Nuovi documenti per l’attribuzione a Felice Rasponi del manoscritto contenente la sua Vita (Classense, Mob. 3. 2 P2: 12)

Felice Rasponi (1522-1579), nun in the Benedictine convent of Sant’Andrea Maggiore in Ravenna, was known for her beauty, piety, erudition and misfortune, and was the author of two printed works, the Ragionamento sopra la cognition di Dio (Bologna, n.d.) and the Dialogo dell’eccellenza dello stato monacale (Bologna, 1572). The article describes a sixteenth-century manuscript held in the biblioteca Classense in Ravenna containing an anonymous dialogue on Rasponi’s life, the Vita della Madre donna Felice Rasponi, and traces its critical and editorial history. Thanks to new archival documents, it is shown that the dialogue, until now attributed to another nun in the same convent as Rasponi, is actually an autograph autobiographical work. This discovery allows us to read the text and the figure of the author under a new light.