Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel was a poet, a political writer, a journalist, and a politician. She was the editor, and virtually the only writer of the Monitore Napoletano (Neapolitan Monitor), the journal in which she recorded the events and debates that took place in the short-lived Neapolitan Jacobin Republic of 1799. She sought to influence both government policy and public opinion. As a political analyst she also put forward with this journal one of the first analyses ever of popular culture and its political implications, and confronted the challenge of trying to implement a revolutionary political project in a situation of abject poverty intertwined with a deeply conservative populist mind-set.
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, Volume 67
Acknowledgments xvii
Editor’s Note xix
Introduction: The Other Voice of Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel 1
Part One: From Arcadia to Revolution 3
Poet, Mother, Jacobin 3
The Kingdom of Naples from Enlightenment to Jacobinism 15
Arcadia and Beyond: Poetry, Letters, Politics 24
Sonnet and Letter to Michele Lopez (1776) 31
Dedicatory Letter to Pombal (1777) 34
Sonnets on the Death of Her Only Son (1779) 39
Ode on a Miscarriage (1779) 41
Letter to Alberto Fortis (1785) 50
Sonnet on the Chinea (1788) 52
Letter to Michele Vargas Macciucca (1789) 56
Introduction to Caravita’s No Right Pertains to the Supreme Pontiff
over the Kingdom of Naples (1790) 59
The Neapolitan Republic 64
Jacobinism, the People, Jacobins and the People 64
Neapolitan Jacobins and Their Republic 69
Anatomy of a Journal: The Monitore Napoletano 80
Editor and Author 80
A Political Project 84
A Note on the Text 91
Part Two: Monitore Napoletano (The Neapolitan Monitor) 93
Epilogue: A Woman Apart 203
Glossary of Places 209
Chronology 217
Bibliography 223
Index 239