"A che effetto sfidar una Donna?" Sara Copio Sullam sull'immortalità dell'anima: tra consapevolezza filosofica ed esuberanza retorica

In the summer of 1621, the Venetian poet Sara Copio Sullam was involved by Baldassarre Bonifacio, a frequent visitor to her literary salon in the city's Ghetto Vecchio, in a delicate dispute concerning the immortality of the soul. The issue was hotly debated on the philosophical axis from Pomponazzi to Cremonini, intercepting the sceptical and libertine approaches of the most radical among the Incogniti, as well as the reverberations of the heterodox positions that were snaking through the Jewish community. Copio published, in response to the accusation of adhering to the mortalist thesis contained in Bonifacio’s Discourse on the Immortality of the Soul, his Manifesto of defence, from which emerges a philosophical weave of fundamentally Aristotelian-scholastic plots, sustained by an extraordinary rhetorical effectiveness, aimed at discrediting the intellectual profile of her opponent and reaffirming her firm adherence to the Jewish religion. In the background there is also a proud awareness of her being a woman with precise intellectual inclinations and an already recognised fame for her poetic abilities, in the face of Bonifacio’s dual contempt for her being a woman and her religion.