Abstract: Italian ludic literary society influenced characteristics of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century société mondaine in France. Giambattista Marino, invited to France by Marie de’ Medici, served as a go-between for Italian and French seventeenth-century salon society. The queen's marriage and patronage practices reflect sixteenth-century transnational exchanges of powerful women through marriage, as well as their patronage of poets and scholars. Such women's tastes in literary, intellectual, and dramatic entertainments, as well as modes of ludic social interaction, proved sufficiently popular to endure into the seventeenth century, illustrating Bernard Suits's notion that games people play are harbingers of things to come and Roger Caillois's observation that the principles of games are often accepted and reflected in the larger culture.

Keywords: société mondaine, games, Italian women, French women, ludic culture, Giambattista Marino

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, poets and scholars (who were often also tutors, ambassadors, and diplomats) traveled between Italy and France, participating in literary society that often included powerful, elite women, aiding the spread of literary and social practices. A key seventeenth-century example is the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), a member of the Sienese Academy of the Filomati, whose modernization of Tassian and Petrarchan styles along with his baroque innovations in poetry were admired in France, as was his epic poem L’Adone (1623). Popular in Italy, he engaged in literary exchanges with the Italian poet and playwright Isabella Andreini, and like Andreini, he found favor in France (see the first epigraph). Marie de’ Medici invited Marino to Paris, where he stayed from 1615 to 1623 and was celebrated in salon society.