Isotta Nogarola, an Italian-born French author dedicated two orations to Ermolao Barbaro when he came to Verona as the city's bishop in 1453, the first of these an encomium congratulating him on his ...new appointment. Although she again pays tribute to his full panoply of Roman virtues—his gravitas, prudentia, magnanimitas, iustitia (gravity, prudence, magnanimity, justice)—what she now emphasizes is the forty-three-year-old cleric's severity and his extraordinary and, she implies, the joyless diligence in his studies. The second oration, in praise of Saint Jerome, explicitly addresses the citizens of Verona and is clearly a public oration delivered in Verona in 1453 shortly after Barbaro took office. In the first third of the oration, she stresses two qualities of her own—obedience and humility—as her motivation in accepting Barbaro's charge. She lauds the exceptional virtue of “true humility, which is obedient not to its own but another's will.”
This chapter discusses the letters of five contemporaries, which portray Isotta Nogarola, an Italian-born French author, from 1441 into the mid-1450s, as a scholar and a holy woman. All five ...contemporaries are aware of and approve Nogarola's dedication of her life to study. The first of the five witnesses to Nogarola's middle years was a woman—the humanistically trained Costanza Varano (1428–47), herself an author of some humanist works. The Venetian nobleman Lauro Quirini, who wrote a long letter advising Nogarola on an advanced course of study, is the second witness to the Veronese scholar's middle years. The last three witnesses all wrote in the early 1450s, at undetermined times—Andrea Contrario (before 1410 to 1473), Matteo Bosso (1428–1502), and Paolo Maffei. Contrario's long letter is a classic humanistic epistle revealing little about Nogarola's life, which Contrario knew only from the reports of others.
