonia’s name since the late nineteenth century, when the family’s surname was erroneously thought to be Giannotti rather than Tanini. The error stems from a partial reading of archival documents. In the early fifteenth century Antonia’s family had not yet assumed a surname and her father used two patronymics:
Francesco di Antonio di Giannotto. However, by midcentury the family had begun to use the surname Tanini, based on an earlier ancestor Tanino.
Elissa Weaver
See also Convents; Theater and Women Actors, Playwrights, and Patrons.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Ponte, Giovanni, ed. Sacre rappresentazioni fiorentine del Quattrocento. Milan: Marzorati Editore, 1974.
Pulci, Antonia. Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival. Translated by James Wyatt Cook and edited by James Wyatt and Barbara Collier Cook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Pulci, Antonia Tanini. La rappresentatione di Santa Domitilla, a8—c4, La rappresentatione di Santa Gugielma, g8—i6, La rappresentatione di San Francesco, n8—p4. Florence: Antonio Misco-mini?, ca. 1490—1495.
Secondary Works
Bryce, Judith. “ ‘Or altra via mi convien cercare’: Marriage, Salvation, and Sanctity in Antonia Tanini Pulci’s Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma.” In Theatre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present: Essays in Honour of Richard Andrews. Edited by Brian Richardson, Simon Gilson, and Catherine Keen, 195—207. Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 2004.
Martines, Lauro. Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance. Pages 64—69. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Newbigin, Nerida. “Agata, Apollonia, and Other Martyred Virgins: Did Florentines Really See These Plays Performed?” In European Medieval Drama 1997. Edited by Sydney Higgins, 175—197. Camerino: Centro Audiovisivi e Stampa Universita di Camerino, 1998.
Weaver, Elissa. Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women, 97—104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
World History
