In Lucrezia Marinella's L'Enrico, overo Bisantio acquistato (Henry, or Byzantium Gained), published in Venice in 1635, a poet entertains dinner guests with a song of extraordinary scope. Altea sings ‘how a cruel wind in the bowels of the earth shakes high buildings; why the sky is clear and bright when the anxious plain is shaken and hit; why the light of the sun dims when it shines the most in the sky, eclipsing the moon, and why the moon appears round or missing a part to our eyes’ (Marinella, Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, ed. and trans. M. Galli Stampino [2009], adapted by Behr, and cited at p. 173).

Altea is a readily identifiable figure from epic: the bard who sings to accompany a banquet in royal houses, epitomising a civilised life. The song's natural philosophical subject matter, reaching from the depths of the earth to the edge of the heavens, evokes a well-known precursor: Iopas, who turns his voice to similar themes in Virgil's Aeneid. But Altea, of course, is a philosopher-bard with a twist: she is a woman.

The heady reworking of epic and humanist tradition achieved by Marinella and her near-contemporary Moderata Fonte in the ‘effervescent Venetian cultural climate at the end of the Cinquecento’ (p. 231) is the subject of Behr's fine book. Behr tracks in extraordinary detail how L'Enrico and Fonte's Tredici canti del Floridoro (Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro), published in 1581, invoke, exploit and transform the terms, tropes and characters of epic and Romance. As the book's knowingly referential title suggests, and as is hinted by my brief account of the Altea episode, Behr focuses on how these two accomplished women writers used their chosen forms to test the conventions and limits of gender, and its intricate connections to genre. In doing so, Behr demonstrates compellingly not only the breadth of these women's learning, and their confident handling of literary matter, but also the frequency with which these authors seized the opportunity to respond to and refashion their precursors, promoting a set of moral and ethical codes presented consistently as feminine.

Behr's goal is ‘to reveal the intellectual empowerment that knowledge of the classical tradition (Greek and Roman literature) granted women’ during the early modern period (p. 1). Her introduction takes in a number of crucial contexts, tracing the opportunities and limits of women's education, the far-reaching influence of Virgil, the intellectual and political ferment of Renaissance Venice, and how women were able to profit from the popular querelle des femmes, a series of lively debates about women, despite the misogyny or at least conservatism of many participants. Behr argues that the writers she studies refuted the ‘normative logic’ of the Venetian patriarchy and the wider culture, creating ‘dissident female characters … whose voices assert women's perspectives and contributions to the debate on the human condition’ (p. 18). She makes the case persuasively that imitation is at once a mode of self-education and a technique of interpretation and criticism. In the chapters that follow Behr establishes Fonte and Marinella as acute readers, who reshaped some of the most famous episodes of literary history to striking ends.

The volume is divided into three main parts. Part 1 addresses the Amazons who appear in each poem and call into question the ethics and abilities of Fonte's and Marinella's male knights. Chapter 1 explicitly situates Risamante, Fonte's Amazon protagonist, in the context of the querelle des femmes, through a detailed series of comparisons focusing in particular on the Aeneid and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Behr argues that Fonte makes the case for mercy: a virtue that is central to the character of her female knight and to which male knights fail to aspire. Risamante also displays an intellectual agility that is essential to her military success; Behr quotes Fonte's earlier Il merito delle donne (1600), in which Leonora reflects that women can ‘excel in valor and skill, aided by that peculiarly feminine talent of quick thinking, which has often led them to outshine men in the field’ (p. 69). Some rewarding close readings illuminate Chapter 2, which dwells on Marinella's Amazons and their Virgilian intertexts.

Part 2, devoted to Marinella, focuses on abandoned wives and the uses of lamentation. Behr acknowledges the extent to which the Enrico's author works within the constraints of Venetian propaganda, which had thoroughly rewritten the messy, vicious and inhumane siege of Constantinople. Nonetheless, she argues persuasively that Marinella's female characters protest against the futility of war and lay bare the threadbare nature of masculine military glory. ‘Lamentation’, Behr notes, ‘reminds us of the suffering caused by heroic death rather than the glory obtained by it’ (p. 122). Aristotle and Ovid are key interlocutors here, though Behr's scholarship is, as always, impressively thorough in tracing the looped intertexts of Marinella's poem, demonstrating Marinella's own reading and range in the process.

In the final section of the book Behr investigates the two authors’ powerful rewritings and recuperation of female enchanters, who had long been cast in negative terms. Tightly paired, Chapters 5 and 6, perhaps the richest and most rewarding of the book, introduce us to Erina, a powerful figure encapsulating numerous divine and epic virtues. Behr's reading of Erina as a vivid counterpart for the author is compelling. Erina's commitment to natural philosophical knowledge and discovery situates her firmly in Marinella's historical moment. Building on previous feminist criticism on the Odyssey and Circe in particular, Behr shows the confident and incisive critical intelligence with which Marinella re-evaluates the villainous seductress, freeing her from the misogynist trappings of Homer's imitators and successors. It is on Erina's happy island that we meet Altea, entertaining both guests and readers with her scientific song and reworking the Aeneid as she goes. A short, final chapter returns us to Fonte's text and her playful imagining of Circetta: a daughter who extends Circe's legacy along the female line, rejecting her mother's tenets in order to embrace the rewards of love.

Behr's brief epilogue summarises her central arguments, before turning to the theme of restraint and mercy in Marinella's remarkable (and implausible) rewriting of the final hours of the Fourth Crusade. Throughout this impressively wide-ranging book Behr demonstrates the urgency of Fonte's and Marinella's readings, and the extent to which they knowingly and elegantly cast female characters in roles that subvert the traditions of epic and rewrite literary tradition. In doing so, Behr makes substantial claims about the functions of classical and Romance texts, including the constitutive obscurities of epic and the critical function of imitation. The book gives a fulsome taste of both women's stylish writing through extensive and apt quotation. It leaves readers firmly convinced of Behr's central thesis: that these two authors created important texts that negotiate and reshape their literary precursors, retelling ancient and more modern tales in the distinctive, critical and corrective voices of women. Like the bard Altea, Fonte and Marinella emerge from this book as powerful, learned and ambitious poets, well-served by Behr's sensitive and detailed account of their characterful texts.