M. virginali flosculo

In the separation from his beloved the sender of the letter cannot find peace neither by day nor by night. The lover begs the woman to be able to talk to her and to taste her sweat candour.

The collection of eighteen model letters does not have rubrics, but rather marginal notes that tag each letter as M. ( missiva ) or R. ( responsiva ). Nine of the letters deal with ordinary matters of daily student life: requests of money and other objects such as a stylus and a writing tablet; parental admonitions on the conduct of the children; students’ reports on the progress of their studies, etc. One of them (8) explicitly refers to the study of ars dictandi and a few are about political Florentine affairs.¹

Women’s voices appear in the exchange of a couple of love model letters.² The exordium of the missiva (14) of this correspondence plainly draws on Ovide. While the citation of Heroides , Ep. XII, 169 ( non mihi grata dies, noctes vigilantur amarae ) provides the topos of the lover weeping day and night, which appears either in Latin or in romance love literary traditions (e. g. Salutz d’amor).³ The allusion to the answer of Tiresias ( Met. , III, 316-338) offers a dictaminal reading of gender difference in sexual pleasure. The blind prophet in Greek mythology, who is a sexually variant figure that crosses gender lines, was asked by Zeus and Hera to adjudicate in their altercation whether women or men enjoy sex more. His answer, that women enjoy more than men, displeases Hera that blinds him.