“ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL WORKS FOR THE STUDY AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE FIGURE OF BENEDETTA CLOTILDE LUNELLI” (ALACEVICH, P. 129). 8vo. (6), 7-30 pp, (2). Bound in later plain wrappers. Printed on strong paper; title-page a little soiled, otherwise very good. Extremely rare sole edition of this pamphlet celebrating the life and works of the Academician Benedetta Clotilde Lunelli (1700-1774). Following her successful public defense of 23 Latin theses on Aristotelian metaphysics at the age of just 14, Lunelli gained admission to a number of Accademie and published a handful of literary works – all of which are extremely rare in census today. In the only modern monograph on Lunelli we have traced, Allegra Alacevich calls Arnaud’s Vita “la fonte più ricca di elementi descrittivi circa la persona di Benedetta Clotilde Lunelli Spinola” (Alacevich, p. 60). Under the patronage of Maria Giovanna Battista, Duchess of Savoy, who met the precocious six-year-old in 1706, Lunelli studied with a local friar who taught her French, Greek, and Latin. On the 22nd November, 1714, in the Church of S. Tommaso in Turin (as opposed to in a secular university), Lunelli was awarded a ‘Doctorate of Arts’ after defending philosophical theses on Metaphysics, Physics and Logic; her dissertation was even published in that year (Philosophia peripatetica ad mentem subtilissimi doctoris… Torino, 1714, surviving in just two copies today). According to the DBI entry, her favor with the Duchess as well as her intellectual achievements attracted “numerous tributes and odes”, and many of her subsequent compositions coincided with her admission to learned societies: degli Innominati, dell'Arcadia romana, degli Incolti, dei Candidati and dei Sabazi. Her literary publications unfortunately seem to have slowed around the time of her marriage in 1722 to the Marquis de Spinola, and following the birth of her six children and the death of her husband in 1738 we find no further traces of her in print. The present extremely rare pamphlet offers a near-contemporary bio-bibliography of Lunelli, ranging from comments on her physical appearance to an annotated listing of her published works. Alacevich reproduces Arnaud’s text in full, “because this document is of a certain rarity, but above all given its interest and the ideas that can be drawn from it in order to contribute to various historical aspects [of her life]” (p. 129). OCLC shows just one copy worldwide, at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign); ICCU adds two further copies, both in Torino. * ICCU TO0E\112121; cf the DBI entry and Alacevich, Una Dama in Parnaso: l'Arcade piemontese Benedetta Clotilde Lunelli Spinola (1700-1774) (2001).