Abstract/Summary

This article deals with Tarabotti's own family, her religious family within her nunnery and her ideal family, the so-called "République des lettres". Despite her permanent denial about her parents and siblings, she has ties with them all: she benifitted from her sister Camilla's and her mother's wills, she had a friendly relationship with one of her brothers-in-law, she took pity of her two sisters who remained spinsters. The same occurred with her religious family, where she developed close friendships with at least two of them. Moreover, her sisters in religion often belonged to patrician, well-off families and it is possible to argue that Tarabotti managed to expand her relationships with very important people via her sisters in religion. But the family she truly cherished, was her family d'election, the one she had been free to choose and to pursue: her literary family. However, this latter one was not a very recomandable family for a nun: therefore she kept silent with the most relevant elements of it, namely with the French priest and astronomer Ismael Boulliau who acted as the go-between for her last book, published abroad two years after her death. The article provides evidence to such connections, ties and knots, explaining at least in part Tarabotti's extraordinary success in life as a proto-feminist and political writer.