Il carteggio tra Isabella d’Este e Lucrezia Borgia

This essay originates from Katarína Dubecká’s degree dissertation, which focuses on the correspondence between Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia: the recent edition of all of Lucrezia’s letters by Diane Ghirardo (2020), and the digitalisation of Isabella’s copy letter books on the Isabella d’Este Archive platform have paved the way for a first biographical, historical, and linguistic in-depth analysis of the epistolary exchange between the two female protagonists of the Renaissance. The paper is organised in three sections: the first illustrates the reasons why the authors came to the decision to reassemble the correspondence between Lucrezia and Isabella; the second lists all the letters, next to their dates, archive cataloguing, and a brief account of the main topics of the letters, among which that of food and nutrition; the third and most substantial section is devoted to the language and highlights the common distinctive traits of court epistolography. A selection of ten letters is included in the appendix.