FASHIONING ADRIA, FASHIONING FEMININITY: VENETIAN WOMEN AND THE RADICALIZATION OF THE QUERELLE DES FEMMES, 1550–1635
By
Katherine McKenna
Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Vanderbilt University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
History
August 9, 2019
Nashville, Tennessee
Approved
William Caferro, Ph.D . Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Ph.D.
Katherine Crawford, Ph.D.
Joel Harrington, Ph.D.
Elsa Filosa, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2019 by Katherine McKenna All Rights Reserved
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For my Florida family—Mom, Dad, & Michael
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When I arrived at Vanderbilt University in August 2013, my advisor and then instructor of the first year History seminar shared a piece of wisdom with the incoming cohort: to complete a dissertation was to effect a movement of the will. This sentiment has proved true over the last six years. Traversing the road to a Ph.D. requires grit, curiosity, and no small dose of mulish obstinacy. It also demands a strong support network comprised of one’s academic community, friends, and family, among which groups we find mentors, emotional aid, coffeeshop cohabitants, cheerleaders, and people to dream with. It is thanks to my Nashville and Florida networks that I arrive at August 2019 and, finally, graduation!
This dissertation would not have been possible without the institutional and financial assistance provided by the Vanderbilt University Fellowship as well as the many travel grants and conference awards offered by the Department of History. Additionally, I am grateful to the
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California Los Angeles for according me the opportunity to conduct dissertation research at UCLA’s Special Collections as an Ahmanson Research Fellow. And special thanks go to Mona Frederick and the Robert Penn
Warren Center for the Humanities for furnishing me with a dynamic intellectual home in which to finish work on this project. During my time at the Center, I also got to meet a fantastic interdisciplinary group of rising women scholars—thank you to my RPW cohort, a “querelle des femmes” for the twenty-first century, for your camaraderie and attentive close readings of my many chapter drafts.
No dissertation can get off the ground and soar without the encouragement of an advisor.
I would like to express my gratitude to Professor William Caferro for believing in my topic and
iv offering me steady mentorship over the last six years. He has also been my teaching guide. As a
TA for his Western Civilization courses, I learned to find my voice in the university classroom as well as the fine arts of paper grading, dialogue facilitation, and teaching with authenticity. This project is also indebted to Professor Sarah Ross, whose work on early modern feminism and women’s education I deeply admire—and cite often! She has been a generous reader and brought a crucial expertise on Renaissance Venice to this work. I would also like to thank Professors Joel
Harrington, Katherine Crawford, and Elsa Filosa for their professional guidance and insightful comments on early chapter drafts.
Before the arguments and content located in those chapters made their way onto the page, many hours were devoted to primary source research on Venetian civic ephemera, poetry, letters, and treatises housed here in the United States and in Italy. I’d therefore like to express my gratitude to the librarians and archivists at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana for providing me a welcoming home base on summer research trips to Venice. I am also grateful to the awesome team of students and interns who run the special collections desk at the Newberry Library, by far the most efficient research venue I’ve had the pleasure to work at. A big thank you also goes to
Jim Toplon and Vanderbilt’s Interlibrary Loan Office for tracking down innumerable articles, book chapters, and obscure monographs for me over the years.
As every academic knows, our Departments manage to stay afloat and run smoothly thanks to their amazing staff members. I am grateful to Chris Lindsey, Christen Harper, Tiffany
Geise, Heidi Welch, and Susan Hilderbrand for all the questions answered, reimbursement requests processed, and administrative steps to graduation demystified. I’d also like to thank
Professor Samira Sheikh for her constant support of women in the academy and her tireless work on behalf of History’s graduate students as our Director of Graduate Studies.
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To my graduate colleagues: thank you for bringing your passion and intelligence to our shared seminars, VHS conferences, and Writing Studio retreats. For the gift of true friendship and unflagging intellectual support, I’d like to thank Kate Lazo, Juliet Larkin-Gilmore, Fernanda
Bretones-Lane, and Daniel Genkins. Here’s to trips to Sonoma, Outlander marathons, girl talk group texts, trivia teams, game nights, Brazilian hot-dog making and all those things that got us through. We did it!
I also want to extend un grand merci to my friend and partner Nathan Dize for sharing this adventure with me. Academia is best done as part of a team, and you are a sterling teammate. Thank you for bringing me mountains of sour gummy worms during the ups and downs of job application season, for driving solo across the country to visit me at UCLA, for happily giving in to my belief that queso counts as brain food, and for turning your car into a mobile dissertation studio so I could wrap up revisions without missing a Philly wedding thirteen hours away. I’ve got keys and candy ready for your run-up to the defense next year.
Finally, the biggest thank you goes to my family, especially William and Sheridan
McKenna (aka Mom and Dad!), for thirty-one years of love and support. My parents raised me to love words. When I was a child, my mom read me stories and encouraged me to imagine my own; my father introduced me to wordsmiths like J.R.R. Tolkien. While the historian’s job differs from that of weaving tales about hobbits and wood elves, storytelling is irrefutably part of our craft. And it is from reading the stories of others, fictional or otherwise, that we discover a love of learning and begin to master the art of writing. I’d also like to thank my brother for his friendship and unstinting willingness to conspire in concocting nachos for cheese-chip night, careening through the house to Tchaikovsky’s “Trepak” at Christmastime, and quoting LOTR special features at every opportunity. And thank you to Jersey (2004–2017), our canine family
vi member and the best study buddy around during high school, college, and most of graduate school. They say that dogs are man’s best friend—I believe that maxim is especially true in the case of academics, for they remind us to unglue ourselves from our laptops, walk away from our desks, get outside, and smell the proverbial roses.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
DEDICATION ...... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv
LIST OF FIGURES ...... x
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Chapter
I. Taking Up the Pen: Women Writers and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400–1600 ...... 20
Foundations: Christine de Pizan and the Querelle de la Rose ...... 23 Growing the Querelle: Gendered Debate after Christine ...... 35 Joining the Debate: French Women Writers ...... 39 Across the Mediterranean, Over the Alps: Growing the Italian Querelle ...... 49 A Tre Corone for the Querelle des Femmes: The Women Humanists of Cinquecento Italy ...... 51
II. The Lepanto Paradox: Civic Rhetoric and Public Women in the Renaissance Venetian Republic ...... 63
Civic Crisis in Cinquecento Venice ...... 70 Lepanto and the Print Boom of 1571–73 ...... 77 Going Public: Civic Female Authorship in the 1570s ...... 88 Civic Discourse in the Veneto: The Ducal Orations of Issicratea Monte ...... 100
III. Fashioning Female Authorship: The Intersection of Civic Myth and Authority in Fonte and Marinella ...... 113
“tu non esperta verginella:” Moderata Fonte and the Renaissance World of Letters ...... 115 The Woman Rhetor and Venetian Myth in Tredici canti del Floridoro...... 126 1635, Venice: Female Epic after Fonte...... 154 Siren of Venice: The Myth of Venice and Female Authorship in L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio Acquistato ...... 159
IV. The Feminist Politics of Venetian Epic ...... 180
V. Patriarchy on Trial: The Querelle Tracts of 1600 ...... 206
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Hot off the Press: Contextualizing 1600 ...... 210 Male Forms, Feminist Structure ...... 214 Challenging Aristotle ...... 222 Contextualizing Identity: Women and Culture ...... 237
CONCLUSION ...... 245
REFERENCES ...... 251
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Engraving of La Rotta d[e]ll’armata Turchesca occorsa alli Cuzzolari alli 7 di otobre nel 1571 co segnalata vittoria de christiani ...... 5
2. Map of the Battle of Lepanto ...... 79
3. Costume plates from Orlando Furioso ...... 188
4. Engraving of La Meravigliosa Piazza de San Marco di Venetia...... 198
5. Frontispiece and Excerpts from Trofeo della vittoria sacra ...... 247
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INTRODUCTION
BREAKING SILENCE, MAKING MYTH: TRACING THE ADVENT OF FEMINIST VENETIAN WOMEN AUTHORS IN SINGLE-AUTHOR PRINT
“The preeminence of men is something they have arrogated to themselves, thus if it is said that we must be subject to them, the phrase must be understood in the same sense that it is said we are subject to natural disasters, illness, and other accidents of this life, that is to say, it is not a subjection of obedience, but of fortitude … but men take it in the opposite sense and wish to reign over us, arrogantly usurping the dominion they wish to have over us although in truth it should be ours.”1
- Moderata Fonte, 1600
At the dawn of the seventeenth century, the norms of patriarchal Venetian society were upended by the publication of two subversive tracts on gender and marriage by Moderata Fonte
(1555–1592) and Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653). Both women belonged to Venice’s elite citizen class and both combined intellectual careers with matrimony and motherhood. When
Fonte and Marinella broke onto the northern Italian print scene, the hegemony of men and the primacy of Aristotelian gender ideology in early modern Venice were strong. Three-fifths of the
Republic’s patrician women were immured in convents in the name of dynastic strategy.2
1 “Questa preminenza si hanno essi arrogata da loro, che se ben dicono che dovemo star loro soggette, si deve intender soggette in quella maniera, che siamo anco alle disgrazie, alle infermità ed altri accidenti di questa vita, cioè non soggezione di ubidienza ma di pacienza…e questo tolgono essi per contrario senso e ci vogliono tiranneggiare, usurpandosi arrogantemente la signoria, che vogliono avere sopra di noi; e la quale anzi dovremmo noi avere sopra di loro.” Moderata Fonte, Il merito delle donne: ove chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette de gli uomini (Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1600), 20–21. 2 Stanley Chojnacki, “Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London: Longman, 1998), 69–71. 1
Contemporary science alleged that women were deficient males lacking in reason and self- control.3 The doors of academic and government institutions were closed to the “other” sex and the syncretic Christian-classical tradition enjoined respectable women to measure out their virtue in silence.4 Although European intellectuals had disputed female merit in the querelle des femmes for over a century, the debate on women was primarily a venue of rhetorical craftmanship rather than social criticism. As Fonte herself would observe in Il merito delle donne, “the majority of men, believe me, who have taken on the task of praising [women] do it more for their own use and honor than for ours.”5 Her hometown was the print capital of Europe, but among its subjects men held almost exclusive license to publish. Prior to the seventeenth century, Venetian courtesans, not housewives dealt in the book trade. Yet in 1600 Fonte and
Marinella successfully produced texts that challenged contemporary definitions of womanhood and insisted that “if we are [men’s] inferiors in authority but not in merit, this is an abuse that has been put into the world” by man and custom.6 Moreover, they did so without tarnishing their reputation as respectable veneziane from the Republic’s elect citizen class. Something had changed. Beneath the narrative of social stability and male excellence perpetuated by La
Serenissima’s conservative patrician elite, cultural and intellectual forces were working to
3 Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 30–46. Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 4 In Politics, Aristotle, godfather of Renaissance philosophy, named silence the glory of women. He wrote, “All classes must be deemed to have their special attributes; as the poet says of women, Silence is a woman’s glory, but this is not equally the glory of man.” The medieval Christian tradition adopted this precept as the Pauline tenant that “women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate.” Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle vol. 2. trans. and ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 126. I Corinthians 14:34–35 (New Standard Revised Edition). 5 “Io credo, rispose Cornelia, come de gli altri, che alcun non sia, che l’abbia fatto per molto amore, ma la più parte, credetemi, si ha messo a tale impresa più per suo vtile, & honor proprio, che per il nostro.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 36. 6 From “se siamo loro inferiori d’auttorità, ma non di merito, questo è un abuso, che si è messo nel Mondo, che poi a lungo andare si hanno fatto lecito ed ordinario.” Ibid., 27. 2 reshape the overlapping public and printed spheres and enable educated local women to recognize and challenge their collective suppression.
My dissertation asks why early modern Venice hosted the feminist radicalization of the querelle. I use the term feminist to denote sentiment that was both anti-misogynist and informed by an understanding of contemporary women’s collective subordination across rank and wealth lines; equally requisite, that sentiment much encompass some call for cultural expansion of women’s opportunities, most often in the arena of education.7 Fonte’s Il merito and Marinella’s
La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne represent such a behest. As the publication of these texts reveals, the Venetian Republic’s entrenched patriarchal system was riddled with cracks at the turn-of-the-century. I use close readings of Renaissance civic ephemera, letters, epic poetry, dialogue, and treatises to investigate the cultural and intellectual forces that destabilized male control of the printing press in Venice and remade Serenissima women’s writing as a platform of identity construction circa 1600. Contemporary civic crisis as prompt to respectable Venetian women’s movement into single-author print and spark to a reconsideration of traditional gender roles is of special concern. Although the pro-woman sentiments espoused by Fonte and
Marinella’s querelle tracts did not generate material change for Italian women in their lifetimes,
7 Since the culture turn of the 1970s, early modern scholars have demonstrated that the term feminism and its modifiers (e.g. protofeminism) are a legitimate lens by which to analyze Renaissance discourse and the work and worldviews of educated women. While scholars like Joan Kelly sometimes define early modern “feminism” simply as “women thinking about women” (Kelly), I use it in a stricture sense based upon Gerda Lerner’s explication of the “feminist consciousness” and Sarah Ross’ theorization of “explicit feminism.” Lerner defines the “feminist consciousness” as “the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is socially determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination.” Ross’ tripart division of early modern feminism identifies its most advanced form as explicit feminism or the sustained critique of patriarchal order accompanied by a positive reassessment of femininity, again most relevantly where education was concerned. See Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes,” Signs 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 5. Gerda Lerner, Women and History, vol. 2, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen- seventy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14. Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Women as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 130–133.
3 they mark a vital step in women’s struggle to be recognized as fully human. The historian’s task is to identify past paradigms that fostered new modes of thinking—my work strives to elucidate the conditions of possibility that shifted women’s mental landscape in early modern Venice.
Feminist Discourse and Civic Myth: Making the Case for Civic Crisis as a Locus of Early
Modern Feminism
The first printed single-author works by cinquecento women from Venice and the Veneto hit the book market in the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), a monumental if short-lived western victory over the Ottoman Empire. So too did the first political texts penned by Italian women writers on the Republic’s behalf. The day-long battle that prompted these productions was an early naval encounter within the greater Venetian-Ottoman contest for dominion of the island of Cyprus and regional control of the eastern Mediterranean fought by the two empires and Venice’s ally the Holy League from 1570 to 1573. Contemporary Europeans accurately celebrated the Christian victory at Lepanto as the largest maritime confrontation since the antique days of Octavian and Mark Antony’s face-off at Actium (31 B.C.), and early modern
Venetians mythologized it as the most epic military battle ever fought, period. As such it became an eternal symbol of state excellence.8 In reality however, Lepanto was not the decisive triumph it seemed to be in 1571; while Venice and its allies won that melee, they ultimately lost both the
War of Cyprus and the island itself, prize jewel of Venice’s maritime empire. What did not
8 One way to measure Lepanto’s scale is the death toll. On Venice’s side, it was approximately 8000 men or two- thirds of total western fatalities. According to Carlo Dionisotti, that number exceeded the total of all Venetian military deaths during the preceding two centuries. The Ottomans, losers of the battle, experienced catastrophic fatalities upward of 25,000 lives. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 449–451. Carlo Dionisotti, “Lepanto nella cultura italiana del tempo," Lettere italiane 23, no. 4 (October 1971): 479–481. To capture the battle’s scale, contemporaries printed maps and lists of ships, troop numbers, and commanders. For a modern accounting, see Appendix B in Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 (London: Cassel, 2003). For contemporary discussion of Lepanto’s epic status, see Chapter Two of this dissertation. 4 change was local fascination with the Lepanto story and the civic celebration of its action, heroes, and supposedly Providential implications as undeniable proof of Venetian greatness. The
Republic celebrated its triumph annually on the Feast of Saint Giustina and local presses published rhetoric, maps, and pictures (Figure 1) that continued to gild the battle’s legacy well into the seventeenth century, enshrining Lepanto within Venice’s state mythos.9
Figure 1. Lepanto’s impressive scale is captured in this engraving by Ferando Bertelli and Nadal Bonifacio Sebeni. La Rotta d[e]ll’armata Turchesca occorsa alli Cuzzolari alli 7 di otobre nel 1571 co segnalata vittoria de christiani. Venice: Bertelli, 1572. Newberry Library FNMC.
While early moderns sang cinquecento Venice’s praises as “a lofty city, producer of heroes, and semidivine” locale, the struggle for Cyprus was not the only challenge the lagoon
9 Iain Fenlon, “The Memorialization of Lepanto in Music, Liturgy, and Art,” in Celebrazione e autocritica: La Serenissima e la ricerca dell'identità veneziana nel tardo Cinquecento, ed Benjamin Paul (Rome: Viella, 2014), 65– 68. 5 polity faced in this era.10 Over the course of the long sixteenth century, Venice experienced economic hardship, the diminution of its international influence, and extensive territory loss as a result of the Italian Wars (1499–1554), the commercial widening of the spice and pepper trades following the circumnavigation of Africa, and persistent military conflict with their erstwhile trade partner and imperial adversary to the east. As a result, the Republic was increasingly unable to rely on accounts of its political or economic might to support its claims to state exceptionalism. Civic myth, long present in the weft of Venetian state-making, took ascendancy as arbiter of the Republic’s reputation. Civic discourse disseminated by Venetian printing presses refashioned the state as the protector of Christendom, bastion of liberty, and purveyor of cultural spectacle. While the citizenly right to partake in such discourse was traditionally the province of men, my dissertation research shows that the image-making machine necessary to uphold the chimera of Venetian exceptionalism in the face of cinquecento civic crisis and the triumphs and tribulations of the War of Cyprus in particular required a constant textual supply. This waxing need for mythic discourse created a literary space on the local book market in which categories of female authorship could expand to include women from Venice's professional and citizen classes as named single-authors.
In this dissertation, I argue that the seeds of the feminist Venetian querelle took root in
Venice's preoccupation with printed image-making and in the advent of women’s engagement with Venetian civic discourse late in the century. While the querelle des femmes has grown continually as a site of historical inquiry since the cultural turn of the 1970s, the question “why
Venice?” or why did the Renaissance Republic host the debate's feminist radicalization has not been sufficiently studied to explain the extraordinary careers of Fonte and Marinella. My
10 “Alma Cittade, D’Heroi producitrice, e Semidei” Bartolomeo Canato, Capitolo in laude di Venetia (Venice: Domenico Farri, 1560), 4a. 6 dissertation evolved from a desire to understand how they navigated the strictures of contemporary patriarchal society to achieve public print careers as cittadine women. I also wanted to know why progressive feminist argument emerged in Venice, a polity that had long and still did pride itself on the domestic enclosure of its elite women in 1600, when it did.
Renaissance historians and literature scholars have looked to European precedent, Venetian women’s economic disenfranchisement, the Italian vernacular turn, and peninsular education trends to answer these queries but never to civic foci, a research trend that precludes us from fully understanding the querelle’s evolution. In order to understand “why Venice,” my project looks to the fact that long before Fonte and Marinella made their public debut as feminist debate writers at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Venetian bookshelves stocked with querelle tractates sat side by side with those laden with civic paeans dedicated to shaping the reputation of the land’s ranking lady, Venetia or the state personified, queen over earth and sea. Despite the genres’ shared popularity and mutual focus on rhetorical identity-fashioning, they have not been studied in relation to each other in either the historiography of the querelle or that of Venetian civic myth. I take up that work here.
The advent of female-authored civic speech in early modern Venice along with the correlative notion that the “other” sex could possess a viable citizenly function anticipated the pro-woman arguments of the querelle tracts of 1600. That some contemporary women, Fonte included, were able to fulfill a conventionally “virile” role as civic speakers in the decades before
1600, a role theoretically denied them by the gendered Renaissance separation of spheres, indicates that the contours of early modern womanhood were more malleable than not. This reality challenges the monolithic narrative that insists on elite Venetian women’s storied reclusion from the world in both the physical and intellectual sense and on their perpetually
7 passive function as objects of rather than contributors to local civic life and knowledge-making.
This narrative originated in contemporary patriarchal ideology in the first instance and has too often been uncritically adopted by modern historiography. It is true that early modern Venetian women’s engagement with the public sphere was limited and that Venice's patriciate and government bureaucracy strove to yoke women’s bodies to its service through contemporary rites like the Sensa, patrician marriage praxis, clausura, and the ostentatious unveiling of its otherwise carefully guarded female wealth before visiting dignitaries like Henry III. But this is not the whole story. Where conventional historiography has positioned Renaissance women as passive objects of Venetian politics and civic myth, I argue that cinquecento changes to Venice’s imperial status, state-making project, and print market expanded categories of authorship, facilitating new definitions of female potential. In their turn, Venetian women writers manipulated the rhetorical space newly available to them after Lepanto to engage with print, establish themselves as civic contributors, experiment with genre, assert authority, and ultimately re-conceptualize the scope of contemporary femininity.
The Historiography of the Venetian querelle
By illuminating the link between Venetian women's roles as pro-woman rhetors and civic actors, I will contribute to a rich historiography that strives to excavate the condition of early modern women and reinscribe their names and words in the literary canon and historical record.11 As previously stated, the querelle des femmes emerged as a legitimate site of academic research during the late 1970s. It did so largely thanks to the groundbreaking work of second-
11 The trend of composing encyclopedia of learned Renaissance women derives from this desire; for examples see, Rinaldina Russell, ed., Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (London: Greenwood Press, 1994) and Anne Larsen, Carole Levin and Diana Robin, Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007). 8 wave feminist theorist and Renaissance historian Joan Kelly. Kelly challenged the American academy to confront the then widespread absence of women in historiography and urged early modernists to question whether or not men and women alike experienced a Renaissance.12 Only after she inspired scholars of European history to conduct investigations of the past from the
“vantage point” of women’s emancipation were the compositions of Fonte, Marinella, and other
Venetian women writers (e.g. Arcangela Tarrabotti, Sara Copiam Sullam) rescued from obscurity and reintegrated with the Italian literary tradition.13
An important early contribution to this effort is Margaret King’s Women of the
Renaissance. As indicated by its title, King's book examines the early modern period through a broad lens. It divides and reviews the lives of premodern women in three spheres—familial, religious, and intellectual—in order to provide students and scholars alike with a “grand panorama of an epochal period;” it also seeks to provide an answer to Kelly’s seminal query:
“did women have a renaissance?”14 To do so, King looks at “the great variety in [European] women’s lives” from 1350 to 1650 rather than at any one author, locality, or specific iteration of the querelle des femmes.15 Fonte and Marinella make an appearance in a section on “Women and
High Culture.” King positions their careers as feminist women writers as the culmination of female learning's progressions from a relative non-entity beyond the convents of medieval
Europe to a humanist attribute accessible only to the daughters of the intellectual elite in the
12 Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, ed. Catharine Stimpson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 21–22. The now outmoded understanding of women’s collective improved condition in the Renaissance stems from the nineteenth-century Burckhartian notion that “women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men.” See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, vol. 2, The Discovery of the World and of Man, Society and Festivals, Morality and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 389. 13 Kelly, “Did Women have a Renaissance,” 32. 14 Catharine Stimpson, Preface to Women of the Renaissance, by Margaret L. King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ix. 15 King, Women of the Renaissance, xiii. 9 quattrocento to a relative cultural norm centered around the vernacular late in the Renaissance.16
She analyzes this process at the continental level and argues that premodern women's engagement with the querelle and literature more generally derived from the slow manifestation of a feminine reading audience, some of whom took up pens to partake in the creation and distribution of knowledge. More recently, historian Sarah Ross proved that this process evolved in tandem with and enabled the growth of feminist rhetoric in Renaissance England and Italy. In
The Birth of Feminism, she analyzes the advent of secular women's education in fourteenth- century household academies run by enlightened father figures, then traces the progressive relocation of women's learning into the salon, a rare locus of feminine autonomy. Ross credits these spaces, rising rates of female literacy, and women's defense both passive and explicit of their intellectual equality relative to their male peers with generating a “counterargument to centuries of biblical and Aristotelian antiwoman sentiment and to the patriarchal structure of
Western society.”17 She also makes the case that Fonte and Marinella were sincere explicit feminists. Her chapters “Learned Wives and Mothers in Italy” and “Discourse of Equality and
Rights,” perform a sharp-sighted case study of the veneziane’s querelle tracts in order to dissect how “women intellectuals used their pens to dismantle gender categories” and find “new possibilities for women’s intellectual and social self-realization.”18
To date, only a small number of querelle studies exist that are dedicated in their entirety to asking "why Venice" or to examining the radical Venetian querelle exclusively. For example, there is only one monograph length study of Fonte’s oeuvre, Paola Malpezzi Price 's Moderata
Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice. This text begins with the premise that early
16 Ibid., 165. 17 Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 5. 18 Ibid., 276, 277, 287. 10 modern women have traditionally been “excluded from History” because of their “marginality in the meaning-giving process” or the construction of social institutions, theory, and law.19 Price attempts to rectify this exclusion by explicating the cittadino social realm to which Fonte (and
Marinella) belonged in hopes of locating the author within it. Interestingly, Price identifies the myth of Venice as a possible inspiration for Fonte's entrée into the querelle, suggesting that the striking contrast between contemporary personifications of Venice as a strong woman (e.g.
Justice, Venus, or the sea queen) and the condition of the Republic’s actual female residents who were subject to strict patriarchal control motivated Fonte to wade into the debate on women.20
While Price’s theory that artistic representations of Venice influenced the qualities of Il merito's cast and content of its dialogue is an interesting one, she does not pursue it at length; this prevents her from adequately explaining how a private Venetian woman whose physical if not mental world was largely confined to the home would have accessed this most public variety of iconography. Price also paints a picture of Fonte's growth as a writer from the time of Tredici canti del Floridoro’s publication in 1581 to the composition of Il merito in the early 1590s as a stark transition from young, naive patriot to bitter feminist.21 I disagree with this characterization, especially as four of Fonte's six known works feature distinctly civic themes, a statistic that suggests a more complicated relationship between the Venetian writer’s pro-woman politics and civic activism than Price’s diagnosis allows.22 However, as one of the only secondary studies of Renaissance Venice’s women writers to identify civics as a crucial
19 Paola Malpezzi Price, Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 13. 20 Price, Moderata Fonte, 87–100. 21 Ibid. 22 Those texts are Floridoro (1581), the civic dialogue Le feste (1581 or ’82), the civic Canzone nella morte del Ser.(mo) Princ. di Venetia Nicolò da Ponte (1585), and Il merito itself (written c.1592, the year of Fonte’s death). Although Il merito’s primary function is feminist, its setting is local and its contents include panegyrics to the state as icon in addition to a critique of Venice’s man-made laws, as well as encomiums to exemplary locals both male and female. 11 component of Fonte’s mental landscape, Price's monograph nonetheless performs an important task within the field of querelle studies.
Another contributor to the scholarship of this field is Italian literature expert Virginia
Cox, whose work as both translator and researcher has been crucial to excavating the lives and works of Renaissance Italy’s women writers. In her 1995 article “The Single Self: Feminist
Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,” Cox tackled the issue of locality as prompt to feminist discourse and demonstrated that Serenissima women’s increasing economic disenfranchisement over the course of the sixteenth-century provided a strong motivator for anti- male rhetoric in Fonte and Marinella’s lifetimes. Specifically, Cox argued that the cinquecento shrinkage of Venice's economy as a result of wealthy houses’ turn from maritime trade to landed investments combined with efforts to preserve their patrimony by restricting opportunities for marriage to one or two daughters in a generation denuded local women of a customary life path and produced the “virtually unprecedented “phenomenon of the “secular spinster.”23 Elite
Venetian women suffered as a result, finding themselves unmarriageable and thus deprived of the limited but important freedom associated with governing a domestic household as its matriarch. And while Venetian law stipulated that daughters receive a share of their parents’ estates equal to that of their brothers in the form of a dowry, this decline in marriage rates also prevented them from acquiring even that modicum of financial independence.24 According to
Cox, “it is against the background of these dramatic changes in women’s position and prospects that we should situate Fonte and Marinella’s analyses of women’s condition.”25 If the economics of marriage do not explain how respectable Venetian women got away with public authorship,
23 Virginia Cox, “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 527–28, 530. 24 Ibid., 533. 25 Ibid., 528. 12 they do highlight the important fact that educated women had greater reason to enter the querelle late in the century. Because Cox weaves a parallel examination of Venetian economic history with a close reading of Il merito and La nobiltà’s fiscal lines of argument, her work also demonstrates that primary source analysis is most effective when it is interdisciplinary or when literary criticism meets historical contextualization.
Interestingly, Cox's early work positioned Fonte and Marinella as true feminists or advocates of Renaissance women's emancipation from “a tyranny that seeks to legitimate itself by spurious claims of male superiority.”26 Later in her career she significantly revised this opinion, averring in 2008 that the querelle tracts of 1600 fought “for no more in effect than a cultural recognition of the dignity of women...there is little by way of a real call for social reform.”27 This historiographic shift seems to be based upon a problematic and political notion that female querelle writers’ call for total social acceptance of women’s “dignity” was not revolutionary enough to qualify as feminist or remarkable—but by what standard? The importance of Fonte and Marinella’s querelle texts does not lie in their ability to fit modern definitions of feminism or in their effectiveness of outcome (i.e. did they cause material change).
Instead the significance of their work is located precisely in the fact that they advocated for women to be understood as fully human in 1600. With the 2009 publication of The Birth of
Feminism, Ross began the crucial task of reasserting the real progressiveness of some female querelle writers’ critique of early modern society and interrogation of the meaning of womanhood. By examining Fonte and Marinella's claim to be viable citizenly actors and speakers as well as their published interventions in the debate on women, my dissertation will
26 Ibid., 520. 27 Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 212. 13 build on Ross’ efforts to further illume their contribution to the perennial struggle for women’s right to self-determination.
Chapter Outlines
In order to contextualize this project’s analysis of early modern Venetian women writers, their civic activism, and feminist politics, I begin with a historiography chapter. Chapter One outlines the history of the continental querelle and traces the contours of female participation in the debate in France and Italy, the major hubs of women’s debate activity prior to the seventeenth century. I begin with a case study set in fifteenth-century Paris, the origin point of the querelle and the residence of Venetian-born pro-woman author Christine de Pizan (1364– c.1430). At the turn of the century, Pizan entered into a literary dispute over the merits and misogyny of a popular allegorical poem entitled the Roman de la Rose with a group of male
Parisian court-goers. She took the stance of women’s defender, protesting the negative treatment of her sex within both the Roman and the greater romantic literary tradition. In her most famous debate work Le Livre de la cité des dames, she articulated a feminist defense of womankind’s educative potential and moral virtue, compiling an extensive list of exemplary women whose life stories stood as evidence of collective female worth. In doing so, Pizan set a literary precedent whose legacy evolved into the European debate on women. Over the course of the fifteenth century, the debate manifested in the urban centers and humanist hubs of France; by the 1460s it had taken off in the courts and city-states of northern Italy. On both sides of the Mediterranean, the querelle des femme’s popularity as a literary subject and the ideological tenor of its arguments were largely shaped by place, as was the frequency and variety of women’s participation. Chapter One ends with a discussion of Cassandra Fedele, early modern Italy’s
14 most famous woman writer. While Fedele’s status as a protofeminist debate author is tenuous, her fame translated into a practical testament to women’s theoretical educative ability. More importantly, she acted as a quasi-civic speaker for the state on two occasions and was the only secular respectable Venetian woman to publish single-author work prior to the vernacular debuts of Fonte and Marinella.
In Chapter Two, I analyze how categories of female authorship expanded on the cinquecento Venetian book market in relation to contemporary civic crisis. In this period the
Republic saw the diminution of its international influence and imperial reach as a result of the
Italian Wars, the shifting balance of trade in India and the Levant, and Mediterranean conflict with the Ottoman Turks. Civic myth, always present in the weft of Venetian narrative, became the primary arbiter of the Republic’s image in consequence. The 1571 Battle of Lepanto is the best exemplary of this reality. It the immediate wake of Venice’s victory, the local book market experienced a boom in ephemeral civic print. Hundreds of unbound vernacular encomiums to
Venetian greatness rolled off the local presses for months on end; by the time Cyprus passed into
Ottoman control in 1573, the battle was cemented in the Venetian imagination as a triumphal, enduring symbol of the state’s excellence. While the right to author civic discourse and military commentary was forged to masculinity in the Renaissance, the Venetian archive shows that local publishing houses with a corner on the civic market like that of the brothers Guerra began to print Lepanto works by a handful of women writers in the winter of 1571.
The appearance of women’s names in political Venetian print, few though they were, was an unprecedented phenomenon that has gone largely undiscussed in the historiography of Italian female literacy and literary endeavor. The history of Venetian-Ottoman relations, the naval tactics played out at Lepanto, the battle’s ebullient aftermath, and the sharp reversal of Venice’s
15 fortunes in the War of Cyprus are well trod scholarly territory; however, academics have yet to investigate how or indeed whether Italian women participated in the battle’s initial celebration in
Venice and its subsequent apotheosis into a staple of Serenissima civic myth. With Chapter Two,
I demonstrate that Venice’s need for myth-affirming discourse in the 1570s created an opportunity for women to assert their voices in the public sphere. We see this for example in the fact that practically two decades before Fonte’s querelle tract hit the press, a quarto edition of her civic performance play Le Feste (1581) was circulating among Venetian literary circles.28 In addition, the front matter of a 1578 oration published by the Guerra press and dedicated to the commander of Venice’s Lepanto fleet included a short poem by one “Madonna M. P.” Fonte’s birth name was Modesta Pozzo; if M.P. is Fonte, the existence of this poem further confirms that civic print functioned as the letterata’s access point to the world of Venetian publishing. While women-authored civic discourse does not fall under the immediate rubric of the querelle, its existence does speak to the debate’s interest in female merit and ability; it also denotes a latent female subscription to the idea that women could be civic actors and therefore possess a role beyond that of daughter, wife, and mother. Such an attitude explains in part how cittadine women like Fonte and Marinella came to assert female worth on multiple levels and challenge patriarchal social supremacy in 1600.
In Chapter Three I further deconstruct the contemporary notion embedded in modern historiography that early modern women were passive objects of civic life to illuminate them instead as active fashioners of Venetian myth—this is my signature contribution to the field. I trace the movement of single-author civic speech by women into the metropole in the early
1580s and argue that as women writers like Issicratea Monte and Moderata Fonte accessed
28 Le Feste was written for and performed in front of Doge Nicolo da Ponte in 1581. 16 mythic rhetoric to burnish the Republic’s reputation, civic discourse became a tool by which to justify literary deviance from gender norms. I also combine historical analysis with intertextual reading to investigate Fonte and Marinella’s gendered intervention in epic poetry in Tredici
Canti del Floridoro (1581) and L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (1635). These texts comment on querelle topoi such as women’s education and public autonomy in heroic tales about women warriors and sorceresses who pursue conventional epic feats (e.g. questing, sword fighting, and prophesizing) while serving as vehicles of pro-woman lyric and mythic rhetoric.
Where appropriate in this chapter, as well as in Chapter Two, I also try to gesture to the intellectual web of patrons, printers, and kin that worked behind the scenes to help move cinquecento Venetian women into print even as state need for civic rhetoric gave them a platform by which to do so. In doing so I follow the precedent set by Diana Robin with
Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century
Italy, which text analyzes mixed gender Italian networks, often via inferential connections derived from paratextual evidence and intertextual overlap.29 I include this information because it is clear that academic networks, primarily that of the Venier salon and the Accademia
Veneziana, played a role in Fonte and Marinella’s print careers. Given that women both wrote less and had their work survive less often than men in this period, it is hard to prove the role of networks definitively and I make no claims to doing so here. Rather I hope to indicate that future research within this avenue of inquiry may help us better understand the world of Venetian
29 Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). Robin’s book looks at the salons of the Colonna and d’Aragona women of Naples and their relationships with printers and poligraphi in Venice like Girolamo Ruscelli, Ludovico Domenichi, and Giuseppe Betussi. Some of her evidence is archival, but most connections derive from theoretical interpretations of paratextual elements of the book. 17 women writers and how for example Fonte and Marinella became two of only five Renaissance
Italian women to publish epic works.
Chapter Four hones in on discursive femininity as formulated in Fonte and Marinella’s epic plotlines. I investigate how the veneziane deployed the mythic narratives dissected in
Chapters Two and Three as a cover for Floridoro and L’Enrico’s critique of contemporary gender categories. In particular, I am interested in how they remade the stock epic characters of guerierra and sorceress as ambassadors of feminism. Epic tradition dictated that these character types should be essential beings defined either by their total virtue or total wickedness. Women warriors in the mode of Ludovico Ariosto’s Bradamante wore their virginity as a shield and resolved their storylines and contemporary readers’ discomfort with their unfeminine virility by dying tragically in battle or surrendering their swords to a hero capable of claiming them in marriage. Similarly, preternatural women modelled after Virgil’s Cumaean sibyl or Ariosto’s
Melissa were honorable, chaste figures who wielded their magic for limited ends while the amoral sorceress whose bag of tricks combined occult power, unfeminine erudition, and overt sexuality with which to wreak havoc on male protagonists provided a literary foil. I examine the characters of Risamante, Circetta (Floridoro), Erina, and Claudia (L’Enrico) to demonstrate that
Fonte and Marinella rejected these binary stereotypes in favor of rescripting epic femininity as moderate and multifaceted.
I end with a case study of the querelle tracts of 1600, the creation of which hinged I think on the precedent for single-author female writing, genre experimentation, and subversion of traditional definitions of womanhood set by the Fonte’s feminist poetics in Floridoro and the advent of political female authorship in 1570s and 80s Venice. Chapter Five performs a close reading of Il merito delle donne and La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne to reveal the extent to
18 which patriarchal society came under fire in the radical Venetian querelle. In doing so, my dissertation will contribute to the greater humanistic project to recover the lived experiences of past women and explicate the ways in which they shaped the dialectical contours of society, knowledge, and the self over time.
19
CHAPTER ONE
TAKING UP THE PEN: WOMEN WRITERS AND THE QUERELLE DES FEMMES, 1400– 1600
“Let Matheolus and all the other prattlers who have spoken against women with such envy and falsehood go to sleep and stay quiet!”1
- Christine de Pizan, 1405
When the fifteenth-century dawned at the Parisian court of Charles VI, two centuries and some six hundred miles away from the Venice of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, courtly love and the romantic escapades of allegorical chivalric poetry were all the rage. In an era of plague, aristocratic factionalism, and the Hundred Years War, romantic literature and its production provided a unifying cultural bond to the well-versed and well-heeled residents of the
Valois court. Clergymen, courtiers, poets, and bourgeoise officials traded letters and lyric and rubbed shoulders as participants in literary orders dedicated to the study and promotion of courtly love like the Cour Amoureuse or Court of Love.2 Among their number was one Cristina da Pizzano, the humanistically-educated daughter of a Bolognese physician who had transplanted his family to France in the 1360s to take a job as the king’s astrologer. Better known by her
Gallicized appellative Christine de Pizan, she would eclipse her father in position and fame, establishing a poetic “court” in her own right and defying contemporary gender norms to carve a
1 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 127. 2 Jacqueline Cerquiglini, “Trial of Eros,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 114–117. David Hult, introduction to Debate of the Romance of the Rose, by Christine de Pizan et al., trans and ed. David Hult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 7–8. 20 place for herself as Europe’s first professional woman writer.3 According to the historical tradition, she also deserves credit as the founder of a Parisian literary debate on gender and misogyny whose intellectual legacy sparked the continental Renaissance movement known as the querelle des femmes.
Any investigation of the European debate on women or the function(s) of femininity within the early modern cultural imaginary must begin with a discussion of Pizan. As Sarah Ross writes in The Birth of Feminism, “Christine represents a point of origin for all scholars interested in the history of educated women in the West.”4 Born in Venice and raised at French court, Pizan was proficient in Latin, trained in the liberal arts, and a prolific wordsmith. In the period between
1394 and 1429 she authored hundreds of poems, an education manual, Charles VI’s official biography, and several defenses of women among other works.5 The latter comprise her most famous writings today. At the turn of the fifteenth-century, Pizan was just entering the protofeminist stage of her career. As a late medieval woman writer and partisan of Isabeau de
Bavaria, Charles’ queen and sometimes coregent, she deployed pro-woman rhetoric as both a practical tool by which to forge patron-client ties and ideological proof of her sex’s educative potential.6 The contemporary debate known as the querelle de la rose was the primary vehicle of these campaigns. Like most manifestations of the debate on women, the querelle de la rose broadly revolved around discursive analysis of misogyny’s cultural ramifications; in detail it was strongly defined by the intellectual tenor of its immediate setting. If premodern European literary
3 Cerquiglini, “Trials of Eros,” 114–117. Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 19, 22–24. 4 Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 19. 5 Nadia Margolis, “Pizan, Christine de (1364/1365–ca. 1430,” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England, ed. Anne Larsen, Carole Levin and Diana Robin (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 294–295. 6 For Christine’s literary support of Isabeau’s political faction and viability as a mother cum regent to the state, see Tracy Adams, “Christine de Pizan, Isabeau of Bavaria, and Female Regency,” French Historical Studies 32, no.1 (2009): 1–4, 23–31. 21 society shared an overarching interest in the meaning of womanhood, factors like culture, context, and the precarity of knowledge transmission across space and time produced multiple iterations of the scholastic debate on femininity. The quattrocento querelle de la rose filtered gendered debate through the lens of romantic poetry, and its roster was limited to members of the
French capital’s intellectual elite. Named for Pizan’s poetic court (the ordre de la rose) and the principle text it engaged, this earliest iteration of the querelle des femmes examined the condition of women through the framework of courtly love and the “other” sex’s treatment within the liaisons and storylines of chivalric literature.
The specific text laid on the discursive chopping block was a bipartite dream allegory entitled the Roman de la Rose. This thirteenth-century text begins as a fairly staid ode to platonic lovers and their ladies, but it mutates quickly into a prolonged satiric assault on female worth and the social norms of decorous love.7 These qualities constituted the rhetorical battlefield of the querelle de la rose, which contest Pizan and a cohort of male courtiers and Court of Love members fought from 1401–1403. Pizan took the stance of women’s defender.8 Her rose manuscripts condemn the Roman’s ideation of women as habitually iniquitous creatures and challenge its narrative embrace of immoral themes such as deception, carnality, and rape. Her first epistolary salvo against the poem dared its fans to answer “how it can be of any value that
… [the author] accuse, blame, and defame women so much” when everyone knows that the world has always been graced with women of every rank who “posses[s] great beauty, chastity, dignity, and wisdom.”9 Pizan was the first European laywoman to articulate such a protofeminist
7 David Hult, “The Roman de la Rose, Christine de Pizan, and the querelle des femmes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 185–186. 8 Charity Willard, introduction and commentary to The Writings of Christine de Pizan, by Christine de Pizan, ed. Charity Willard (New York: Persea Books, 1994), 139–141. 9 Christine de Pizan, “Lesser Treatise on the Romance of the Rose,” in The Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed. C. Willard (New York: Persea Books, 1994), 155. 22 stance. Although historians are unsure whether later women writers knew of the Italo-French author’s querelle works, Pizan’s intellectual interest in the nature of gender survived her by multiple centuries, as did the rhetorical framework wherein literary debate functioned as a crucible through which early moderns could distill and disseminate contemporary attitudes toward identity, virtue, and female learning.10
This chapter provides an overview of that legacy starting with a case study of Pizan and the inception of the querelle des femmes. From there, I trace the trajectory of secular women writers’ continuing participation in the debate in France and Italy from 1400 to 1600, paying special attention to the evolution of pro-woman thought on the Italian peninsula.11 The point I hope to make here is that Renaissance women’s ability to participate in the querelle was always contingent upon place, as was the shape of the debate itself. In doing so, I will lay the contextual groundwork for my dissertation’s analysis of how and why the querelle radicalized in Venice at the turn of the seventeenth century.
Foundations: Christine de Pizan and the Querelle de la Rose
Scholarly interest in the embryonic years of the querelle des femmes has been on the rise since the American academy’s cultural turn in the 1970s and 80s. This era saw the inception of gender studies and feminist theorist Joan Kelly’s provocative demand that medievalists and early modern scholars challenge historiography’s ingrained patriarchal configuration by conducting their analyses of the past from the “vantage point” of women’s emancipation.12 Her intervention
10 Willard, introduction and commentary to The Writings of Christine de Pizan, 141, 143. King, Women of the Renaissance, 220. 11 France and Italy were hubs of the cinquecento querelle, particularly where women’s participation was concerned. While English women also took part in the debate on women, usually through the lens of Christian humanism and religious reform, their participation as pro-woman thinkers largely came late, predominantly in the seventeenth century. Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 8–9. 12 Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” 21–22. 23 sparked new interest in the recovery of feminine early modern voices and the querelle de la rose.
While chivalric medieval poetry was hardly the first school of literature to delve the question of female nature—indeed a profusion of ink has been spent on the topic since antiquity––Christine de Pizan’s pro-woman critique of educated Parisian society’s engagement with its oft misogynist themes was unique. Prior to the fifteenth century, written discourse of whatever genre that contemplated the nature, moral character, and proper roles of women was invariably composed by men. Medieval Christian Europe had wholeheartedly adopted the Aristotelian interrelation of female virtue with silence and contemporary cultural norms dictated that the “other” sex “should prefer to listen in silence rather than to talk.”13 While most scholars agree that European women as a whole did not experience positive social, economic, or legal growth in the Renaissance, the advent of the querelle and the relative proliferation of women’s writing in this era demonstrates that something changed where elite attitudes toward education and contemporary women’s mental landscape are concerned.14 Thanks to the research of early modernists like Margaret
King, Virginia Cox, and Sarah Ross, we now comprehend that an early form of feminism that encompassed the beliefs that women are fully human and intellectually competent emerged in this period. This notion spurred a select group of educated women to break with orthodox gender roles including the injunction to silence. As the first secular woman writer to publicly interrogate
13 Leon Battista Alberti, The Albertis of Florence: Leon Battista Alberti’s “Della Famiglia,” trans. Guido Guarino (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1971), 225. While the Pauline edict on silence was the common biblical standard on silence, the bible offered other justifications for women’s subjugation, i.e. “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. Permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man, she is to keep silent.” I Timothy 2:11-12. 14 Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” 20–22. On the notion that women did not see an expansion of opportunity see Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, xi–xiii. Cox agrees with the proposal that women did not experience a renaissance but states that Kelly exaggerated the extent to which women experienced a contraction of options between the medieval period and the Renaissance and instead emphasizes the continuities between the eras. The work of Sarah Ross and Margaret King also fall into this historiographic category. 24 misogynist textual treatments of the female sex and to propound a positive model of femininity via the querelle de la rose, Pizan can be understood as an origin point for this change.
According to the literary critic David Hult, Pizan’s pro-woman corpus represented “an active counterassault against an entire intellectual establishment to which women were solely the object of discussion, and which greatly limited their ability to take up the subject position in speech.”15 The Roman de la Rose, the immediate object of Pizan’s criticism, epitomized contemporary love poetry’s proclivity to cast to female characters as silent objects upon which men may act as they will. This was particularly true of the dream allegory’s second half. Begun by the obscure medieval author Guillaume de Lorris sometime between 1230 and 1235, the
Roman was fleshed-out and completed by the Parisian poet-scholar Jean de Meun later that century, after which it went on to reign over the French literary circuit as one of the most popular poems ever written. Its contents relay the story of a male Lover who ventures into nature one fine
May day and happens upon an idyllic garden ruled over by that god who “apportions the gifts of love according to his desire, who governs ladies, and who humbles the pride of men, making sergeants of seigneurs and servants of ladies.”16 During the Lover’s subsequent perambulations around this flowery landscape, an all-consuming desire to possess one of its resident red roses overcomes him after the watching God of Love moves to transfix his eyes with the arrows of
Beauty, Simplicity, Courtesy, and Fair Seeming.17 The verses that follow alternatively detail the
Lover’s quest to claim his beloved and, in the section by Meun, veer off on lengthy rhetorical tangents (e.g. the nature of philosophy, fortune, and deceit) designed to showcase the author’s
15 Hult, introduction to Debate of the Romance of the Rose, 1. 16 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 32, 42. 17 Ibid., 54–56. 25 erudition.18 They also describe the Lover’s encounter with allegorical characters like Reason and
Jealousy, the erection and siege of a fortress built to protect the Rose, and “her” capitulation to his cupidinous efforts. Although Meum imbues the Rose as signifier of the female beloved with conventional womanly virtues such as chastity and maidenly shyness, the Roman does not look kindly upon femininity or the mixed-gender exchanges of courtly romance in general. The
Lover’s desire for the Rose is libidinous rather than platonic, and his possession of her culminates in a thinly disguised rape metaphor. More broadly, the book criticizes women as vulgar, greedy, fickle, easily seduced, and tainted by “too many devious and malicious ways in their hearts.”19
Christine de Pizan’s querelle tracts by contrast aver that no matter what “[Jean de Meun] and all his accomplices may have sworn … there have been, still are, and will be many more worthy, more honorable, better bred, and even more learned, who have done more good for the world than he ever did.”20 This statement derives from an epistolary treatise she wrote in 1401 and addressed to a royal secretary named Jean de Montreuil. Montreuil had been colleagues with
Pizan’s then deceased husband Etienne du Castel, and he was the recent author of an encomium to Meun.21 If Montreuil responded to Pizan’s letter, that document is lost; however, his clerical associates Pier and Gontier Col did issue replies, serving as two of the querelle de la rose’s principle disputants along with Christine. Given the social nature of Pizan’s connection to
Montreuil and her fellow debaters, historians must remember that her motivations for enjoining a literary controversy in the early 1400s were multiple and potentially as pragmatic as they were reactionary when analyzing the querelle de la rose. Practically speaking, Pizan’s decision to stir
18 Jonathan Morton, “Le Roman de la rose,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 69, no. 1 (2015), 81–82. 19 Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 301. 20 Pizan, “Lesser Treatise,” 156. 21 Hult, introduction to Debate of the Romance of the Rose, 6, 12–13. 26 the rhetorical pot by lambasting the misogynist timbre of the most widely read text in contemporary France was a savvy career move. If Pizan was a pro-woman advocate, she was also a career writer and a careful promoter of her own work. Widowed since 1389 and responsible for the upkeep of her family from that time on, she anticipated the printshops of the
Renaissance by running a manuscript workshop that reproduced and distributed her literary productions. In 1402 for example, she compiled a dossier of debate documents as a patron gift for the French queen.22 Blanketly labeling Christine de Pizan a gender warrior or feminist ideologue then would be to underestimate the complexities of her position as a single woman, court-goer, and member of late medieval France’s clerical class. However, as a learned Christian woman who combined matrimony and motherhood with a public career, Pizan also knew the difficulties and necessity of defending women’s moral compass, mental acuity, and then- subversive claim to a right to education firsthand. Rhetorically short-circuiting the brand of gender ideology espoused by the Roman de la Rose was thus personally and professionally important for the letterata.
Pizan’s early querelle works attempt to convince her audience that reading the Roman, a work whose pages simultaneously undermined the orthodox rules of courtly love, encouraged sexual profligacy, and befouled the reputation of her sex could only harm the social order. “What good can come of it?” she asks. “I can see none, other than an impediment to peace and harmony, or to make husbands hearing such silliness and bilge … suspicious of their wives and less affectionate to them.”23 Pizan damns Jean de Meun for painting all women with the same tarry brush and condemns his universalizing tendencies as intellectually suspect, claiming that
22 Hult, “The Roman de la Rose,” 190. Christine de Pizan to Isabeau de Bavière, February 1402, in Debate of the Romance of the Rose, trans. and ed. David Hult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 98–99. 23 Pizan, Lesser Treatise, 156. 27
“since he blamed all women in general, I am forced to believe for that very reason that he never had any acquaintance or relation with honorable or virtuous women … if he had only reproached indecent women and advised that one flee them, it would have been a good and just teaching.
But no! Instead, he accuses all women without exception.”24 To undermine the specter of the essential, wicked woman raised by Meun’s storytelling, she populated her debate letters to
Montreuil and the brothers Col with lists of exemplary women. Female figures both biblical and modern (e.g. Esther, Rebecca, and Queen Jeanne of France) are included.25 Finally, she invoked her own human experience as paradigm in order to delegitimize the Roman’s antifeminist portrayal of women as unfit to live and think autonomously, writing that “as I am in fact a woman, I am better suited to attest to these matters than he who, not having had this experience, speaks instead through conjecture and in a haphazard manner.”26
In “Christine de Pizan and the Authority of Experience,” gender scholar Mary Anne Case interprets Pizan’s insistence that the female existence qualifies as source of authority as a forerunner to outsider jurisprudence or the notion that within any given society, scrutiny of a marginal group is best left to a member of that group rather than a person from the dominant bloc, here men.27 While the belief that subordinate groups possess a legitimate right to self- describe is accepted today, this was not the case in Pizan’s era. As Case demonstrates, the
24 Christine de Pizan to Jean de Montreuil, June-July 1401, in Debate of the Romance of the Rose, trans. and ed. David Hult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 58. 25 Ibid., 59. This list of women is representative of the exemplary tradition in medieval writing, inherited from ancient Greek literary praxis and the recovery of Roman writers like Quintilian and Cicero. According to Aristotle, example was one of two forms of rhetorical persuasion (the other was the syllogism). In its original form, rhetoric was reserved for arriving at a conclusion on a subject on which ultimate truth did not necessarily exist, aided by the use of examples which played on the writer and audience’s shared knowledge and cultural assumptions. In the medieval period the example came to assume a moral overtone, exemplified here by its use to excoriate or prove female virtue. John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 6–7, 9, 28. 26 Ibid., 58. 27 Mary Anne Case, “Christine de Pizan and the Authority of Experience,” in Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, ed. Marilynn Desmond (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 71. 28 assertion that women possess some right to speak to their own nature reflects a premodern controversy that debated whether or not physical experience, defined here as the embodied experience of being a woman, could be a source of authority.28 This question preoccupied western intellects for centuries and outlived the querelle de la rose to feature in both pro and antifeminist querelle des femmes arguments. To inhabit a female body in premodern Europe was deeply problematic; the prevailing gender episteme categorized women as fundamentally imperfect creations whose humoral defects rendered them susceptible to inordinate passion, fickleness, weakness, and irrationality.29 Such incapacitation precluded them from operating as legitimate consumers and conveyers of knowledge, an attitude that gestures to the precarity of
Pizan’s position as a female author. And indeed we can find a clear manifestation of such thinking in a 1402 rose letter by Gontier Col who derides Pizan’s interpretation of the Roman as
“manifest error, folly, or senselessness that came to you as a result of presumption and arrogance—you being a woman passionately engaged in this matter.”30
The troubled association between experience and gender suggested by Col’s words was only one part of the hurdle Pizan had to leap in order to make a convincing argument for the validity of experiential female authority. The experience-authority debate had a second facet, western culture’s traditional equation of knowledge with book learning. As Kelly notes in “Early
Feminist Theory and the querelle des femmes,” book-based authority rested firmly on the side of the patriarchal tradition, which could martial centuries of male-authored philosophy and history
28 Ibid., 72. 29 Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, 30, 32. 30 Not only does this statement point to the authority associated with texts that stood the test of time, but it also cunningly implies that Meun’s female reader should be educated on her own deficiency given that his writing is founded in classical masculine rhetoric and thereby has jurisdiction in regard to knowledge. Gontier Col to Christine de Pizan, September 1401, in Debate of the Romance of the Rose, trans. and ed. David Hult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 95. 29 to its cause in this period.31 As we will see in Chapters Four and Five, the one-sided state of the canon would remain a central obstacle to pro-woman argument for centuries. Where the textual heart of the early querelle, the Roman itself, is concerned, we can see that its author relied on the experience-authority dialectic as it pertained to literary jurisdiction and sex to bolster his credibility and keep the theoretical female reader in her place. For example, Meun disrupts the
Lover’s invasion of the castle that encloses his rosy beloved with a section of direct address aimed at “worthy women” to whom he proclaims that, “If you ever find set down here any words that seem critical and abusive of feminine ways, then please do not blame me … I certainly never said anything … either through drunkenness or anger, against any woman alive … but we have set these things down in writing so that we can gain knowledge, and that you too may do so by yourselves. … I shall never lie in anything so long as the worthy men who wrote the old books did not lie.”32 In other words, his text replicates rather than invents a critique of femininity that literate women should gratefully peruse as an exercise in knowledge acquisition and a lesson on their own deficiency.
To counter Meun’s claims and successfully invoke the experience-authority dialectic on women’s behalf, Pizan needed to illuminate misogyny’s cultural entrenchment in the classical, patristic, and ecclesiastical textual traditions and so challenge the evidentiary primacy of such material in contemporary rhetorical praxis.33 At the same time, she needed to invert contemporary gender norms to link the condition of womanhood with intellectual strength rather than debility. Both strategies are on display in her rose writings. For instance, Pizan’s use of
31 Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory,” 13. 32 Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 258–259. 33 For a study of Pizan’s gendered interaction with the problematic of authority and text (specifically the catalog tradition, which drew on all three types of sources), see Glenda McLeod, “The Defense of Gender, the Citadel of the Self,” in Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). 30 exempla as testament to the other sex’s inherent merit feminized a conventionally patriarchal rhetorical device while also demonstrating that women sex could rationally engage with book learning.34 She combines this with a staunch defense of worldly experience as an equally legitimate source of proof, advising Gontier Col for example that “if you discount my arguments to such a degree on account of the meagerness of my faculties (for which you reproach me when you say ‘being a woman’) you should know that I do not in truth consider this at all a reproach
… because of the consolation arising from the noble memory … of women who have been and still are most worthy of praise.”35
Pizan’s creation of a literary space in which pro-woman argument was achieved through some combination of exemplary discourse and the validation of the female experience was her most enduring contribution to the querelle des femmes. As we will see in Chapter Five, both
Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella employed this strategy to some extent in the Venetian querelle tracts of 1600. Where Pizan’s corpus is concerned, this device reached its full form in her first monographic contribution to the debate, Le Livre de la cité des dames (1405), the discussion of which will conclude this case study of the querelle’s prehistory. To quote Pizan, she wrote The Book of the City of Ladies to interrogate “how it happened that so many different men … are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many devilish and wicked thoughts about women and their behavior.”36 Its action revolves around an elaborate dream allegory in which a fictional Christine constructs a parchment city where moral women from all time periods and social classes can find safe haven from western misogyny. Its
34 Pizan could not simply toss exempla out the figurative rhetorical window; she no less than any other historical person was culturally conditioned by the intellectual structures that governed thought in her time period. Argument through example was standard practice and a required skill for any person who wanted to credibly engage with elite intellectual culture. Pizan’s ingenuity lay in reconstituting the exemplum for protofeminist uses. 35 Christine de Pizan to Gontier Col, September 1401, in Debate of the Romance of the Rose, trans. and ed. David Hult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 97. 36 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 3–4. 31 plot expands upon the themes articulated in Pizan’s querelle de la rose epistles. The book begins with Christine sitting alone at her studies, reading the notoriously anti-woman Lamentations of
Matheolus, a thirteenth-century polemic against marriage and the company of women. As she reads, Christine becomes desperate to ascertain “whether the testimony of so many notable men” against her sex “could be true” when her own extensive female acquaintance does not accord in temperament or character with the negative portrayal of femininity before her eyes.37 Doubting the legitimacy of her personal experience as evidence of women’s nature, Christine resolves that her sex must be a monstrosity given that male authors “all speak from one and the same mouth” against them.38 At this point a queenly trio composed of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice personified appear to save Christine from despair and transform her from a passive imbiber of written male misogyny to a zealous defender of women. Together the characters build a shining metropolis that stands as a moneument to positive female potential and locus where famous women can unite to “make liars of [men] by showing forth virtue and prove [men’s] attacks false by acting well.”39
Much of Le Livre de la cité des dames’s page space is devoted to a roll call of the city’s new residents. In Pizan’s hands, this format acts as a literary canvas on which she may attempt to refashion exemplary argument as a feminist rhetorical tool, mainly by remaking Giovanni
Boccaccio’s well known catalog of women’s lives De mulieribus claris (c.1360–74).40
Boccaccio’s compendium was the first such text produced in Europe since antiquity and it was a
37 Ibid., 4 38 As Pizan indicates later in the book, she was aware that this problem stemmed in large part not from male authorship per se, but its monopoly and the one-sided nature of history, a discursive domination that presented itself as nonpartisan and free of sexual bias. She directs Christine to say “I am surprised that so many valiant ladies, who were both extremely wise and literate and could compose and dictate beautiful books … suffered so long without protesting against the horrors charged by different men.” Ibid., 5, 184–185. 39 Ibid., 5–6, 17–18, 256. 40 McLeod, “The Defense of Gender,” 11–114. 32 smash hit with humanist circles active in Pizan’s time where it circulated in Latin, French, and
Italian copies.41 Its contents are neither wholesale misogynist nor feminist, but an intriguing commentary on the proper moral instruction of women produced in reaction to a changing post- plague social structure characterized by the rise of courts (and by extension the donna di palazzo) as well as the literary example of the publicly active female.42 The result is a mixed bag of stories about women. The Florentine letterato condones female figures who adopt male qualities in service of the state or the arts as exceptional virile women (e.g. the Roman orator
Hortensia); those who emulate or reject traditional female virtues like chastity are praised or shamed accordingly (e.g. Lucretia); and women who possess a “misgendered,” unattractive desire for power are condemned as threats to patriarchal hegemony (e.g. Athaliah, Queen of
Jerusalem).
Le Livre de la cité des dames by contrast celebrates the positive notes attached to female biographies and transmutes or excises the rest. Where the De mulieribus claris set a precedent for exempla based meta-commentary on the female sex, Pizan’s manuscript laid a path forward for molding that commentary and the stories attached to it to fit a pointed defense or disparagement of women. The Parisian writer reworked many of Boccaccio’s exempla to promote the education of women and eradicate the aspersions of sexual looseness and moral deviancy that his text cast at powerful women. In doing so, Pizan showed herself to be a cunning rhetorician, citing Boccaccio as the widely respected male humanist whose auctoritas legitimates her work even as she recycles his biographies into subversive pro-woman arrows to fling against
41 Deanna Shemek, "Doing and Undoing: Boccaccio's Feminism (De mulieribus claris),” in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, Janet Levarie Smarr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 195. Margaret Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society (Burlington, VT: Ashgate: 2006), 10. 42 Shemek, “Doing and Undoing,” 203-204. Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines, 1, 8. Virginia Green, introduction to Famous Women, by Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. Virginia Green (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), xiv–xv. 33 patriarchal tradition. Under the cover of “Boccaccio's own words, [whose] credibility is well- known and evident,” Pizan revised the life histories of classical figures like Semiramis, Queen of the Assyrians. 43 In Boccaccio, the incestuous and power hungry Semiramis functions as a symbol of the dangers of female rule and carnality; in Le Livre de la cité des dames she is rehabilitated as a just, noble, and powerful monarch whose historical context serves to necessitate or legitimate even her most deviant actions including a rumored romantic relationship with her son.44 Pizan also demystified female erudition, an ambiguous and potentially destructive force in the De mulieribus claris, to make a case for the positive consequences of female learning.45 To that end, she amplifies past women’s learned achievements, rewriting the story of an ancient Arcadian woman named Carmentis for example to credit her sex with creating the first western system of laws.46 In doing so, Pizan began the task continued by future querelle authors of separating female exempla from the patriarchal literary tradition and establishing the female voice as a valid alternative expert on history and the nature of womanhood. In addition, she articulated early defenses of Eve, companionate marriage, and the necessity of recognizing that literature and reality alike were pervaded by a toxic `double standard on virtue and vice.47
43 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 78. 44 Boccaccio, Famous Women, trans. Virginia Green (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 10–11. Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 39–40. Pizan eradicates all mention of Semiramis’ supposed general surrender to lust and declines to blame for marrying her son because the social mores of the time period in question deemed such an action acceptable. 45 Boccaccio frames female intelligence, when it occurs as a marvel. Within the world or his stories, female intelligence often wreaks social disruption. For example, he frames Ceres, goddess of the harvest, as a Sicilian queen who invented the tools of agriculture including the plow and flour-milling process and so civilized man. But— Boccaccio does not allow even that result to be purely good; instead he makes it a double-edged sword through which culture but also vice entered the world of men Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, 14–16. 46 Ibid., 53-54. Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 71. 47 In addition to traditionally bearing the blame for the Fall of Man, Eve was a vehicle for the belief that women were subordinate to men because she was created last and was literally made of man. Pizan upends this narrative to insist that “Adam slept and God formed woman from one of his ribs, signifying that she should stand at his side as a companion and never lie at his feet life a slave.” Ibid., 23. Re marriage, she found that women should be “diligent in serving, loving, and cherishing their husbands” as partners in the maintenance of the household, but not expected to condone inconstancy or abuse from their spouses. Ibid, 118-119, 255. In regards to the relative wickedness of men and women she wrote that “The law does not maintain, nor can any such written opinion be found that permits them 34
While Pizan’s brand of feminism did not translate into material change or social upheaval, her defense of female education as a social good plus her personal embodiment of women’s mental acuity cemented the first steps forward on the path to cultural acceptance of the learned woman in France and Europe.48 The European intellectual elite would continue to emblazon that path and expound on the theoretical framework and themes introduced by the early querelle long after the name Christine de Pizan faded from memory.
Growing the Querelle: Gendered Debate after Christine
Female writers were a rarity in the debate on women until the late sixteenth century, the period of the querelle’s continental peak.49 Although the tradition of female authorship in France dates back to the Carolingian era, women’s writing in Francophone territory was almost exclusively religious until the late Renaissance when secular, mixed literary circles emerged in
Lyon and Poitiers.50 As a secular woman writer working in Paris at the turn of the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan was an anomalous figure. When the querelle de la rose petered out, literary debate over women’s intellectual and moral merit was continued by men. Protofeminist
French voices remained rare in this period and the production of antiwoman discourse continued unabated, most often in verse or dialogic complaints about the ills that men who engage in
and not women to sin, that their vice is more excusable. In fact, these men allow themselves liberties which they are unwilling to tolerate in women.” Ibid., 165. 48 “[I]f it were customary to send daughters to school like sons…they would learn as thoroughly and understand the subtleties of all the arts and sciences as well as sons” Ibid., 63. 49 Gisela Bock and Margarete Zimmerman, “The European Querelle des Femmes,” Disputatio 5 (2002), 130. 50 Roberta L. Krueger, “Female voices in convents, courts, and households: the French Middle Ages,” in A History of Women’s Writing in France, ed. Sonya Stephens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11 Religious female writing flourished from the twelfth century on; important women writers in this tradition include Heloise the Abbess of the Paraclete, Clemence of Barking, and an author who wrote under the name Marie de France. Marie is the most interesting of these women, for in addition to moral works she composed short poems on issues of love, sex, and marriage, most likely for a courtly audience although we lack the source material to link the author to a known historical personage. Ibid., 16–20. 35 courtly love or marriage suffer.51 In 1424 for instance, French letterati were busy reading Alain
Chartier’s (another court cleric) Belle dame sans mercy (1424), an antiwoman querelle poem that features a bereaved male lover who observes a beautiful woman seduce and then cruelly rebuff some poor besotted suitor, pushing the victim of her wiles to commit suicide.52 While literary critics question the extent to which Chartier sympathized with any of his interlocutors, contemporaries understood the poem as a critique of femininity.53 Other widely read texts from the period include the anonymous Les Quinze joyes du mariage (date unknown) and Antoine de la Salle’s Petit Jehan de Saintré (1456), both of which censure women’s “bad” behavior in courtship scenarios and condemn matrimony as a diseased institution infected by disharmony and deceit 54
On the pro-woman side of the early debate, some French writers continued the querelle de la rose’s interrogation of allegorical romantic poetry and the literary stereotypes that equated immorality with the general condition of womanhood. The most famous of these is Martin le
Franc, Provost of Lausanne’s lyric composition Le Champion des dames (1440). This text features a dispute between Franc Vouloir (Free Will) and the representatives of Malebouche
(Foul Mouth) over Jean de Meun’s ideation of the sexes.55 The text’s central argument is that
51 Maïté Albisture and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français: du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Éditions des Femmes, 1977), 62. 52 Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 109–111. 53 Ibid., 110. 54 Albisture and Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, 62–63. While such works bemoaned the negative consequences of marriage for the groom, according to Albisture and Armogathe such criticism, while admittedly misogynist, was steeped less in a strong belief in female inferiority than in a sense that a relationship between unequal persons must be incompatible and produce a negative power dynamic in which the disparate apportionment of authority plays out in the use of force on one side and trickery on the other when the married parties interact. Ibid., 63. 55 Helen Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France, 1440–1538 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 18–19. Note that Franc’s champion represents a conglomeration of pro-woman voices including that of Christine de Pizan, whose writing is used as a source of exempla and who herself is named as a fellow disputant, a reference that I think demonstrates the success of her rhetorical campaign to establish herself as a viable authority. Ibid., 70. 36 men are more villainous than women in matters of love, a hallmark argument of early pro- woman querelle rhetoric.56 To corroborate this point, Franc Vouloir admonishes men to consult
Reason in their interactions with women; he also furnishes them with a conduct guide to courting and an extensive catalog of virtuous lady loves and the lotharios who pursued them.57 Because debate tracts on both sides of the protofeminist aisle deployed the exemplum and romantic themes, some literary critics contend that books like the Champion des dames and the contemporary querelle had no teeth—in other words, that they were entirely rhetorical and intellectually static to boot. In Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance
Writing for example, Floyd Gray diagnoses fifteenth-century polemic as “reli[ant] on a common core of examples and arguments, rehearsing the raw materials of a discourse which, in its history and articulation is both derivative and redundant.”58 Wrapped up in post-structural enthusiasm for the study of text and words as entities with meanings and lives of their own, Gray falls into the trap of ahistoricity and neglects to analyze early modern rhetoric as a unique cultural product shaped by its specific historical context.59 This mode of querelle analysis is remedied in the work of interdisciplinarians Gisela Bock, Margarete Zimmermann, and Helen Swift. Their scholarship
56 Don Arthur Fischer, “Edition and Study of Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des dames,” (PhD. Diss., Florida State University, 1981), 8. 57 Ibid., 8–10. 58 Floyd Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1, 11. A similar judgement of querelle rhetoric can be found in the work of Renaissance scholar Ian Maclean who states that the querelle des femmes was “characterized by indiscriminate plagiarism and the repetition of stock arguments by both feminist and anti-feminist writers." Ian Maclean, Women Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 25. 59 As Lyndan Warner points out in The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France, humanistically educated early moderns were trained in pro et contra argument (for the querelle, praise and blame narratives) and the belief that one could discover truth by exploring all sides of a topic. This does not mean that querelle texts are pure sophistry; rather they are indicative of both a past method of analysis and contemporary anxiety around issues of identity, the dignity of mankind, and mixed-gender relationships. In backing Warner’s argument, I do claim one caveat however. Warner dismisses the possibility that feminist sentiment should count among these concerns as anachronistic. This is incorrect. Because Warner focuses almost exclusively on male authors, she forgets to ask what it meant for early modern women to write about sex (both for the women authors themselves and their male counterparts); their participation and the debate’s clear framing of identity as at least partially discursive bespeaks its real ideological stakes re the condition of woman. The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 2, 7, 51–80, 96. 37 reminds us that we cannot judge the past according to modern aesthetics and demonstrates that premodern authors used imitation, or as Swift calls it “creative recycling,” to articulate ideas both old and new.60 As we have seen, Renaissance rhetoric privileged the exempla and inherited book learning as sources of authority. These components shaped the intellectual frame in which contemporary writers operated; however, like all structures made of multiple parts, this frame could be manipulated, added to, and fractured into new shapes with time and ingenuity. This sixteenth-century evolution of the debate on women speaks to this potential.
In the cinquecento, the querelle des femmes diversified as the first female participants since Pizan appeared in France and protofeminist thinking expanded to include the proposition that women might be men’s equals (or even their superiors) in more than the ability to learn.
Early modernists agree that the dissemination of German polymath Henricus Cornelius
Agrippa’s tract De Nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei was the key to this shift, sparking new intellectual interest in the condition of women and moving the debate forward across Europe.61
Agrippa composed De Nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei in 1509 and the text was printed in
French for the first time in 1537.62 The work’s primary claim to fame was its sensational declaration that the subordinate position of women in contemporary society derived from the cultural imperative of patriarchy rather than any essential, flawed female essence.63 Agrippa
60 Bock and Zimmermann, “The European Querelle des Femmes,” 136. Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance, 21; 17, 221–222. 61 For example, see Albisture and Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, 62–63. Letizia Panizza, “Polemical Prose Writing, 1500–1600,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. Letizia Panizza and Sharon Woods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 69. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 14, 38. 62 According to Albisture and Armogathe, Agrippa’s embroilment in church reform controversies prevented the publication of his text for twenty years. Albisture and Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, 91–92. Regarding print: another reason for the querelle’s exponential growth in popularity in the sixteenth rather than the fifteenth century was the proliferation of the printing press. The press’ spread led to new interest in the dissemination of information and the rise of discursive centers like Lyon, both of which fostered literary debate in turn. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 288–289. 63 King, Women of the Renaissance, 182. 38 claimed that men and women are differentiated by their biology only rather than by some fundamental disparity in their natures, an argument that differentiated his work from the
Boccaccian mode of exemplary discourse which labeled character traits as ubiquitously masculine or ubiquitously feminine and contended that women who possessed virile qualities were the exception that proved the rule of female inferiority.64 Like Christine de Pizan, Agrippa embraced women’s collective educative potential, arguing that Renaissance women’s social condition would improve with the acquisition of literacy and worldly knowledge, which assets might enable them to adopt new gender roles and achieve sexual parity.65 Reframing the
European querelle as a debate over gender equality was Agrippa’s key contribution to the movement. While some branches of the sixteenth-century querelle remained preoccupied with courtly romantic themes and the question of the merit or fault of courtiers and their female love objects,66 the De Nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei’s rhetorical concern with questions of equality was widely adopted by early modern authors, women included, going forward
Joining the Debate: French Women Writers
The midcentury reemergence of female voices in the querelle des femmes primarily occurred in urban settings like Paris and Lyon, major hubs of French intellectual life that boasted diverse academic networks and thriving salon societies in which educated women circulated,
64 Ibid., 182–183. 65 Albisture and Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, 93–94. 66 This was the subject of a sixteenth-century querelle offshoot known as the querelle des amyes. Discussion of the friendship question stemmed from medieval literary interests in male-female relationships compounded by Baldessare Castiglione’s more recent discussion of court women in Book Three of The Courtier, which section was published independently of the greater text in France under the title L’Amye de Court in 1541. Other key texts include Charles Fontaine’s La Contr’Amye de Court, and Antoine Heroet’s La Parfaite Amye. Ibid., 94–95. In France this debate was especially popular prior to the rise of the Pléiade in Lyon (a humanistically trained group of poets/learned men and their networks) and its members’ rejection of medieval themes. For a study of this transition and of the querelle des amyes generally, see M.A. Screech, “An Interpretation of the querelle des amyes,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 21, no.1 (1959): 103–130. 39 some of them as public authors. In Lyon, the cultural capital of France from the early to mid- fifteenth century, a combination of progressive social organization, proximity to the Italian peninsula, and humanist activity created an intellectual atmosphere open to the prospect of women as viable literary actors and producers of culture.67 The southeastern city hosted four multinational book fairs annually and was a popular destination on the royal court’s yearly perambulations.68 The first female name that typically appears in studies of Lyon in this time period is that of Jeanne de Flore, a mysterious personage whose appellation is absent from the historical record with the exception of a handful of texts published under her name. Querelle texts attributed to Jeanne de Flore first appeared on the Lyonnaise literary scene in the late
1530s, around the same time as the French publication of De Nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei.
The best known of these is the Comptes amoureux, a novella collection in the Boccaccian mode whose stories about courtly love and the evils of adultery are narrated by a group of female interlocutors before an attendant male audience.69 Although the work is addressed to female readers and portrays marriage as a threat to wives rather than husbands, constitutive elements of contemporary defenses of women, literary scholars have found the Comptes hard to categorize because their endings punish women for the ill-effects of love gone wrong.70 This seems like an odd position for a female querelle disputant to take. With that in mind, early modernists like
Cathleen Bauschatz and Régine Reynolds-Cornell have theorized that Jeanne de Flore was not a historical figure but a pseudonymous cover for a mixed-gender circle of local poets who wrote
67 Deborah Lesko Baker, introduction to Complete Poetry and Prose by Louise Labe, ed. Deborah Lesko. Baker, trans. D. Baker and Annie Finch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1–2. 68 Andrew Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book World (Boston: Brill, 2007), 68. 69Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “To choose ink and pen: French Renaissance women’s writing,” in A History of Women’s Writing in France, ed. Sonya Stephens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 43–44. 70 Ibid., 43. Régine Reynolds-Cornell, “Flore, Jeanne,” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance, 145–146. 40 the Comptes collectively—thus the work’s rhetorical strangeness.71 Either way, the distribution of printed rhetoric under a woman’s name speaks to the actuality of local interest in women’s voices and point of view as provocative, salable intellectual entities early in the sixteenth- century.
If the case of Jeanne de Flore provides a precarious example of French female authorship, the career of Lyon’s most famous female poet and querelle contributor is better documented. The bourgeois writer Louise Labé (1520–1566) made her formal premiere on the publishing scene in
1550 with the production of her collected works, which volume of prose and verse would be reprinted three times during her life.72 The daughter of a professional ropemaker, Labé belonged to a literary order of Neoplatonists and Petrarchan poets known as La Pléiade. Its members shared a philosophical interest in spiritual love and a salutary publishing relationship with
Lyon’s leading bookman and querelle promoter Jean de Tournes.73 Labé was the most prolific female member of the Pléiade and the most demonstrably protofeminist Lyonnaise woman writer of the period, though the group’s associates did include other local women like the poet Pernette
Du Guillet and the salon hostess Madame de Pierrevive.74 Labe’s writing explores the position of the lyric love object, desire, and male-female relationships from a female perspective. Like
Christine de Pizan, she also used text as a platform from which to defend her sex’s right to an
71 Bauschatz, “To choose ink and pen,” 43. Reynolds-Cornell, “Flore, Jeanne,” 145. 72 Baker, introduction, 4. 73 Carla Frecerro, "Louise Labé's Feminist Poetics," in Distant Voices Still Heard, ed. John O’Brien and Malcolm Quainton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 107–108. Tournes specialized in the production of texts by and about women, as did many of the Pléiade poets where the latter is concerned. In addition to printing Labé’s collected works, he printed Pernette du Guillet’s poems, the first edition of Marguerite de Navarre’s collected works (as a queen, she is exceptional as an early modern figure and thus outside the bounds of this study), and Juan Luis Vive’s advice on women’s education. Julie Campbell, “Louise Labé, l’Imparfaicte Amye,” in Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-Cultural Approach, ed. Julie Campbell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 100–105. Francois Rigolot, “Louise Labé and the ‘Climat Lyonois,’” The French Review 71, no. 3 (February 1998): 407. 74 Ibid., 97, 100–101. 41 education. For example, in the dedicatory letter to her Œuvres Labe bullishly suggests that patriarchal attitudes toward female learning had evolved to the point that “men’s harsh laws no longer prevent women from applying themselves to study and learning.”75 She then proclaims,
“It seems to me that those who have the means should take advantage of this well-deserved freedom…and if any of us succeeds to the point where she can put her ideas down in writing, she should do it seriously and not disdain fame but adorn herself with it.”76 In a later elegy, she further admonishes her hypothetical female audience to beware Love as the enemy of study, declaiming that she herself could have achieved the martial acuity of a Bradamante or Marfisa as a younger woman if only she had dedicated her mind to cerebral matters exclusively.77
Despite her protestations, Labé did acquire cultural prominence in the 1550s and 1560s, enjoying the friendship of Pléiade luminaries like Maurice Scève and Pontus de Tyard for example.78 As it so often does however, fame proved to be a double-edged sword in Labé’s case.
If her intellectual activity was of a piece with Lyonnais social norms, elsewhere she confounded and was reviled by traditionalists like the religious reformer John Calvin who resented her transgression into the masculine public sphere.79 Over time and especially after her death, the antiwoman side of the French querelle appropriated Labe’s story as an exemplum of wicked womanhood and the notion that a woman’s “unnatural” learning and rhetorical activity must bespeak an immoral mind and impure body.80 When viewed in this light, we can see that the
Lyonaisse’s confident endorsement of a protofeminist cultural revolution belonged more to the
75 Louise Labé, “Dedicatory Letter,” in Complete Prose and Poetry, ed. D. Baker, trans. D. Banker and A. Finch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 43. 76 Ibid. 77 Labé, “Elegy 3 [Oh Women of Lyon],” in Complete Prose and Poetry, 167–168. Bradamante and Marfisa are women warrior characters best known from their inclusion in Lodovico Ariosto’s epic romance Orlando Furioso. They will appear again in Chapters 3 and 4. 78 Campbell, “Louise Labé, l’Imparfaicte Amye,” 97–101. 79 Baker, introduction, 4–5. 80 Ibid. 42 realm of wishful thinking than reality. The fact of her literary career however, does reflect a new if contingent attitudinal shift toward gendered proscriptions on who could write and on what in the early modern world.81
If sixteenth-century Lyon’s “climate” was renowned for producing “docility and vivacity of mind … in both sexes,” the political French capital of Paris also hosted women writers in this period.82 Like Lyon, Paris was home to a bustling print industry that promoted philosophical and commercial interest in the figure of the female author.83 The first Parisian female querelle writer of the cinquecento was Hélisenne de Crenne (c.1510–1560). Like the sobriquet Jeanne de Flore, the name Hélisenne was pseudonymous; unlike Flore, it veiled the identity of an actual woman writer.84 The name belonged to Marguerite Briet, an elite French woman active on Paris’s literary scene in the 1530s and 1540s. Historians know relatively little about Briet’s life, but surviving legal documents tell us that she was the daughter of a Picard magistrate who married into the ranks of France’s lesser nobility through her union with one Philippe Fournel, lord of
Crenne. She was educated in Latin and a member of Parisian publisher and bookseller Denis
Janot’s humanist circle.85 The oeuvre attributed to Crenne is varied and includes a translation of
Virgil’s Aeneid, a dream allegory, a novel based on Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, and a polemical letter collection entitled Les Epistres familieres et invectives (1539).86
81 According to Leah Chang, the growing print industry in sixteenth-century Lyon (and Paris) made both the female voice and perspective objects of cultural and commercial nouveauté. The phenomenon of the woman writer and her pro-woman material productions provided contemporary French society a medium by which to explore identity’s malleability and the significance of sex difference. Leah Change, Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 17–20, 28–30. 82 “La docilite & vivacite des bons espritz, qu'en tous artz ce Climat Lyonnois a toujours produit en tous sexes.” Antoine du Moulin, “Aux Dames Lyonnoizes,” Preface to Rymes de Gentile et vertueuse Dame D. Pernette du Guillet, Lyonnoise (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1545) cited in Rigolot, “Louise Labé,” 108. 83 See footnote 82 above. 84 Paul A. Archambault and Marianna Mustacchi Archambault, “Hélisenne de Crenne (c.1510–1560),” in French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, ed. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 99. 85 Ibid.,100–101.. 86 Bauschatz, “To choose ink and pen,” 44. 43
Renaissance scholars look to the latter text for evidence of Crenne’s protofeminism, although her novel Les Angoysses douloureusses qui procedent d’amours (1538) is also academically important as the first French sentimental novel. That work relays the marital travails of a woman named Hélisenne (despite the overlap in nomenclature, the book is not believed to be autobiographical) who suffers physical abuse and adultery at the hands of her spouse. While
Crenne’s novel shares the debate on women’s interest in marriage as subject, it replicates rather than refashions medieval love tropes, causing historians to label it a commercial print venture in the first instance rather than a real ideological intervention in the querelle.87 Crenne’s compendium of Ciceronian letters on the other hand directly tackles debate themes such as misogyny, exemplary femininity, and women’s education with the express purpose of inserting itself in the tradition of praise and blame narratives about woman. The letters take the form of a pro et contra argument on gender achieved through a series of epistolary exchanges between the author and her assorted friends and family, including a fictionalized husband figure whose ripostes embody traditional antiwoman ideology.88 The pro-woman letters’ primary discursive target is patriarchal society’s harsh treatment of women who eschew total adherence to normative gender roles in order to partake in literary culture. Crenne employs exempla (e.g.
Hortensia, the biblical heroine Judith, Zenobia) in order to rehabilitate woman’s nature as rational and robust and so justify more equitable relationships between the sexes..89 Both of these
87 Diane S. Wood, “Crenne, Hélisenne de (Marguerite Briet; ca. 1500–ca. 1552),” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance, 105–106. 88 Ibid. 89 In this she follows in the footsteps of Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies. Jerry Nash, “Renaissance Misogyny, Biblical Feminism, and Hélisenne de Crenne's Epistres Familieres et Invective,” in Renaissance Quarterly 50, no.2 (Summer 1997): 382–84, 387–89, 393, 397. Archambault and Archambault, “Hélisenne de Crenne,” 100–104. 44 texts were published by Janot, who marketed them as products intended for female commercial consumption.90
Like the gap between Pizan and Crenne, if on a smaller scale, there was a decades-long span between Crenne’s querelle activity and the entrée of another Parisian protofeminist woman writer on the book market. That person was Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645), a Christian humanist, the editor of Michel de Montaigne, and, later in life, a cofounder of the Académie française.91 While Gournay was probably ignorant of the debate’s founder and her history, she too built a full-time literary career within the French court. Gournay’s family was aristocratic but impoverished and she supported herself as a professional author. She worked in multiple genres, attended the salon of Marguerite de Valois, and sought patronage and pensions from prominent contemporaries such as Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.92 In addition to these courtly connections, Gournay boasted a widespread literary network known as a famille d’alliance or a theoretical intellectual family in which she could reputably circulate her writing.93 Most successful Renaissance woman writers enjoyed the patronage and protection of a prominent male letterato; the innovation of the famille d’alliance late in the sixteenth century formalized and extended those relationships at a heightened scale. Literary “families” could be many branched, reach across state boundaries, and comprise multiple men and women. Gournay for example became Montaigne’s honorary “daughter” as a teenager; over time she took on new roles,
90 We can tell that her works were designated for literate women readers from their small size and the fact that Janot published them in a series with Latin language editions of Cicero, a pairing that literature experts interpret as a gendered gesture meant to attract male and female buyers. Chang, Into Print, 26–29. Wood, “Crenne, Hélisenne de,” 105. 91 Richard Hillman, introduction to Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Novels, by Marie le Jars de Gournay, ed. and trans. R. Hillman and Colette Quesnel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3–5, 16. 92 Ibid., 9. 93 Carol Pal, “Forming familles d’alliance: Intellectual Kinship in the Republic of Letters,” in Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, ed. Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 254–255. 45 becoming the literary “mother” to the prominent Dutch feminist Anna Maria van Schurman in her own right for example circa 1640.94
As Gournay’s relationship with Schurman implies, her career more properly belongs to the seventeenth-century world of letters than it does to that of the sixteenth century. Querelle historiography typically positions Gournay as demonstrably more feminist than the other French women discussed here, an attribution owed at least in part to the later date of her career and the quasi-respectable precedent for pro-woman female authorship they had set.95 Where France’s early female querelle contributors regularly defended their mental aptitude and called for more egalitarian partnerships between the sexes in love and marriage, Gournay took a more explicitly
Agrippan interest in the nature of femininity broadly conceived and the need for gender equality beyond home and classroom.96 While these themes manifest most clearly in her debate tracts from the 1620s, the decade in which her literary career peaked, I include Gournay here because she released her first pro-woman work in 1594, issuing the novel Proumenoir de Monsieur de
Montaigne inside her first edited edition of the titular thinker’s essays.97 The Proumenoir tells the story of an ancient Persian princess who commits suicide after experiencing a tragic series of events including the threat of an arranged marriage, an elopement, and her beloved’s betrayal.98
Its plot directly derives from an earlier work by Claude de Taillemont (a member of Labé’s
94 Ibid., 254–256, 265–273. 95 Bauschatz, “To choose ink and pen,” 57–61. For a discussion of Gournay’s worldview and its context, see Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 124–139. 96 Broad and Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought, 124-139. According to Constance Jordan, Gournay saw her argument as historical (i.e. the culmination of a long history of feminist argument) and a real call for change; that it went unrealized in French society is reflected in the changing tenor of her work over time. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 281– 286. 97 Gournay’s most famous (and most feminist) works came out in the 1620s: The Equality of Men and Women (1622) and The Ladies Complaint (1626). 98 Hillman, introduction, 22. 46 circle); Gournay reframes the story’s events as the cultural cost of femininity within patriarchal society. She moved the needle on gendered discourse by exploiting older literature’s preoccupation with romance as an opportunity to criticize courtly love, illuminate masculinity’s susceptibility to vice, and most importantly, explicitly argue that the defense of women should focus on the question of identity rather than woman’s romantic potential.99
The last set of protofeminist woman writers who deserve some mention in this section are
Madeleine Neveu (1520–1587) and Catherine Fradonnet (1547–1587), better known as the
Dames des Roches. This mother-daughter pair lived in the French city of Poitiers, a much smaller metropolis than Paris or Lyon, but one that shared the place markers that made them centers of literary innovation. Like them, Poitiers hosted a prominent humanist network and, on occasion, the French court. Members of the Pléiade like the poet Joachim du Bellay also visited the city periodically and are thought to have aided Madeleine in Catherine’s education, a circumstance that highlights once again the importance of space where premodern women’s engagement with the querelle is concerned.100 While the Dames des Roches are best known as defenders of Renaissance women today, their oeuvre was wide-ranging. They translated Latinate and Italian texts into French and composed poetry, personal epistles, and discourses on religion.
They also hosted a popular salon in the 1570s and 80s until their literary careers were peremptorily cut off by an outbreak of plague.101 The agenda of their pro-woman works focused primarily on issues of education and the promotion of the theory that letters are a universal social good, the possession of which could provide low-ranking or common born people an alternate
99 Ibid., 23. 100 Anne R. Larsen, “Dames des Roches (Madeleine Neveu, 1520–1587; Catherine Fradonnet, 1542–1587),” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance, 109. See also Kendall Tarte, Writing Places: Sixteenth-Century City Culture and the Des Roches Salon (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007). 101 Larsen, “Dames des Roches,” 109–112. 47 path to nobility.102 This view resonated with contemporary Platonist thinking that framed education as a prompt to virtue; it also provided the French letterate with a rhetorical instrument by which to disassociate themselves from patriarchal gender stereotypes that degraded public, prolix women as immoderate and impure.
Of the Dames des Roches’ shared corpora, the works that challenged that position most strongly are Catherine’s pedagogic dialogues, entitled Dialogue de Placide, et Severe and
Dialogue d’Iris, et Pasithée (1583). In the first text an enlightened father figure and his misogynist merchant neighbor discuss the pros and cons of raising educated daughters; in the second, their female children illustrate the consequences of that choice.103 Together the dialogues functions as a combination of querelle argument and conduct guide; Pasithée, the learned daughter, is obedient to her father, studious, skilled in both domestic tasks and the graces of a courtier, and is authoritative in her command of knowledge. Iris, the daughter of the hidebound merchant, is flighty and ignorant.104 While Catherine’s advocacy on behalf of female learning is not itself especially radical, her dialogues are notable because their exemplary sections give equal attention to ancient and modern instances of erudite, imitation-worthy women as evidence of the universal benefits of humanistic learning.105 Moreover, the majority of Catherine’s modern exemplars are Italian, including the humanist Olympia Morata of Ferrara, the poet Laura
Terracina of Naples, and the Venetian Cassandra Fedele. The presence of foreign women writers in debate texts from Poitiers is not only a rare indicator of educated early modern women’s extant if not ubiquitous awareness of each other, an entity whose study has largely eluded
102 Anne Larsen, introduction and commentary to From Mother and Daughter: Poems, Dialogues, and Letters of Les Dames des Roches, ed. and trans. A. Larsen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16–17. 103 Anne Larsen, “Journeying Across Borders: Catherine des Roches’ Catalog of Modern Women Intellectuals,” in Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, ed. Julie D. Campbell and A. Larsen (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 230–237. 104 Larsen, introduction and commentary to From Mother and Daughter, 181–184. 105 Ibid. 48
Renaissance historians, but also a sign of female authorship’s peninsular proliferation and the continental continuance of the debate on women.
Across the Mediterranean, Over the Alps: Growing the Italian Querelle
In Italy as in France, early manifestations of the querelle des femmes began with manuscript culture and the exchange of pro or antiwoman compendia of famous women inspired by Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and the classical tradition. This occurred primarily in the courts of northern Italy where humanists and sometime courtiers like Antonio Cornazzano,
Mario Equicola, and Agostino Strozzi circulated catalog-style defenses of women in hopes of expanding their intellectual networks and attracting patronage. Their desired audience and hoped-for supporters were the quattrocento city-states’ ruling families whose cultural, if not political tsars included educated (and wealthy!) wives and daughters such as Bianca Maria
Visconti, Battista da Montefeltro, and Isabella d’Este.106 While most conduct literature from this period recommended that women cultivate antiquated feminine virtues like diffidence and needle-craft, the increasing spread of humanism infused elite Italian society with the belief that reading great texts was morally efficacious. This sentiment combined with the cultural elect’s desire to garner acclaim and showcase the social capital of their houses through sons and daughters alike fostered an environment more and more amenable to female learning.107 This shift was strengthened by the circulation of vernacular texts like Boccaccio’s Decameron and
106 Pamela Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 33– 40. 107 Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 29–31. Diana Robin, “Humanism and feminism in Laura Cereta’s public letters,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: LEGENDA, 2000), 369. * Il Cortegiano was first published in Venice by the Aldine press in 1528, but likely circulated amongst Castiglione’s mixed coterie in manuscript during the 1510s and early 20s.
49 later Baldesar Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (1528)*, wildly fashionable dialogic books whose women-heavy plots featured articulate female interlocutors and, where the latter is concerned, a rhetorical interrogation of women’s worth accessible to any reader with basic Italian literacy.
While neither of these texts was written explicitly for the querelle, they also alluded to women’s educative potential and illustrated gender’s intellectual and commercial appeal as literary topos.
With the arrival of the sixteenth century, the woman question’s literary popularity grew as its themes were picked up by the printing presses and poligraphi of Italy’s urban centers such as
Naples, Florence, and most importantly, Venice.
Thanks to the presses of the Venetian Republic, the book shelves of cinquecento Italy housed a plethora of vernacular debate tracts such as Galeazzo Flavio Capra’s Delle eccellencza e dignità delle donne (1501), Ludovico Dolce’s Dialogo della institution delle donne (1545), and
Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo della dignità delle donne (1542). At the same time, the publishing houses of Venice and Italy furthered the cultural normalization of the learned woman by producing texts authored by European women, though respectable women Venetian women were unable to participate in single-author printed discourse for most of the century. Thus in the twenty-two year period between 1538 and 1560 for example, peninsular presses (led by Venice) printed twenty works by Italian and European women.108 Because print culture and rising literacy rates in the cinquecento fostered vernacular literary composition, women with a modest education could engage with the sixteenth-century book market in a manner not possible in the age of manuscripts. As historians like Paul Grendler, Margaret King, and Sarah Ross have shown, rising literary rates combined with the literature-positive legacy of humanist ideology and expanding educative opportunities for Italian women in convents and household academies
108 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 131. 50 produced a statistically significant reading female public.109 In cinquecento Venice for instance, female literacy rates hovered around thirteen percent by the end of the century, a number roughly on par with that of the peninsula as a whole.110 Thus we can assume that women comprised a percentage of querelle readers, a few of whom took up their pens to participate.
A Tre Corone for the Querelle des Femmes: The Women Humanists of Cinquecento Italy
Interestingly, while the debate on women flourished in sixteenth-century Italy and a growing cohort of exemplary educated women (e.g. Veronica Gambara, Vittoria Colonna, Laura
Terracina) managed to successfully pursue intellectual careers on the Italian book market, the cinquecento was largely devoid of female Italian querelle writers. Prior to the publication of
Venetian cittadine Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella’s querelle tracts in 1600, premodern
Italy could boast three major women authors whose pro-women work or early precedent as exemplary models of female virtue, erudition, and fame qualified them as debate participants. All of them were active in the quattrocento, and all of them lived either in La Serenissima itself or in one of the northern Italian cities under the Venetian Republic’s patrimonial sway. They were also humanists, a fact that positioned them within the upper echelons of the Italian cultural elite.111
109 King, Women of the Renaissance. Ross, The Birth of Feminism. 110 Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 42–47. 111 While Italy’s early female querelle authors were all Latin humanists, that category is not synonymous with debate participation. Other Italian cities boasted an erudite figurehead in the figure of a virtuous woman trained in Greek and Latin whose exceptional erudition flattered rather than shamed the state. For example, fifteenth-century Florence had Alessandra Scala (1475–1506) and cinquecento Ferrara had the poet Olympia Morata (c.1526–1555). While Morata was not an explicit feminist, her example was interpreted as a model of women’s progressive intellectual capacity by later participants like Anna Maria van Schurman, Marie de Gournay’s femme d’alliance. Holt Parker, “Morata, Fulvia Olympia (1526/1527–1555),” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance, 269–271. 51
Veronese author Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466) was the linchpin of the humanist trio formed by herself, Brescian author Laura Cerera, and the internationally famous Venetian
Cassandra Fedele. As the earliest querelle participant of the three, Nogarola is considered to be the luminary of early modern Italy’s cultural investment in learned woman.112 What Christine de
Pizan did for France, Nogarola did for Italy; Renaissance scholars credit her alongside the compendia tradition with sparking peninsular interest in gendered debate and "setting up the framework within which learned women expressed themselves over the next several centuries."113 The letterata was born into a wealthy aristocratic family thirteen years after Venice seized control of Verona as part of its early imperial expansion on the Italian mainland; from all appearances the Nogarola quickly became loyal clients of the powerful Republic, marrying into its nobility, serving within its regional bureaucracy, and even taking up residence there from
1438–1440.114 As a woman Latinist, Isotta was an important cog in the cultural machine by which her clan furthered their social status at home and across the Veneto. She and her younger sister Ginevra were the star pupils of humanist Martino Rizzoni (himself a protégé of Guarino
Guarini, with whom they exchanged writing samples) and active contributors to the Republic of
Letters, which structure they manipulated to forge respectable epistolary relationships with prominent male contemporaries including the Aristolian theorist Lauro Quirini, members of the d’Este dynasty, Nicolò Venier, and Jacapo Foscari, son of the Venetian doge.115 While Ginevra
112 Her predecessors include Battista da Montefeltro and the poet Angela Nogarola, her aunt. While Isotta was by no means Italy’s first educated noblewoman, she was one of its first secular female humanists famous not only for her erudition and learned upbringing, but also for actively contributing to contemporary philosophical and literary production. 113 Margaret King and Diana Robin, introduction and commentary to Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, by Isotta Nogarola, ed. and trans. Margaret King and Diana Robin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1. 114 Ibid., 6, 28. 115 Ibid., 40–41. Margaret King, “Petrarch, the Self-Conscious Self, and the First Women Humanists,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no.3 (2005): 541. The education of daughters and expectation of their contribution to the family’s legacy was a hallmark of the Nogarola—as mentioned in note 110, Isotta’s aunt Angela 52 seems to have ceased all literary production upon her marriage in 1438, Isotta remained single and seemingly embraced spinsterhood in order to pursue a lifelong intellectual career from within the protective confines of her brothers’ households and that of her leading patron
Ludovico Foscarini.116 Foscarini was a Venetian patrician who served as Verona’s governor in the 1450s. He also served as one of two principle interlocutors in Isotta’s most famous protofeminist work, a revolutionary dialogue on original sin, Augustinian dogma, and female nature entitled Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Eve and Adam (c.1451). The Veronese author herself was the second.
Dialogue was one of four humanist forms in vogue in Italy at the mid-century point. The others were the letterbook, oration, and consolatio or letter of consolation; over the course of
Isotta’s diverse literary career she worked in all four genres and tackled secular themes (e.g. the nature of friendship, the intersection of knowledge and morality) as well as biblical and patristic syncretism.117 The letterata is remembered today as an early feminist because of the gendered discussions of education and exemplary defenses of women located in her letterbook. In addition, her dialogue on Adam and Eve dissected the Genesis story of serpent, apple, and the invocation of original sin to unburden Eve and the female sex as a whole from the tradition of shame and blame for that sin attached to it by the Christian tradition. The weakness and culpability of Eve as signifier of womanhood was a foundational pillar in the premodern edifice
was a Petrarchan poet who corresponded with famous men like Pandolpho III Malatesta (ruler of Rimini) and Gian Galeazzo Visconti (ruler of Milan). Very little of her work survives today, but she too likely possessed a humanist education. Another famous female family member was the cinquecento lyric poet Veronica Gambara, Ginevra Nogarola’s granddaughter. Holt N. Parker, “Angela Nogarola (c.1400) and Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466): Thieves of Language,” in Women Writing Latin: Early Modern Women Writing Latin, ed. Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11–13. Diana Robin, “Veronica Gambara (1485–1550), in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance, 160–161. 116 King and Robin, introduction and commentary to Complete Writings, 6. 117 Ibid., 9. Carmel McCallum-Barry, “Learned Women of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period in Italy and England,” in Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly, ed. Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 32. 53 of patriarchal supremacy. While theologians had previously debated the delineations of sin in relation to this story, Isotta Nogarola’s dialogue added a probing interest in the nature of gender to the conversation; thanks to her example, the interrogation of Catholic dogma around Eve and its misogynist undertones became a hallmark of the debate on women.118 On the surface, the text does not seem overtly radical: its contents do not challenge contemporary belief in a gender binary, nor masculine supremacy; instead it plays on that ideology and popular understanding of femininity as the weaker gender category to shift fault for mankind’s fall to Adam and thus the male sex. A more progressive ideation of feminism runs beneath the surface as the fact of its female authorship and discursive execution by historical speakers who engage in humanist debate as intellectual peers coalesces into a secondary argument that suggests that women and men may perhaps be equal after all. The fact that Isotta and Foscarini were reputed to have actually engaged in a semi-public iteration of the debate reinforces this effect.119 Interestingly, although Isotta’s daily life was cloistered within the private spaces of the home, she may have spoken publicly on more than one occasion. Indeed, all three of quattrocento Italy’s premier female humanists seems to have delivered public orations at some point in their careers. In
Isotta’s case, primary source documents from the period suggest that she delivered brief religious speeches for the papal jubilee of 1450 and the investiture of Francesco Barbaro as bishop of
Verona in 1453.120 While it would be incorrect to label the Veronese author a public woman given her aristocratic, humanist background as well and the spiritual rather than political tenor of
118 King and Robin, introduction and commentary to Complete Writings, 13, 142–143. 119 Although Nogarola worked out of the home, she received multiple male guests whose letters attest to her direct interaction with contemporary humanists. Leah R. Clark, “Collecting, sociability, and exchange in the Renaissance studiolo,” Journal of the History of Collections 25 no.2 (2013): 175–176. Matteo Bosso’s letters attest to the historicity of Nogarola and Foscarini’s debate. King and Robin, introduction and commentary to Complete Writings, 115–116. 120 King and Robin, introduction and commentary to Complete Writings, 160–162. She also wrote a call for crusade against the Ottoman Turks for the 1459 Congress of Mantua; the text is extant but Nogarola did not attend. 54 these works as well as their Latinate form, her acclaim as a learned woman and symbol of virtu set an important precedent for the other fifteenth-century debate writers discussed here.
The next member of quattrocento Italy’s trio of humanist women is the Brescian writer
Laura Cereta (1469–1499) whose epistolary Latin disputations on such themes as pleasure, warfare, family, and the female intellect circulated in northern Italy at the end of the century.121
Unlike earlier generations of peninsular women writers, Cereta belonged to the Veneto’s professional rather than patrician class. She was the daughter of local attorney Silvestro Cereta, who sent her to a monastery as a child to acquire basic reading and domestic skills (e.g. the art of embroidery) before continuing her education in Latin and perhaps Greek at home himself.122 As a middle class letterata, Cereta is a prime example of a female member of Italy’s cultural elite who was humanistically trained for the good of her family; she was a living symbol of the
Cereti’s intellectual capital and the amanuensis for Silvestro in the 1480s. While she was briefly married to a Venetian merchant in 1584, after his death following a bout of plague she pursued an intellectual life as a single woman.123 Cereta’s surviving work is largely autobiographical in nature and its topical interests range from modish humanist themes like the nature of friendship and the merits of urban versus pastoral life to her personal bereavement to the other sex’s educative potential. Cereta was an ardent believer in womankind’s ability to learn (her own especially) and her letters deploy exempla of virtuous but erudite famous to persuade their audience that raising literacy rates among “the republic of women” would sweeten marriage and mixed gender relationships.124 Her writing also avers that “nature imparts one freedom to all
121 Diana Robin, introduction to Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, by Laura Cereta, trans. and ed. Diana Robin (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3–6. 122 Albert Rabil, “Laura Cereta (1469-1499),” in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, ed Rinaldina Russell (London: Greenwood Press, 1994), 67. 123 Robin, introduction, 4–5. 124 Laura Cereta to Bibolo Semproni, Brescia, January 13, 1488, in Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, trans. and ed. Diana Robin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 80. 55 human beings equally—to learn.”125 On the other hand, although she understood literature and learning as universal cultural goods, Cereta did not analyze the misogyny inherent in patriarchal
Renaissance society, nor the structural impediments that philosophy set in the way of contemporary women’s scholastic achievement. Instead, she placed the onus on individual women to seek out an education and attain individual exceptionalism.
As a member of northern Italy's Republic of Letters, Cereta was aware that other women from Venice and the Veneto had attained that individual intellectual success and her letters cite both Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele as positive examples of female erudition and ambition.126 As suggested by these author’s shared location within the Venetian empire, place was essential to their literary careers, however much Cereta preffered to emphasize personal excellence as the key to educative opportunities even for elite women. As residents of
Serenissima territory, Nogarola, Cereta, and Fedele had access to an interwoven network of academic communities spread across the metropole and its client cities. Laura Cereta's hometown Brescia was a hive of humanist activity as well as the prize jewel of the Republic’s terraferma empire and a hub of intellectual exchange.127 She lived there before the formal foundation of the academic academies that would flourish there in the Cinquecento, but she and other resident intellectuals enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of the local nobility. According to
Renaissance scholars Stephen Bowd and Diana Robin, it is also likely that Cereta attended mixed salons where she cultivated academic relationships with famous men and recited those letters
125 Ibid., 78. 126 Ibid. Notably, Cereta tried to establish an epistolary relationship with Fedele in 1478; she was rebuffed. Her extant letters show that she was angered by Fedele's response (if it was a written one, it no longer survives), but she nevertheless cited the Venetian as an exampla of learned womanhood in other writings like the epistolary defense of woman cited above. See Laura Cereta to Cassandra Fedele, April 7, 1487, in Collected Letters, 141–144; Laura Cereta to Bonifacio Bembo, August 22, 1487, in Collected Letters, 145–148. 127 Stephen D. Bowd, Venice’s Most Loyal City: Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 4–19. 56 amongst her oeuvre that read like oratory.128 An example of one such speech is Cereta’s 1499 disquisition on the evils of warfare, an oration circulated under the rubric of a letter to the
Brescian magistrate Luigi Dandolo. The text bemoans the German invasions into northern Italy that presaged the Italian Wars and condemns European warfare for the violence that “left so many innocent people homeless, slaughtered so many soldiers, destroyed so many city walls
[and] laid waste so many fields.”129 Although Cereta self-effacingly claimed to possess a maidenly "insufficient knowledge of military matters,” the letter also accurately recounts the events of a historical battle that occurred in Cereta’s lifetime (the Battle of Calliano) and forcefully insists "that Brescia strengthen its relationship with its Venetian overlords" in the face of continental aggression.130 It goes on to praise the Republic’s much prided and self-professed
“constancy … and moral courage honed by adversity … the Numatine patrimonies of their nobles [and the] opulent wealth of this stable empire which long years of battling the Turks has never been able to shatter or threaten.”131 While historians can't definitively prove that Cereta recited these lines in a semi-public capacity, their focus on current events and thematic resonance with Venetian civic myth suggest that the letter was intended for consumption by a wider audience than its single addressee.132
If early modernists cannot know for certain that Laura Cereta dealt in oratory, it is a fact that her Venetian contemporary Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558) did. The veneziana was the most famous Italian woman writer of the fifteenth-century, for which reason I include her here—her
128 From the 1470s on, Brescia was also an important early print center. Also of note - contemporaries urged Cassandra Fedele to relocate to Brescia to participate in its intellectual life. Ibid., 36. 129 L. Cereta to Luigi Dandolo, Brescia, August 29, 1487, in Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, 161. 130 Ibid., 161; 164. 131 Ibid., 164. 132 Cereta goes unmentioned as a female exemplar in Fonte’s Il merito delle donne; however, we cannot place too much importance on this as Il merito’s arguments are generally not based on exemplum. Marinella does make brief reference to Cereta as “a noble lady of Brescia known as Laura [who] wrote most elegant letters.” Marinella, La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne, 38. 57 fame alone transformed her into a protofeminist exemplum in her own right for women’s scholastic capacity. Born into a respectable Serenissima family that belonged to Venice’s cittadino originario class, Fedele like Cereta was a member of the generation of learned Italian women subsequent to that of Isotta Nogarola wherein non-aristocratic families began to educate daughters as ennobling conduits of cultural capital.133 Fedele’s primary intellectual circles were located in the Republic and nearby Padua, the site of Venice’s university. As a woman, the
Italian letterata could not hold a formal office with the University, but she exchanged letters with and participated in academic events alongside its male members.134 For example, she was an associate of the prominent Aristotelian philosopher Niccolò Tomei and his Paduan circle, which group stood to gain cultural prestige through their engagement with that most rare figure of the idealized, exceptional woman as Fedele very much was as a female humanist.135 She also enjoyed an international renown during the 1480s that was unique in a young contemporary woman of middling rank. The fact of Fedele’s widespread fame is evinced by her correspondence list, the register of which contains names like Queen Beatrice d’Aragona of
Hungary, Louis XII of France, and Queen Isabella of Castille, the latter of whom offered her a position at Spanish court.136 The royal, patrician, and humanist elite in Venice and abroad celebrated Fedele as the decus Italiae virgo (maiden, glory of Italy),* and although she seems to have abandoned her Latin literary career upon marrying a Vicenzan physician in 1499, her reputation endured: at her death decades later in 1588 for example, Venice commemorated the
133 King, “Petrarch, the Self-Conscious Self,” 546. Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 546 134 Diana Robin, introduction to Letters and Orations, by Cassandra Fedele, trans. and ed. Diana Robin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4–5. 135 Lisa Jardine, “‘O Decus Italiae Virgo', Or the Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance,” The Historical Journal 28, no.4 (December 1985): 805–814. 136 Diana Robin, “Fedele, Cassandra (1465–1558),” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance, 137–138 * this is a Virgilian reference to the female warrioress Camilla. 58 brilliance of her youthful humanist career with a state funeral.137 While very little of Fedele’s writing was published before the seventeenth century, her name remained current thanks to the
Boccaccian compendia tradition, vernacular local histories, and querelle rhetoric, all of which featured her as a female marvel among the gems of the Republic’s cultural riches.138 Of course, the patriarchal notion that she was exceptional and therefore safe in her erudition and gender nonconformative notoriety did enable this in part. On the other hand, later women writers contrastingly appropriated Fedele as a symbol of their sex’s collective if socially suppressed merit and she shows up as such for example in Lucrezia Marinella’s querelle tract.139
Unfortunately, relatively little of Fedele’s manuscript productions survive today. Primary sources tell us that she was a skilled Latin poet and the proud author of a scientific treatise, but no remnants of either exist today.140 What does survive is Fedele’s humanist letterbook and transcripts of several public orations given by her in quattrocento Venice and Padua that were preserved thanks to their belated, posthumous publication and preservation in 1636.141 None of these texts qualify as purposed interventions in the debate on women in the same vein as Louise
137 Ibid., 138. In early modern Venice, respectable women’s access to the life of the mind was usually dependent on physical separation from worldly matters, marriage included; that reality is one of the reasons that Moderata Fonte’s simultaneous roles as writer, mother, and member of the cittadini class stand out. Fedele seems to confirm the divide between marriage and learning for Renaissance women in a 1492 letter to the Florentine Greek scholar Alessandra Scala that ponders whether Scala should “dedicate [her]self to the Muses or to a husband.” Cassandra Fedele to Alessandra Scala, January 1492, in Letters and Orations, trans. and ed. Diana Robin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 31. 138 The historian Francesco Sansovino included Fedele in his various accounts of Venice. After his death in 1587, Fonte’s patron and one-time guardian Nicolò Doglioni became the editor of these histories, which enjoyed multiple print runs in the following decades. Fedele’s fame aside, these circumstances suggest that Fonte certainly knew of her Venetian predecessor. See Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobillissima et singolare (Venice: Domenico Farri, 1581), 190a, 252a–b. Leonico Goldioni (this is Doglioni’s pseudonym), Le cose maravigliose et notabili della città di Venetia (Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1612), 189. 139 Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne, 40. 140 For example, Sansovino recorded that she “wrote a book entitled Order of the Sciences in which she commemorates the seven philosophers (alt. translation, the doctrines of philosophy).” Original: “scrisse un libro con titolo, De scientiarum ordine, nelqual commemora le sette dei filosofi.” The Italian is such that this could be a reference to the seven Greek sages or philosophy more generally: “sette” can mean seven and doctrine. Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima, 252a. 141 Robin, “Fedele, Cassandra,” 138. 59
Labé’s epistolary defense of female learning or Nogarola’s dialogue on Adam and Eve. Instead
Fedele’s status as a querelle author is largely owed to what historian Sarah Ross labels
“participatory feminism” or the veneziana’s status as a living example of erudite womanhood and effective participant in the Renaissance world of humanist letters.142 While many of Fedele’s extant writings deal with subject of learning, she never theorized about the nature of identity nor commented on or condemned the strictures of patriarchal society, although she did allow that women stood to benefit from easy access to education. Both of the Latin speeches that date to the heyday of Fedele’s career deal with pedagogical themes. In the first, her only work printed during her lifetime, she extolled the liberal arts and “the advantages obtained through virtue and the intellect” for the occasion of her male cousin Bertucio Lamberto’s 1487 graduation from the
University of Padua.143 A short time later, she delivered an oration before the Venetian senate that expanded on the ennobling quality of education and literature with the other sex in mind.
Here we find the clearest sample of Fedele’s views of the intellectual condition of contemporary women. She begins with the assertion that reason and the schooling required to attain it are universal goods and the only element that separates humanity from bestiality; thus women should not be suffered to live unlettered lives.144 She proceeds to vaunts the lesser but still important innocent pleasure derived from learning and then declaims that “when I meditate on the idea of marching forth in life with the lowly and execrable weapons of the little woman—the needle and the distaff—even if the study of literature offers women no rewards or honors, I believe women must nonetheless pursue and embrace such studies alone for the pleasure and enjoyment they contain.”145
142 Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 10, 132. 143 Fedele, Letters and Orations, 157. 144 Ibid., 159–161. 145 Ibid., 162. 60
Fedele’s extant writings pursue that line of thought no further. However, her reputation more than her work survived the passage of time, ensuring her remembrance as a testament to woman’s exemplary potential (a fitting occurrence perhaps in a state so deeply invested in narrative memory). Like the cinquecento women writers I discuss in later chapters, Fedele was perceived as both “un’ornameto delle Muse” (i.e. a literary woman) and an ornament to the
Venetian state.146 She filled this role in a more passive capacity than her sixteenth-century followers in that she did not by and large disseminate her work via the printing press. As a sort of feminine figurehead for Venice, she was also as much an object of Venetian excellence as she was a creator of it, but this role nevertheless furthered her career and created some precedent in the metropole for semi-public female speech.147 I say semi-public because the Latin language divide that drove a wedge between elite Italian society and the lower ranks insured that some barrier always existed between Fedele and the popular public sphere. This was also true of
Cereta and Nogarola.
While Fedele was the least progressive of this humanist, protofeminist, Italian trio where the debate on women is concerned, her cultural prominence remained current long after she stopped writing, or later, died. Her life and important works were chronicled by local poligrafo
Giuseppe Betussi in an addendum to Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris for example, and the state brought her out of retirement in 1566 for Polish queen Bona Sforza’s 1566 visit to Venice, on which occasion she delivered a brief welcome address as one of the Republic’s cultural curios.
As suggested by the sizable gap between Fedele’s disappearance from the literary seen upon her
146 Giuseppe Betussi, Libro di M. Gio. Boccaccio delle donne illustri, tradotto per Messer Giuseppe Betussi con una additione fatta dal medesimo delle donne famose del tepo di M. Giovanni fin à i giorni nostri (Venice: Francesco de gl'Imperatori, 1558), 173a. (first published in 1545) 147 Where Fedele was invited to ornament academic or civic occasions by delivering a Latin speech, Fonte and Marinella used printed text to offer new elements to the myth of Venice; Marinella for example reimagined the history of the Fourth Crusade to paint Venice in a better light in L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (see Chapter 3). 61 marriage in the late quattrocento and this speech, conditions of time and place were critical to when and how early modern women’s voices were heard in this period. If Renaissance European culture was characterized by an enduring interest in the figure of the exemplary learned woman, and if the querelle des femmes provided a framework for femininity’s analysis and sometimes the literary overtures of contemporary women, it was not a monolith that manifested in the same way at all times; rather locality and the tenor of any given cultural moment were key. The same holds true of the radical Venetian iteration of the debate spearheaded in 1600 by the late Renaissance women writers Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella and of the development of a new literary space for vernacular, public female authorship on the local book scene that took place in the thirty year period that preceded the publication of their explicitly feminist critiques of patriarchal society.
62
CHAPTER TWO
THE LEPANTO PARADOX: CIVIC RHETORIC AND PUBLIC WOMEN IN THE RENAISSANCE VENETIAN REPUBLIC
“What rhetorician, or Greek or Latin poet could describe even the thousandth part of the honors and rare privileges bestowed by Heaven on this most happy and powerful city of Venice, the true glory and unparalleled ornament of Italy and the World?”1
- Issicratea Monte before the Venetian Senate and Doge, 1578
Twenty-two years after Cassandra Fedele welcomed Bona Sforza to the shores of Venice, the Senate extended an invitation to address that body to the Rovigan poet Issicratea Monte
(c.1564–1585). Her summons was prompted by local war hero Sebastiano Venier’s recent election to the dogeship and the protracted pomp and circumstance that surrounded major civic events in the early modern Republic. In due course, the teenage author accepted the offer and travelled to the lagoon metropolis and the frescoed halls of the Palazzo Ducale to deliver a flowery oration in Venier’s honor. Her speech touted the “universal happiness” incurred by his
“lofty virtues” and political elevation, and lauded the Venetian bureaucracy’s superlative stewardship of “this marvelous and divine Republic.”2 In doing so, Monte became the first
1 “[Q]ual Retorico, ò Poeta greco, ò latino potrebbe narrare la millesima parte sola delle vere lodi, & rari priuilegi dal Ciel dati, & concessi a questa felicissima, & potentissima Città di Vinegia? vera gloria, & vnico splendore non solo dell’Italia tutta, ma del Mondo tutto ancora.” Issicratea Monte, Seconda oratione di Mad. Issicratea Monte Rodigna, nella congratulatione dell’Invitiss. E Sereniss. Principe di Venetia Sebastiano Veniero. Da lei propria recitata nell’Illustriss e Eccellentiss. Collegio à sua Serenità (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1578), 2b. Referenced from here on as “1578a.” 2 From “Volendo adunque … in questa tanta, & non solo nostra, ma universale allegrezza ragionare de gli alti meriti” and “questa maravigliosa, & diuina Rep.” Ibid. Ironically, Venier’s much-vaunted turn as head-of-state ended almost as soon as it began; he became doge in June 1577 and died in March 1578. 63 respectable woman from Venice and the Veneto to speak publicly on the state’s behalf since her humanist forerunner. The Italian letterata also broached a milestone that Fedele had not: later that year, the Castello printshop of Domenico and Giovanni Battista Guerra printed a quarto edition of her civic speech.3 The resulting text is adorned with a formal printer’s device and features a paratextual ode to the author, five sheets of orderly prose, and the prominent display of
Monte’s name on the frontispiece. Although the Rovigan author was not a formal disputant in the querelle des femmes, her named intervention in sixteenth-century Venice’s political sphere as a successful female orator and published civic author absolutely showcased woman’s educative potential. Moreover, it did so in a way that was new. When Cassandra Fedele greeted the Polish queen in 1556, she did so as a virtual relic of another era rather than from a place of nonconformity. She was ninety years old, a humanist who spoke in Latin, and her writing had not been published since the late fifteenth century. Monte by contrast was a young vernacular poet and an active member of northern Italy’s intellectual circles. Moreover, the unbound edition of her oration was no one-off, but one of three such texts penned by her and printed by the
Guerra brothers in the late 70s—and she was alone in composing civic discourse for Venice that decade. If Fedele’s 1556 remarks stood as an important but solitary example of feminine political rhetoric, Monte’s doubly public debut as a civic actor for Venice alongside several other Italian women writers late in the century indicates that a new citizenly function and literary space for women was coming into being in the Republic in the years just before the local querelle’s radicalization.
3 While Fedele’s graduation speech was printed in 1488, her civic oration for Sforza was not published until her collected works came out in 1636. Robin, Introduction and commentary to Letters and Orations, 154. Monte’s 1578 oration was her second such published text and the first one that scholars confidently claim she delivered in person. As its title relates, it was “recited by her before his Serenity in the most illustrious and excellent Collegio.” Monte, Seconda oratione, frontmatter. 64
When the Guerra brothers published Monte’s oration in 1578, their establishment was one of the most prolific and well-known printshops in a state that headed the cinquecento
European book market. Venetian bookmen and their agents bought and sold printed texts at the transalpine markets of France and Germany, and traded further afield via Mediterranean shipping.4 At home, the interconnecting islands that collectively made up the metropole hosted four hundred and fifty plus printers, publishers, and booksellers.5 To borrow the words of an itinerant Milanese friar, the Renaissance Republic was “so full of books that it was hardly possible to walk down a street without armfuls thrust upon you, like cats in a bag.”6 One of the most interesting genres for sale in the city itself during the cinquecento was the civic oration, the genre to which Monte’s tribute to Sebastiano Venier belonged. These ephemeral texts named the state La Serenissima, divine republic, and queen of the sea, and they commemorated important municipal events such as military victories, ducal elections, and the Sensa (Venice’s annual ritual marriage to the Adriatic Sea). Typically written in the vernacular and purchasable for mere pennies, these texts held a flattering mirror up to the Republic and reflected the image of a motherland to be proud of back to readers.7
In early modern Venice as in western Europe, the composition and distribution of civic discourse traditionally belonged to the province of men. Prior to the 1570s, the Venetian archive is devoid of printed civic rhetoric attributed to women writers. Given the primacy of Aristotelian
4 Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Lydia G Cochrane (Boston: Brill, 2013), 269– 270, 274–275. 5 Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 3. Wilson derived this number from Ester Pastorello’s 1924 Tipografi, editori, librai a Venezia nel secolo XVI. For Guerra’s biography, see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 60 (2003), s.v. “Guerra, Domenico.” http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/domenico-guerra_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ 6 Quoted in Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 33. 7 Ephemeral text is defined as pamphlets, broadsheets, and verse or song under sixty pages in length; such works could sell for as little as half a soldo, a quarter of the cost of a loaf of bread. Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 20. 65 gender ideology in this period and the widespread perception of female bodies and minds as weak, changeable, and immoderate, the monolithic nature of Serenissima men’s interaction with printed civic speech is unsurprising. Early moderns understood that text is rarely a static entity; it possesses mobility, attracts readership, and presumes the ability to convey knowledge to an audience. As such writing could function as a form of speech-making and an especially powerful one at that when disseminated by the printing press. Renaissance society frowned on female access to such power. While elite Italian women were regularly educated by the cinquecento, conservative gender norms dictated that female learning should include neither “the intricacies of debate nor the oratorical artifices of action and delivery;” “rhetoric in all its forms … lies absolutely outside the province of women.”8 This was especially true in Venice where elite society strove to circumscribe women’s lives according to the precept aut murus, aut maritas.
Literally this translates to walls or marriage; practically it refers to Venice’s desire to limit women’s engagement with knowledge-making and the world to the private realm behind casa and convent walls.9 There patriarchal culture enjoined them to cultivate virtue and serve the family by pursuing traditionally feminine qualities like chastity, obedience, and silence.10
If femininity was problematic within this system, transgressing gender norms as a woman writer was doubly so. For most of the sixteenth-century, men held almost exclusive license to publish among the Republic’s subjects. While outsider letterate from the Italian peninsula like
Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara could and did produce single-author works with
Venetian presses, local women from La Serenissima’s patrician and citizen classes did not. Some
8 Lionardo Bruni, “The Tractate of Lionardo Bruni d’Arezzo, De Studiis et Literis,” in Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, ed. William H. Woodward (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 126. 9 Francesca Medioli, “Monache e Monacazione nel Seicento,” in Rivista di storia e letterature religiosa 33, no. 3 (1998), 684. 10 These virtues are enumerated in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia, which served as a foundational text of decorum throughout the Renaissance. Alberti, The Alberti’s of Florence, 216–225. 66
Venetian noblewomen (e.g. Laura Beatrice Capello, Giulia da Ponte) participated in manuscript culture, circulating hand-written works among exclusive circles of family and friends, and contributing to print anthologies issued under the names of their male editors; however, any overtly public engagement with popular discourse risked damaging a well-bred veneziana’s reputation. 11 Given that contemporary body theory held that the physical instruments of speech
(e.g. the tongue and lips) were sex organs, imbuing a woman’s mouth and by extension her speech acts with carnal potential, this threat applied to some extent to women in every European state.12 In republican Venice however, male control of women’s bodies and sexuality was seen as especially vital to maintaining the unique endogamous kinship networks that sustained the state and bound power and wealth among the governing elite. There public speech-making by a woman of rank was interpreted as not only a marker of unruly individual openness and familial shame, but also as an indicator of systemic social disorder.13 In result, the only single-author monographs written by native women and published in Venice between 1488 and 158014 were the literary offspring of courtesans like Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco whose already- sullied reputations could support the stain of publicly defying gender boundaries.15 In the 1570s
11 Note that in 1600s Venice, elite women’s association rate with manuscript production was significantly lower than in other Italian cities. Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 82–84, 86, 139. 12 "Elizabeth Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 171–173. Bonnie Gordon, "The Courtesan's Singing Body as Cultural Capital in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 188–190. 13 Venetian control of female bodies is best understood via the example of virgin daughters. Patrician society maintained its exclusivity and government control via endogamous marriage; unwed daughters were sent to convents. In both cases, the chaste bodies of daughters served the state, the first in prayer, the latter by reinforcing kinship networks and producing sons. In the cinquecento, some daughters also remained at home as high dowries and economic changed produced the phenomenon of the “secular spinster.” For any of these women to be unchaste in word or deed risked family and thus state dishonor. Horodowich, Language and Statecraft, 171–173. Cox, “The Single Self,” 527–28, 530. Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5, 8, 12, 69–70, 96–97. 14 Best I can tell, Fedele’s Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto was the last such work printed before Fonte’s Floridoro. 15 For an introduction to prostitution and education in Venice, see Fiora A. Bassanese, “Selling the Self; or, The Epistolary Production of Renaissance Courtesans,” in Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Revising the Canon, ed. Maria Ornella Marotti (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 67 however, something changed. Female voices appeared in the pages of printed civic rhetoric dedicated to Venice for the first time, beginning with texts by Sienese and Mantuan foreigners
Virginia Salvi, Beatrice Salvi, and Hortensia Nuvolona Aliprandi in 1571 and 72 and moving into the Veneto with Monte by decade’s end. Then in 1581 respectable Venetian women emerged on the local print scene with the publication of a civic dialogue and chivalric romance by cittadina matriarch Moderata Fonte, ending what by then was a decades long silencing by and of upstanding women from the metropole. How did this come to pass?
This chapter looks to civic print and the Venetian Republic’s greater fascination with identity and its printed production for an answer. If Serenissima women were long prohibited from engaging in rhetoric, they were wildly popular as its subjects. The nature of female character, social roles, and bodies were modish topics among literate audiences and vernacular monographs dedicated to the other sex fairly rolled off contemporary Venetian presses. Readers curious about the art of crafting female beauty from dyes, powders, and oils could peruse
Giovanni Marinello’s Gli ornamenti delle donne (1562) while woman’s reproductive function was explored in his Le medicine partenenti alle infermità delle donne (1563).16 Conduct handbooks like Giacomo Lantieri’s Della economica tratatto (1560) enumerated woman’s proper domestic functions. Meanwhile, from 1546 on Venetians could contemplate programs for women’s learning while reading Juan Luis Vive’s De l'istitutione de la femina christiana, uergine, maritata, ò uedoua.17 And finally, local printshops produced multiple editions of popular querelle tracts like Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De Nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei
(1529; c.1540 in Italian) and Ludovico Dolce’s Dialogo della institution delle donne (1545).
16 Perhaps Giovanni’s intellectual engagement with the nature of womankind inspired the authorial interests and ambitions of his daughter, Lucrezia Marinella. 17 This came out in Venice in compilation with his other works De l'ufficio del marito, come si debba portare uerso la moglie and De lo ammaestrare i fanciulli ne le arti liberali. 68
These texts belong to diverse literary genres but all of them shared in a larger contemporary goal to fashion the meaning of womanhood with words. From the virtues of the proper Serenissima woman to the statist attributes of the Republic, image and its production fascinated early modern
Venice. This overlap is crucial to understanding local women’s movement into single-author print. My dissertation explores the relationship between print, civics, female authorship, and the local manifestation of the querelle des femmes in the late sixteenth century. This chapter argues that cinquecento changes to the Republic’s imperial status, print culture, and civic narrative laid the root system for the emergence of respectable native female voices in single-author print at the end of the Cinquecento.
During the long sixteenth-century, Venice’s international economic and political clout, as well as its imperial holdings declined as a result of the Italian Wars, the Portuguese route east, and conflict with the Ottoman Empire. By the 1570s, the decade this chapter focuses on, orthodox Venetian self-fashioning as a dominant, outward looking state rang hollow. Imperial warfare over the island of Cyprus, jewel of Venice’s Mediterranean empire, exacerbated that problem; increasingly, the Republic turned to civic myth as arbiter of its reputation for excellence. Contemporary civic discourse posited Venice as a new Rome and defender of
Christianity, lauded its republicanism, and celebrated the state’s role as a purveyor of cultural spectacle. Visitors to the teatro del mondo, as Venice was called, were encouraged to marvel at its unique geography, partake in Carnival, and observe the diverse peoples, costumes, and customs on display in its harbors and squares.18 The image-making machine that upheld these narratives required a steady rhetorical supply of myth-affirming civic panegyrics. This chapter will show that Venice’s changing fortunes and rising entanglement in civic myth at the end of the
18 Francesco Sansovino, Delle Cose notabili che sono in Venetia (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1561), dedication. 69
Cinquecento created an intellectual environment newly open to women writers. In its turn, feminine civic discourse acted as a springboard for Italian women’s writing and publishing, creating a rhetorical space for women to engage with and manipulate the political literary sphere and assert their viability as public intellectuals.
Civic Crisis in Cinquecento Venice
Cinquecento crisis unmade the status quo of the preceding centuries. From the twelfth to fifteenth century, the Venetian state had amassed a formidable Mediterranean empire and extended its colonial and diplomatic reach into continental Europe, establishing itself as a political player on the international stage. The Italian Wars were the first major event to unravel this legacy. They were a series of struggles for control of Italy characterized by shifting alliances and peninsular violence fought by Venice, the Papal States, and other European powers including France and the Holy Roman Empire between 1494 and 1559. Papal and imperial fear of Venetian expansion on the terraferma were a leading cause of these conflicts.19 Venice originally joined the action in 1495 as a member of a Holy League assembled to defend the peninsula from French invasion, but the Republic’s first goal then and always was to protect its patrimony. In 1499 it defected from the League in order to defend its mainland empire from
Milanese aggression.20 As the Italian state with the largest and best organized independent army, the Republic’s decamping brought its every move under scrutiny as did its decision to deploy its peninsular manpower in order to take advantage of the conflict as a platform for expansion,
19 Venice had expanded into Lombardy and the Veneto in the early fifteenth century, sparking long-lasting Italian fears of Venetian imperialism. Similarly, its self-proclaimed legendary longevity was somewhat ironically perceived as an implicit threat of dominion. Robert Finlay, “The immortal Republic: the myth of Venice during the Italian Wars (1494–1530),” The Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 5 (1999), 935–937. 20 J.R. Hale and M.E. Mallett, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 57–61. 70 seizing territories likes Trieste from the Habsburgs and Cremona from Milan for example.21 In the 1490s and early 1500s, Venice habitually profited from Italian hardship by sending troops into territorial power gaps (e.g. Romagna) left by military strife, enraging allies and enemies alike.22 Consequently, the major forces of Europe, France included, rallied to form an alliance against Venice known as the League of Cambrai in 1508. Over the next year the newly embattled state witnessed the rapid loss of its mainland empire to conquest and desertion; in the ensuing struggle to win back its territory, Venice also suffered the ruination of its farms and crops and the depletion of its coffers and armies.23 Although the Republic managed to recover its mainland empire by 1517, its political and military strength were permanently diminished by the Italian
Wars.24
In the meantime, Venice’s monopoly over economic access to the East and the lucrative spice and pepper trades also suffered a blow. Portugal had discovered a sea route to India in 1497 and that state along with important Venetian markets like England and France increasingly sent their own ships east rather than rely on Venetian middlemen in the sixteenth century.25
Additionally, at the same time that Venice was fighting to preserve its mainland territory in the
Italian Wars, Portugal and its imperial Indian clients were implementing a harassment policy in
21 Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 243. 22 Hale and Mallet, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State, 61–64, 221. 23 Robert Finlay, “Venice, the Po Expedition, and the End of the League of Cambrai, 1509–1510,” Studies in Modern European History and Culture, 2 (1976), 38. Michael Edward Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars 1494–1559: War, State, and Society in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2012), 294. 24 Mallet and Shaw, The Italian Wars, 296. 25 As an island city, Venice produced few products besides glass; to profit from trade, it became a middleman with a strong Mediterranean presence (while the technology of the day didn’t allow for total oceanic control, the Venetian fleet was large enough to restrict piracy and impede enemy ships). In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice had merchant settlements from Greece to Constantinople, Acre to Alexandria; as a result, it had first access to spices brought to Acre from India and the spice islands via Mecca and Egypt. Venetian ships carried European products like wool and copper to these ports and brought back nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. The circumnavigation of Africa lessened need for the middleman role so profitable to Venice. Domenico Sella, “Crisis and Transformation in Venetian Trade,” in Trade and Industry in Early Modern Italy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 88, 90–91. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, 70–72. 71 the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. This effort occupied the 1500s and 1510s, and it was designed to disrupt the commercial networks that carried spices to Levant markets in Acre and Egypt and from there to the spice road west and Venice.26 As a result, Venetian participation in the spice trade was almost none existent for twenty years. The Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 offset
Portugal’s power in that region, and this combined with new patrician investment in the recently recovered Veneto allowed Serenissima affluence to rebound by midcentury. While the Republic ultimately remained an important Mediterranean economy in the Cinquecento, its much-prided image as arbiter of the East was irreparably tarnished.27
As La Serenissima’s fortunes waned in the early years of sixteenth-century, at least one of its industries experienced a boom: print. When Venice lost control of Lombardy at the Battle of Agnadello in 1509, the Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli famously remarked that “in all those places where they are recovering the Venetians are painting a lion of
St. Mark, which has in its hand a sword rather than a book, from which it seems they have learnt to their cost that study and books are not sufficient to defend states.”28 This witticism did not hold true for long. If Venice had sometimes relied on wordy diplomacy and printed text rather than the sword where state-making and oversight of its European reputation prior to 1494 were concerned, the state only increased such efforts in the Cinquecento. Practically speaking, Venice served early modern Europe as the dispersal point for news about the Italian Wars as the polity closest to the frontlines. In addition, the state deployed the printing press to disseminate
26 Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, 291. 27 Ibid., 291–292. Brian Pullman, “The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility in the Middle and Late Sixteenth Century,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. John R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 380–381. Note that mainland investment would only increase in importance for Venice with the outbreak of another war with the Ottomans in 1570. 28 “Intendesi come e’ viniziani, in tutti questi luoghi de’ quali si rinsignoriscono, fanno dipignere un San Marco che, in scambio di libro, ha una spada in mano, d’onde pare che si sieno avveduti ad loro spese che ad tenere li stati non bastono li studj e e’ libri.” Niccolò Machiavelli to Ten Magistrates of War, December 7, 1509, in Opere, vol. 2, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), 1239. 72 propaganda and civic rhetoric on its behalf at home and to quash rebellion and encourage civic unity across the terraferma.29 The industry only continued to flourish with the arrival of peace.
Venice became the leading print center of Europe in this period and was a trendsetter in vernacular publication; indeed, by the 1550s its presses were responsible for up to seventy percent of all texts published in Italy.30 The embryonic Venetian print market had made its mark on the European book scene by reproducing classical Greek works; over time its bookmen also came to specialize in treatises, history, secular writing, religious works, and cartography.31 After the Italian Wars, Venetian statesmen and humanists like Gasparo Contarini and Andrea
Mocenigo also utilized local presses to bolster the Republic’s brand, producing vernacular monographs that celebrated the state’s longevity, emphasized the near-divine wisdom of
Venetian mixed government, and promoted citizenly pride.32 Thus in the decades that preceded women’s entrée into Serenissima civic rhetoric and the reemergence of the respectable Venetian women writer, printed discourse and civic rhetoric in particular were experiencing increased demand in the early modern Republic.
The greatest crisis Venice faced in the sixteenth century was the erosion of its
Mediterranean possessions. From the time of the medieval settlement of the marshy lagoon islands of the northern Adriatic to the period of Venice’s imperial rule as a maritime Renaissance
29 Massimo Rospocher and Rosa Salzburg, “An Evanescent Public Sphere: Voices, Spaces, and Publics in Venice during the Italian Wars,” in Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe, ed. Massimo Rospocher (Bologna: FBK, 2012), 94, 104–105. Edward Muir, “Was There Republicanism in the Renaissance Republics? Venice after Agnadello,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297–1797, eds. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 138–140. In the 1500s and 1510s, multiple Veneto towns rebelled against the embattled Venetian state, whose mainland rule was more oligarchic than serenely republican, incentivizing state efforts to reinforce its rule via positive printed civic rhetoric. 30 Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5–6, 136. 31 Ibid., 136–138. Jane Bernstein, Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-century Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15–16. Genevieve Carlton, Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 4, 144. 32 Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 29–31. 73 state, la regina del mare had prided itself on its dominion over the waters.33 The waterborne
Republic waged a constant battle against sea and silt in order to create land and preserve the canal system by which goods, ships, and people moved at home; abroad it sought to master the waves and acquire both power and resources by establishing coastal and island colonies.34 The long fifteenth century was the most fruitful period of Venetian eastward expansion (historian
Natalie Rothman defines this as approximately 1380-1540 for the Republic).35 This era saw the
Venetian conquest of prize Mediterranean locals such as Dalmatia and Cyprus; not surprisingly, the quattrocento also saw the onset of a series of wars for regional power over the eastern
Mediterranean fought by Venice and her erstwhile trade partner and adversary, the Ottoman
Empire.36 Almost as rapidly as her Mediterranean empire expanded, Venice lost pieces of it to
Ottoman aggression: Negroponte was taken in 1470, Modon and other Venetian colonies in the
Peloponnese were lost in 1500, and the Republic’s Aegean possessions including Santorini fell in the 1530s. Although Venetian-Ottoman warfare was sprinkled with occasional Western victories and a lengthy span of peace enjoyed by both sides between 1540 and 1570, renewed conflict
33 Venetian myth dates the polity’s origins to the 5th century A.D. and the migrations of people across Italy as a result of Hunnic invasion; archaeology dates the first settlement in the Venetian lagoon to the 6th century, in the area of the Rialto. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pazan, “Toward an Ecological Understanding of the Myth of Venice,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297–1797, eds. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 49. 34 Ibid., 45, 49–52. 35 As an Italian city-state geographically located in the west, Renaissance Venice was treated as a self-consciously western state aligned with transalpine Europe by 19th and much 20th century historiography; however, as historian Natalie Rothman has shown, the state occupied a more liminal space and is more appropriately understood as part of the Mediterranean world prior to the 17th century—thus it’s determined expansion into the Levant. Natalie E. Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 9–10. 36 When possible, Venice pursued a policy of accommodation with the Ottoman Empire for the sake of trade, discovery, politics, and even artistic exchange. As Daniel Goffman writes, for the Venetian state “there was a chronic and fascinating tension … between a religious ideology and conceived perpetual Crusade against the Islamic world and a situation that demanded bonds with Islamic states that controlled the international routes to the east.” Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 137; 133. See Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 8. See also Claire Norton, "Blurring the Boundaries: Intellectual and Cultural Interaction between the Eastern and Western, Christian and Muslim Worlds,” in The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, ed. Anna Contadini and Claire Norton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 5–7, 11–20. 74 over the island of Cyprus in the early 1570s further diminished Venice’s imperial reach. Cyprus was a strategic spice trade port and a producer of salt and grain it its own right; as such, it was considered the jewel of the Republic’s maritime empire, and its loss kicked Serenissima need for civic discourse as arbiter of its image into overdrive.37
The most apt exemplar of this reality is the Battle of Lepanto, an early naval engagement in the War of Cyprus (1570–1573) and a monumental if temporary western victory in the annals of Mediterranean warfare. The one-day battle was fought by Venice, her allies Austria and the
Holy League, and the Ottoman Empire for control of the channel that connects the Gulf of Patras to the Gulf of Corinth. On October 7th, 1571, the combined western forces roundly defeated the
Turkish navy and promptly sent news missives the length and breadth of Europe naming Lepanto a resounding Catholic victory from which the Ottoman enemy would never recover. Furious celebrations erupted in Venice at the news: the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was strewn with star-like lights that glittered above the water, the Rialto bridge was draped in velvet, masked musicians played fifes and tambours in the streets, and social strictures were set aside as men and women flocked to the city’s churches and public squares to thank God for the decisive naval triumph.38
In point of fact however, La Serenissima had won the battle only to lose the war. Selim II had sent troops to occupy Cyprus in 1570 and so the island remained for all the mayhem and
37 After the loss of Cyprus in 1573, Venice was no longer a key player in the conflict between East and West; this refocused as a land struggle between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. Molly Greene, “The Ottomans in the Mediterranean,” in The Early Modern Ottomans, eds. Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 106–107. Pullman, “The Occupations and Investments,” 382. 38 Sansovino, Venetia città nobillissima, 158a–158b. Gianpietro Contarini also gives a compelling account of this thanksgiving in his history of Ottoman-Venetian relations. He writes that “throughout the city one could hear jubilant cries of victory, bells, and infinite other noises of merriment as each citizen gave thanks to God.” “In tanto per tutta la città non si udiva, se non giubilosi gridi di vittoria, suoni di campane, vedeansi indistinti abbracciamenti de popoli, & infiniti altri tenerissimi segni d’allegrezza, con chi ognuno laude al Creatore della tanta & si larga sua recevuta gratia.” Gianpietro Contarini, Historia delle cose successe dal principio della guerra mossa da selim ottomano a’venetiani, fino al dì della gran giornata vittoriosa contra Turchi (Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, 1572), 56a. 75 bloodshed of Lepanto; Venetian relations with the Holy League soured; and the Ottomans rebounded quickly in the Mediterranean, rebuilding its fleet in the space of a year and continuing campaign to lay permanent claim to Cyprus.39 Turkish incursions in 1572 and early 1573 overwhelmed Venice’s Mediterranean presence, and in March 1573 the Republic bowed to
Eastern ascendancy and signed a unilateral peace treaty with Selim, ceding control of its prized territory to a rival state that had been pronounced irrevocably subdued only seventeen months before.40
No events better embody the intersection of cinquecento Venice’s changed reality with civic myth-making than Lepanto and the War of Cyprus. Fascinatingly, while the aftershocks of
Lepanto dramatically reduced the Republic’s Mediterranean agency, the Venetian government and press consistently commemorated the battle as a symbol of divine favor and Christian supremacy rather than acknowledge the political losses that surrounded it. This interpretation did not reflect actuality, but the Venetian state was well aware that perception can supersede fact.
Venice required a glorious narrative to uphold citizenly pride and sustain state lore of an unconquered Republican power in the late sixteenth century and that is what it produced.
Accordingly, in 1572 Doge Alvise Mocenigo and the Venetian Senate ordered that an annual celebration of Lepanto be added to the civic liturgy on the feast day of Santa Giustina.41 Every
October 7th a ducal andata wound from Piazza di San Marco to the Castello convent of Santa
Giustina in order to remind Venetians of the Christian victory against the Turks and showcase
39 Goffman, The Ottoman Empire, 161. Kate Fleet, “Ottoman Expansion in the Mediterranean,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, ed. Suraiya N. Faroqhi and Kate Fleet, vol. 2, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453– 1603 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 168–169. 40 Benjamin Paul, “Introduction,” in Celebrazione e autocritica: La Serenissima e la ricerca dell'identita veneziana nel tardo Cinquecento (Rome: Viella, 2014), 12–13. 41 Giustina was a virgin martyr in the Catholic tradition; she lived in area that became Padua in the first century A.D. and was executed under persecutions by Claudius for refusing to renounce the Christian faith. Fenlon, “The Memorialization of Lepanto,” 65–66. 76 the harmonious stability of church and state in the perennial Republic.42 Going forward, diverse print media including sermons, songs, orations, epic poetry, and island books continued to mark
Lepanto as a symbol of Venetian excellence well into the seventeenth-century.43 Print offered the
Republic an instrument by which to offset change. After the combined military disasters of the
Italian Wars and the loss of Cyprus, Venice could no longer rely on accounts of its political and economic might to support the claim that it was an extraordinary state. Instead civic myth, always omnipresent in the weft of Venetian narrative, took ascendancy as arbiter of its image.
Lepanto and the Print Boom of 1571–73
The sheer profusion of text produced in the aftermath of Lepanto cannot be overstated.
From 1571 to 1573 hundreds of orations, librettos, and poems were printed in commemoration of the battle, outstripping production of civic speech for the seventy-year period preceding the bloody maritime victory exponentially. Prior to the 1570s, most civic rhetoric in praise of Venice was authored by statesmen embedded in the political sphere, most commonly diplomats and ambassadors from outside cities like Chioggia that were subject to la Serenissima’s rule.44 With
Lepanto, civic authorship became a temporary but de rigueur act of male citizenship. Literate
Venetian men of diverse backgrounds burnished the state’s reputation by penning tracts on the history of Venetian-Ottoman relations and publishing orations in celebration of the Islamic other’s defeat. The list of Lepanto authors includes local figures as various as Tiziano Vecellio, painter and cultural icon; Domenico Venier, head of a prominent noble family; and Celio Magno,
42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 69. 44 The surviving names of oration authors from 1500–1570 include Giovanni Domenico Roncale, ambassador from Rovigo in the 1550s; Paduan nobleman Marcantonio Zabbarella; Francesco Grisonio, ambassador from Capodistria (modern day Slovenia) in the 1540s; and Dominico Falconetto, ambassador from Chioggia in the 1560s. 77 poet and bureaucrat.45 Men of the book trade also took part in cementing Lepanto’s place in the myth of Venice. For example, publisher Giorgio Angelieri and cartographer/publisher Giovanni
Francesco Camotio produced anonymous and self-authored works on the battle respectively in order to keep abreast of public demand for printed renditions of the victory.46 Lepanto texts typically featured some combination of glorification of the battle, praise of the state, honoring of military commanders, thanks to providence, and technical description of fleet formations and combat timeline. In so doing these works established their authors as expert witnesses to
Venetian excellence and conveyed mixed mythical and factual civic knowledge to their readers.
A prime example of such literary bricolage of fantasy and fact is Gianpietro Contarini’s
(c.1549–c.1604) Historia delle cose successe dal principio della guerra mossa da selim ottoman a’venetiani, fino al dì gran giornata vittoriosa contra turchi, published by the Rampazetto press in 1572. One of the lengthiest Lepanto texts at fifty-six folios, this work was “put to press to make known to the world the immense wisdom and bravery” of the princes, noblemen, and soldiers who fought at Lepanto, and to allow “all those who were never in the Levant to see the success of the war clearly, as if they were present.”47 Early modern scholars know almost nothing about the Venetian historian, including whether or not he was actually present at the battle (doubtful); either way, his statement of intent reflects the Renaissance custom of printing
45 Tiziano Vecellio, Oratio pro magna navali victoria dei gratia contro turcas (Venice: Domenico and Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1571). Publication date 1571 is a best guess; both ’71 and ’72 are listed on the cover. Domenico Venier, Canzone sopra la vittoria dell’armata christiana contro la turchesca (Venice: Giorgio Agnelieri, 1572). Celio Magno, Canzone sopra la vittoria dell’armata della santissima lega novamente seguita contr la turchesca (Venice: Gratioso Perchacino, 1571). All future references are taken from this edition. 46 In example see Canzone per la gloriosa vittoria contra il turco, con due sonetti, et vn' epigramma latino (Venice: Giorgio Angelieri, 1571) and Giovanni Francesco Camotio, L’ordine delle galere et le insigne loro, con li fanò, nomi, & cognomi delle magnifici, & generosi patroni de esse, che si ritrovorno nella aramata della santissima lega, al tempo della vittoriosa, & miraculoso impresa ottenuta, & fatta con lo aituto divino, contra la orgoglioso, & superba armata turchesca (Venice: Giovanni Francesco Camotio, 1571). 47 From “io a contemplation di lei (referencing previously mentioned “Prencipe, gentilhuomini, e soldati”) habbia dato alle stampe e publicato al mondo l’imenso della lora prudentia & bravura: a tutti quelli altri che non furono mai in Levante, di veder distesamente il successo di questa guerra, come vi fussero stati presenti.” Contarini, Historia delle cose, dedication. 78 travel accounts faux and firsthand alike, as well as contemporary Venetian’s keen appetite for reading materials about foreign cultures and current events.48 Like the vast majority of sixteenth- century Venetian civic rhetoric, Contarini’s monograph was printed in the vernacular in order to appeal to a wide audience.49 His History begins with a biographical overview of Sultan Selim
II’s life and then takes the reader on a tour of Venetian-Ottoman affairs that culminates in a dramatic account of cannon fire and sunken galleys. According to Contarini, the deadly naval clash between Christianity and Islam off the coast of Greece in October 1571 was precipitated by a longstanding Turkish desire to possess Cyprus that morphed into a concrete plan of attack in
1569.50 As Contarini reminds readers, the Venetian Arsenal suffered a devastating fire in this year. The blaze destroyed the Republic’s gunpowder supply and shipyard, weakening its fleet and thereby its ability to defend its Mediterranean positions.51 Thanks to the strong diplomatic and commercial presence of Ottoman citizens in Venice, the Turks were all too aware of this event and well-positioned to act on it. In February 1570, the Ottoman ambassador to La
Serenissima formally requested the cession of Cyprus; Venice refused.52
Contarini devotes the majority of his page space to the War of Cyprus, also known as the
Fourth-Ottoman Venetian War, and the Battle of Lepanto. He describes the ships, weapons, and
47 Venice had a uniquely close relationship with the Ottoman Empire thanks to the bailo in Constantinople and its long commercial engagement with the East; as such Venice was the primary producer of Renaissance travel accounts, maps, news missives, and histories about the Empire. Andrei Pippidi, Visions of the Ottoman World in Renaissance Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 43–46. Peter Burke, “Early Modern Venice as a Center for Information and Communication,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297–1797, eds. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 391–393. 49 Venice is one of the few Italian population centers from which we have evidence for literary rates. In the late sixteenth century, it is estimated that approximately 23 percent of the overall population, 33 percent of males, and 13 percent of females were educated. Literacy rates were likely higher than these statistics as scholars think the majority of working men in urban centers attained practical literacy without any formal schooling at home or school, largely because of the rising number and availability of textbooks thanks to the printing press. Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers, 109–111, 139. 50 Contarini, Historia delle cose, 2a–3a. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 4a. 79 numbers that both sides employed and supplements these details with a finely detailed map of the Gulf of Patras meant to aid readers’ understanding of the geography and fleet formations that shaped the battle’s course (Figure 2). He also provides a registry of Christian and Ottoman naval commanders and the vessels under their direction, as well as listing the individual ship captains deployed in each division.53 Readers searching for a numeric break down of the enemy forces learn that “the Turkish armada was armed by two hundred and seventy vessels, among which were two hundred galleys, fifty galeotte, and twenty pinnaces that came against the Christians in three sets.”54 Both sides are portrayed as knowledgeable sea farers and able military combatants,
Figure 2: Detail with fleet formations and commander positions from Map of the Ionian Sea and the Battle of Lepanto. 1572. Vellum. From: Contarini. Historia delle cose … Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, 1572. 49b–50a. Newberry Library.
53 Ibid., see 36b–39b for the Christian fleet and 43b–47b for the Ottoman fleet. 54 “L’armata Turchesca, che era di legni armati CCLXX, tra quali erano ducento galee, cinquanta galeotte, & venti fuste, veniva in tre scheire di medesima ordinanza, come la Christiana.” Ibid., 50b. 80 circumstances that establish the Ottoman navy as an adversary to reckon with. Contarini asserts that Muslim and Christian soldiers alike fought the sundering seas and each other with bravery and vim, and he credits a midday shift in wind rather than human works alone with giving a tactical advantage to the Western fleet, enabling them to claim final victory while evening fell on
10/7/1571.55
Contarini’s statistical delineation of Venetian and Ottoman ship positions and chronological sequencing of events runs parallel to a civic narrative that intermixes fact with emotive rhetoric and breathes colorful life into the nuts and bolts of military maneuvers, bestowing the patina of legend on Lepanto. For example, the historian cum dramatist describes the nighttime warfare that closed the day as follows: “Turks and Christians fought a narrow battle with short-range arms that left few alive; infinite were the mortalities that flowed from swords, scimitars, iron clubs, knives, manarini, swords, arrows, arquebuses, and artificial fire.
The sight of the bloody sea was a frightful and horrible spectacle … barely alive Christians and
Turks swimming in the water called for aid and clung to wood in an effort to save themselves.”56
Such textual illustration helped Contarini’s audience envision the far-flung seas in which
Serenissima ships and citizens had striven to defend Venice’s Mediterranean presence and la regina del mare’s good name. The Historia delle cose also encouraged its readers to translate the
Christian forces’ tactical success and meteorological good fortune into symbols of providential good will and Venetian exceptionalism. The afternoon shift in wind that took place over the Gulf of Patras and favored eastward facing ships as Venice’s were is not a natural event in
55 Ibid., 50b–52a. 56 “Turchi e Christiani combattendo insieme ristretti a battaglia dell’arme curte, dalla quale pochi restarono in vita, & infinita era la mortalità ch’usciva da i spadoni, scimitarre, mazze di ferro, cortelle, manarini, spade, freccie, archibugi, & fuoghi artificiati … Spavétoso e horribile spettacolo era il vedere tutto il mare sanguinoso … molti mal vivi Christiani & Turchi mescolati, dimandar nell’acque nuotando aiuto, & abbracciati ad un istesso legno cercar di salvarsi.” Ibid., 52a, 53b. 81
Contarini’s rendering, but a product of divine intervention.57 Lepanto was not simply a maritime success by his reckoning, but rather “the greatest and most famous naval battle” ever fought
“from the time of Caesar Augustus on, occurring at almost the same place where Augustus vanquished Marc Antony.”58 This rhetoric imbued Lepanto with the mystique and grandeur of
Actium, and the state with the valor of the nascent Roman Empire. History and civic myth have clearly mixed in Contarini’s book. When the Venetian Republic embarked on the War of Cyprus, the state was already working to keep its head above water where the existential struggle to remake its image in light of a changing economic and political status quo was concerned.
Illuminating Lepanto as a “great and glorious” episode that “brought down the wings of the great serpent of the Orient” was crucial to that effort.59
The mythologization of Lepanto visible in Contarini’s history is also enmeshed in the shorter but more proliferous genre of the civic oration, the primary product of the 1571–73 print boom and the format in which female-authored civic rhetoric would first appear. In the seventy- year span of the Cinquecento that predated Lepanto, forty-seven of these works were produced in
Venice with a mere handful (i.e. 5–9) coming out each decade.60 In 1572 by contrast, the
Bordogna press was able to assemble a single oratorical battle anthology that contained over one hundred and twenty such odes to Venetian greatness, most of which had been written and printed
57 Ibid., 50b–51b, 54a. 58 From “Questo fù il successo dalla maggiore & più famosa battaglia navale, che dal tempo di Cesare Augusto in qua sia mai seguita, & fu a punto quasi nel medesimo luogo, dove egli vinse Marci’Antonio. Ibid., 53b. 59 From “Grande veramente & miracoloso è stato questo glorioso fatto, che…si abbassasse l’ali al gran serpe d’Oriente, crudelissima ferità scemate al potente Selim.” Ibid., 53b. In the dedication, Contarini extravagantly claims that Lepanto trumped Actium, the Battle of Chios, and all naval clashes between Athens and Corinth. 60 This number is based on a search of the OPAC catalog that serves all Venetian libraries. Civic orations are not recognized as a genre and usually have no formal classification, making them difficult to identify; they are usually subsumed under the heading Miscellanea and sometimes History. While this number is undoubtedly too low, it is meant to be indicative of the genre’s relative popularity prior to Lepanto rather than an exact statistic. 82 independently in the winter of 1571.61 Individual Lepanto orations ranged from six to thirty folios long, and their sole purpose was to invoke citizenly pride in the state while bolstering
Venice’s spectacular image as a miraculous state blessed with Republican liberty and God’s favor. The wide commercial market for such texts at the beginning of the 1570s is indicated both by their abundance and the fact that local authors were able to find printers to produce multiple of their assorted ruminations on the Battle of Lepanto. For instance, the Venetian artist and writer Giovanni Mario Verdizotti composed four works inspired by the battle in between 1571 and 73—an oration dedicated to John of Austria, admiral of the combined Christian fleet, and a trio of sonnetts addressed to Sebastiano Venier, Marc’Antonio Colonna, and Pope Pius V respectively. Venetian patrician Sebastiano Venier and Roman nobleman Marc’Antonio Colonna had served as generals at Lepanto where they commanded flagships and experienced the heavy fighting at the battle’s center, which combat was owed the lion’s share of the credit for subjugating the Ottoman fleet. Pius V was the instigator of the Cyprian Holy League. The brothers Guerra, publishers of Issicratea Monte’s aforementioned odes to Venier, printed a collection of Verdizotti’s battle lyric entitled Novissima canzone al sereniss. Sig. D. Giovanni d’Austria generale dell’armata della santissima lega sopra la vittoria seguita contra l’armata turchesca.62 This text depicts Venier, Colonna, and the Pope as a heroic trinity brought together
61 Trofeo della vittoria sacra, ottenuta dalla christianiss. lega contra Turchi nell'anno 1571, ed. Luigi Groto. (Venice: Sigismondo Bordogna & Francesco Patriani, 1572). 62 Giovanni Mario Verdizotti, Novissima canzone al sereniss. Sig. D. Giovanni d’Austria generale dell’armata della santissima lega sopra la vittoria seguita contra l’armata turchesca, il VII. giorno di ottobre MDLXXI (Venice: Domenico and Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1571). Another popular triad of Lepanto figures in the form of the trinity was Spanish King Philipp II (the Hapsburgs financed the Holy League), Pius V, and the Venetian Doge Alvise Mocenigo. The poet Celio Magno wrote of them that as it is right to give thanks for victory to God, the son, and the holy spirit, so too “it must be done according to the glory of you three Holy Father, Serene Catholic King, and Prince of Venice, who are tightly bound (so I will say) in an earthly trinity.” “Si debbano publicare sotto la gloria di tuuti Voi tre insieme Beastissimo Padre, & Serenissimi Re Catholico, & Prenicpe di Venetia: i quali legati, e stretti in una (dirò così) terrena Trinità” Celio Magno, Trionfo di Christo per la vittoria contra turchi rappresentato al sereniss. prencipe di Venetia il di di san Stefano (Venice: Domenico and Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1571): all future textual references are to this edition. 83
“to defend [Christendom] from the towering rage of the wolves of the Orient, those unholy tyrants.”63 Like Contarini, Verdizotti painted the Christian victory in the Peloponnese as a singular naval triumph. By his reckoning, “every ancient victory is lesser” compared to Venice’s achievement; “the Roman, Persian, and Greek empires cede honors to it.”64
This sentiment echoes throughout Venetian civic rhetoric produced after Lepanto. For example, it appears in local poet Celio Magno’s (1532–1602) declaration that the era of the Holy
League “topped every other bold age, and will hold up a mirror (i.e. an example) to every future age.”65 Magno was a highly networked cittadino, intellectual, and diplomat who had travelled in
Syria in the 1560s; no fewer than five editions of his Lepanto writings were produced by
Venetian presses in 1571 alone.66 These consisted of a brief dramatic dialogue originally performed for Doge Alvise Mocenigo on the feast of Saint Stephan and a lyrical oration that invited a Muse (most likely Euterpe, muse of lyric poetry) to celebrate the downfall of the
“cunning Thracians” with “laughter and song.”67 Magno’s play, entitled Trionfo di Christo per la vittoria contra turchi, was published by Onofrio Farri as well as Domenico and Giovanni
Battista Guerra who seem to have specialized in printing civic works.68 They also produced an
63 “Hor lo difende de la rabbia alpestra, De’lupi d’Oriente empi Tiranni” Verdizotti, Novissima canzone, 2b. 64 From “Di questa sola ogni vittoria antica Minor si sente. A lei cedan gli honori E l’Imperio Latino, e’l Perso, e’l Greco.” Ibid., 3b. 65 “O sopra ogni altra aventurosa etade, che sarà specchio ad ogni età futura” Magno, Trionfo di Christo, 2b. 66 Magno (1536–1602) was an important member of the Venetian letterati; he belonged to Domenico Venier’s salon and was a founding member of the Accademia Veneziana (1558–1561). His poetry primarily circulated in anthologies. In addition to writing, he was active in Venetian government as secretary to the Consiglio dei Dieci and as ambassador to Spain. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 67 (2006), s.v. “Magno, Celio.” http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/celio-magno_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. Trecanni is the Italian equivalent of Britannica; this website is the best bibliographic source on now obscure cinquecento literary figures I have found. 67 From “Vinto è’l perfido Thrace” and “Gioia, gioia versiam fra riso, e canto” Magno, Canzone sopra la vittoria, 1a. 68 See the previously cited Magno, Trionfo di Christo published with the Guerra press, and Magno, Trionfo di Christo per la vittoria contra turchi rappresentato al sereniss. prencipe di Venetia il di di san Stefano (Venice: Onofrio Farri, 1571). 84 edition of Magno’s oration, which circulated under several headings and was published again by
Domenico alone and in a third iteration by the bookman Grazioso Perchacino.69
Through the multitude of civic orations pumped into the literary sphere of the early 1570s by local presses, Venetians gave “everlasting gratitude and glory to [the] eternal Father;” they also seized the opportunity to fervently buff their patria’s image while at. 70 Magno’s oration, here referred to by its Perchacino title, Canzone sopra la vittoria dell’armata della santissima lega novamente seguita contr la turchesca, credited God with inspiring the Christian triumph via the change in winds in the Gulf of Patras. He wrote, “eternal Father of heaven and earth, everlasting spring of gladness, at that hour you poured new manna for your people … you altered the Boreas so against us sails emptied, giving marvelous sign to your power.”71 His play on the other hand, positions the Venetian state as arbiter of victory. Its action begins with God, who sends David, Saint Giustina, and other heavenly personages before the victorious Doge and
Senate “to honor [the] happy might” of Venice, a “lofty virgin led by a blessed prince, temple of charity and true faith.”72 Here Venetian virtue and strength assume the primary causal role in
Europe’s success. Where Magno used separate works to satisfy Lepanto rhetoric’s competing needs to honor God and bolster the state’s reputation, Venetian bureaucrat and humanist
Ottaviano Maggi resolved the dual devout and diplomatic purposes of civic speech in a single
69 Magno, Canzone sopra la vittoria. Magno, Canzone nella vittoria dell’armata della Santissima Lega contra la turchesca (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1571). Magno, La bella et dotta canzone sopra la vittoria dell'armata della santissima lega, nuouamente seguita contra la turchesca (Venice: Domenico Guerra, 1571). Typically, only the publication year is given on the frontispieces of early modern Venetian texts, thus I do not know which printing came first and these are not listed in any special order. 70 From “Rendiamo a te con vivo affetto eterno Gratie, e gloria mai sempre ò Padre eterno.” Magno, Trionfo di Christo, 4b. 71 From “Padre eterno del cielo, e della terra; D’ogni letitia inessiccabil fonte, C’hor nova manna al tuo popul verasti … e in Austro allhor cangiasti Borea, che contra noi se vele empiea, Dando del poter tuo stupendo segno.” Magno, Canzone sopra la vittoria, 4a. 72 From “David son io dal sommo re mandato … per honorar vostra felice forte” and “tu diletta mia Vergine altera, Sotte Prencipe tal beata a pieno, Tempio di Carità, di Fede vera” Magno, Trionfo di Christo, 2a, 3a. 85 work. His 1571 Lepanto canzone positioned Venetian officials and naval officers as the chosen overseers of God’s earthly realm. Maggi stipulated that as “God alone rules the heavens, on earth there may be only one Faith, one law” administered by men.73 According to civic rhetoric, the
Catholic victory at Lepanto definitively revealed that Christians and nots Muslims had the right to administer that law. Maggi’s ideation of an alliance between heaven and Venice supported the cinquecento conception of La Serenissima as a new Rome, the most Catholic city of the
Renaissance world. Maggi argued that it was precisely because of Venice’s humble piety that
God ordered her, “virgin,” “Queen of the salty waters,” the “only and beloved daughter of the highest Father” to make war on Selim, the “bloody dragon” of the East.74 Maggi teaches readers that God’s blessing emboldened Venetian soldiers and prompted la regina del mare and her
European contemporaries to “see the Ottoman’s pride grounded, and [the] fierce lion that had sometimes trembled, roar and take on, tie, rend, and consume the Ottoman” enemy.75 Through ink and paper Maggi’s text celebrated the naval results at Lepanto and augmented Venetian self- fashioning as a devout, victorious state. Contrary to the Machiavellian witticism cited earlier, the
Republic defended its reputation with sword, religion, and book in the sixteenth century.
During Lepanto’s aftermath, mythic discourse consistently positioned the maritime state as “an ancient city, a free, plenteous, peaceful, stable, wealthy, noble, docile (to god), faithful, magnificent, and religious” Republic and a locus of “just, prudent, strong, valorous, wise, eloquent, and godly men.”76 This narrative was most commonly located in male-authored
73 “Com’un Dio solo il ciel regge, Sia sola in terra una Fede, una Legge.” Ottaviano Maggi, Canzone sopra la vittoria (Venice: 1571), 4a. Publisher unknown. 74 “Vergine;” Reina di queste salse acque;” “Figlia unica, & cara Del sommo Padre;” “sanguinoso Drago.” Ibid. 1a, 2a, 3a. 75 “C’hor vede à l’Ottoman bassar gli orgogli, E’l tuo fiero Leon, ch’hor freme, & rugge, L’impiaga, prende, lega, squarcia, & strugge.” Ibid., 3b; 2a, 3a-3b. 76 “una Città antica, libera, abdondante, pacifica, sicura, ricca, nobile, obediente, fedle, magnifica, & religiosa” and “Republica d’huomini giusti, prudenti, forti, valorosi, saggi, eloquenti, & divini” Michele Agostino, Orazione in nome della Povertà, nella creazione del Principe Sebastion Veniero (Venice: 1577), 3. In the years following 86 orations dedicated to state, countrymen, or the Holy League, but Lepanto texts took many forms.
Audiences in search of oratorical variety could enjoy an anonymous castigation of Sultan Selim
II and Islam in Nuova canzone a Selin imperator de Turchi, published by Domenico Farri in
1572.77 Citizens in want of a quick read or an opportunity to practice their ABCs could peruse the unsigned, page-long Alphabeto sententioso sopra la vittoria dell’ armata christiana contra infideli.78 And finally, customers of the Farri, Guerra, Scoto, and Zanetti, presses in search of the frisson of the unexpected could purchase Lepanto lyric by one nobile Venetiana, Virginia and
Beatrice Salvi of Sienna, and Hortensia Nuvolona Aliprandi of Mantua.79 Although the Lepanto works by these women writers amount to no more than sixteen folios collectively,* they are of substantial consequence. The Aliprandi and Salvi texts are the first extant examples of printed, named, single-author rhetoric written on behalf of the Venetian state by women. The Salvi text was a popular read; like the work of Verdizotti and Magno, it was published more than once.
Aliprandi’s battle canzone circulated on the book market in a freestanding edition and as an entry within the Bordogna anthology of Lepanto ephemera. As we have seen, Lepanto epitomized a
Lepanto, it was also normal to celebrate the battle within texts written in praise of men who had participated in the battle like Sebastian Veniero, General of the Venetian fleet, and Doge from 1577–1578. 77 Nuova canzone a Selin imperator de Turchi (Venice: Domenico Farri, 1572). 78 Alfabeto sententioso sopra la vittoria dell’armata christiana contra infideli (Venice: 1571). Excerpt below: “A All’arma, all’ arma, poiche è superato it B Buffalo d’Ali con la sua schiera… G Gratie rendendo al Profeta Maohemeto H Havendo preso Cipro il Bassà lieto R Rendi quel, che non frodi hai conquitato S Selim crudel nemico de’ Christiani” 79 Hortensia Nuvolona Aliprandi, Canzone dell’illustre signora Hortensia Nuvolona Aliprandi, per occasion della vittoria (Venice: Cristoforo Zanetti, 1571). See also H. N. Aliprandi, Canzone, in Trofeo della sacra vittoria, ed. Luigi Groto. (Venice: Sigismondo Bordogna & Francesco Patriani, 1572), 86b-87b. The Salvi women’s work was published in two forms, the first (by the Guerra press) with the poems alone, and the second with the addition of letters and a response from the poems’ dedicatee, Celio Magno. The latter addition was published by both the Guerra and Scoto presses. Virginia Salvi and Beatrice Salvi, Due sonetti di due gentildonne senesi, madre & figliuola a.m. Celio Magno (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1571). Virginia Salvi and Beatrice Salvi, Lettera, et sonetti della signora Virginia Salvi, et della s. Beatrice sua figliuola a m. Celio Magno con le risposte. Et un sonetto dell'istesso in lode di Venetia (Venice: Brandino & Ottaviano Scoto, 1571) All future textual references will be to the Scoto text. * I count each text once here, not the page count from the texts’ total print runs. 87 period of narrative crisis for Venice. By 1571 the Republic’s presses were working full tilt to glorify the state’s image. The advent of female-authored civic speech demonstrates the reality that Venetian social proscriptions on political female speech were inflexible until they abutted the city’s legendary pride and deepening need for reinvention. In addition, the booming Venetian print market was always in need of new genres, authors, and texts to publish in the quest to attract buyers. Learned women whose respectability mirrored that of lady Venice and whose voices promised novelty to a print scene already saturated with male voices could help fill the need. At the same time, Venice required fresh forms of cultural spectacle to promote tourism and bolster its image as a theatre of culture and custom; no one could deny that civic women authors provided both literary and cultural novelty in spades. Because the Republic had few respectable public women authors of its own in this period, it appropriated female intellects from the peninsula; as female authorship and the Venetian public sphere intersected, named municipal female authorship would move closer to home.
Going Public: Civic Female Authorship in the 1570s
While no Venetian women participated overtly in the print boom of 1571–1573, it is possible that the Farri press tried to recruit a local woman author to that endeavor. In the spring of 1573, the printshop’s magnate Domenico issued an anonymous Lepanto text written for
Sebastiano Venier in a female register. Entitled the Canzone Bellissima, this ephemeral work thanks God for “bringing the Ottoman empire to ruin” and granting the west “a victory worthy of eternal glory.”80 Unfortunately, we know nothing about this text aside from its immediate
80 “fia l’Imperio Ottoman posto in roina” and “tal Vittoria Degna d’eterna glorio” Canzone bellissima fatta novamente da una nobile Venetiana, in lode dell’Illustrissimo Procurator Veniero, per causa della ottenuta vittoria (Venice: Domenico Farri, 1573), 3b, 4a. 88 content. According to the canzone’s frontmatter, the Farri press acquired it from one Martiale
Avanzo, a minor Veronese poet and letterato. Avanzo, an early modern whose surviving historical footprint is itself faint, declined to illuminate the work’s origins for readers, and his dedicatory letter states only that good fortune brought the canzone to his attention.81 He identifies its author only as a Venetian noblewoman “no less wise and judicious as she is religious and Catholic.”82 While it is possible that text is a forgery or imitation of the female voice created by Avanzo or his printer in hopes of capitalizing on novel rhetoric’s commercialism on a flooded book market, its anonymity rings true in light of contemporary
Venice’s still potent gendered proscriptions around access to the public sphere. More importantly, contemporary documents testify that early moderns believed that the Canzone bellissima was the product of a feminine pen. For example, the ecclesiast Lodovico de Torres, archbishop of Monreale during the late 1580s and 90s, owned a copy of the canzone; as reported in an inventory of de Torres’ library, he credited the text to an author named Malipiera.83 There is only one sixteenth-century Venetian poetess of that denomination—Olimpia Malipiera, a patrician and regular contributor to compendia literary circuit. If Olimpia is indeed the Canzone bellissima’s author, that text would represent her only single-author publication and the first such text printed in the Republic since the quattrocento.
If we know little about Malipiera and the Farri canzone, we know more about the Salvi mother-daughter pair and their Lepanto lyric. The Salvi family belonged to the professional class of lawyers and bureaucrats in Sienna, a city decidedly more open to female academic
81 Martiale Avanzo, “Alli molti magnifici M. Nicola e M. Marc’ Antonio fratelli …" Canzone bellissima fatta novamente da una nobile Venetiana, in lode dell’Illustrissimo Procurator Veniero, per causa della ottenuta vittoria (Venice: Domenico Farri, 1573), frontmatter. 82 “non men savia e giuditiosa, che veramente religiosa e catolica” Ibid. 83 Francesco Mango, Varietà letterarie (Rome: 1899), 51–56, 70. The Malipiero were a prominent Venetian family; the spelling of the name with an “a” as its final vowel is a grammatical indicator of femininity. Malipiera’s date of death is uncertain, as is this attribution; however it reinforces the possibility that the Canzone bellissima is authentic. 89 accomplishment than Venice in the sixteenth century. According to Konrad Eisenbichler, Sienna first emerged as a site of intense female literary activity at the tail end of the Italian Wars as a group of local women including Aurelia Petrucci, Laodomia Forteguerra, and Virginia Salvi began to circulate religious, political, and Petrarchan poetry in manuscript form around the then- dying Republic.84 Of the Salvi duo, Virginia (c.1510–after 1571) was by far better-known author—she was an elected member of Siena’s Accademia dei Travagliati and something of a political firebrand, though neither she nor Beatrice (fl. 16th cent.) possessed the literary fame of a
Colonna or Gambara.85 Virginia was infamous however for her 1546 arrest on sedition charges and her promotion of imperial French interests on the peninsula.86 That celebrity seems to have served her well on the Italian print market and her lyric poetry was published in Lucca, Venice,
Rome, and even Antwerp in madrigal collections and poetry anthologies like Lodovico
Domenichi’s Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuossime donne (1559 Lucca), to which she was the lead contributor.87 The Domenichi anthology included poems by fifty-three Italian women writers, most of whom never published single-author texts in their lifetimes. Collections like this demonstrate that if early modern books were rarely printed under the names of women, they were salient participants in the Italian Republic of Letters. Few early modernists know
Salvi’s name today, but she was an important figure in her time. And because Domenichi
84 Konrad Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 1–11, 26–27. 85 Salvi was admitted to the academy in 1560, likely out of its members’ desire to compete with Sienna’s greatest academy, the Intronati, who had recently added the famous female poet Laura Battiferri to their ranks. In addition to allowing female access to its male academies, Sienna also boasted the first academy founded by a woman, the Accademia delle Assicurate, established by Vittoria delle Rovere in 1654. Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 313. Virginia Cox, “Members, Muses, Mascots: Women and the Italian Academies,” in The Italian Academies 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, ed. Jane E. Everson, Denis V Reidy, Lisa Sampson (Routledge: 2016), 134, 142 86 Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 11, 171-180. 87 Ibid., 207-213. For an example of her work, see Lodovico Domenichi, ed., Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuossime donne (Lucca: Vincenzo Busgragho, 1559), 162–205. 90 prefaced every poem in his Rime with the designation of its recipient, we can envision the extent of Virginia’s intellectual network. The dedicatees of her verse include French queen Catherine de
Medici, Roman Cardinal Vitellozo Vitelli, Siennese poet Latanzio Benucci, and Sienna’s principle literary club, the Accademia degli Intronati.
The Venetian poet Celio Magno also held a spot in Virginia’s literary network, a connection that proved vital to the Sienese authors’ Lepanto project. Virginia and Beatrice constructed their Lepanto poems as panegyrics to Magno and his already famous battle canzone; the Serenissima letterato in turn provided metrical responses to their odes for inclusion in the
Scoto edition of said poems. Entitled Lettera, et sonetti della signora Virginia Salvi, et della s.
Beatrice sua figliuola a m. Celio Magno con le risposte, this work proffers additional evidence the Salvi’s intellectual relationship with Magno in the form of a November epistolary exchange between Virginia and Magno on the art of lyrical composition. In letter one, dated to November
17, 1521, Virginia informs Magno and their readers that the eloquence of his battle opus must derive from divine patronage; she also thanks God for “giving strength to the Christians to obtain that lofty victory” and so inspire Magno’s verse. Similarly, she further credits Providence with
“[giving] the grace to rejoice” about the veneziano’s civic oration “to both myself and to my daughter Beatrice.”88 The religious tenor of this letter had dual connotations in the late sixteenth century. In the first instance, Virginia’s tone conformed to the thematic conventions of Venetian
Lepanto literature as well as contemporary European interpretations of the October battle more generally, both of which framed the continent’s naval victory over the Ottomans as divine validation of Christianity over Islam. At the same time, Virginia’s decision to position a cross-
88 From “Molto Mag. Sig. mio. Credo, che Dio habbia inspirato à la S.V. il favor suo nel far cosi rara Canzone, non altrimenti che ha date le forze à Christiani per ottenere cosi alta vittoria, & à me, et à Beatrice mia figliuola ha dato gratia di goder l’una, & l’altra.” Salvi, Lettera, et sonetti, 1b. 91 gender letter exchange and the Salvi’s female print project as the spiritual fruit of earthly piety constituted a shrewd move on the chessboard of early modern gender relations. Virginia’s words situated the Salvi’s public interaction with a public male figure and the Venetian civic sphere as divinely sanctified and therefore unobjectionable. By luck or design, Magno’s reply echoed
Virginia’s pious theme, further legitimizing the female print scheme. He devoutly acknowledges that God’s grace was the source of both his eloquence and the Sienese writer’s desire to pay him homage,89 averring also that the publication of his canzone was not motivated by any personal desire for fame, but by the wish to demonstrate “the infinite happiness that reigned and will always rule in me because of the increased glory [Lepanto bestowed on] Christ Our Lord’s name and to show the worth and honor of my fatherland.”90
The sonnets that follow the November letters reinforce Magno’s claim and celebrate him as the most learned, diffident, and Christian author living or dead, a credit to his state. Virginia compares the letterato’s rhetorical skill to the magniloquence of ancient poets like Horace and
Alceo, while Beatrice grandly proclaims that the Catholic soldiers who had paid for the western victory in the Gulf of Patras with their lives on October 7th garnered new glory through the sensational brilliance of Magno’s words.91 Both poems end by disavowing their authors’ ability to adequately recognize the magnitude of Magno’s lyrical feat. Virginia uses her sonnet to reiterates the letters’ discussion of Magno as a paragon of humility, a man too humble to acknowledge his own genius even as persons like herself exult in it. Beatrice, the younger and less experienced writer, implies instead that her pen is not equal to the task at hand.92 As
89 Ibid., 1b. 90 From “Io feci la Canzone semplicemente per dar segno di quella infinita allegrezza che regnava, et regnerà sempre in me della gloria accresciuta al nome di Christo N.S. & del bene, et honor di questa mia patria.” Ibid., 2a. 91 Ibid., 3a–3b. 92 Ibid. 92
“Proposta Della Sig. Virginia”93 “Proposta della Sign. Beatrice"
You, who today sings of the lofty Victory Oh fortunate me, because in such green In such learned and bright verses, years So that you surpass the illustrious and rare Heaven gives me, through you, good ancestors feeling. To whom’s celestial immortality you now To experience in such rare and lofty style compare: The Victory of CHRIST, and the losses of With such wonder you show the merit of others: others (the Holy League), Happy them, that in blessed ranks A task so worthy that every age may learn May enjoy without fear a joyous April, About this victory through you. Oh [poet] This mortal life holding to base things, without equal, Sure of eternal earthly grief. You make their glory and your own Daring souls fully in truth eternal. Lifted by you, in that brilliant work Alceo, il Mincio, and Horace fall By which you made [them] appear like the silent living Sun. Your style surpasses theirs Oh, why am I not able, your lofty soul Just as the Sun outshines every light. To praise, as now, your rare Who is it, that to your high, divine genius Virtue my spirit understands and honors? Can fully render true honor, If from whoever is able to give thanks you do not take it?
Magno’s own epistolary posturing denotes, self-deprecation was a standard authorial trope in the
Renaissance. Given Beatrice’s sex and youth however, its use was especially seemly in her case.
In the early modern period, even the most liberal segments of Italian society considered the traditionally feminine virtue modesty to be integral to a respectable woman’s disposition.
Venetian bookman Ludovico Dolce, a temperate but pro-woman querelle participant and Salvi contemporary (he and Virginia were co-contributors to a 1561 anthology of funerary rime), gave witness to this reality in Dialogo della institution delle donne. 94 There he succinctly summed up
93 “VOI, che l’alta Vittoria hoggi cantate, in cosi dotti versi, & cosi chiari, Che gli antichi avanzando illustri et rari, A celesti' immortali ora v'agguagliate Con tal stupore l'altrui valore mostrate, Che sia ben degno, ch'ogni etate impari Per voi, vincer da questa. O senza pari, Che la lor gloria, e vostra eterna fate. Taccia Alceo, taccia il Mincio, el il Venusino: Che’l vostro stil tanto è del lor maggiore, Quanto piu di ‘ogni luce il Sol risplende. Chi sia, ch’al vostro ingeno alto, e divino, Possa render à pieno il vero honore, Se da chi tutto puo gratia non prende?” Ibid., 3a 94 Dionigi Atanagi, ed., Rime di diversi nobilissimi, et eccellentissimi autori, in morte della Signora Irene delle Signore di Spilimbergo (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra), 1561. Irene di Spilimbergo was a musical 93 the contemporary importance of feminine modesty, saying “In my daughter I should look for timidity and modesty, which should almost be the basis and foundation of the entire fabric of virtue with which we intend to construct her and without which, I believe, the whole edifice would fall.”95
Italian women writers wary of toppling their reputations needed to uphold this precept.
The emphasis Beatrice placed on her sonnet’s meager literary value functioned as a symbolic nod to the gendered social expectations of her time. A similar gesture is located in Virginia’s letter, which apologizes for any artistic lack in the forthcoming poems and poses the Salvi as aesthetically weak but eager celebrants of Magno’s Canzone, the rhetorical machinations of which merited applause from the “leading (and presumably male) writers of the world.”96
Virginia and Beatrice’s performance of proper female modesty deflected attention from the unusual circumstance of their text’s greater civic project. And by crafting their Lepanto ephemera as paeans to a well-known Venetian writer rather than offer oratorical accounts of the battle or the diplomatic strife that occasioned it, they also ameliorated the subversion of their engagement with the Venetian political sphere. Because the Salvi Lepanto poems are short and rhetorically prosaic examples of early modern verse, scholars must look beyond the literary caliber of their words and beneath the gloss of feminine self-effacement that surrounds them in order to understand the text’s import. Lettera, et sonetti is the first extant example of a civic text published with a feminine attribution on the title page in the Republic. Though their rhyme may
prodigy from the Veneto who enjoyed a brief period of fame in her own time; although her death is the object of the collection, it likely owned its compilation to the reputation of her mother Giulia da Ponte who will be discussed further on page 31. 95 From “ricercarei nella mia fanciulla, timidita e vergogna, legqualie habbiano ad esser quasi base e fondamento di tutta la fabrica delle virtù in che noi intendiamo disciplinarla e senza queste e da credere, che tutto lo edificio rovinera” Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della institution delle donne (Venice: Giolito, 1545), 13a. 96 Virginia writes that she is sending him two sonnets, “lequale si degnerà perdonaci questo ardire, meritando ella esser canta, & celebrate da primi scrittori del mondo.” Ibid., 1b. 94 not sparkle, Virginia and Beatrice demonstrate an efficient fluency in Serenissima myth and the civic tenants of humanism.97 The credit Venice with spearheading the victory at Lepanto and treat Magno as a son of Venice who effectively serves the state with his pen, amplifying the
Republic’s much-prided claim to be the patria of a noble citizenry. In short, the Salvi’s sonnets reflect contemporary women’s fluency in the political knowledge and needs of the period and their ability to contribute to Venice’s civic project if they played their cards wisely.
Speaking of cards, I believe that the Salvis’ engagement with the Venetian press was enabled by a pre-existing rather than recently manufactured relationship with their subject. The back and forth style of both editions of Lettera, et sonetti indicates that it was a collaborative venture. As a high-profile cinquecento poet and active Venetian bookman (in addition to his role as poet, Magno was the former translator for the Academia Veneziana and thus the Aldine press), Magno possessed the cultural cache to promote its production.98 His influence over the project is palpable in both the decision to include past poetry by him in the Scotto edition of the work and the fact that at the time of printing, the head of that printshop, Girolamo Scotto, was preparing to reissue Magno’s Canzone as part of a madrigal collection whose sales could only be bolstered by the dissemination of an encomium to one its authors. 99 Magno’s work had appeared alongside Virginia’s in the past and he has a proven history of engaging with contemporary learned women including locals like the courtesan Veronica Franco and noblewoman Giulia da
97 While scholars debate Hans Baron’s assertion that civic humanism existed as an clearly identifiable and separate branch of humanism, it is uncontested that the Ciceronian ideal of the studia humanitatis adopted by early modern Europe included the notion that the primary purpose of an education in history, philosophy, rhetoric, etc. was to create learned men ready and able to serve their state in a civic capacity. See Charles Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8, 13. 98 Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 215. 99 Bernstein, Print Culture and Music, 876. 95
Ponte.100 The da Ponte connection is especially interesting. She was a member of a wealthy
Venetian banking family who split her time between Venice and Friuli, where she married into the patriciate and participated in the Veneto branch of the Republic of Letter’s in the 1540s and
50s.101 While her name is not widely recognized today, it appears in both Francesco Sansovino and Giacomo Alberici’s lists of famous Venetian writers.102 The latter describes her as a “woman of great esteem and worthy of much praise for her rare virtue, [she] wrote many letters which are placed and seen in books by diverse writers.”103 These multifarious works are difficult to track down some have probably been lost to time, but da Ponte does appear in the printed record thanks to the 1559 epistolary collection compiled by that Venetian jack of all trades, Lodovico
Dolce.104 His anthology Lettere di diversi eccellentiss huomini contains six letters by da Ponte, three from her correspondence with Serenissima nobleman Giorgio Gradenico and one each to the letterato Catarin Zeno, the Patriarch of Aquila, and Prospero Frangipani. The letters are unremarkable in and of themselves except that they illuminate da Ponte’s active involvement in learned Italian society as a reputable Venetian woman. This is best illustrated by Giulia’s second letter to Gradenico, which expresses gratitude for two letters recently sent her, and for several
100 Both Franco and Magno belonged to the intellectual salon hosted by Domenico Venier. The Venetian Giulia da Ponte, an epistolary participant in the Republic of Letters in her own right, has largely been forgotten today except as the mother of Irene di Spilimbergo whose death inspired the aforementioned poetry collection to which Dolce and Salvi (under the name Virginia Martini), as well as Celio Magno contributed. Daria Perocco, “Franco, Veronica (1546–1591),” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England, ed. Anne Larsen, Carole Levin and Diana Robin (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 154. Atanagi’s name is on Rime di diversi nobilissime, et eccellentissimi autori, but Virginia Cox hypothesizes that Venetian patrician and affiliate of Ponte Giorgio Gradenigo was at least partially responsible for the collection. Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 103. 101 Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Irene di Spilimbergo: The Image of a Creative Woman in Late Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no.1 (Spring, 1991): 43–44. 102 Sansovino, Venetia città nobillissima, 281b. 103 “donne il molto pregio e degna di gran lode, per la sue rare virtù fece diverse lettere quali sono poste e si veggono ne i libri di diversi scrittori” Giacomo Alberici, Catologo breve de gl’illustri et famosi scrittori venetiani, quali tutti hanno dato in luce qualche opera, conforme alla loro professione particolare (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi eredi, 1605), 42. 104 Ludovico Dolce, ed., Lettere di diversi eccellentiss huomini, raccolte da diversi libri tra lequali se ne leggono molte, non piu stampate (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1559), 458–466. 96 books Gradenico provided to facilitate the education of her daughters Irene and Emilia.105 When
Irene died in the early 1560s, Celia Magno contributed verses in her honor to a poetry anthology dedicated to da Ponte and compiled by their mutual intellectual acquaintances Gradenco and
Dionigi Atanagi.
What, one might ask, is a diagesis on Giulia da Ponte doing in the middle of this chapter’s analysis of Lepanto and the evolution of Venetian civic rhetoric? In include her for two reasons. First, I wish to demonstrate the inclusive nature of Celio Magno’s intellectual network.
His Venetian circle overlapped with those of the majority of the Italian women authors discussed in this chapter and the next—for example, one of Issicratea Monte’s teachers (Luigi Groto) was also one of Magno’s editors; the Venetian poet was pen pals with local physician Lucio Scarano and, eventually, Scarano’s best known client Lucrezia Marinella.106 Given Magno’s connection to persons like these and his tenure as a member of both the Venetian academy and Venier salon, the premier Serenissima intellectual societies of the century, we can also hypothesize with great confidence that he was acquainted with the historian Nicolò Doglioni (a star in the Venier orbit) and his protégé Moderata Fonte.107 These ties in addition to Magno’s connection to Giulia da
Ponte affirm that it would have been in character rather than deviant for the Canzone author to act as intellectual friend to the Salvi. The second reason I mention the prolix noblewoman is her regional affiliation, the fact of which illumes the reality that Venice was not a total blank in
105 Giulia da Ponte to Giorgio Gradenico, Spilimbergo, in Lettere di diversi eccellentiss huomini, raccolte da diversi libri tra lequali se ne leggono molte, non piu stampate, ed. Ludovico Dolce (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1559), 459– 460. 106 Maria Galli Stampino, Notes to Enrico, or Byzantium Conquered A Heroic Poem, by Lucrezia Marinella, trans. and ed. Maria Galli Stampino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 12. Susan Haskins, "Vexatious Litigant, or the Case of Lucrezia Marinella,” Nouvelles de la republique des lettres 25 no. 2 (2006): 102. 107 Fonte’s unpublished works include a sonnet to Domenico Venier, demonstrating that the salon head and friend of Magno was part of her intellectual sphere. Such connections were typically facilitated by women writer’s male patrons. Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 89, 260. 97 terms of upstanding female authorship before Fonte made her splashy single-author debut on the book market in the 1580s. The depths of the Venetian historical record contain da Ponte’s writings, as well as those of her mid-century contemporary Olimpia Malipiero.108 As elite
Serenissima women, they engaged the Republic’s print scene from a remove and always through a male intermediary; neither the readers of the Renaissance nor today’s historians could find their names on the frontispieces of locally produced texts. Nevertheless, there was a shimmer of feminine Venetian literary production in the otherwise dark gap that followed Fedele’s retirement at the close of the fifteenth-century. My dissertation concentrates on civic crisis as impetus to print, but these phenomena remind us that concurrent (and, I think, interconnected) forces were at play in the decades that saw the expansion in local categories of female authorship. The parameters of mixed gender Renaissance networks have not yet been excavated, but it is evident that overlying channels to print and literary production existed in Venice prior to
1571 for women both local and foreign. Thus the appearance of Virginia and Beatrice Salvi’s odes to Magno in that year is indicative of the socially conservative Republic’s need to appropriate new voices as weavers of mythic discourse in the wake of Lepanto and rising demand for civic print, with non-resident female authors not subject to local strictures around female life making that move first, but also of a shared reality wherein already thriving networks of intellectual exchange extending throughout and beyond Venice aided women from multiple backgrounds onto the page.
108 Malipiero is slightly better known today than da Ponte; she spent most of her life in Florence but the family was Venetian. Her name is also included in Alberici’s catalog as a “woman of noble blood, of happy genius and bright spirit, esteemed in poetry, [she] gave to light some elegant and simple rhymes which everyone sees dispersed in diverse books by [many] authors.” Like Salvi and Magno, she contributed to the memorial to Irene di Spilimbergo; she is also included in Domenichi’s anthology. “Olimpia Malipieri, Donna oltre la nobiltà sangue, di felicissimo ingengo, e di vivace spirito, molto stimata nella Poesia, compose, e diede in luce alcune leggiadre, e vaghe rime, quali si veggono tutta via sparse in diversi libri d’Autori.” Alberici, Catologo breve, 69. 98
The Mantuan Hortensia Nuvolona Aliprandi (fl. 16th cent.) also had connections to the
Venetian literary scene, as a reader if nothing else. Like the Salvi texts, her Lepanto canzone does not describe the battle itself, but a male-authored battle paean—in her case Venetian bureaucrat Ottaviano Maggi’s Canzone sopra la vittoria. Aliprandi’s tribute to Maggi’s poetic civic achievement begins with the humble assertion that “I, along with every other artist, instinctively cede first honor to you kind Maggi, just as the stars yield to the sun because your beautiful song did not merely paint, but showed the living Queen of the Sea asking pity from
God … amongst tears and sighs.”109 In other words, Maggi’s verse brought the far-flung events of Lepanto alive for readers back home and imbued Venetian statecraft with an emotional, sympathetic veneer. According to Aliprandi, even “the sacred choirs of the Muse and Apollo sang praises” in honor of the Venetian heroes who traded their lives for victory against the
Turks, but Maggi, “happy siren” led men in the production of civic speech. 110 Because no historical records from Aliprandi’s life have been found as of yet, we cannot know definitively whether or not she had a relationship with Maggi; however, her intimate familiarity with
Maggi’s lyric combined with the fact that both of their Lepanto works were published in the short window between October and December 1571 suggests that she had access to Maggi’s work pre-publication. Given the greater historical reality of co-participation by Italian men and women in the sixteenth-century Republic of Letters, it is probable that Aliprandi and Maggi were intellectual contacts. In any case, the Mantuan author was clearly attuned to the intellectual trends and civic demands of the Venetian Republic. The lines quoted above testify to the
Mantuan letterata’s understanding that in image-proud Venice, the creation of civic speech was
109 “Ced a pur ceda apelle Con ogn’altro pittore A voi, Maggi gentile, il primo honore: Come cedono al Sol tutte le stelle. Poi che non pur dipinta Ma viva viva mostra La bella Canzon vostra La Reina de l’acque Chieder a Dio pietà … tra lagrime e sospiri.” Aliprandi, Canzone dell’illustre signora Hortensia, 1a. 110 From “i sacrati cori De le Muse e d’Apollo Cantan le lodi de i novelli Heroi” and “Voi felice Sirena” Ibid., 1b. 99 as valuable to the state’s wellbeing as the daily deeds of governance—hence her pointed praise of Maggi’s role in immortalizing the battle with the written word. In regard to questions of gender, she like the Salvi smartly acknowledged the orthodox boundaries that governed La
Serenissima’s public sphere by inserting herself into its mythic state-making project obliquely rather than head on. Like the Salvi women, Aliprandi wrote a deceptively facile text in praise of praise rather than her own account of a naval engagement. The decision to proffer a literary appraisal of Lepanto rhetoric couched Aliprandi and the Salvi’s feminine ingress of into the realm of Venetian politics and public rhetoric as bookish, but their success demonstrated nonetheless a new female ability to share in the conventionally masculine task of fashioning
Venice as the glorious home of poetry and great men.
Civic Discourse in the Veneto: The Ducal Orations of Issicratea Monte
When the initial Lepanto print boom hit in 1571, Venice had no secular women writers of its own who came from elite or professional patrimony working in single-author print, thus the appropriation of Italian women writers from the peninsula. Over the next decade however,
Venetian need for pro-state civic discourse continued unabated and the production of female rhetoric on behalf of the Republic moved closer to home. This began in the Veneto with Rovigan poet Issicratea Monte in the late 1570s before materializing in the metropole itself with the career of Moderata Fonte. I should also note that while courtesan literary production is not of immediate interest to this dissertation, you can witness local preoccupation with civics if not
Lepanto’s legacy to some extent in the poetry of Veronica Franco, a famously infamous and erudite member of La Serenissima’s demimonde whose published poetry occasionally waxed sentimental on Venetian excellence in verses themed around the emotional effects of exile from
100 one’s home (for an example, see footnote).111 In any case, while the Venetian cession of 1573 bestowed Cyprus and parts of Dalmatia to the aegis of Ottomans command, cementing the disassembly of the Republic’s Mediterranean empire, these events did not impede the continued mythologization of Lepanto and its legacy. While commemorative battle orations in the mode of
Magno and Maggi’s lyrics had run their course on the local print market by 1574, the fantasy of a glorious western triumph on the waters of Greece lived on, incontrovertibly installed in state mythos as a central pillar of Venetian greatness. The historical record bears witness to this reality. In the years after the battle, surviving Lepanto champions were trotted out to greet foreign dignitaries visiting from abroad; city guides like Francesco Sansovino’s Venetia città nobilissima et singolare invoked the October 1571 victory celebrations as the ultimate example of state spectacle; printed civic ephemera dedicated to la regina del mare and her earthly representatives continued to deploy martial rhetoric as prop to citizenly pride.112 The latter vehicle of municipal discourse proved especially effective in propagating the myth of Venice, especially those done in the mode of ducal ode. A sub-genre of the civic oration, ducal odes marked the election or death of La Serenissima’s loftiest political figure. Some reflected actual
111 While Franco did not write about Lepanto or Venetian politics, she did infuse her 1575 poetry collection with mythic themes inspired no doubt at least in part by the salability of civic work and the topical interests of the Venier salon to which she belonged. For example, she devoted her twelfth poem to inciting contemporary love of the Republic, writing that her audience should praise “Adria, the blessed, noble retreat, which, earthly as it is, has the true form of heaven on earth” and boasts possession of all the beauty and sweetness that is most acclaimed and praised on earth.” Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 127, 129. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 61–93. 112 The Venetian notary Rocco Benedetti’s description of French king Henry III’s 1574 visit to Venice states that multiple naval heroes officially greeted the King, including Sebastiano Venier, who had commanded a flagship at Lepanto, and Antonio da Canale, the Proveditor of the Armada. M. Rocco Benedetti, Le Feste et trionfi fatti dalla Sereniss. Signoria di Venetia nella felice venuta di Henrico III. Chrsitianiss. Re di Franci, et di Polonia (Venice: Libraria della stella, 1574), 4b. Sansovino’s history describes how the city was draped in sumptuous fabrics following Lepanto, how processions of priests, singers, and merchants filled the streets, and how even women, of ranks high and low alike took part in the festivities en masque. Sansovino, Venetia città nobillissima, 158a–158b. Martial civic rhetoric could include heroic genealogies; the ability to claim familial ties to a Lepanto hero was a mark of honor and source of patrician legitimacy. We see this for example at Marino Grimani’s election as Doge in 1595—civic print honored his lineage as a source of major diplomatic players in the War of Cyprus. Carlo Querini, Oratione al. sereniss. prencipe di Venetia Marino Grimani recitata a’xxii d’agosto MDXCV (Venice: il Muschio, 1595), 5. 101 speeches as part of state ceremonies. While this type of print predated Lepanto, it enjoyed new popularity after 1571; in 1577 Venice would solicit the first of three such works by a female poet, the Veneto resident Issicratea Monte. The publication of Monte’s ducal odes legitimated the political example set by Aliprandi and the Salvi, and created an opening for female subjects of the Republic itself to act as viable public contributors.
Like her Sienese and Mantuan predecessors, Issicratea Monte leveraged sex as a shield against male criticism of her literary enterprise. Each of her Venetian orations begins with a protestation of the meager academic value of the prose contained therein or a deft rendition of feminine humility suitable to a proper Renaissance woman. Unlike the Salvi and Aliprandi
Lepanto paeans, the body of Monte’s works patently failed (or refused) to live up to their surface claims of gendered verbal vacuousness. In content the orations are substantively “masculine” or cross-voiced to mimic rather than merely comment upon the author’s chosen medium. Rather than praise male authors and their civic productions, Monte’s stand-alone oratory offered complete iterations of Venetian myth and detailed delineations of ducal lineages and deeds. I argue that Monte’s skilled impersonation of masculine speech weakened Venetian insistence on female silence and undermined local narratives of masculine intellectual primacy. In doing so, her work set a precedent for printed female experimentation with categories of literature and identity that helped enable the rise of newly feminist interpretations of women’s scholarly and citizenly ability in the Venetian querelle des femmes.
Today scholars know frustratingly little about this intriguing Renaissance person. Monte lived from 1564 to 1584 or thereabouts, and she was an elite resident of the Venetian commune of Rovigo born just five years after the Italian Wars’ conclusion. She shot to cultural prominence as a literary prodigy in the 1570s and was widely known as a “learned, illustrious and fair”
102 example of female exceptionalism in northern Italian academic circles, but her promising career was cut-off prematurely by a fatal illness when she was twenty.113 How the Veneto teenager came to be invited to pen three civic orations for the Venetian Republic, at least one of which she recited personally before the state government, is unknown.114 If we outline Monte’s intellectual matrix however, it becomes clear that she possessed ties to a network of Venetian letterati who were active in the querelle and known to promote female scholarly efforts. Such ties were likely critical to Monte’s academic success. To begin, Monte had a relationship if not a membership with the Accademia dei Pastori Fratteggianti, the Rovigan equivalent of Sienna’s Accademia dei
Travagliati to which Salvi belonged. The Pastori Fratteggianti were known to celebrate female intellect and they sponsored the literary work of Lucrezia Gonzaga.115 Monti’s literary mentors
Luigi Groto and Giovanni Maria Bonardo belonged to this institution,116 as did multiple Venetian poligraphi including Ortensio Lando, Ludovico Dolce, and Ludovico Domenichi.117 Dolce and
113 An example of such rhetoric can be found in a poem dedicated to Monte by Lodovico Giorgi, a lesser member of a patrician Venetian family; he calls her the first among “those learned, illustrious, and bright women that Italy so honors and esteems.” “… quante dotte, illustri, e chiare donne, ch’Italia tanto honora, e stima.” This poem prefaces a 1581 oratione by Monte printed in Padua on the occasion of Holy Roman Empress Maria of Austria’s visit to Italy. In Issicratea Monte, Oratione d’Issicratea Monte Rodigna, alla sacra Maestà di Maria d’Austria, Reina di Boemia, di Ungaria, de’Romani, et gradissima Imperatrice, nella ventua di S. Maestà a Padova (Padua: Paolo Meietti, 1581). 114 See footnote 3. 115 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 145–146. 116 Luigi Groto was a Veneto intellectual and statesman; he acted as ambassador to Venice for the town of Adria in the 1560s and 1570s, and was one of the diplomats who regularly penned civic orations about Venice prior to the genre’s boom after Lepanto. In 1571, he authored both a Lepanto commemoration and ducal ode; as such he was particularly well-placed to train Monte in the mechanics of civic rhetoric. Their intellectual relationship is primarily evidenced in letters that survive in print like the 1606 epistolary collection Lettere famigliari di Luigi Groto cieco d'Adria, which contains eight letters addressed to Monte. Luigi Groto Cieco, Oratione di Luigi Groto Cieco Ambasciator di Hadria, fattin vinegia, per l’allegrezza della vittoria ottenuta contra Turchi dalla Santissima lega (Venice: Francesco Rocca, 1571). Oratione di Luigi Groto Cieco Ambasciator di Hadria nella creatione del Serenissimo Prencipe di Vinegia, Luigi Movenigo nella quale si rallegra della sua dignità, & essorta tutti i Prencipi Christiani all’impresa contra Turchi (Venice: Francesco Rocca & Bastian de Ventura compagni, 1571). For his correspondence with Monte see Lettere famigliari di Luigi Groto cieco d'Adria, scritte in diuersi generi, & in varie occasioni con molta felicita, e di nobilissimi concetti ornate: delle quali, come di vn viuo esemplare, se ne potrà ciscuno securamente seruire in ogni maniera di lettere, ed. Giovanni Sega (Venice: Matteo Valentini, 1606), 98a– 99a, 115a, 118a, 138a–139b, 142b–143a, 143b–144a, 148b–149a. 117 Meredith Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 86. 103
Domenichi we have encountered already in connection with Giulia da Ponte and Virginia Salvi;
Lando was a celebrated author patronized by Gonzaga and known for impersonating female voices as well as pushing the Renaissance book market to include actual women’s writing.118
Given the Accaddemia dei Pastori Fratteggianti’s liberal reputation, Groto and Bonardo’s link to multiple Venetian bookmen, Groto’s aforementioned affiliation with the Venier salon and through it the civic luminary Celio Magno, as well as his position as Hadrian ambassador to
Venice in the 1560s and 1570s, we can surmise that this network played a role in Monte’s printed rise.119 While no archival “smoking gun” has yet been found to prove the exact mechanics of that process, it is clear that Monte possessed the rare but by no means fantastical cultural backing necessary to open doors in the entangled spheres of Venetian politics and print in the late sixteenth century. This theory is further substantiated by the fact that Monte’s ducal odes were published by the Guerra brothers. Their printshop specialized in civic speech and already included female authors in its client list, having produced the previously discussed
Lepanto texts by Titian, Verdizzoti, Magno, and the Salvi. Interestingly, only a decade after
Domenico and Giovanni Battista Guerra made the Salvi frontispiece authors and only four years
118 Ibid., 54. Lando’s sincerity as a defender of women in the querelle is debated - he was an expert in rhetorical paradox and his 1548 anthology of “female” letters contain examples that showcase the virtues of women, as well as contrasting pieces that reflect the polar opposite. Nevertheless, Lando was a rare example of an early modern male thinker committed to the exploration of female subjectivity and voice. Ray’s work on this text established Lando as the shadow author. For more, see Anne R. Larsen, “Paradox and Praise: From Ortensio Lando and Charles Estienne to Marie di Romieu,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 759-774. Ortensio Lando, Lettere di molte valorose donne, nella quali chiaramente appare non esserne di eloquentia ne di dottrina alli huomini inferiori (Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1548). 119 The sponsorship of academies was a key component of Italian women’s literary success more generally in the sixteenth century. They were especially popular in the Veneto; although Monte was the only female Veneto author to produce civic orations for Venice in this period, there were other active women writers in the region at this time including Maddalena Campiglia (1553-1595). I mention Campiglia, who is best known for the pastoral drama Flori specifically because her career was similarly encouraged by Vivenza’s Accademia Olimpica, through which she had ties to Grotto and the greater Venetian Republic of Letters. Also, Grotto’s letters tell us that Campiglia was also a correspondent of Monte. These circumstances gesture at the fact that Veneto/Venetian women writers were aware of each other and that contemporary intellectual networks in this region were actively promoting literary pursuits by women in a period better known today for stifling Venetian women’s voices at the printing press. Lisa Sampson, Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre (Routledge, 2017). Luigi Groto to Issicratea Monte, Hadria, in Lettere famigliari di Luigi Groto, 138b. 104 after they published Monte’s first ducal ode, they would would go on to facilitate the literary endeavors of the budding cittadina writer Moderata Fonte, issuing her dialogic civic experiment
Le feste (1581 or 82) as well as her religious poem La passione di Christo (1582).
Within Issicratea Monte’s oeuvre, her 1577 and 1578 orations in honor of Sebastiano
Venier are of greatest import to this chapter. As Generelato di Mare of Venice, Venier had commanded Holy League forces alongside John of Austria at Lepanto. Their ships headed the
League’s central division, which experienced the heaviest fighting of the battle and seized and submerged the flagship of Ottoman Grand Admiral Ali Pasha, securing western ascendancy on
October 7th, 1571.120 Patrician memory of Venier’s Lepanto command likely spurred his election to the dogeship following the death of Alvise Mocenigo in 1577. Monte’s orations support this theory. Her 1578 text retroactively thanks Venier for accepting the scepter of the Captain
General of the Sea and leading the Republic to victory over, “Sultan Selim the Ottoman, impious tyrant, and most cruel enemy of the Christian faith.”121 She credits Venier with setting an example of Catholic courage for the Western troops and asserts that “on the sacred day of the
Blessed Giustina, your Serene Lordship, having first with an intrepid and Christian spirit exhorted everyone to bravely fight on behalf of state power, wives, children, their own selves, the fatherland, and the Christian faith, brought happiness and wellbeing to all the Republic.”122
The same sentiments appear in Monte’s 1577 ode, which positions Lepanto as the event
120 Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571 (American Philosophical Society, 1984), 1057– 1058. 121 “Sultan Selim Othoman, empio tiranno, e nemico crudelissimo della Christiana fede.” Monte, Seconda oratione, 5a. 122 From “e il giorno Sacra alla Beata Giustina … vostra Serenità prima havendo con animo intrepido e christiano essortati tutti animosamente e virilmente a combattere per la facoltà, le moglie, per gli figliouli, per se stessit, per la patria…e per la fede di Christo…apportò a tutta la christiana Rep. allegreazza e salute infinita.” Ibid. 105 responsible for making Venetian citizens aware of Venier’s “honorable nature,” and “incredible, superhuman valor.”123
Monte’s sortie into Venetian civic discourse necessitated that she actively address the disparity between her sex and her printed activity on behalf of the state. Feminine Lepanto lyric by Aliprandi and the Salvi had established a vital precedent for respectable womanly intervention in the Venetian public sphere, but binary gender norms that barred the “other” sex from public politics were still strong at the end of the sixteenth century. As previously noted,
Monte worked within rather than tangentially to a male genre, and the gap between circulating short verse in praise of male authors and publishing full-fledged civic rhetoric mattered. The fundamental strangeness of Monte’s direct participation in a masculine genre undermined institutionalized patriarchy. While some show of humility was a routine authorial move in this period, Monte’s gendered posturing reflects a real awareness of the extent to which her writing contravened Italian definitions of decorous womanhood, exposing her to possible to cultural disapprobation. As noted above, Monte tried to offset this peril by invoking such female virtues as obedience and modesty in the opening lines of her ducal odes. Each text claims that its author only dared speak because she possessed male permission. For example, Monte’s 1578 ode to
Venier informed the Doge that she was appearing before him as a civic celebrant because “they
(the Venetian Signoria) urged me to come, even though I am a private maiden and inexperienced, in order that I might gladden myself at your sublimity.”124 This statement positions Monte as compliant with Venetian social norms that compelled virtuous women to
123 From “nella qual vittoria Vostra serenità mostrò con tanto suo honore … l’incredible e sopra humano suo valore.” Issicratea Monte, Oratione di mad. Issicratea Monte Rodicina nelle congratulatione del sereniss. Principe di Venetia Sebastiano Veniero (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1577), 3b–4a.” 124 From “mi hanno sospinta a venire, quantunque io sia private Donzella, e inesperta, a rallegrarmi con vostra sublimità.” Monte, Seconda oratione, 2a. 106 obey men’s commands and physically cloister themselves from the world unless told to do otherwise. By framing her embarkation on public speech-making as the product of ducal invitation, Monte was also able to configure the power dynamic between Venier and herself in terms of male primacy. As the speech-maker, Monte was effectively bestowing a gift upon the
Doge; however, the rhetoric of compliance elevated Venier to the dominant subject position and repositioned the author as the passive beneficiary of his “sublimity.” As a result, Monte’s work seems to uphold normative gender relations even as it blatantly defied the imperative to female silence.
The Rovigan author played upon a similar inversion in her third Venetian civic oration, a prose celebration of Nicolò da Ponte’s election to the dogeship following Venier’s death later in
1578. Here Monte deploys a paratextual dedication and feminine patron-client to disguise the unconventional nature of her rhetorical pursuits and present her text as a decorous object of courtly exchange rather than a piece of political commentary. The Oratione di mad. Issicratea
Monte Rodigna nella congratulatione dal serenenissimo principe di Venetia, Nicolo da Ponte opens with an address to one Signora Marina Gussoni, “Consort of the Magnificent and
Renowned Signor Nicolò da Ponte.”125 Gussoni was the spouse of the Doge’s grandson, Nicolò
Gasparo. The marriage was a political one — Gussoni belonged to a respected patrician family and her brother Vicenzo, a ducal elector, had sponsored da Ponte’s candidacy for the dogeship.126 Monte positions Marina Gussoni as a kind and virtuous patroness to whom she can safely entrust her oration, which she self-effacingly describes as the meager product of her “few
125 Issicratea Monte, Oratione di mad. Issicratea Monte Rodigna nella congratulatione dal serenenissimo principe di Venetia, Nicolo da Ponte (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1578), 1b. Referenced after this as “1578b.” 126 William Archer Brown, “Nicolò da Ponte: The Political Career of a Sixteenth-Century Venetian Patrician” (dissertation, New York University, 1974), 26, 133–134. 107 and weak talents.”127 This text is the only one of Monte’s Venetian works to include a dedication; I hypothesize that Monte imposed the filter of a female dedicatee upon the work in order to cloak her discursive overtures to Nicolò, a powerful male politician to whom she had no strong ties, in respectability.
As we have seen, Monte had a viable intellectual connection to the Doge when
Sebastiano Venier was in office thanks to her student-teacher relationship with Luigi Groto and thus his ties to the Venier salon. She had no such personal affiliation to the Ponte family to soften her discursive breach of social norms as a civic rhetor. To gift the printed oration to a woman was to cast it as an inoffensive object of woman-to-woman exchange in the first instance.
Monte’s dedication alludes to this reality within a rare comment on the risks faced by early modern female writers. She writes that after deciding to “give light to this my oration,” she realized that she “need[ed] to offer it to a Lady” of high virtue and rank so that “under her authority it could rest securely and be sure of not falling in the way of envy and the bites of malignant reprovers.”128 Monte further removed her behavior from male opprobrium by staging a convincing display of humble female modesty before the eyes of Senate and Doge in the ode itself, declaring that she had only dared take up her pen in the first place because she felt “so assured of the immense courtesy and good will … of these most illustrious and excellent Lords, who in past times with manifest signs of mildness and good will toward me have all shown themselves ready to listen to me.”129
127 “… le poche, et deboli forze mie.” Monte, 1578b, 1b. 128 From “[I]o essendo per dare in luce questa mia Oratione ... et dovendo, si come è cosa conueneuole, offrirla à Signora tale, che sotto la sua auttorità potesse vivere tranquilla e star sicura di non cascare nella invidia, e ne’ morsi de’ maligni reprensori, mi venne subito in mente Vostra Signoria.” Ibid. 129 From “sono cosi rassicurata della immense cortesia e benignita … da quello anco di questi Illustr.e Eccell. Signori, liquali veggio hora con manifesti segni di mansuetudine e di natural bontà verso me tutti rivolvi per ascoltarmi, mi son resoluta divoler dinovo fare esperienza.” Ibid., 2a. 108
The rhetorical skill and civic fluency with which Monte crafted the substance of her ducal odes sharply contradicted their disclaimers of feminine incompetence and humility. Monte was a cunning wordsmith and her civic orations represent a tour de force of gender role revision and genre appropriation disguised as good behavior. Crucially, all mention of Monte’s sex and literary ineptitude disappear as soon as she embarks on the sub-genre’s defining litany of civic speech in commendation of the dogeship and Venetian history. Monte showers effusive praise on
Venice’s government bureaucracy, civic rites, patrician families, and military triumphs, demonstrating that women could operate effectively in literary fields beyond the respectable confines of spiritual and lyric poetry. Her odes emphasize key aspects of the myth of Venice including the wondrous and unique nature of the state’s participatory government, which entity fostered “a well-regulated Republic” and made Venice the “fitting home of liberty” within
Europe.130 Monte also enumerates the various posts that Venier and da Ponte filled on the road to ducal election (podestà, bailo, proveditor generale, procurator di San Marco etc.) and pays rhetorical homage to various government offices like the Avogaria di Comun and the Capo di
Dieci.131 Most importantly, she suffuses her writing with references to Venice’s spectacular nature. For example, she eloquently describes the floating Mediterranean metropolis as “that city which renders all the world amazed and which seems to have been made not by human hands but by divine providence over the waters, where all virtues are embraced, not just those spread through Italy, but also those of all the world.”132 And if we apply a mythic analytical lens to the feminine protestations that prefaced Monte’s panegyrics to Doge and state, we find that even
130 “ben regolata Republica” and “albergo felicissimo di liberta.” Monte, Oratione di mad. Issicratea Monte, 2b, 4a. 131 Ibid., 3a–3b. Monte, 1578b, 3a. 132 “Questa è quella città, che rende gradissimo stupore, e incredibil maraviglia à tutto il mondo, laquale per comun parere non è stata per humana opera fabricate, ma ben per voler divino miracolosamente sopra quest’acque forta, dove tutte le virtù non solo per tutta l’Italia sparte, ma pere tutto il Mondo ancora insieme s’accolsero.” Monte, Oratione di mad. Issicratea Monte, 2b. 109 these seemingly straightforward placatory remarks had a potential secondary rhetorical purpose.
Given the Venice’s investment in spectacle as a marketable state commodity, the fact that the
Rovigan author repeatedly and noticeably highlighted her position as “a private woman … [and] an inexperienced maiden of fifteen years” could be read as yet one more proof of the Republic’s impressiveness.133 In other words, Venice was not only a city and empire in which great men, freedom, virtue, and unearthly beauty resided, but also one that could marshal prodigal and daringly transgressive female voices on its behalf.
The queer theory of feminist literary critic Judith Butler can help us make sense of
Monte’s strategic use of multivariant contemporary notions of gender and identity in order to simultaneously excuse and legitimate her verbosity. According to Butler, “the acts, gestures,
[and] enactments” that comprise gender “are performative in the sense that the essence of identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.”134 That is to say that while heterosexual societies past and present label bodies and persons as male or female, those categories have no ontological origin. Rather they are produced and maintained via repetition within civilizations that train people to behave in ways culturally defined as masculine or feminine. While Monte and her Renaissance contemporaries did not think about sex and gender in precisely these terms, they were very much aware of the ambiguities of identity. Early modern Italian society justified patriarchal hegemony and the gendered division of life and labor into public and private spheres by promoting a binary image of gender. However, the conceptual framework that underlay this binary metonymy did not hold that masculinity and femininity total opposites; instead it
133 “vi darete non poco ammiratione, ch’io essendo non solo private, ma dozella ancora, da quindici anni, e inesperta habbia ardire coparire inanzi à vostra Sublimità.” Ibid., 2a. 134 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 36. 110 understood gendered difference as the product of degrees of difference on a spectrum of metaphysical perfection.135 According to this model the body was an epiphenomenon while gender was “real.” Put another way, the body was an untrustworthy map—genitalia and biology could not definitively reveal identity. Because masculinity depended on variable entities like heat and the balance of one’s bodily humors, there was great worry that a woman could approach male ratios and appropriate his virtues.136 As a result, proper gender performance was crucial to sustaining the binary and social order. Monte’s writing features both feminine tropes and “virile” civic speech, indicating some awareness on her part of identity’s fluid nature. In line with
Butler’s theory, this juxtaposition undercuts the pacifying verbiage of her orations’ opening and encourages readers to confront the artificial rather than natural quality of contemporary gender norms. I contend that wherever Monte enacts the traditionally male task of image-making on behalf of the Venetian Republic, she is virtually cross-speaking or inhabiting the male voice. As such the author functionally and purposefully showed herself to be the rhetorical equal of a man.
Thinking with Butler allows us to analyze Monte’s literary occupation of the male voice as drag. According to Butler, drag “reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.”137 Her brand of queer theory further contends that culturally normative gender identities are both constructed and cemented by the “stylized iteration of acts,” which drag and other parodic cultural practices like cross-dressing can undermine or alter.138 I contend that
Monte’s masterful performance of conventional feminine meekness combined with a main act of
135 Laqueur, Making Sex, 4–5, 25–27. 136 Todd Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 20–25. 137 Butler, Gender Trouble, 137. 138 Ibid., 140. 111 masculine myth-making denaturalized patriarchal Venetian insistence that intellect, the right to public action, and citizenly spirit were masculine prerogatives. As ever with modern theory, some care must be taking when applying Butler’s premise to the past, especially as she is a poststructuralist who wants to fracture all notions of some essential gender identity or a priori subjectivity. For Butler, parody in its fullest form reveals “that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.” Monte was a sixteenth-century person and would not have thought in these terms. However, if eradicating binary notions of gender and dispelling the concept of a priori subjecthood were not her aims, her vocalization of masculine themes can and should be understood as instances of parody rather than mere imitations. Setting aside the ideological apogee of Butlerian performance theory, the question of whether a drag performance qualifies as parody or imitation depends on the result, practically speaking—are gender categories successfully destabilized? Monte’s iteration of public myth-making and her conscious manipulation of early modern gender ideals in tripart service to social practicality, state spectacle, and female literary advancement illuminated the artificial distinctions her society drew between masculine and feminine scholarly and citizenly ability. The success of her performance is evinced by the fact that she published not one but three ducal odes in the 1570s
Republic and by the continued propagation of womanly civic speech in Venice by way of the
1581 debut of Moderata Fonte, a member of Monte’s literary network and—by no accident—a future contributor to the Venetian querelle des femmes.
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CHAPTER THREE
FASHIONING FEMALE AUTHORSHIP: THE INTERSECTION OF CIVIC MYTH AND AUTHORITY IN FONTE AND MARINELLA
“See how she grows little by little, almost like a simple maiden, noble and kind, It seems that heaven, earth, sea, and fire favor her laughing April, as her foundations have a place in the waves
… The heavens cover her and the earth sustains her, no less than the sea, which surrounds and encloses her.”1
- Moderata Fonte, 1581
“[A]mong the shells, rocks, and reeds, your glorious homeland grows closer to Heaven in fame and grandeur every hour; she does not fear the pride of others and she scatters thousands of gifts; it seems that her majesty removes the merit of invincible and memorable works by others; in vain will a learned hand try to narrate her beauty with a printed pen.”2
- Lucrezia Marinella, 1635
Ten years after the Holy League and Ottoman navies collided in a blaze of cannon fire and spindrift at Lepanto, Moderata Fonte memorialized “the victory that took place in the salty
1 “Vedete come cresce à poco à poco, Quasi fanciulla ingenua, alma e gentile, E par che’l Ciel, la Terra, il Mar, e il Foco Donin favore al suo ridente aprile, Ch’i fondamenti suoi ne l’onde han loco … Il Ciel la copre e la sostien la Terra Non men del Mar, che la circonda e serra.” Moderata Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro (Venice; Eredi di Francesco Rampazetto, 1581), 12.19. 2 “E guata tra Conchilie, e giunchi, e scogli, Ch’ogn’hor più sorge al Ciel famosa, e grande La patria gloriosa, che gli orgogli D’atrui non teme, e mille gratie spande; Par che sua maestade à l’altre togli Il vanto d’opre invitte, a memorande, Indarno dotta man tenterà d’essa Narrar con penna la beltade impressa.” Lucrezia Marinella, L'Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato, poema eroico, ed. Maria Galli Stampino (Modena: Mucchi Editore, 2011), 7.6. 113
Ambracia bay” in epic form with the publication of Tredici canti del Floridoro (1581).3
“Behold,” she wrote in that book’s thirteenth canto: “the fleets of the united Christians are gone out from the ports. With time a cruel war born of a certain incident between the Turkish lord and the Venetians will justify putting such a superb and valorous armada to sea.”4 At Fonte’s prompting, the western forces’ long sunk or recommissioned ships rematerialize from inky black blocks of ottava rima to sail once more and fight against their eastern foe on October 7th, 1571.
Fifty-four years later, Fonte’s literary successor Lucrezia Marinella followed suit in the rhymes of L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (1635), a crusade epic in the Tassean style. There she deployed a prophecy-pronouncing enchantress to refloat the Lepantine armada and instruct her audience to “observe there among the frothy waves how the immense Ionian Sea is set afire by the light of weapons and hit by the oars and weight of many ships so that its back is heavy and crowded with them.”5 Sebastiano Venier, returned to his flagship, incites the parchment flotilla to repel the Ottoman “dragon,” scattering its forces.6 On the page and in readers’ imagination,
Venice and the Holy League triumph over Islam anew.
If Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte are best known as querelle des femmes disputants today, the diversity of their corpora together with L’Enrico and Floridoro’s narrative engagement with the Battle of Lepanto demonstrates that early moderns knew the letterate as both feminist rhetors and skilled civic speakers. This was especially true of Fonte, whose literary career began in the post-Lepanto moment that also saw the civic interventions of Virginia and
Beatrice Salvi, Hortensia Aliprandi, and Issicratea Monte in Venetian myth. This chapter
3 “la vittoria…che conseguì nel salso Ambraccio seno.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 13.3. 4 From “Hor mirate, di qua de i porti uscite L’armate de Christiani insieme vnite. Guerra crudel per certa occasione Tra’l signor Turco, e i Venetiani nata, Di por col tempo in Mar sarà cagione Così superba, e valorosa armata.” Ibid., 13.6-7. 5 "Là tra l'onde spumanti, quata come Arde al fulgor dell'armi il Ionio immenso, Che percosso da' remi e dalle some Di tanti legni ha 'l dorso grave e denso.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 7.54. 6 “tumido dragon” Ibid. 114
explores the movement of named single-author, pro-state rhetoric by women into Venice and interrogates the function and character of civic speech in Fonte and Marinella’s epic works, as well as Fonte’s lesser known dramatic dialogue Le feste, In doing so, I demonstrate that the emergence of the respectable Venetian woman author in the late sixteenth century was inextricably linked to La Serenissima’s investment in civic myth and identity fashioning. Chapter
Two showed that cinquecento Venetian politico-economic crisis and the Lepantine print boom of
1571–1573 opened an intellectual space for women in Venice’s overlapping public and printed spheres. Chapter Three argues that Fonte and Marinella deployed epic poetry to manipulate that space, assert their writerly authority, and expand the contemporary notion of womanhood by staking a feminist claim to the Renaissance veneziana’s public, citizenly capacity as fashioner of the myth of Venice.
“tu non esperta verginella:”7 Moderata Fonte and the Renaissance World of Letters
Before making her single-author debut on the Venetian print scene under the pseudonym
Moderata Fonte in 1581, the Venetian cittadina Modesta Pozzo achieved her first publication credit in the frontmatter of Issicratea Monte’s 1578 oration to Doge Sebastiano Venier. While historians know relatively little about Fonte’s life, the historical record combined with her publishing footprint allows us to hypothesize that Fonte’s literary career was facilitated by her intellectual network and cinquecento Venice’s increasing investment in mythic discourse after
Lepanto. As a celebration of Monte’s “noble eloquence” as a civic speaker, Fonte’s first attempt
7 Literally, “inexpert virgin.” Fonte’s patron Niccolò Doglioni labeled her thusly in a poem that praises Floridoro’s unexpected genius given its author’s gender. Niccolò Doglioni, Poem “Alla Sig. Moderata Fonte,” in Tredici Canti del Floridoro, frontmatter. 115
at printed verse falls squarely within the rubric of civic discourse.8 Her fourteen-line paratextual poem commends the Rogivan’s rare learned genius and labels her a “new Minerva beloved by
Heaven [whose work] scatters a host of virtues into our sea.”9 There is no surviving record of how Fonte and Monte came to know each other, but it is clear that they were personally acquainted. Their introduction was most likely facilitated by the Italian playwright and diplomat
Luigi Groto, Monte’s foremost literary patron and a known epistolary correspondent of Fonte, with whom he exchanged writing samples.10 When Fonte sought to publish her own civic production Le feste three years later, Monte’s Venetian publishers (the fratelli Guerra) took her on as a client. The reign of Doge Nicolò da Ponte, another dedicatee of Monte’s ducal odes as well as that of Le feste, was also instrumental to Fonte’s literary success. From 1578–1585, he presided over Venice and dedicated the state’s resources to a systematic attempt to refurbish its image through architecture, iconographic campaigns, and civic ritual in the wake of the War of
Cyprus and diminution of the Republic’s Mediterranean empire. He initiated the redecoration of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the ducal palace with allegorical paintings such as Jacopo
Tintoretto’s The Voluntary Submission of the Provinces to Venetian Dominion, presided over the opening of the Palladian church San Giorgio Maggiore on the Feast of Saint Stephen in 1581, and, to celebrate that event, commissioned a program of civic spectacles that included a public
8 “alma eloquenza” Attributed to Moderata Fonte, “Alla virtuotissima Signora Issicratea Monte Rodigina di Mad. M. P.,” in Seconda oratione di Mad. Issicratea Monte Rodigna, nella congratulatione dell’Invitiss. E Sereniss. Principe di Venetia Sebastiano Veniero. Da lei propria recitata nell’Illustriss e Eccellentiss. Collegio à sua Serenità, by Issicratea Monte (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1578), 1b. 9 “Questa nova Minerva al Ciel diletta Sparge un mar di virtù nel nostro mare.” Ibid. 10 While Fonte’s correspondence is no longer extant, Luigi Groto references their scholarly relationship in a 1583 letter addressed to Monte, in which he informs his protégé that “Signora Modesta…has sent me many of her things, in particular some plaintive verses…and a plenipedia recited for the Doge on Saint Stephen’s Day” (a clear allusion to Le Feste). “Signora Modestia…mi ha mandato molte sue cose, e in particolare alcune stanze piante...et una Plenipedia recitata al Doge il giorno di S. Stefano.” Luigi Groto to Issicratea Monte, Hadria, 12 January 1583, in Lettere famigliari di Luigi Groto, 138b. It is possible that Monte and Fonte also corresponded, though we have no evidence to this effect. There was a contemporary precedent for written female intellectual exchange; in example, Monte corresponded with the Vicenzan writer Maddalena Campiglia, an exchange only known about today thanks to this same letter. 116
performance of Fonte’s dramatic dialogue.11 With the publication of that text, named single- author civic speech in the female register crossed the barrier between the metropole and the outside.
While Le feste and the concomitantly published Tredici canti del Floridoro are the earliest extant single-author works by Moderata Fonte, they were not the letterata’s first literary experiments, nor, perhaps, her very first printed monographs. According to Fonte’s guardian and biographer Niccolò Doglioni, the author showed a proclivity for writing early in life and owed her intellectual career to a natural literary talent augmented by that still semi-rare Renaissance phenomenon for non-noble women: an education. As a child Fonte was raised in the Dursoduro convent of Santa Marta where she learned to read, write, and give recitations before entering the household of Prospero Saraceni (her maternal grandfather) at age nine. Under Saraceni’s tutelage
Fonte studied arithmetic, literature, poetry, and Latin in addition to more conventional feminine skills like drawing, music, and needlework.12 She also wrote feverishly. The Doglioni vita (1593) is full of variously charming, hyperbolic, and informative anecdotes that illume Fonte’s life-long relationship with the written word. For example, Doglioni relates that on one summertime expedition to Saraceni’s Veneto villa, a cestella holding the child Fonte’s writings bounced inopportunely off her lap and over the side of her family’s carriage just as they crossed the river
Piave. The pages were lost to the current and Fonte promptly had a temper tantrum.13 This story and the greater Doglioni vita gives modern readers a brief glimpse at the woman behind the now-
11 Note that authoring a play for a holy feast day was a typical career move for contemporary authors and civic contributors; in doing so Fonte aligned herself with contemporaries like Celio Magno, who also wrote a play for the Saint Stephen’s Day celebrations in the 1580s according to Virginia Cox. David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 41–44. Price, Moderata Fonte, 30–31. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 88–89. 12 Giovanni Niccolò Doglioni, “Vita della Sig. Modesta Pozzo di Zorzi, nominata Moderata Fonte,” in Il merito delle donne ove chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette de gli uomini, by Moderata Fonte (Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1600), 3–4. 13 Ibid., 4. 117
yellowing texts that bear her name and sit silently in the archive; it also reminds us that the tides of history may have similarly washed away a number of Fonte’s adult writings. Fonte became
Doglioni’s ward in the late 1570s, sometime after an outbreak of plague hit the Republic in1575; at that time he encouraged the young author “to write and publish her works” including
“innumerable sonnets, songs, and madrigals on various subjects, among them some rappresentazione that were recited before the most Serene Princes of Venice, and were also printed, if for the most part anonymously.”14 Today historians are none the wiser as to the identity of these undesignated texts.
Virginia Woolf once observed that “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman” before the modern period.15 Given Renaissance Venice’s strict adherence to the Pauline cultural imperative to female silence, it is not surprising to discover that
Moderata Fonte sometimes engaged the sixteenth-century printing press from the veil of anonymity. In the case of civic performance texts, of which Doglioni tells us she wrote several, anonymity was also an accepted component of the genre. The rappresentazione tradition of which Le feste is a part originated in the religious sphere of confraternities and convents; it is possible that Fonte first encountered such works during her time at Santa Marta, although the genre’s secular manifestation had dominated the type since the early sixteenth-century.16 Like the civic oration, the secular rappresentazione flourished in Venice after the Battle of Lepanto, and its primary function was as to convey mythic rhetoric. Nicolò da Ponte was the genre’s leading sponsor and most civic performance plays that date to Fonte’s lifetime were printed and
14 From “cominciai … ad essercitarla à comporre, & insieme publicando le sue cose, fui principio di farla conoscer al mondo” and “vi compose anco innumerabili Sonetti, Canzone, Madregali in varie materie, et seco insieme alcune rapresentationi, che recitate davanti i Serenissimi Principi di Vinegia, sono anco state stampate, se ben per lo più senza nome.” Ibid. 15 Virginia Woolf, A Room of Own’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 49. 16 Courtney Quaintance, “‘Le feste’ of Moderata Fonte,” in Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Convent Theatrical Texts and Contexts, ed. Elissa B. Weaver (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2009), 196–197. 118
performed during his dogeship. The prolific Guerra brothers’ press seems to have functioned in a semi-official capacity in this period as the sole printer of such works, which were commissioned to mark the state’s four major holidays: the Ascension, the Feast of Saint Vitus (June 15), the
Feast of Saint Mark (April 25), and of course the Feast of Saint Stephan (December 26).17
Civic rappresentazioni were typically performed during a state banquet and could comprise several acts though they were brief in length. Surviving librettos from the period are ten to thirteen folios long on average and routinely devoid of authorial identifiers. The lyrical passages of these texts feature audience pleasing encomiums to Venice embedded in religious, pastoral, or moral themes discussed by a cast of classical and/or personified figures. For instance, the Saint Stephan’s Day plays from 1579 and 1580 respectively feature a discourse on virtue by
Saint David, Temperance, Chastity, and Faith (amongst others), and a dispute over the relative merit of Peace versus Victory .18 In 1580, the performance text for Saint Vitus’ Day staged a debate between pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus on whether people should weep or laugh in response to human misery.19 Did Fonte write any of these? Probably. While we cannot know for sure, the Doglioni vita combined with a 1582 letter in which Fonte retrospectively thanked Nicolò da Ponte for perusing multiple works by her makes it likely.20
Given the letterata’s aptitude for dialogic writing as shown in Le feste and, later, Il merito delle donne, as well as her topical preoccupation with military themes in Floridoro, it is tempting to
17 According to Quaintance, early modern Venetian law mandated that the Doge host state banquets for Venice’s senators, magistrates, and other officials on these holidays. Ibid., 198. 18 Rappresentatione al Serenissimo prencipe di Venetia Nicolo da Ponte, il giorno di S.Stefano l'anno 1579 (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1579). Rappresentatione fatta auanti il serenissimo prencipe di Venetia Nicolo da Ponte, il giorno di S. Stefano 1580 (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1580). 19 Rappresentatione al Serenissimo prencipe di Venetia Nicolo da Ponte, il giorno dell'Ascensione l'anno 1580 (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1580). 20 Per Virginia Cox, Fonte thanks da Ponte for reading works by her in the past in the dedicatory letter of her 1582 work La Passione di Cristo, also published by the Guerra press. Virginia Cox, “Moderata Fonte,” The Italian Women Writers Project. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/BIOS/A0016.html, accessed 4/1/2018. 119
hypothesize that Fonte authored the 1580 Saint Stephen’s Day rappresentazione. In this production, Peace, the daughter of Venice personified, sparks a rhetorical fracas by inquiring whether she “may presume [her]self superior in praise and value to Victory,” her sister.21 Victory scoffs at this notion and proclaims that the trophies, glorious wars, and brave rulers forged with her aid, along with the many temples raised in her name from the age of Rome on make her the greater immortal.22 Contrary to the Serenissima siblings’ competing notions of preeminence however, the play’s adjudicator Wisdom decides that Peace and Victory represent two sides of the same coin and are therefore equal. The debate ends in a draw.
If this structure sounds familiar to Fonte cognoscenti, it is because a similar frame governs the action of Le feste. Fonte’s one-act performance play comprises a verbal duel between a Stoic and an Epicurean philosopher over the merits of pleasure and virtue or how best to live a good life. Where Fonte’s cheerful Epicurean argues that “it is impossible to find anything better to do in the world than to make merry and entertain oneself,” the Stoic somberly avers that virtue alone “is the true good” whose beauty can “transport spirits to heaven.”23 As in the ideological clash between Peace and Victory, the truth will ultimately be located betwixt these polar opinions. In between the philosophers’ opening remarks and closing arguments however, the play diverts their attention to an encomium of Venice as befit their actual civic purpose. To that end, both characters pronounce that the trait they cherish is epitomized by the
21 From Peace’s request that wisdom judge their merits: “hor non ti sdegni, Ch’à me, che Pace son, di lode, e pregio Vittoria andar superior presuma?” Rappresentatione … il giorno di S. Stefano 1580, 2a. I formed this hypothesis while doing primary source research on the da Ponte rappresentazioni that predate Le feste; Courtney Quaintance arrives at the same theory in her 2009 essay on Le feste, validating the suggestion. Quaintance, “‘Le feste’ of Moderata Fonte,” 195. 22 Rappresentatione … il giorno di S. Stefano 1580, 3b–4a. 23 Epicureo: “Veramente atro bene Non si ritrova al mondo Che star in festa, e in gioco.” Stoico, from: “ella (virtu) è’l vero bene” and “la sua bellezza fura gli spirti, anzi gli porta il n cielo.” Moderata Fonte, Le feste: Rappresentatione avanti il Serenissimo Prencipe di Venetia Nicolo da Ponte, il giorno di S. Stefano 1581 (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1581), 2b, 3a. Note that Le feste’s frontispiece does not include a date; 1581 is a best guess. 120
Republic, to which they have travelled on their search for the road to rectitude. For example, the
Stoic reports that, “because I have heard that [virtue’s] splendid gleam is better unveiled here in the place where she resides, I am come to enjoy … her sweet, dear sight, that shines out of you, illustrious and worthy Prince.”24 At this point, another foreign visitor arrives on the scene: the
Eritrean Sibyl. In antique mythology, the sibyls were prophets of Apollo, but Fonte’s sibyl has been updated for a Renaissance audience.25 She preserves her oracular abilities, but serves as a representative of Jesus, whose birth she takes credit for predicting long ago. Like the quarrelling theoreticians, the sibyl has come to Catholic Venice after “hearing the rumors of that glorious name which the [doge’s] virtue causes to be scattered through the world.”26 Like the character
Wisdom in the 1580 Saint Stephen’s Day play, the Eritrean Sibyl functions as an arbiter. She resolves the text’s moral debate by agreeing to hear the disgruntled philosophers’ arguments and render a verdict upon them. She finds that both the Epicurean and the Stoic are guilty of possessing limited knowledge, saying “you are both wrong, and both right” and “debate that which you should not.”27 She then declares that men should possess pleasure and virtue alike in moderation, thought neither is the highest good; rather those who wish to live righteously should seek above all to know Christ.28
Le feste’s musings have received almost no scholarly interest to date. The most in-depth analysis of Fonte’s performance play currently available is literary scholar Courtney
24 E perch’odo, che quì meglio si scopre Il suo splendido raggio; Qui dove in propria stanza ella risiede, son venuto à fruir … Sua dolce, e cara vista, Che fuor di voi Principe illustre, e degno, Traspar.” Ibid., 3b. 25 By casting a Sibyl in Le feste, Fonte may have been referencing the convent rappresentazione tradition. Sibyls were common characters in convent dramas and were first incorporated into the Judeo-Christian tradition in antiquity. Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 146–148. 26 From “La sibilla son’io, detta Eritrea, Ch’udendo il suon del glorioso nome, Che la vostra virtù nel mondo sparge, Son venuta à verdervi.” Fonte, Le feste, 5b. 27 “… ambo havete il torto, ambo ragione A contender di ciò, che non dovreste.” Ibid., 6b. 28 Ibid., 6b–7a. 121
Quaintance’s 2009 introduction to the text’s modern edition. Quaintance interprets Le feste as the opening salvo in Fonte’s campaign to establish herself as an erudite Venetian author in the
1580s. According to Quaintance, Fonte modeled the text’s philosophical monologues on Lorenzo
Valla’s fifteenth-century treatise De voluptate, a decision intended to showcase her familiarity with the humanist tradition.29 Interestingly, while Quaintance successfully excavates the stylistic and theoretical overlaps between Fonte and Valla’s writing, convincingly demonstrating that the veneziana was attuned to the Renaissance Italy’s intellectual pulse, she dismisses Le feste’s encomiastic sections as so much trivial tinsel required to garnish a Venetian text preoccupied by more serious themes. Given the extreme social problematic of Fonte’s gender in relation to print at the time, I think this is a mistake. In the 1570s, civic rhetoric specifically had opened an avenue by which Italian women writers and female Venetian subjects could access the political print scene in a state and an era otherwise characterized by the strict policing of women’s voices within the public sphere. Thus I contend that Le feste’s civic content was crucial rather than incidental to its composition and positive social reception (as evidenced by the fact that it was both performed and published) and so also to Fonte’s ability to build a literary career as a cittadina in the late sixteenth century.
Just as the philosophical know-how of Fonte’s speakers stood as evidence of her fluency in humanist dogma, their skillful complimentary discourse about the sights and assets of Venice demonstrated her citizenly capacity as a Serenissima author. As previously evinced in Chapter
Two’s analysis of Lepanto orazioni, a Venetian writer’s encomiastic fluency established their validity as a civic authority and thus their right to “speak” on that subject. In keeping with that equation, each page of Le feste includes a celebration of Venice, that “life giving residence,”
29 Quaintance, “‘Le feste’ of Moderata Fonte,” 204–205. 122
designed to evoke state pride and guarantee the play a warm reaction from local viewers and readers. Its panegyrics emphasize key aspects of Venetian myth such as the Republic’s religiosity, longevity, virtue, liberty, and proficient government. For example, the play begins with a declaration by the Chorus of Feast Days that in Venice “as in paradise, reigns peace, celebration, and laughter in company with virtue.”30 The Eritrean Sibyl echoes this sentiment, describing Venice as a “sublime Republic that dispenses days of virtue and modest delights, whose people live in peace and great happiness under the government of the doge and senators.”31 Fonte’s Sibyl further honors the state and illumes her author’s civic capacity by deploying her prophetic powers on Nicolò da Ponte’s behalf, informing him that his dogeship would be long and prosperous according to heaven’s ordinance and the needs of the polity,
“which now spends its days in virtuous and modest pastimes, and lives in peace and great delight” under his reign.32 Once the Sibyl completes her prophecy and instructs Le feste’s misguided philosophers to reconcile their ideological differences, the Feast Days return to obsequiously observe that anyone in need of a model of Catholic life could do no better than to emulate the Republic’s leaders.33
At this point Le feste transitions to its final scene and Poetry personified takes the stage to grant Venice a final blessing. Like her creator, Poetry is female, a literary prodigy, and a self- identified resident of the lagoon Republic, qualities that suggest a possible link between writer and character. She is also a smooth civic rhetorician. Fonte’s decision to finish her script with a civic benediction was a shrewd one, for the showy style choice gave her a final chance to
30 “Qui, come in paradiso, Con virtù regna pace e festa e riso.” Ibid., 2b. 31 “[Q]uest’alma Republica, che sotto il governo di voi dispensa i giorni hora in virtute, hora in modesti giuochhi, et vive in pace, e in allegrezza tanta.” Ibid., 5b. 32 From “Il governo di voi dispensa i giorni Ora in virtute, ora in modesta giuochi, E vive in pace, e in allegrezza tanta.” Ibid. 33 Ibid., 7b. 123
impress readers with her mythic knowhow. Venetian rappresentazioni did not close with a blessing as a rule, but the practice reinforced the genre’s rhetorical, celebratory purpose and was commonly used as a result. Blessing speeches typically addressed God or the city itself and requested that Venice receive such bounties as peace, long life, and happiness. For instance, an anonymous Saint Stephen’s Day play from 1579 terminated with a benediction to the “highest eternal Heaven, which scattered beautiful things here and there, spread all creation, and instilled the immense shape of the word and the sky with your grace: we the reverent and humble pray to your glory for peace every hour. And [we pray] that these gentle spirits (the watching Venetians) in whose bosom we fashion our home will always be happy, and that their lofty and esteemed fatherland may enjoy life equal to that of the world.”34 At the 1580 Sensa celebrations, the performance play of the day concluded with the exultation, “Oh happy city, that by Heaven was already chosen as the particular abode and recipient of peace and goodness, which things in the world did not have a roof to cover themselves from enemy swords … God through the hands of his servants gave the beginning to your foundations. … Oh blessed and fortunate people: in order to renew the golden age you were settled here; always guard her goodness from worries; may all your days and years be happy.”35 Le feste’s closing invocation resembles these closely thematically and is arguably more eloquent. Poetry faces Fonte’s audience and professes “Is
[Venice] not my temple, the sacred dwelling where I come at times to amuse myself … Is this not my Prince to whom I write infinite pages in a sublime and worthy style? … May it please
34 “O Sommo eterno Sole, Che quáto e qui bel sparso, e diffuso tutto creasti, & hai l’immensa mole Del mondo, e ‘l ciel della tua gratia infuso: Noi riverenti humili Pace al módo, à te gloria ogn’hor preghiamo. Et che questi gentili Spirti, il cui petto in nostr’albergo usiamo, Sian lieti sempre: & l’alma lor gradita Patria goda col mondo egual la vita.” Rappresentatione … il giorno di S.Stefano l'anno 1579, 6a. 35 “O Felice citade, Che dal Ciel fosti eletta Già per particolar nido e ricetto Di pace e di bontade, Ch’al mondo non havean sicuro tetto Da ricovrarsi da nimiche spade … Dio per le man de’servi suoi Diede principio à i fondamenti tuoi. … O gente benedetta e fortunatta: Che per rinovellar l’età de l’oro Fosti da lui gia qui posta e locata; Tu sempre sua bonta guardi d’affanni; Tutti à te sian felici i giorni e gli anni. Rappresentatione … il giorno dell'Ascensione, 7b. 124
Heaven that in the summer and in the winter I may return to you with joy eternally. Remain in peace, and with you this entire marvelous and beautiful city, created the abode of every good thing, and the devoted handmaid of God and virtue … and may a friendly star always guard and conserve the glory brought onto you.”36
With this beautiful, myth-infused blessing, Fonte fully established her abilities as author and viable contributor to the Venetian civic project. Like the production of Issicratea Monte’s ducal orations in 1577 and 1578, the publication of Le feste demonstrated that a female Venetian subject could function respectably as a public author and work in a masculine genre in a manner that exalted the Republic. That this was possible marked an important evolution in the Italian literary tradition. Unlike Renaissance Italy’s earlier elite women authors like Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, Fonte would make her literary career by working within traditionally male genres. She wrote six single-author printed texts that we know of; of these, only two belong to the typically female realm of love lyric and spiritual poetry. Le feste and the rest of her oeuvre fall outside that sphere. Those texts are the chivalric romance Tredici canti del Floridoro, a 1585 a ducal oration, and the querelle dialogue Il merito delle donne (1600).37 In addition to their deviation from contemporary gendered genre norms, these texts share an interest in civic themes and, the oration aside, rely on character-driven mediums to propel their action. The last trait is
36 “Non è quest ail mio tempio, e’l sacro albergo, Over talhor per mio diporto io vegno? … Non è questo il mio Prencipe, à cui vergo Perpetue carte instil sublime, e degno? … Così al ciel piaccia, che lastate, e’l verno Con gaudio à voi tornar possa in eterno. Dunque in pace restate; e con voi tutta Questa città meravigliosa, e bella Per nido d’ogni ben qua giù produtta; Di virtute, e di Dio divota ancella. E’l colmo da gloria in voi ridutta Sempre guardi, e conservi amica stella.” Fonte, Le feste, 8a. 37 Fonte’s Canzon nella morte del Ser.(mo) Princ. di Venetia Nicolò da Ponte further indicates the link between her career and da Ponte’s ducal tenure. Five of her six known works were published during his dogeship. The Canzon is one of nine ducal orations published in 1585 and one of three written in connection to da Ponte’s death that year. It describes Fonte and “weeping Venice’s” grief at his passing. The text’s existence also alludes to the importance of Fonte’s greater network—it was published by Sigismondo Bordogna in collaboration with the Rampazetto press. Francesco Rampazetto was Floridoro’s publisher. Bordogna was one of Fonte’s literary friend Luigi Groto’s publishers. And in terms of genre models, Fonte had one at home in the form of her guardian Nicolò Doglioni who had previously composed a ducal oration for Sebastiano Venier in 1577. 125
particularly important for it enabled Fonte to envision female interlocutors and address issues of gender. As we have already seen, Le feste’s rhetorical tribunal on the good life is propelled by fictional actors, the most important of whom is a woman. Unlike the individualistic and autonomous female characters of Fonte’s later monographs, the Eritrean Sibyl did not defy orthodox binary gender norms in her sheer presence, personality, or lines. Following the publication of Pietro Bembo’s Gli asolani in 1505 and Baldessar Castiglione’s Il cortegiano in
1528, it had become normal to include female speakers in dialogic texts and even to position them as the directors or arbiters of discursive exchange.38 Upright womanly rhetors in the sibylline, spiritual, or personified mode (i.e. Chastity, Faith, Temperance etc.) were de rigueur in
Venetian rappresentazioni. However, if Fonte’s use and portrayal of female speakers in Le feste was not unusual in and of itself in 1581, it nonetheless brought a new and potentially subversive tint to the trope given her gender. As the literary offspring of a female Venetian pen, the Eritrean
Sibyl’s seemingly innocuous presence highlighted Fonte’s own highly unusual role as a non- silent Serenissima woman on the printed page and so in the world.
The Woman Rhetor and Venetian Myth in Tredici canti del Floridoro
If the Eritrean Sibyl or Le feste’s other female characters were a subtle nod to Fonte’s role as a contemporary Venetian woman writer, Tredici canti del Floridoro dispensed with all possible cloudiness about the identity and civic function of its author in favor of direct address.
To wit: in canto thirteen of Floridoro, Fonte interrupts the text’s action to assert her presence as narrator. Behold, she writes, how “I with beautiful threads adorn and weave my cloth … I gather in it every clear and vivid ornament of my homeland and all her lofty and beautiful glories. …
38 Virginia Cox, “The Female Voice in Italian Renaissance Dialogue,” Modern Language Notes 128, no. 2 (January 2013): 56–57, 71–74. 126
With her noble exploits … I make this work of mine lovely and magnificent.”39 Several decades later, Lucrezia Marinella similarly highlighted her personal desire to honor the Venetian state by moonlighting as a mermaid in L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato. In the twenty-second canto of that text, the enchantress Erina takes a doomed Venetian crusader on a magical tour of the globe in a chariot pulled by winged lions. As the epic duo approach the salty Mediterranean lagoon where Venice abides, Erina draws the crusader and reader’s attention to the seascape below and directs them to “[l]ook at a beautiful mermaid come out of the waves; she’s pretty and still young, and she emits beautiful and joyful notes from her learned cithara that guild the seaweed and shores all around … nymphs and Adria’s swans run to listen to her music and song."40 Although Erina omits the mermaid’s name, the lyrical siren is a clear reference to
Marinella herself, a humanistically trained or “learned” woman, a well-known poet, and
Venetian citizen. These passages highlight Fonte and Marinella’s performative claiming of the authorial role via the careful intermeshing of conventional feminine roles and deviant virile speech. As weaver and siren, they brought epic authorship and civic speech under the umbrella of legitimate female endeavor. At the same time, they established themselves as successful public “singers” of history, warfare, and romantic love in line with greater literary tradition of
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso.
As the pantheon of names listed above suggests, epic authorship was a crucial component to literary fame in the Renaissance. Those authors who successfully mastered the genre, disseminating their work to a reading public and enforcing their claim to rhetorical authority,
39 “E io di sì bel fili adorno e tesso La tela mia … Mentre raccolgo in lei chiaro e espresso Della mia bella patria ogni ornamento, E tutte le sue glorie altere e belle. … Dell’alte imprese sue, del suo splendore Rendo quest’opra mia vaga e pomposa.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 13.2–13.3. 40 “Mira vaga sirena uscir dell’onde, Bella, leggiadra, e pargoletta ancora, Temprar con dotta cetra alte e gioconde Note, onde l’alghe intorno e i liti indora … Ecco come ad udir corrono intanto Le ninfe e i cigni d’Adria il suono e ’l canto.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 22.28. 127
could stake a coveted spot within a prestigious intellectual lineage that stretched back to antiquity.41 Given the genre’s customary focus on illustrious genealogies, fantastical plots, and ekphrastic histories, it also served as an obvious canvas for encomiastic lyric and the production of civic myth. Given Fonte’s efforts to establish her literary career in image-proud Venice, the attractions of epic seem obvious. However, if the civic oration and public performance play were widely seen as male fields, epic in both the Virgilian and chivalric modes was understood as practically synonymous with masculinity by the letterati of Europe and Italy. Both the sheer scale of epic works and the perceived authorial ambition required to produce one were considered distinctly masculine. 42 More importantly, epic’s topical concerns violated early modern cultural norms that associated the other sex with the domestic sphere and sexual innocence, never mind feminine meekness and silence. As Virginia Cox eloquently puts it, “the two principle themes of chivalric literature, love and war, were both, for different reasons problematic for women. War seemed intrinsically incongruous as subject matter for the feminine pen … Love, in the frequently sensual and lascivious form it took within the Ariostan tradition was equally suspect.”43 Although educated women counted amongst epic’s audience, printed epic works by Italian women were almost a non-entity in the Renaissance. Only five such works survive today, and prior to Tredici canti del Floridoro’s publication in 1581, no original female epic had been printed on the peninsula. Neapolitan noblewoman Laura Terracina and transient courtesan Tullia d’Aragona had produced direct imitations of male works, but Fonte was the first to devise her own characters and storyline.44 Later, her monograph crucially provided both
41 Laura Lazzari, Poesia epica e scrittura femminile nel Seicento: “L’Enrico” di Lucrezia Marinella (Leonforte: INSULA, 2010), 21. 42 Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 166. 43 Ibid. 44 Terracina published her Discorso sopra il principio di tutti i canti dell’Orlando Furiosi in Venice in 1551, and d’Aragona published Meschino detto il Guerrino (a poetic transcription of the fourteenth-century chivalric prose text 128
precedent and model for Marinella’s L’Enrico and Roman author Margherita Sarrocchi’s La
Scanderbeide (1606, 1623). Exactly how Fonte got Floridoro to press in 1581 is unknown, but the sponsorship of powerful Venetian intellectuals like her guardian Niccolò Doglioni, a friend of Domenico Venier (the unofficial head of Venetian literary life) and a member of both iterations of the highly networked Accademia Veneziana, was no doubt influential.
While no epistle, print shop record, or other smoking gun has been discovered to tell us precisely how Fonte managed to placed Floridoro with the Rampazetto print shop, the skill with which she manipulated the epic genre and civic discourse in a cultural moment characterized by increased Venetian for state affirming rhetoric made the work imminently marketable. So too did its literary ancestry. Fonte modelled the work on Lodovico Ariosto’s (1474–1533) canonical romantic epic Orlando furioso (1532 standard version), one of the most beloved texts of the sixteenth century. In Venice alone, the Furioso was published at least once a year from 1540 on, and across Italy a staggering one hundred and thirteen editions of the Furioso were printed between 1540 and 1580.45 According to the Imolese bureaucrat Francesco Caburacci, Ariosto’s epic was “handled by the old, read by the young, held dear by men, prized by women, cared for by the learned, sung by the unlearned, [and] found with everyone in the city and everyone in the village.”46 Luxurious leather-bound quarto editions of the Furioso could be found on the bookshelves of the wealthy, while high profile courtesans displayed the book in their homes as a marker of taste and erudition.47 Like Ariosto’s bestseller, Floridoro was written in the vernacular
Il Meschino di Durazzo by Andrea da Barberino) in 1560, also in Venice. Julia Hairston, “Aragona, Tullia d,” The Italian Women Writers Project. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/BIOS/A0004.html, accessed 5/10/2018. 45 Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of “Orlando Furioso” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 10. 46 “L’opera sua essere manegiatta dai vecchi, letta dai gioveni, havuta cara da gli huomini, pregiata dalle donne, tenuta cara da i dotti, cantata da gl’indotti, star con tutti nella Città, andar con tutti in villa.” Quoted in Javitch, 14. 47 Ibid., 13. It was also typical for courtesans to own copies of Petrarch and Boccaccio’s work for this reason. Valeria Finucci, “Moderata Fonte and the Genre of Women’s Chivalric Romances,” Introduction to Floridoro: A 129
to appeal to a broad audience and featured entrelacement or multiple interwoven plot lines, a cast of leading characters rather than a singular Aristotelian hero, a strong interest in genealogy, and an intrusive narrator.48 Fonte also drew inspiration for her characters from the Furioso’s colorful cast of knights, warrioresses, and conjurers, although she chose to construct original actors rather than reuse the well-known figures of the Orlando cycle.49 For instance, Floridoro’s resident enchantress Circetta is an amalgam of Ariosto’s Alcina and Logistilla assembled with a feminist brush, as we shall see later. Finally, Fonte and Ariosto shared a preoccupation with the perennial clash between Italian states and the Ottoman Empire, which confrontation came to a head in the far away Gulf of Patras in each of their lifetimes.
Lodovico Ariosto was born in 1474, twenty-five years before the onset of the Italian
Wars. They raged for the entirety of the Ferrarese poet’s adulthood and were the backdrop against which he wrote Orlando Furioso. The Italian Wars burnt out six years after Ariosto’s death, and it is no surprise that they appear in the prophetic stanzas of the text, which report for example that “when the Gallic torch sets all of beautiful Italy ablaze, [Ferrara] alone will be in peace, and exempt from fear and tribute.”50 As a resident of the d’Este court, a member of the anti-Venetian League of Cambrai, the poet-client’s need to praise the martial vigor of his patria mingled with an Italian’s greater regret for the ubiquitous discord suffered by the peninsula as a
Chivalric Romance by Moderata Fonte, ed. Valeria Finucci, trans. Julia Kisacky (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 17–18. 48 In the second half of the sixteenth century, Aristotle’s Ars poetics was retranslated and his literary philosophy rapidly became the dernier cri; narrative unity and the primacy of a lead character were norms promoted by the ancient auctor. Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 16–17. 49While readers today primarily associate characters like the female knight Bradamante, the wandering Orlando, the errant Ruggiero, and the fiery Rinaldo with Ariosto and Orlando furioso, they in fact derive from a much older, low- brow culture of oral and vernacular tales that Ariosto welded with the conventions of classical epic to create the Furioso. Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Italian Renaissance Epic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 95–97, 100–108. 50 “[Q]uando la Gallica face per tutto havrà la bella Italia accesa, si starà sola col bel stato in pace, e dal timore e dai tributi illesa.” Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Marco Dorigatti (Ferrara: Leo S. Olschki, 2006), 3.49. 130
whole as a result of the Italian Wars. Ariosto especially regretted that the states of Europe and
Italy were marching on each other’s borders when a more important, common enemy lay in the
East.51 According to Giuseppe Mazzotta, east-west conflict was an epic trope utilized in both chivalric and heroic texts to sculpt a “tragic paradigm of history as a feared and apparently recurring confrontation with Moorish culture, beliefs, values, and dreams of mastery.”52
Ariosto’s readers encounter this paradigm in the Furioso’s frame—the fictional African king
Agramante has besieged Paris and is at war with Charlemagne, whose knights frustratingly keep deserting their posts in a mad pursuit of love. The trope also informs authorial asides in which
Ariosto bemoans the ways in which contemporary Islam in the shape of the Ottoman Empire posed a threat to the Mediterranean world (see note 51). During Ariosto’s lifetime, this threat was embodied by Sultan Bayezid II’s naval victory over Venice at the first battle of Lepanto in
1499, a defeat that would imbue the Holy League victory there seventy-two years later with even greater meaning.53
Fonte was born twenty-two years after Ariosto’s death; her generation saw the revamping of Mediterranean strife and renewed shrinkage of La Serenissima’s international footprint in the wake of the War of Cyprus. As Chapter Two showed, the cost of this territorial conflict drove
Venice to invest in civic speech in the second half of the century, enabling women writers to move into the public realm of political print. While Fonte and Ariosto connected to the cinquecento history of war at different places, their literary careers were mutually entangled in
51 In canto seventeen for example, Ariosto accuses the leaders of Europe of being “no longer now defenders of the faith, with one another Christian knights contend…You Spaniards; Frenchmen, choose another path; Switzers and Germans no more armies send. … If ‘the most Christian’ rulers you would be, and ‘Catholic’ desire to be reputed, why do you slay Christ’s men … Why do let the unclean Turk command Constantinople and the Holy Land?” Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando): A Romantic Epic by Lodovico Ariosto, ed. and trans. Barbara Reynolds (Penguin Books, 1975), 17.74–75. 52 “Mazzotta, “Italian Renaissance Epic,” 95. 53 Barbara Reynolds, Introduction to Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando): A Romantic Epic by Lodovico Ariosto, ed. and trans. Barbara Reynolds (Penguin Books, 1975), 13. 131
its path. Fonte’s first printed work picks up the east-west epic trope in the pages of an extended prophetic sequence about the 1571 battle at Lepanto that represents the first known naval history by a woman author.54 According to Fonte herself as well as Doglioni’s vita, the book is technically unfinished, a fact that has led scholars to debate the reason Fonte chose to release the text in ’81.55 I suspect that Floridoro’s publication around the ten-year anniversary of Lepanto was no coincidence.
Fonte’s epic is also tied to the 1579 wedding of the Venetian patrician Bianca Capello to
Francesco de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, to whom the book is jointly dedicated. This union was an event of great magnitude in Venice, marked by civic events like a regatta and a ducal ceremony in which Nicolò da Ponte knighted the bride’s father. The doge also declared Bianca an official daughter of Venice, a rare honor.56 In this period, it was common for authors to make use of such events as an opportunity to seek patronage and augment the market for their writing; for example, the prolific historian Francesco Sansovino dedicated his own 1581 production (a history of Venice) to the recently titled Gran Duchesa.57 At the same time, linking their work to a wedding, an event that belonged to both the public and domestic sphere, allowed authors to rhetorically position their work as a magnanimous (and therefore private, at least on the surface) literary gift rather than a merely salable item on the book market. For a secular Venetian woman author like Fonte, this was an especially wise move given that she was otherwise subverting
54 Finnuci and Kisacky, Notes to Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, 372 n.8. 55 In a newly recovered letter appended to the 2006 edition of Floridoro, Fonte wrote that she permitted thirteen cantos of a longer text to be printed at the urging of friends. Doglioni’s vita reports that she wrote Floridoro while living under his roof and that it comprised sections both printed and unpublished. The question of why Fonte cut the book’s action off at canto thirteen remains a mystery today, although the fate of its female protagonist may hold a clue. Moderata Fonte, Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, ed. Valeria Finucci, trans. Julia Kisacky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 46, 48. Doglioni, “Vita della Sig. Modesta,” 4. 56 Else van Kessel, “Staging Bianca Capello: Painting and Theatricality in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Art History 33, no. 2 (2010): 281. 57 Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobillisima et singolare, 2a frontmatter. 132
cultural norms by engaging the printing press and appropriating the epic mode. Fonte was well aware of this and of the fact that orthodox definitions of proper femininity remained strong in her lifetime. In addition to framing Floridoro as a wedding gift, she published it (and the rest of her works) under a pseudonym. That Fonte employed a nom de plume was an open secret in contemporary Venice. The moniker “Moderata Fonte” was a witty play on the veneziana’s birth name that framed its owner as a reasoned fountain of inky lyric.58 Rather than immutably conceal
Fonte’s identity, the name gave a nod to contemporary ideals of feminine modesty. As the cittadina herself noted in a letter to Francesco de Medici, she wrote under a pseudonym “since my own true name I have not judged it well to expose to public censure, being a young marriageable woman, and according to the custom of the city.”59 Fonte also employed this conceit in Canto Ten of Floridoro, which describes the decorations of an Apollonian altar formed by sculptures of “future” Venetian poets like Bartolomeo Malombra, Domenico Venier,
Celio Magno and a “solitary young woman” dressed in virginal white. The marble figure who fears to be named according to Floridoro’s is simultaneously demure and unassuming and a flagrant reference to the scene’s author.60
The action of Tredici canti del Floridoro comprises a dynastic prehistory of the Tuscan and Adriatic republics set in the classical past. Per the opening Virgilian invocation to the Muse, the poem will “sing the glorious deeds and sweet affections of illustrious knights and ladies,” including the fantastical adventures of Bianca and Francesco’s antique forbears, the Mycenean
58 Fonte’s birth name Modesta Pozzo roughly translates to “modest spring;” her pseudonym aggrandizes the metaphor. 59 She states that she published Floridoro under the imagined name Fonte “poi che ‘l mi overo, et proprio non hò giudicato esser bene di esponer alla publica censura, essendo giovane da marito, et secondo l’uso della città.” Fonte, Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, 48. 60 From “una giovane stavasi romita.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 10.37–38. 133
knight Floridoro and a female warrioress called Risamante respectively.61 Floridoro spends his folios pursuing courtly love at a Greek tourney where he hopes to win the esteem of Celsidea, a beautiful princess from Athens.62 In a reversal of genre and gender norms, Floridoro is characterized first and foremost by his youth, looks, and gentle personality rather than by virility and mighty deeds. In a word, he is effeminate. As Fonte writes, “the aspect of his fine face was so agreeable, so comely the splendor of his beautiful golden hair, and so divine his appearance that every heart, even a bitter one, was inclined to love him. … Love laughed in his tranquil brow … Every part of him except his speech seemed that of an illustrious and pretty girl.”63
Fonte’s appropriation of the epic mode embraces feminine qualities as good; thus Floridoro’s womanly traits augment rather than detract from him status as a hero. He is skilled in the arts of war, but is also honorable, kind, gentle, and honest in his largely Platonic rather than prurient pursuit of Celsidea. If any character of the book is traditionally masculine, it is Risamante, who spends her stanzas fighting to dethrone her twin sister Biondara and claim sole rule of the fantastical kingdom of Armenia. Like Ariosto’s Bradamante, Risamante is a Petrarchan beauty in appearance who spends most of her time cloaked in armor in which she is indistinguishable in looks, might, and valor from a man.64 Unlike Bradamante, Risamante’s actions are driven by
61 “Canta l’inclite imprese e i dolci affetti De’ cavllieri e delle donne illustri.” Ibid., 1.2. Renaissance epic often opened with an imitation of Virgil’s famous lines “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qu primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit litora … Musa, mihi causas memora.” “I sing of arms and a man, who first from the region of Troy, by fate a refugee, came to the shores of Laviniam and Italy … Muse, recount why to me …. Virgil, Aeneid Books 1–6, ed. Randall T. Ganiban (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2012), 29. 62 Note that Celsidea commits to bestow a crown on the tourney’s winner, not her hand. In this Floridoro’s plot deviates from chivalric norms that routinely positioned women themselves as a prize for men to compete over. Constance Jordan, “Writing Beyond the Querelle: Gender and History in Orlando furioso,” in Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 308–310. 63 “L’aer del suo bel viso era sì grato, Sì vago lo splendor de’ bei crin d’oro, E la sembianza havea tanto divina Ch’ad amarlo ogni cor ben ch’aspro inchina … Amor ridea nel suo tranquillo ciglio, … Ogni sua parte fuor che la favella Par d’una giovanenetta illustre, e bella.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 5.45–46. 64 When we first meet Risamante, she is described as “a knight on an adventure … His insignia was green and on his green shield was a white lily, his clothes were green and white.” After dueling and defeating a giant named Macandro who was harassing the Athenian court, she removes her helmet and “reveals blond locks clearer and more luminous than gold, and two starts appeared (her eyes) … Her fresh and rosy cheeks moved the lilies and scarlet 134
duty, power, and politics rather than love.65 Contrary to the title of the book, she is the lead character.66 Given Fonte’s Venetian citizenship and the fact that Floridoro’s prophetic portions focus on the Republic, readers new to the book might understandably expect the gender-bending guerierra to be the founder of Venice, but she is not. I believe that Risamante’s Tuscan heritage was a gesture to Bianca’s new Florentine loyalties; it may also stem from the Medici dynasty’s long history of producing and supporting powerful public women, a tradition Venice did not share in.67 Finally, the monograph features a host of colorful if fragmentary side characters and subplots, including an African dwarf who travels to Thrace in search of a protector for his beloved Raggidora, the fickle knight Risardo who travels to Delphi with the cross-dressing knight Odoria, and the Latin prince Silano who is shipwrecked on a the island of Ithaca while journeying to the Athenian tourney where Celsidea presides. This subplot is the most important of the book, for it introduces us to the enchantress Circetta, a captive on the Homeric isle. Her character will reveal the future of Italy and Venice to Silano, and she is Fonte’s primary mouthpiece of mythic civic rhetoric.
roses to jealousy.” “Un cavalier ch’à la ventura andava … Era sua insegna in verde scudo un bianco Giglio, era verde e candido il vestito.” And from “Si tolse l’elmo e discoprì le bionde Chiome de l’or più terse e luminose; E due stelle apparir … Movean le guancie fresche e rubiconde Invidia à i gigli, e à le purpuree rose.” Ibid., 2.4–5, 2.26. 65 Bradamante, one of Charlemagne’s knights, abandons the Christian defense of Paris in order to find her one true love and destined husband Ruggiero in the Orlando Furioso. 66 Although Floridoro is technically unfinished, its emphasis on a female figure is in character with Fonte’s querelle stance and the format of her other major work Il merito delle donne. In other words, Risamante’s primacy is not accidental. 67 In the Renaissance, Medici women like Contessina de Bardi and Lucrezia Tournabuoni were able to act as patrons and achieve significant political sway via sottogoverno. Alfonsina Orsini effectively ruled Florence in the late 1510s, as did Eleonora di Toledo in the 1540s and 50s. Outside of Italy, the famous Catherine de Medici was regent of France four times. Natalie Thomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 3–5, 46–55, 164. N. Thomas, “Eleonora di Toledo, Regency, and State Formation in Tuscany,” in Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Grand Ducal Tuscany, eds. Giovanna Benadusi and Judith C. Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 60. Leah L. Chang and Katherine Kong, “Catherine de Médicis and the Other Voice,” Introduction to Catherine de Medicis and Others, Portraits of the Queen Mother: Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 4. 135
Broadly speaking, the stories of Tredici canti del Floridoro follow the standard recipe of
Renaissance romance: sword fights abound and there is much jumping on and falling off of horses, a dose of mistaken identities, cross-dressing, and ruminating about the ideals of courtly love. Where the text is atypical is the vast swathe of page space in which its characters’ multifarious adventures are put on hold so Fonte/Circetta may relay an encomiastic history of
Venice. This diegesis occupies much of the third, tenth, twelfth and thirteenth cantos. Its action encompasses everything from the Republic’s legendary fifth-century founding amidst the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the frenzied clash of arms on the deck of Sebastiano Venier’s galley during the Battle of Lepanto. Tredici canti del Floridoro first began to attract scholarly attention in the late 1990s and academic interest in Fonte’s epic has only recently begun to really take off. Relatively few studies of the text exist today, and even less give attention to the work’s panegyric passages. According to the medievalist Eleonora Stoppino, the histories cum genealogies of Renaissance epic have generally been overlooked by modern scholars based on the commonly held opinion that these contemporary narratives are largely devoid of meaning and importance, a requisite Renaissance political garnish that detracted and detracts from the
“real” art of storytelling. In reality however, such dynastic diegesis was central to the vernacular chivalric tradition adopted by Ariosto and emulated by his subsequent literary followers, Fonte included.68 More to the point, it was exactly in line with the Venetian state’s obsession with identity fashioning.
In addition to the introductory essays by Valeria Finucci that preface the modern Italian and English editions of Floridoro, other important studies of the work include essays and articles by scholars like Stephen Kolsky, Virginia Cox, and Paola Malpezzi Price. Understandably given
68 Eleonora Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the “Orlando Furioso” (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 2. 136
the feminist trajectory of Fonte’s career, most of these works analyze the function(s) of gender
Floridoro and the ways in which epic served as a forum in which to dissect women’s issues.
Unfortunately, matters of civics are largely ignored. To wit: Circetta receives historiographic attention as a female sorceress freed from the character type’s wicked and libidinous roots, but not so her prophecies. For example, in her introduction to the English translation of Floridoro,
Finucci analyzes Circetta’s virginity as a cipher for the book’s sexual agenda which strives to reveal men rather than women as the architects of epic “program[s] of seduction.”69 Finucci then asks “if lust is described as unappealing to [Floridoro’s women], and if the use of guile is not in their agenda, what else is there for women writers to flesh out for their female characters?”70 Her
1994 article “La scrittura epico-cavalleresca al femminile” posits that in Circetta’s case at least, the answer is nothing, one reason perhaps that Fonte did not publish (or as Finucci suggests, could not imagine) an end for the book.71 I would propose the recitation of civic myth in answer to Finucci’s question where Circetta is concerned; however neither essay devotes sustained analysis to Floridoro’s dynastic/historical diegeses except as proof of the character’s innocence and her creator’s wish to honor Francesco de Medici and Bianca Capello by providing them mythical forebears.
Early modernist Stephen Kolsky broaches the topic of Circetta’s forecasts in the 1999 article “Moderata Fonte’s Tredici Canti del Floridoro: Women in a Man’s Genre,” but again from the perspective of gender only. Kolsky argues that Circetta’s ekphrastic discussion of
Venetian history with the shipwrecked Silano should be understood in the first instance as a meta commentary on interpretation (i.e. who has the right to interpret) and the ways in which male-
69 Finucci, “Fonte and Women’s Chivalric Romances,” 24; 23-26. 70 Ibid., 25. 71 Valeria Finucci, “La scrittura epico-cavalleresca al femminile: Moderata Fonte e ‘Tredici canti del Floridoro,’” Annali d'Italianistica 12, (1994): 227-228. 137
female relationships create spaces for misunderstanding.72 Kolsky positions Circetta as a female truthteller juxtaposed by Silano’s masculine deceitfulness, an inversion of Renaissance gender stereotypes that privileged male honor and honesty.73 This is a valuable reading, but one that ultimately renders itself hollow by divorcing the content of the prophecies from their significance. What Fonte directs Circetta to speak about matters as much as the moral character of that speech. More recently, the historian Sandra Plastina began the important work of connecting civics to women’s writing by tracing military themes in early modern female lyric.
She argues that women authors like Chiara Maitraini and Laura Terracina adopted martial themes in their epic and poetic works in reaction to cinquecento military failures across Italy. 74
Regrettably, Plastina gives little attention to Fonte and Circetta in this context, locating the
Venetian author once again as an author of gender rather than civics. Finally, Virginia Cox’s important study of chivalric literature within the Prodigious Muse positions Margherita
Sarrocchi’s Scanderbeide and Marinella’s L’Enrico as “part of the barrage of ideologically charged literature in this period that sought to recast Christian Europe’s essentially losing battle against Ottoman encroachment in a more optimistic and self-flattering light,” but excludes
Floridoro from that tradition because it has an exotic rather than historical setting.75
One of the only studies to investigate Floridoro from a civic angle is Italian literary expert Paola Malpezzi Price’s 2010 article “Venetia Figurata and Women in Sixteenth-Century
72 Stephen Kolsky, “Moderata Fonte’s Tredici Canti del Floridoro: Women in a Man’s Genre,” Rivista di Studi Italiani 17, no. 1 (June 1999): 172–174. 73 Silano is shipwrecked on Circetta’s island on the way to fight in the Athenian tourney in celebration of Celsidea. Celsidea occupies his heart, but when Circetta reveals the existence of a quest whose victor may claim mastery of her island, Silano wages a flirtatious campaign to manipulate Circetta’s shy attraction to him in hopes of claiming the prize with her aid. Thus the knight, rather than the usually suspect magical sorceress, is the liar and seducer. Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 8.28–34. 74 Sandra Plastina, “Mythological Epic and Chivalric Fiction in Moderata Fonte’s and Lucrezia Marinella’s Poems,” Análisi. Revista de investigación filosófica 4, no. 2 (2017): 281–282, 288–289. 75 Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 169170. 138
Venice: Moderata Fonte’s Writings.” This brief study emphasizes the fundamental importance of civic myth and ritual to Venetian politics and culture, and it correctly points out that the cinquecento Republic used civics to yoke contemporary state excellence to Venice’s grand past.76 One such mechanism was the personification of the city as a neoclassical triumphant female, an identification that dated back to at least the fourteenth century and one that clashed with the Republic’s strict policing of actual women’s speech, bodies, and minds.77 Price hypothesizes that civic depictions of Venice in such guises as Justice, Venus, and Marian heavenly queen provided an alternative vision of womanhood that inspired Fonte’s creation of strong female characters in Floridoro and the querelle text Il merito delle donne.78 The theory is an interesting one, though the sixteen page article is too short to investigate it with any substance or to address potential impediments to its validity like elite women’s problematic lack of regular access to the public spaces that featured such imagery. Nonetheless, Price’s article provides a positive first step towards bringing Fonte within the fold of Venice’s known civic authors. The current lack of academic analysis on Fonte as such and on the prophetic sections of Floridoro prevents us from fully understanding that work and her career as a Renaissance Venetian author.
Civic eulogy holds a prominent place in her epic; literarily pleasing or not, it is fundamental to the work’s purpose. Much of that myth-infused discourse deals directly with the East-West paradigm found absent by Cox. Sixteen octaves of canto twelve describe Venice’s long history of Mediterranean conflict with the Turks. Twenty-four stanzas of canto thirteen are dedicated to the Battle of Lepanto and Venetian valor’s triumph over the Ottoman other.79 This civic
76 Paoloa Malpezzi Price, “Venetia Figurata and Women in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Moderata Fonte’s Writings,” in Italian Women in the City, eds. Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2010), 18–19. 77 Ibid., 18, 22. 78 Ibid., 26, 30. 79 I think it is also of interest that Risamante’s future daughter will be fathered by the King of Cyprus. Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 3.44. Either by design or because the text is incomplete, readers never meet this figure; however, 139
accounting must be weighed in the balance when scholars interrogate Floridoro and investigate how Moderata Fonte got away with publishing an epic text in 1580s Venice. Moreover, Fonte’s civic and gendered agendas are interwoven, as are those of Marinella; both must be analyzed to fully elucidate their works pro-woman arguments.
Early modern Venice took speech seriously. In 1553, for example the Esecutori Contra la
Bestemmia criminalized blasphemy committed in boats and galleys, those precious instruments of trade and war.80 This law reflected state feeling that public speech (and its reception by
Providence) had a direct effect on the identity and wellbeing of the Republic. Corrupt or blasphemous speech incurred dire misfortunes like disease and military losses, while godly civic speech delineated who belonged and fomented patriotism.81 The prophetic sections of Floridoro contain exactly this type of speech. They position Fonte as a contributing citizen (regardless of her sex) and reinscribe Venice’s imagined position in the world as a paradigm of republican excellence and bulwark of strength, liberty, peace, and piety. Fonte’s reader first encounters the thread of civic discourse that winds throughout Floridoro in canto three, when Risamante meets a fay creature who declaims that she and Floridoro will separately generate progeny destined in turn to found noble Italian dynasties. The scene is set in an underground tomb where a secret door leads into a chamber that holds a mirror “in which everyone can see their lineage before it comes.”82 Risamante’s offspring, the ancestors of Francesco de Medici march through its panes
his position relative to Fonte’s heroine reflects the island’s longstanding centrality to Venetian imagination, where it was understood as the fabled birthplace of Venus (a figure related to Venetia personified) and the territorial key to Mediterranean influence. Rosand, Myths of Venice, 117, 120–130. Palmira Brummett, Mapping the Ottomans: Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 112–114. See also the recent dissertation Tamás Kiss, “Cyprus in Ottoman and Venetian Political Imagination, c.1489-1582” PhD diss., Central European University, 2016. 80 Elizabeth Horodowich, Langauge and Statecraft, 71. 81 Ibid., 2–5, 11–12, 76. 82 From “…uno specchio onde ciascun vedere Puote la stirpe sua prima che vegna.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 3.40. This scene is clearly modeled on Orlando furioso’s third canto, in which Risamante’s epic counterpart Bradamante descends into Merlin’s magic cave with the help of the good sorceress Melissa. Here she 140
first. As those images fade, the Fay instructs Risamante to behold how “in the glorious and fortunate bossum of the Adriatic a city will be founded, heaven will not see another of its grandeur or beauty upon the earth; with a chain of love … its people will live united in liberty; the name Venice will be bright and delightful and will endure until the end of the world.”83
While Venice technically springs from Floridoro’s line, the prophecy further reveals that the two dynasties will eventually intertwine, giving Risamante ties to both. According to the Fay, the guerierra’s future daughter Salarisa will marry one of Floridoro’s sons, a union that will bind the
Tuscan and Venetian genealogies together in a reflection of the cinquecento states’ link via the
Capello wedding and their shared identification as republics.84 This genealogical mixing has gone unremarked upon in Floridoro studies, but it offers another solution to Fonte’s seemingly paradoxical choice to celebrate Venice’s “future” in a book which otherwise seems to privilege
Florence’s past in the figure of Risamante. The nuptial linking also honored the book’s co- dedicatee Bianca, whom the Fay describes as peerless in her virtue and “dear to Venice and to
Florence” alike.85
Fonte limits the magic mirror’s use as a window to the future to canto three. Elsewhere prophecies of events to come are achieved via ekphrasis. In this Floridoro echoes the Orlando
Furioso, whose pages contain multiple prophetic episodes achieved by artistic description. The most important of these are received by Bradamante on three separate occasions that collectively
sees visions of the future. Additionally, Fonte’s fay (a woman) gives Risamante a magical ring that dispels enchantments in the mode of the ring of Ariosto’s Brunello. Ibid., 3.38–39. For the Bradamante scene, see Ariosto, Orlando furioso, 3.6–60. 83 “Nel glorioso e fortunato seno De l’Adria ha da fondarsi una Cittade, Ch’altra il ciel non vedrà sopra il terreno, Di più gradezza ò di maggior beltade; Con catena d’amor … Viverà sua gente unita in libertade; VENEZIA il nome sia chiaro e giocondo Che durerà fin à la fin del Mondo.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 3.63. 84 Ibid., 3.44–45. 85 “Tanto cari a Venezia e a Fiorenza.” This passage marks both Bianca and Francesco de Medici as beloved by Italy’s republics; however, the surrounding text focuses solely on the merits of Bianca, giving the statement greater pertinence where she is concerned as the figurative bridge uniting Venice and Florence. Ibid., 3.65–3.66. 141
form a prophetic trio.86 This tripartite structure is replicated in Floridoro. Although Risamante witnesses only one of the book’s vatic discourses, the text contains three predictive installments bound instead by their shared Venetian subject matter. The first occurs in the Fay’s cave, the others via the interpretation of decorative art at a Delphic temple and at the sorceress Circetta’s underground palace.
Floridoro’s Delphic episode occurs within a canto ten subplot in which the minor characters Risardo and Odoria visit the oracle of Apollo. Upon arriving at the god of music’s temple, they spy an altar that bears the aforementioned unnamed image of Fonte within an iconographic program of future “glorious and noble poets.”87 The persons shown are Fonte’s literary contemporaries and probable intellectual contacts. The sculpted likenesses include patricians Maffeo and Domenico Venier, the renowned Lepanto poet and Salvi patron Celio
Magno, Orsatto Giustiniano, the Ariostan commentator Alberto Lavezuola, humanist Gianmario
Verdizzotti, and the authors Bartolomeo Malombra and Cesare Simonetti, both of whom contributed prefatory poems in Fonte’s honor to Floridoro.88 All of these men belonged to the robust network of salons and academies that organized intellectual life in Venice and the Veneto; many of them were known sponsors of learned women. Verdizzotti for example contributed to
Irene di Spilimbergo’s funerary collection. The Venier supported the work of women writers
Veronica Franco and Veronica Gambara; Giustiniano exchanged letters with and dedicated poems to Marinella, Vicenzan author Maddalena Campiglia (a friend of Issicratea Monte) and the Venetian poet Olympia Morata.89 Fonte allots each figure one octave of celebratory text that
86 The Furioso’s ekphrastic prophecies are the Rocca di Tristano murals and Bradamante’s reception of Cassandra’s tent upon her marriage to Ruggiero. See Ariosto, Orlando furioso, 3.6–60, 33.6–59, 46.84–98. 87 “superba scola De’ gloriosi e nobili poeti” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 10.21. 88 Ibid., 10.23–25, 10.27, 10.31–32, 10.35. 89 Gianmario Verdizzotti, “Spargea Gioue dal ciel di bianche brine,” in Rime di diversi nobilissimi et eccellentissimi autori in morte della signora Irene delle signore di Spilimbergo, ed. Dionigi Atanagi (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1561), 80–84. Martha Feldman, “The Academy of Domenico Venier, Music's Literary 142
hints at their scholastic accomplishments. Domenico Venier for instance is described as wearing an imperial purple toga and gold crown; he sits atop a throne inscribed with the words “light of the world” beckoning viewers toward him in clear reference to his role as the effective head of cinquecento Venice’s literary scene via the Venier salon.90 This episode is Floridoro’s shortest prophetic interlude, but it’s exaltation of prominent Venetian letterati was perfectly pitched to play to state vanity and the Republic’s much vaunted reputation for literary excellence. As such, it also conditioned the reader to accept its female creator as a viable discursive authority.
That readers accept Fonte’s intellectual auctoritas was vital to Floridoro’s didactic and civic goals. The book’s final prophetic sequence takes the form of a comprehensive Venetian history lesson relayed by the enchantress Circetta, a fitting mouthpiece for the first such account written by a woman. Circetta’s augury occupies cantos twelve and thirteen and encompasses such events as the fall of Rome, the Hunnic invasion of Italy, war with Frederick Barbarossa, the creation of the Venetian Senate, and the Italian Wars. At every turn, its narration deploys mythic rhetoric to bolster the Republic’s reputation and demonstrate woman’s active citizenly capacity.
This is achieved through the ekphrastic description of Circetta’s palace, on whose “illustrious adamantine walls art made a fallacy of nature” and “a thousand beautiful figures were sculpted.”91 The strangeness of these figures captivates the attention of Silano, the shipwrecked knight privy to Circetta’s hospitality, and he requests that she teach him their meaning. He must ask, for she alone possesses the wisdom needed to interpret them. Circetta agrees and we learn that her mother, the infamous goddess Circe, crafted the diamantine scenes whose actors “have
Muse in Mid-Cinquecento Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 498–503. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 89. Celio Magno and Orsatto Giustiniano, Rime di Celio Magno et Orsatto Giustiniano (Venice: Andrea Muschio, 1600). 90 From “Era il suo nome in’or puro e giocondo, DOMENICO VENIER, luce del mondo.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 10.22–23. 91 From “Dico l’illustri, adamantine mura Onde fé l’Arte inganno à la Natura” and “mille belle figure eran scolpite.” Ibid., 8.38, 8.39. 143
not been nor yet are, rather the miserly goddess Time will bring them in the hour prescribed in heaven,” blessing the earth with an “indomitable people.”92 More to the point, the images “make known to us the lofty successes of an illustrious city from her founding” to the marriage of her favorite daughter Bianca Capello.93 While the deeds of men occupy the majority of that history,
Circetta’s invocation of Circe and Bianca as historical actors frames that account with a feminine cast, as does her emphatic replication of Venice’s traditional personification as a she. At the same time, Circetta’s hyperbolic celebration of Bianca as the epitome of womanhood and
Venetian citizenry stood as a patriotic reminder to early modern readers that La Serenissima past and present merited its glorious reputation. Or as Fonte wrote, “never was seen so beautiful and so graceful a form in the world or in the supernal sky above as [is seen] in her, who will always follow the footsteps of virtue in her divine government such that it behooves vice to sleep because of her … therefore happy and five and six times blessed is any man who may be born in her.”94
Fonte’s chronicle proceeds temporally from here, beginning with the Republic’s mythical nascence as a polity sprung from the ashes of barbarian invasion in the fifth century A.D.95 The
92 From “queste istorie innanzi a noi discritte Non fur né sono ancor, ma ’l tempo avaro Le dee portar nell’ore in ciel prescritte” and “persone invitte.” Ibid., 8.44. 93 “Fù di mia madre il principal intento … per fare noto à noi dal fondamento D’una illustre Città gli almi successi.” Ibid., 12.7 Circetta credits Bianca with inspiring her mother’s interest in Venice. Lines 12.7–12.9. 94 “Né mai sì bella e sì leggiadra forma Fù vista al Mondo ò sù nel Ciel superno Com’in costei, che di virtute l’orma Seguirà ognihor nel suo divin governo; Tal che per lei convien che’l vitio dorma … Felice dunque, e cinque volte e sei Beato l’huom, che nascer debbe in lei.” Ibid., 12.21. 95 According to archaeologists and environmental history scholars, the islands of the Venetian lagoon were first settled in the 500s, a century after the date claimed by Venetian myth (421 A.D.) The first extant historical account of Venetian settlement is the Giovanni Diacono’s Chronicon Venetum et Gradense (late 10th or early 11th century), which identifies the Lombard rather than Hunnic invasions as the spur of migration to the Veneto. Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Toward an Ecological Understanding of the Myth of Venice,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297–1797, eds. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 41–46, 49. 144
most important of these is Atilla the Hun’s 452 incursion into northern Italy.96 His cruel image bestrides the Ithacan palace’s wall and Circetta comments that neither armor nor shield would avail Italy in the coming fight against him.97 Instead “the nobility of the miserable Italian people will find themselves reduced to living amongst the most deserted rocks with their things, with their wives.”98 As these refugees flee to the safety of the coast, they sow the seeds of a new civilization. As Circetta explains to Silano, these events force the world “to bless the bloody deeds of the dreadful Atilla, who put Italy to fire and sword in all places; [for] he destroyed all cities and made a single city rise from scattered remains—by her sad Italy is consoled” and the sun “filled with wonder.”99 And so the myth of Venice begins.
The fantastical origin story of Venice’s watery birth amidst Italic ruin and the fall of
Rome was the bedrock upon which all future state claims to excellence rested.100 For example, early modern Venetian posturing as a new Rome and Christian reincarnation of the former
Roman Republic in connection with contemporary forces like Lepanto and local antipathy toward the papacy was enabled by the polity’s historic lack of Roman roots (a rare quality in an
Italian city).101 Venice’s Christian heritage also facilitated its claiming of Saint Mark as symbol of the state, an affiliation that grew in scope and importance over time according to the easy malleability of civic narrative. In Fonte’s lifetime, the apostle was entrenched in Venetian
96 Fonte strove for academic rigor in addition to panegyric praise of Venice in her history; for example, while they are not discussed at length, she goes to pains to also mention earlier invasions by the Gepids, Goths, and Visigoths in Fonte, Tredeci canti del Floridoro, 12.18 97 Ibid., 12.10. 98 “Si troverà la nobiltà ridutta Delle misere genti italiane Ad abitar fra i più deserti scogli Con le sostanze lor, con le lor moglie.” Ibid., 12.12. 99 Fonte writes that Venice’s rise caused “the world to forget old offenses” (“scordo il mondo le passate offese) and instead “benedir le sanguinose imprese De l’immanissimo Attila, ch’à foco E à ferro pose Italia in ogni loco. Distrusse tuttle l’altre, e fé una sola Sorger Città de le reliquie sparse, Per cui la mesta Italia si consola.” Several stanzas later she states that the new city is so divine “ch’empirà poi di maraviglia il sole.” Ibid., 12.2–3, 12.13. 100 Ibid. The fall of Rome is mentioned in 12.14. 101 Rosand, Myths of Venice, 5–7. For a good account of tensions between Rome and Venice, especially the Interdict Crisis of 1606, see William James Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Republican Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 145
imagery and rhetoric as prophet and patron of the lagoon city. According to Iain Fenlon, Saint
Mark first entered the myth of Venice in eighth-century stories that falsely claimed the saint had evangelized in northern Italy as the first bishop of Venice and Istria.102 By the thirteenth century, that legend had accreted another Marcian episode called the praedestinatio. This tale professed that Saint Mark had actually shipwrecked on the Rialto, during which incident he foresaw that the then vacant island would be his final resting place, in effect predicting the rise of Venice and the construction of Saint Mark’s Cathedral’s in which his supposed relics have now lain since the ninth century.103 While Fonte’s octaves stress the socio-political rather than religious components of Venice’s origin myth, the sculptural program of Circetta’s palace makes some reference to all aspects of the tale. Scenes of Germanic and Hunnic invasions take center stage, but Saint Mark appears in the guise of a Lion attending Venice personified; the figural Republic is shown refusing to cede her Catholic honors to papal Rome.104 And on a metaphoric level,
Circetta’s prophecy may itself be a reference to the praedestinatio. The maga’s prescient discourse clearly symbolized Fonte’s civic authority in the first instance, but on a deeper level, her use of augury may have reminded local readers of the longstanding importance of supernatural interference and foresight to Venice’s existence.
In addition to eulogizing Venice’s early past, Floridoro’s third prophetic sequence correctly interprets the Republic’s geographic setting as a key part of its wondrous nature. This too reinforced Fonte’s legitimacy as a civic speaker. The Renaissance iteration of the myth of
Venice consistently positioned the lagoon polity as the ideal offspring of natural perfection and human ingenuity. According to the cinquecento historian Gasparo Contarini, foreign tourists
102 Iain Fenlon, The Ceremonial City: History, Memory, and Myth in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 10–16. 103 Ibid. 104 Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 12.15, 12.29. 146
marveled more at Venice’s extraordinary natural setting than at any good available in her exotic markets.105 Venice’s “biographers” alternatively described the Republic as the center of the world (East vs West, Holy Roman Empire vs Rome, Rome vs Byzantium), as an insular virgin state protected from outside penetration by the sea, and as a theater from which to observe the parade of citizens, merchants, politicians, carnival goers, and outsiders who congregated in her campi and fondamenti.106 Fonte replicated many of these narratives in Circetta’s speech, which interprets Venice’s splendid geography as a guarantor of greatness. For example, while showing
Silano a series of images that record Venice’s progress from medieval settlement to Renaissance
Republic, Circetta remarks that Fortune as well as “heaven, earth, sea, and fire favor her laughing April (i.e. her youth) as her foundations miraculously have a place in the waves” and
“heaven covers her and earth supports her no less than the sea which encircles and adorns her.”107 Later on, Fonte directs the Ithacan enchantress to recount the tale of the Sensa, the civic ritual in which the Doge married the Adriatic in symbolization of Venice’s union with the sea.108
As an island state, Venice celebrated its connection to the sea in both imperial and generative terms. If the Republic’s ships ruled the sea, it could also claim to be the offspring of the waves.
In this the state managed to align itself with another divine figure, the ocean-born goddess
105 Gasparo Contarini, De magistratibus et republica Venetorum libri quinque (Venice: Baldum Sabinum, 1551), 56. Scholars debate Fonte’s Latin literacy; it is possible that Contarini’s work was known to her. This book, which goes on to discuss the seeming divine construction of the city, was popular in its day and was translated into English in 1599, providing us a clear example of the reach of Venetian civic myth. 106 Denis Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth- Century Italy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1993), 36–41. D. Cosgrove, “The myth and the stones of Venice: an historical geography of a symbolic landscape,” Journal of Historical Geography 8, no. 2 (1982): 146– 147. 107 “E par che’l Ciel, la Terra, il Mar, e il Foco Donin favore al suo ridente Aprile, Ch’i fondamenti suoi ne l’onde han loco miracolosamente … Il Ciel la copre, e la sostien la Terra Non men del Mar, che la circonda, e ferra.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 12.19. The reference to Fortune appears in stanza 12.20. 108 Fonte describes the Sensa’s origins in octave 12.52, in which Pope Alexander III gifts Doge Sebastiano Ziani with a gold ring in recognition of Venice’s right to rule the Mediterranean as a reward for the Republic’s military aid in constraining the territorial ambitions of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarosa. After this, it became an annual custom for the doge to toss a gold ring into the sea as a marker of their “marriage.” 147
Venus. Circetta’s ruminations on Venetian geography also take this link into account.109 While some of the images on her palace walls show Venice as “a superb city founded in the midst of the sea, that possesses in herself such majesty and glory that she seems divinely made,” others depict the state “in the form of a young maiden … seated in the guise of an excellent and divine queen.” The modern reader may miss the allusion present in these lines, but Circetta’s juxtaposition of watery generation with maidenly divinity perfectly evokes Venetia’s alter ego, the seaborn goddess of love and beauty.110 The four layers of female civic function embedded in this passage (Venus, patron and model of → la regina del mare, beneficiary of → Circetta, civic historian and cipher for → Fonte, citizen and poet) also bespeak the real civic relevance of early modern womanhood in the public sphere.
From here Fonte and Circetta direct their attention to new palace walls and a protracted account of Venetian politics from the reign of Doge Paoluccio Anafesto (the first doge) to that of
Nicolò da Ponte, skipping over the period of the Venetian “principate” in favor of a republican storyline.111 Rather than list every doge named by Fonte, I wish to illuminate how this history furthered Floridoro’s testamentary function as proof of woman’s citizenly ability. Through
Circetta, Fonte modelled patriotic loyalty, writerly awareness of the epic genre’s grounding in east-west themes, and an erudite command of history, all of which defied traditional notions of
109 Like Venice, Venus was born of the sea. As the symbol of love and reproduction, she was considered a water goddess (water was a sign of generation). The myth of Venice stipulated that her astrological sign was in ascendancy in March 421, the state’s legendary founding date. The Venus-Venice association was a Renaissance phenomenon bolstered by state’s need to boost its image after the Italian Wars and warfare with the Turks (Venice’s adoption of Roman classicism in its imagery overlaps with its loss of power in the cinquecento) Rosand, Myths of Venice, 118– 137. Edith Kern, “The Gardens in the Decameron Cornice, PMLA 66, no. 4 (June 1951): 515–518. 110 From “una Città superba…in mezo’l Mar fondata, ch’in sé tal gloria serba, Che par divinamente fabricata. In forma poi d’una Donzella acerba Nel terzo Quadro à studio era intagliata, Ch’à guise di Regina eccelsa, a diva siede, & hà in man la pretiosa oliva.” Venetian iconography that showed the state as a woman was multi-layered at all times; this figure can be read as Venus given its placement next to a sculpture that depicts the state as a sea-born miracle, but also as Justice given that she clasps an olive branch in her hands. Ibid., 12.24. 111 Though Fonte calls this period a principate, Venice was actually a subject of the Byzantine Empire in its early years, a fact that Fonte and Venetian myth more generally preferred to omit. Finuccia and Kisacky, Notes to Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, 338–339 n.4. 148
mental female frailty to position her instead as a proactive citizen. She begins by celebrating
Venice’s Republican heritage and government institutions, whose members willingly set individual dynastic concerns aside to serve the state and “conserve their homeland in liberty
[and] maintain justice in the city while enlarging their borders outside.”112 The doge, Venice’s head of state, is charged with leading these efforts after his election from the “bright and glorious squads of fathers, sons, and princes of this [city] … by having his merits in proportion with the lofty seat of that great Lion.”113 Next, Fonte examines their efforts to amass and defend a
Christian empire capable of standing up against Ottoman ambition, a charge that reflected epic’s traditional preoccupation with the eastern world and contemporary Venice’s longstanding if faltering reputation as the doorway to the Levant. To that end, Circetta predicts Doge Pietro
Tradonico’s valiant skirmishes with Saracen pirates in Narenta and Moors in Sicily; in fitting mythic fashion she elides the conclusions of both events in victory rather than acknowledge that the latter conflict ended in Venetian defeat.114 Later in the narrative, she prophesizes that Vitale
Michiel will contribute a son and a fleet to the First Crusade.115 In 1124, Serenissima forces will return Tyre to Christian control.116 When Circetta’s augury cum history reaches the Fourth
Crusade (the subject of Marinella’s epic), Enrico Dandolo appears to lead the assault on
Constantinople; in the aftermath of Byzantium’s fall, Venice annexes Crete for its empire.117 In keeping with the mythic tenor of Circetta’s speech, the suspect ethics of the western attack on
Christian Constantinople go unacknowledged in Floridoro’s pages. Instead Venetian history
112 “Conserveran la patria in libertade, Mentre fuori allargando i lor confini Giustizia manterran nella cittade.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 12.31. 113 From “… di sì chiare, e gloriose squadre De’ Padri, Figli, e Prencipi di questa” and “Tenendo i merti suoi proportione Con l’alto seggio di quel gran Leono.” Ibid., 12.33. 114 Ibid., 12.41. 115 Ibid., 12.45. 116 Ibid., 12.47. 117 Ibid., 12.54–55. 149
materializes as an unblemished golden path that arcs ever forward into the future. Even the devastating Italian Wars are transformed into proof positive of Serenissima greatness and thus of
Fonte’s rhetorical skill. The League of Cambrai musters momentarily on the walls of Circetta’s palace, but to no avail. The combined forces of Europe fail to crush the figurative Republic, who instead “rends the union, scorns the furors, and returns more than ever to her previous honors.”118
So mighty is Venetian excellence as filtered through Fonte’s pen that even Fortune accedes to it, pausing the spinning of her wheel as Venice “achieves a thousand and more victories, peaces, and armistices time upon time.”119
The pièce de résistance of Fonte’s myth-affirming narrative is canto thirteen’s account of the Battle of Lepanto. The style decision to set Lepanto apart from canto twelve’s extended
Venetian history lesson signals its import, as does Fonte’s interruption of the book’s action with a disquisition on her role as weaver/epic author. Fonte uses direct address to inform the reader that just as a plain stone may be adorned with a frieze or enamel work, so may a plain cloth be ennobled by dying or embroidery. Cloth should be read as “text” in this common epic metaphor, which insists on the merit of Fonte’s writing and illuminates her recognition of the rhetorical task at hand. Fonte is fully aware that the tale of Venice, like the contents of Floridoro, is not a simple iteration of fact but a substance imagined and made real by its translation into words by a skilled writer or embroiderer. If Fonte was a weaver of civic myth, a triumphal interpretation of
Lepanto was the brightest adornment with which she could clothe her work, for just “as among
118 “E squarcia l’union, scherne i furori, E torna più, che mai ne primi honori.” Ibid.,12.80. The Italian Wars get less page space in Floridoro than in Ariosto, but like her predecessor Fonte seems to feel some disdain for the fractures of war. Though glorious civic narrative requires military praise, there is a crack in the otherwise honorific terms Circetta uses to describe battle in the Italian Wars section. Here she paints war broadly conceived as “hateful” (odiose) and praises peace or the time in which Janus’ temple doors close as the highest good (see 12.81). She will also count the human cost of conflict in canto thirteen. 119 From “Ecco Fortuna, che sua rota inforsa, Come l’hà sotto il gran Leon fermata, Che mille, e più vittorie, e paci, e tregue Di tempo in tempo, e mille honor consegue.” Ibid., 12.56. 150
beautiful gems the pearl has the first honor, and among flowers the rose, and as gold of all the metals has the most value, so above every other excellent and glorious [event] is the fortunate victory that occurred in the salty Ambracia bay.”120
Like the civic orations of 1571 and 1572, Fonte’s Lepanto rendition combines technical detail with sentimental lyric to demonstrate its author’s civic authority and resonate with
Venetian memory of the battle as a glorious state triumph. That the 1571 victory ultimately did not prevent the fracturing of Venice’s Mediterranean empire has no place in Fonte’s version of events.121 Circetta begins her oration-esque tale in front of a wall panel that shows a meeting of the Venetian Senate led by Alvise Mocenigo, a patrician who led that body in a no-vote against the proposal that Venice accede to the 1570 Ottoman demand for Cyprus.122 Elected doge shortly thereafter, Mocenigo also contributed to the Holy League’s formation—another decorative panel depicts him, Pope Pius V, and Philip II of Spain joining their forces in preparation for war with the Ottomans.123 As October 1571 approaches, soldiers on both sides pray for victory and combatant galleys plow toward each other through the Grecian waters between Epirus and
Corinth, the currents of which also flow around Circetta’s island.124 When October 7th dawns,
“the gods, the fish, and the shores, Heaven, earth and all the elements wait in anticipation.”125
Battle standards bearing the Ottoman crescent, the papal miter, and the eagle of Saint John rise to form a forest amongst the galleys.126 Through Fonte’s verses, readers confront the visceral sights
120 “Ma qual trà belle gemme ha’l primo honore La margarita, e qualtrà fior la rosa; Come l’or trà metalli hà più valore, Tal sopra ogni altra eccelsa, e gloriosa E’la vittoria, e fortunata à pieno, Che consegui nel salso Ambraccio seno.” Ibid., 13.3. 121 Indeed Fonte, who wrote with the benefit of hindsight, omitted the cession of Cyprus to the Ottomans in 1573 completely, jumping straight from Sebastiano Venier’s heroic welcome upon his return to Venice after the battle to the visit of Henry III (the events are linked by their association with civic spectacle) in 1574. See Ibid., 13.28–29. 122 Ibid., 13.5. 123 Ibid., 13.6–7. 124 Ibid., 13.9-10. 125 “Stanno i Dei, stanno i pesci, e i lidi attenti, Il Ciel, la terra, e tutti gli elementi.” Ibid., 13.9. 126 Ibid., 13.11. 151
and sounds of battle and witness the bravery of Christ’s soldiers. Circetta demonstrates how “the artillery sends high the fog of black smoke, and the sky roars and groans … the cannonballs open the sea with such a roar that up to the sky leap the salty waves.”127 The sculpted Turkish fleet catches the brunt of such damage and Ottoman soldiers fling themselves into the sea to escape their burning ships only to be struck down by western arrows.128 “So horrendous” is the “uproar” of battle, which “carries half the ships to the bottom and into the mouths of sea monsters delivers living men,” that Circetta wonders aloud “what pen or style will be excellent enough to describe and outline it fully.”129
The implicit solution to this puzzle is of course Fonte herself. She counterposes the ruin of war with Venetian heroism and deploys traditional Lepanto rhetoric to reveal the hand of
Providence in the Christian victory. The naval captains of the Holy League tower over the watery carnage, smashing Ottoman ships and inciting their troops to keep fighting. “Behold Venier,”
Circetta exclaims, “the Venetian fleet’s commander: with sword in hand upon the prow … he risks his own life for others … no mortal peril affrights him.”130 Further along the wall “John of
Austria works to accomplish great deeds, he hits the enemy’s galley on the side … and takes prisoner its captain (Ali Pasha, admiral of the Ottoman fleet). He adorns himself with immortal glory … while a hundred other ships are oppressed and conquered by Christians.”131 As the battle and Circetta’s ekphrasis progress, “the faithful unitedly raise the beloved name of Victory to the sky [at which] horrible yell, ice runs through the bones of the Ottomans. They are finally
127 “Mandan l’arteglierie la nebbia in alto Di nero fumo, e il Ciel rimbomba, e geme; … Apron le palle il mar di rombo tale Che sbalza fino al ciel l’ondoso sale.” Ibid., 13.12. 128 Ibid., 13.19–20. 129 From “Quel horrendo fracasso … Quel portar via meze le navi al fondo, E in bocca d l’Orche dar gli huomeni vivi … Qual penna, ò stil sarà tanto eccellente, Che descrive, e disegni pienamente?” Ibid., 13.13. 130 “Ecco il Venier, dell’adriana armata, Capo, col brando in man sopra la prora … Espone per altrui la propria vita … Né lo spaventa alcun mortal periglio.” Ibid., 13.15–13.16. 131 “Giovanni d’Austria à far grā proue attende, La galea del nemico urta per fianco … e’l Capitano prende; E di glorio immortal s’adorna … Mentre cento altri legni oppressi, e vinti Son da Christiani.” Ibid., 13.17. 152
routed in the grip of the Gospel’s defenders.”132 A messenger brings news of the rout to Venice, whose citizens embrace in the streets and throng in the churches to thank God and the Virgin
Mary for safeguarding their fleet.133 In accordance with the accounts found in Sansovino and
Contarini, Venetian pageantry is allowed full expression in Circetta’s prophecy as the Republic sets sumptuary law aside to allow revelers to display silk clothes, gold, and gems and “spend
[days] in games, music, and songs as if they were Bacchanals or holy days.”134 Finally, while the figurative lands beyond Venice remain rainy and gray, summer returns to the lagoon, flowers bloom, and the sun shines in a supernatural reflection of the Republic’s good fortune.135
While the proliferation of civic text after Lepanto meant that a wide corpus of potential source material was available to Fonte in the early 1580s, scholars hypothesize that Nicolò
Doglioni was her most important resource.136 Although Floridoro predates Doglioni’s printed histories, Fonte’s guardian was an expert in Venetian affairs and the defining ambition of his scholarly life was to compose a universal history of the Republic according to the encyclopedic medieval tradition. One component of this task was the production of Historia venetiana scritta brevemente da Gio. Nicolò Doglioni, delle cose successe dalla prima foundation di Venetia sino all’anno di Christo 1597 (1598). Whether Fonte had access to Doglioni’s municipal brain trust in
132 “Inalzano I fideli unitamente L’amato nome di Vittoria al cielo; Et à quel grido horribil, che si sente, Scorre per l’ossa à gli Ottomani il gelo. Eccoli tutti rotti finalmente In preda à i defensori del Vangelo.” Ibid., 3.18. 133 Ibid., 13.22–23. 134 From “Ciascun gli spende in giuochi, in suoni, in cāti. Come sian Bacanali, ò giorni santi.” Ibid., 13.25. 135 Ibid., 13.26–27. Fonte probably took this imagery from Magno’s Lepanto dialogue, which credits Venice with transmuting her environment, changing seaweed to flowers, and describes just such a fantastical change in seasons with summer sun replacing winter. Magno, Trionfo di Christo, 15b. 136 Fonte’s circle included multiple letterati with historical or practical knowledge of Venetian-Ottoman relations. Another such was the condottiere Scipio Costanzo, whose son Giovanni served in the Venetian navy and was an Ottoman prisoner from 1571–1574. Fonte’s connection with the Costanzi is noted by both Doglioni and Groto, both of whom report that she penned funerary lyric for Giovanni at Scipio’s request circa 1582. One such poem is included in Il merito. Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth- Century Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 215. Doglioni, “Vita della Sig. Modesta,” 6. Luigi Groto to Scipio Costanzo, Hadria, 22 December 1582 and Groto to Issicratea Monte, Hadria, 12 January 1583 in Lettere famigliari di Luigi Groto, 137a–138b. Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 138–139. 153
research or early written form is unclear, but his civic expertise undoubtably shaped her literary career. Contrary to its title, the Historia venetiana is 1,055 pages long and its contents provide an exhaustive history of the state’s formation, its doges, and their politico-economic encounters with the Islamic other. Every imperial ducal feat listed in Floridoro appears in Doglioni’s monograph; the War of Cyprus occupies an entire book.137 In addition, the Historia venetiana’s frontmatter includes a civic motto that could just as easily adorn Floridoro or Le feste’s pages. It states that “every person in this world [is] obligated more to their fatherland than to anything else.”138 For Doglioni, who was “born to so worthy and noble a city [as Venice], not only magnificent, but miraculous, and praised by everyone with reason as unparalleled,” civic rhetoric was the only viable way to render thanks for his privilege.139 If Fonte’s consistently political print record and civic panegyrics are any indication, Doglioni passed this ideal on to his female protégé. However, whether Fonte as civic virtuoso and biting querelle combatant saw the fulfillment of Doglioni’s decree as a true raison d’etre, convenient literary shield, or some combination thereof is for readers to decide.
1635, Venice: Female Epic after Fonte
I suspect that Doglioni’s historical corpus was also a source for Lucrezia Marinella’s
L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato. Although the cinquecento literary circle that centered around Doglioni and other figures like Domenico Venier and Celio Magno and which promoted
137 Giovanni Nicolò Doglioni, Historia venetiana scritta brevemente da Gio. Nicolò Doglioni, delle cose successe dalla prima foundation di Venetia sino all’anno di Christo 1597 (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1598). For Tradonico see 39–40, for Orseolo 58, for Vitale’s role in the First Crusade 72–73, and for Tyre 116–117). 138 From “Essendo vbligato ciascuno in questo Mondo, più che ad altro, specialmente alla patria … che si debbe ella anteporre alla vita medesima.” Ibid., frontmatter. 139 From “Per tanto io, che mi trouo essere nato in cosi degna, e tanto nobil città, che non pure maragivliosa, ma miracolosa, & vnica con ragione è predicata da ogn’uno, m’ho tenuto fin ad hora … per non essermi mai scoperta occasioni di mostrarmele grato.” Ibid. 154
both civic writing and female authorship had died out by 1635, Marinella’s L’Enrico hearkens back to that era in inspiration and civic content. The politico-economic crises of the last century had survived into the seventeenth, necessitating the continued production of civic print as a prop of state excellence. Although Venice was at peace with the Ottoman Empire for much of
Marinella’s life, Venetian power at home and abroad had continued to shrink. Its Mediterranean empire remained fractured, Barbary piracy threatened the merchant marine, and Ottoman territorial ambitions were shifting toward Venetian Crete, over which naval warfare would erupt in 1645.140 On the mainland, the Thirty Years War threw Venice’s German trade markets into chaos, further eroding its spice trade margins.141 Worse, the Republic suffered a devasting plague that obliterated one third of its population between 1630 and 1633.142 At this time, Doglioni’s
Historia venetiana had been circulating in print for two decades. In addition to providing a glowing overview of local history, that work also featured an inset on the Fourth Crusade,
Marinella’s chosen subject.143 Italian histories of the Fourth Crusade were few and far between on the Renaissance book market, making Doglioni’s inset an important example of the episode’s civic utility. It is also likely that Marinella had known the historian personally through his connection to Lucio Scarano, her patron and a co-founder of the Second Venetian Academy along with Doglioni, which group early modernists believe orchestrated the publication of the
1600 querelle tracts.144
140 Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 51–52. 141 William McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1789 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 142– 144. 142 Maria Galli Stampino, “A Singular Venetian Epic Poem,” introduction to Enrico or Byzantium Conquered. A Heroic Poem by Lucrezia Marinella, ed. and trans. Maria Galli Stampino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 11–12. 143 The section on Dandolo occupies 119–131. 144Note that Marinella’s brother Curzio was also a member of the Academy. Stephen Kolsky, “Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi: An Early Seventeenth-Century Feminist Controversy,” The Modern Language Review 96, no. 4 (October 2001): 976. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 242. 155
In addition to Doglioni’s scholarship, other possible sources for L’Enrico’s Byzantine storyline include Niceta Coniata’s thirteenth-century crusade chronicle, contemporary histories by Paolo Ramusio and Andrea Morosini, and Celio Magno’s much lauded Lepanto text Il
Trionfo di Christo.145 Although L’Enrico was published sixty years after that battle, its canonization within the myth of Venice ensured its continuing topical popularity with
Serenissima audiences. In the interval between October 1571 and the publication of L’Enrico,
Lepanto texts had continued to roll off the local presses. During the 1580s and 90s for example, the Venetian print market was flooded with isolarii, modish Italian travel texts that merged cartography with narrative and structured their depiction of Mediterranean geography around the
Fourth Ottoman Venetian War.146 The battle had also continued to appear as an omen of
Venetian excellence in epic works like Camillo Pancetti’s Venetia libera (1622), a fantastical account of the Republic’s dealings with Charlemagne published shortly before L’Enrico.147 At the same time, the vast corpus of original Lepanto memorializations from 1571–1573 provided intellectuals with a functional literary practicum in military tactics and martial lyric artistry. For an aspiring epic author physically confined to the feminine domestic sphere as Marinella was, such instruction in rhetoric and the mechanics of death and war would have been a crucial resource.148 A Magno-esque civic fluency and prophetic plot detour by way of Lepanto could
145 Lazzarri, Poesia epica e scrittura femminile, 41–44. In addition to his poetic fame, Magno enjoyed an epistolary relationship with Marinella and Scarano documented by manuscript sources in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Haskins, “Vexatious Litigant,” 102–103. 146 The isolario or island book was a descendent of the medieval portolan; for Lepantine Renaissance examples, see Gioseppe Rosaccio, Viaggio da Venetia, a Constantinopoli per mare, e per terra, & insieme quello di terra santa, da Gioseppe Rosaccio con brevità descritto. Nel quale, oltre à settantadui disegni, di geografia, e corografia, si discorre, quanto in esso viaggio, si ritrova. (Venice: Giacomo Franco, 1598). 147 Camillo Pancetti, Venetia libera, peoma heroico (Venice: il Muschio, 1622), 15.9–15.59. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 168. 148 In the 1604 edition of Sansovino’s guide to Venice, Marinella (at age 33) is described as “staying shut away in her room every day, and attending with lively spirit to the study of letters, from which she has made marvelous profit.” From “la quale standosene nella sua camera tutto il giorno rinchiusa, & atendendo con vivo spirito agli stuii delle belle lettere, vi ha fatto maraviglioso profitto.” Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et 156
also allow a female author like Marinella to veil her gendered intervention in the genre of Virgil,
Ariosto, and Tasso as a patriotic rather than subversive act just as Floridoro, yet another important source for L’Enrico, had done.
Given the time gap between Floridoro and L’Enrico, it is important to acknowledge that when Marinella made her epic debut in the seicento, the Lepantine print boom and early political experiments of Fonte and Issicratea Monte, as well as Marinella’s own boundary-breaking work as a querelle author had already opened a space for singe-author productions by Venetian women on the local print scene. Nevertheless, L’Enrico’s determined civic theme and myth-affirming prophetic sequences suggest that civic rhetoric remained a prudent filter for female speech in
1635. In the monograph’s opening letter ai lettori, Marinella self-effacingly reports that she selected Enrico Dandolo’s valorous performance in the Fourth Crusade as her topic so as to
“ennoble and soften the nature of my rough and lowly style.”149 Her more prideful in-text assertion that she as a cithara wielding siren of Venice “deserved more honor than any other” implies epic poetry also represented a final frontier of sorts for a career letterata eager to outshine her female predecessors at this most prestigious form of authorship.150 When the
Imberti press published L’Enrico in 1635,151 Marinella had already enjoyed a long literary career. Her first printed work, the religious poem La Colomba sacra, had come out in 1595, five
singolare…correta, emendata, e più di un terzo di cose nuove ampliata dal M. R. D. Giovanni Stringa (Venice: Altobello Salicato, 1604), 426. Also cited in Stampino, introduction to Enrico; Or, Byzantium Conquered, 6 n23. 149 Like Issicritea Monte’s protestations of her small literary skill within an expertly crafted civic oration, Marinella’s obsequious opening nod to gender norms is a tongue in cheek example of feminine defiance disguised by performative meekness. Immediately afterwards, Marinella launches into an explanation of how Aristotle’s Ars poetica shaped her writing, signaling her actual deeply intellectual knowledge of rhetorical theory. From “recercando di valoroso capitano azione tale quale potesse con la sua grandezza ed eccellenza di rozzo e depresso stile la natura nobilitare e ringentilire … si mi appresentò agli occhi dell’intelletto la … impresa di Enrico Dandolo.” Marinella, L’Enrico, frontmatter. 150 “E sia d’onor forse più ch’altra degna.” Ibid, 22.29. See also Virginia Cox, Preface to Poesia epica e scrittura femminile nel Seicento: “L’Enrico” di Lucrezia Marinella by Laura Lazzari (Leonforte: Insula, 2010). 151 Note that Imberti was one of Moderata Fonte’s publishers, having issued her Il merito delle donne in 1600. 157
years after Fonte’s death. Over the ensuing decades Marinella also authored La nobiltà, the pastoral romance Arcadia felice (1605), and a host of Counter Reformation hagiographies including lives of the Virgin Mary (1602) and Saint Giustina (1606).152 L’Enrico, ovvero
Bisanzio acquistato was her eleventh work. In contrast to the Ariostan moment in which Fonte composed Floridoro, the seicento offered aspirant epic writers like Marinella dueling models on which to base their chivalric offerings thanks to the celebrity of Torquato Tasso’s masterpiece
Gerusalemme liberata (1581). L’Enrico belongs to the Tassean tradition, for like Gerusalemme liberata it features a central plot line, historical actors, and a singular lead character rather than the competing subplots and fantastical interlocutors of the Furioso and Floridoro.153 Just as a crusader narrative allowed Tasso to illuminate Christendom’s struggle to reclaim the Holy Land, the western overthrow of Constantinople in 1204 provided Marinella a lens by which to investigate East-West relations. Because Venice’s involvement in the Crusades peaked in the
Fourth, that subject also gave the cittadina writer an important opportunity to try her hand at molding the distant past into a shape befitting contemporary Venetian myth. L’Enrico’s depiction of religious warfare, its glorious prizes, and civilian costs is sometimes more ideologically complex than Floridoro’s straightforward embrace of Risamante’s bellicose dynastic agenda and Venice’s military history, but overall Marinella’s text results in a similar aggrandizement of the Republic as a powerful imperial state in an era in which that vision was wavering between mirage than reality.
152 Like L’Enrico, La vita di Maria Vergine Imperatrice dell’universo was dedicated to the doge and state in a departure from Marinella’s usual praxis of dedicating her monographs to famous contemporary women. The work probably had dual religious and civic purposes as Mary was one of Venice’s patrons credited, amongst other things, with helping the Republic achieve victory at Lepanto. The book also contains additional elegies to Saint Mark and the city’s virtues including its splendor, clemency, and possession of heroic citizens. For example, see Lucrezia Marinella, La vita di Maria Vergine Imperatrice dell’universo (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1617), 64a–b. 153 Stampino, introduction to Enrico; Or, Byzantium Conquered, 2–4,12–13. Lazzari, Poesia epica e scrittura femminile, 20–27. 158
Siren of Venice: The Myth of Venice and Female Authorship in L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio
Acquistato
Where Floridoro featured a fanciful antique landscape and performed civic discourse through extended prophetic subplots, L’Enrico’s fourteenth-century setting allowed Marinella to weave civic myth into the text’s basic plotline. This was necessary, as the rout of Constantinople was a problematic historical incident. Although Venice celebrated the defeat annually and could date its imperial roots to this era,154 medieval Constantinople had been a Christian polity, the last remainder of the Roman Empire, and the western soldiers who overthrew it had ostensibly been charged by God to retake Muslim-controlled Jerusalem. The veracious account of the Fourth
Crusade was therefore as infamous as it was glorious. To create L’Enrico, Marinella needed to burnish, rewrite, and when necessary, erase this history to produce a narrative on which Venice could reflect with pride. She begins this effort in canto one, which section bears the weighty responsibility of setting up the book’s epic intent and multiple civic interventions. These include reimagining the Fourth Crusade’s nascence, establishing Dandolo as a democratically-minded liberator and hero, asserting Venetian virtue, and a complicated repositioning of Christian
Byzantium as Eastern other. Canto one also informs readers that the poem’s contents should serve contemporary Venetian citizens as an actionable model of patriotic excellence. This is a lot to accomplish. To do so, Marinella begins by injecting the seeds of these themes into the text’s
Virgilian invocation, proclaiming:
“Humble cithara … sing about the great captain (Dandolo) who with pious zeal loved and defended right; sing about his merits and how in glorious victory he granted the Thracian kingdom to the unvanquished Gaul. Muse, who in Heaven produces and inspires exalted praises from angelic squadrons … inflame my soul, arouse my desires, and unravel the stops and knots of my inept tongue … I wish now to recall famous deeds of my great homeland from distant centuries and to awaken glorious minds to just work and glorious feats by his example.
154 Lazzari, Poesia epica e scrittura femminile, 19 n.71. 159
Magnanimous Lion, who shines brightly with endless merits by virtue of your immense valor … Be present in my song and ignite my heart to these great deeds with your ardent spirit so that my verse may be worthy of you.”155
By the end of octave four, Marinella’s audience is prepped to encounter Enrico Dandolo, who had been ninety years old and blind in 1204, as a heroic main character to whom they should look for a model of masculine Venetian excellence.156 Historical Byzantium is costumed with its first layer of oriental trappings through its pointed description as a Thracian polity (Thracian was a classicizing Renaissance byword for Turkish).157 And finally, Venice in its Marcian embodiment as a “magnanimous Lion” has been apotheosized into an enduring emblem of virtue and literary genius rivaling the ancient Muse of epic poetry.
From here, Marinella proceeds to mythologize the context that informed Dandolo’s assault on Constantinople, painting a grim picture of a thirteenth-century riven by religious strife and Christian suffering for her audience. According to Marinella, “a great sorrow and piercing cries [were] heard from Christians everywhere” in the medieval past as Moors, Scythians and other Islamic peoples raided, burned, and generally laid waste to the world.158 As a result of this destruction, the Pope “cried in his holy palace” and “called Christ’s faithful to war to give timely help to Christianity.”159 The princes of Europe answered his call willingly, as did Enrico
Dandolo, one “more illustrious, and worthier than all the rest in fame, name, appearance,
155 “La cetra umil … Canta il gran capitan qual con pio zelo Difese il giusto e ‘l pregio e i merti suoi, Come vivente, glorioso e degno Concesse al gallo invitto il tracio regno. Musa, che su nel Ciel detti ed inspiri Alle angeliche squadre eccelse lodi … L’alma m’infiamma desta i miei desiri; Sciogli alla lingua inetta in freni e i nodi … Bramo or recar da secoli lontani Della gran patria mia gesti famosi E destar col su’esempio inclite menti Ad opre giuste, a gloriosi eventi. Magnanimo leon, che illustre splendi Pel tuo immenso valor d’eterni pregi … Sii presente al mio canto e ’l cuor m’accendi Coll’ardente tuo spirto a fatti egregi, Che ’l verso sia ben di te degno.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 1.1–1.4. 156 Donald E. Queller and Thomas F. Madden, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 9–10. 157 For example, Celio Magno uses the terms Turk and Thracian interchangeably to describe the Ottoman force at the Battle of Lepanto in his battle canzone. For example, see Magno, Canzone sopra la vittoria, 1–3. 158 “Già quinci e quindi udiansi acuti gridi Degli amici di Christo e un grave lutto.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 1.6. 159 From “Pietro piangea nella sua sacra reggia … Per dar a tempo al christianesmo aita, Li fedeli di Christo a guerra invita.” Ibid., 1.7. 160
strength, famous deeds, and glorious feats.” Although countries like England, Spain, Frisia, and
France also mustered at the pope’s call, Venice was most fervent in her response. At Marinella’s prompting, the Venetian doge is immediately consumed by a desire to serve Christ. At his command, the Republic’s smiths and shipwrights “cover the sea with thousands upon thousands of vessels” capable of ferrying crusaders to war, a fleet so massive that it puts the legendary armadas of Xerxes and Menelaus to shame.160 Just as the holy army takes ship for Jerusalem, word reaches them that the throne of Constantinople has been seized by a usurper called Alessio
(historically, Alexios III), subjecting the already-backward polity to enemy control. This “unjust deed delayed the pious passage since the just heart of each man was lit with rage.”161 In a matter of eight lines, the Christian fleet detours to Byzantium, exiles the usurper, and resumes its eastward course.162 Unfortunately, the newly instated emperor’s ghost manifests among them all too soon to report that he has been murdered by a man called Mirtillo (a fictional character) and to beg the western army to “turn your weapons, turn your ships … and your victorious banner against the impious” and return to Byzantium.163 As the literary personification of Venetian republicanism, Enrico Dandolo summons his fellow captains to vote on a response to the ghost’s request; for his part, he argues that righting present wrongs should take precedence over the worthy but ancient mission to reclaim Jerusalem. The captains accede and elect him to lead the proposed siege.164 With Dandolo and the Venetians securely installed at the mission’s helm, the western fleet sails for the Bosporus once more. And so the stage for Constantinople’s invasion is swiftly and honorably set.
160 From “Che più l’alta Repubblica non mostri Coperto il mal da mille e mille rostri.” Ibid., 1.24 161 “Ritardò ’l pio passaggio il fatto ingiusto Onde ognun d’ira accese il petto giusto.” Ibid., 1.28. 162 Ibid., 1.45–46. 163 “L’armi e le navi vostre … Volgete agli empi e la vittrice insegna.” Ibid., 1.50; 1.48–50. 164 Ibid., 1.58–67, 1.71, 1.74–77. 161
The brevity and simple righteousness in which Marinella cloaked the Fourth Crusade’s origins was an act of civic genius in itself. In reality, mercantile Venice had approached Innocent
III’s proclamation of crusade cautiously, with an eye to trade, empire, and the profit it could wring from such a venture. In August 1198, the Pope had dispatched a papal legate to Venice bearing a request for ships. In contrast to L’Enrico’s plot, the Republic had demurred and sent the cardinal home empty-handed; Venetian emissaries followed on his heels with a list of conditions to which Rome needed to stipulate before La Serenissima would agree to crusade.
The most important of these demanded that Innocent grant Venice special dispensation to trade with Islamic peoples, which commerce the Church had forbidden in 1187.165 In the meantime,
Venetian diplomats were also busy in the East. Alexios III, whose usurpation of the Byzantine emperorship sparks the action of L’Enrico and whose rule Marinella dates to 1202 (the year the crusader fleet departed Venice), had actually reigned in Constantinople since 1195. As late as
1198 he and Dandolo were busy renegotiating the Republic’s legal and economic privileges in
Byzantium.166 Although early modern Venice prided its diplomatic independence from Rome and its storied commercial acumen, this version of events clashed with the state’s mythic vision of itself as the pious Lepantine defender of Christendom. Their conspicuous absence from
L’Enrico’s plot suggests that Marinella was fully conscious that the crucible of literature can render history and identity malleable. Her blatant textual silencing of the Zara episode, a defining moment of the Fourth Crusade, proves it.
In the forty-sixth octave of canto one, Dandolo and company reach Constantinople after an uninterrupted journey across the Mediterranean Sea.167 With Marinella’s guidance, they touch
165 Thomas F. Madden, Enrico Dandolo & the Rise of Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 119–120. 166 Ibid., 116–120. Michael Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context (New York: Routledge, 2003), 54–56. 167 See Marinella, L’Enrico, 1.32–44. 162
down as a righteous, un-blooded troop sanctified by God’s grace. In reality however, the historical army that dropped anchor in the Bosporus in June 1203 had already seen battle. More importantly, they bore the stigma of excommunication. The massive fleet of galleys and uscieri which Marinella floated on the Adriatic Sea in a matter of lines had a long and complicated past.
Its construction cost medieval Venice a huge percentage of its military and economic resources—crusade chronicles report that Dandolo had to suspend overseas commerce, the lifeblood of Venice, for eighteen months in order to dedicate adequate labor and ships to the fleet-building effort.168 According to the Treaty of Venice (1201), the Republic was owed 85,000 silver marks in exchange for tackling such a monumental endeavor; however, when the final bill came due the Frankish crusaders responsible for its remittance came up short by almost half. So the real Dandolo struck a new deal—in lieu of proper payment, Venice agreed to release the fleet if the French host would agree to divert to Dalmatia in pursuit of Venice’s imperial agenda before assailing Egypt and Jerusalem.169 There the holy army would conquer Zara, a Christian port city nominally subject to Venetian control but then occupied by Hungarian forces. There was only one problem: the Pope had expressly forbidden any such attack because the Hungarian king was sworn to the crusader cross.170 In November 1202, the crusaders sacked it anyway.
Indeed, it was in Zara that Enrico Dandolo first entertained the envoys of Alexios Angelos, an exiled Byzantine royal hoping to depose his uncle Alexios III.171 Meanwhile, an infuriated
Innocent III excommunicated the crusaders.172 Strikingly, L’Enrico’s pages bear no witness to these events. Similarly absent is any mention of the voracious sacking that followed
168 Madden, Enrico Dandolo, 129–30. Queller and Madden, The Fourth Crusade, 17. 169 Norman Housley, “The Thirteenth-Century Crusades in the Mediterranean,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, ed. David Abulafia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 570. 170 Madden, Enrico Dandolo, 128–136. 171 Ibid., 145–147. 172 Ibid., 142–145. 163
Constantinople’s surrender on April 13th, 1204, during which debacle the European army vandalized the city, desecrated the Hague Sophia, and executed local civilians.173 These incidents defied Tassean epic’s chivalric bent and Christian tenor. More importantly, they stood in direct contradiction to Marinella’s desire to ornament the seicento Catholic Republic—so she took them out. L’Enrico’s Dandolo and his inky compatriots accept Constantinople’s surrender graciously and offer its defeated populace paternal love and mercy rather than the sharp end of a sword.174 The crusader fleet made of paper and poetry sails blindly past the Dalmatia’s shores. In doing so, Marinella’s literary ambassadors of Venetian excellence altered the weft of history and signaled her virile textual command.
Because L’Enrico is a historical epic, its civic tone has not gone unnoticed and most scholarly work on the text makes some note of the plot alternations named here; however, no extended analysis of Marinella as a civic woman writer exists. I believe that L’Enrico represents a concerted effort on Marinella’s part to prove that female writers could effectively contribute to the public sphere of state-making. Like its historically loose plot, L’Enrico’s characters contribute to that effort and personify prized attributes of the myth of Venice. As the titular character, Dandolo leads in this arena. Marinella describes his “subjugation” of the wayward
Byzantine empire as “the most magnificent, glorious, difficult, and dangerous feat ever
173 To accomplish this, Marinella alters the Crusade’s timeline. In canto 24, a group of crusaders do manage to enter the city where they wreak temporary death and mayhem; instead of setting off a three-day sack as happened historically however, such action is limited to one night and occurs within the legitimizing context of war rather than after Byzantium’s formal defeat. Warfare resumes the next day and continues for three more cantos. Marinella, L’Enrico, 24.53–87, canti 26, 27. Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 144–145. 174 Marinella writes that Dandolo “received them with paternal love, he cried and sighed over their fatal misfortunes,” while the character and historical crusader Boniface of Montferrat “did not give them trouble, but instead gave some comfort to those unhappy people and pardoned them.” From “[Enrico] accoglie con amour paterno, Lor sventura fatal piange e sospira” and “Bonifazio … non pur non gli dà noia, ma procura Qualch’agio agl’infelice e lor perdona.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 27.90–93. 164
undertaken by any great king or brave captain.”175 In his Marinellan reincarnation as a young man, Dandolo leads from the front, inspiring crusaders of every rank to new heights of bravery through his presence on the battlefield just as the contemporary Venetian hero Sebastiano Venier had famously done at Lepanto. At Marinella’s command, Dandolo “moves amongst his soldiers on horseback wherever he sees need; … the fierce warrior’s aspect reveals his power and knowledge, and with the voice of a magnanimous heart” he exhorts men on against the
Byzantine foe—“every fierce enemy [to encounter him] is reduced to fear and suddenly flees or turns away.”176 The Italian guerrieri Claudia and Venier fight at his side. Claudia is an epic female warrior in the mode of Bradamante, Risamante, and Clorinda (Tasso’s woman knight).
As a delegate of respectable Italian civilization, Claudia marries bold military prowess with proper feminine chastity and kindness. Unlike her eastern character equivalent Meandra, a maverick captain of the fractious Byzantine army, Claudia fights companionably alongside her fellow foot soldiers rather than command troops herself in a shrewd gesture to contemporary gender norms and, as Maria Galli Stampino has argued, to legendary Venetian fellowship.177
Like Venetia, the Republic’s female image, Claudia is a virgin and if her swordsmanship “casts men into fright and terror,” her demeanor exudes generosity and magnanimity at all times.178
Venier is the most important male knight in Dandolo’s company. His patronymic, which linguistically links him to the state itself in addition to the contemporary Venetian dynasty that counted statesmen and letterati Domenico and Sebastiano Venier amongst its members, indicates
175 “la soggezzione” and from “… impresa senza dubbio la più magnifica, la più gloriosa, la più difficile, la più pericolosa che sia mai stata fatta d qualsivoglia gran re o valoroso capitano.” Ibid., frontmatter. 176 From “Ma Enrico, il sommo duce, il destrir gira Tra suoi soldati ove il bisogno vede … di guerrier feroce Il poter e ’l saper svela e discopre Nel bellicoso aspetto, e con la voce Di magnanimo cuor gran segni scopre … Ogni ferro inimico è in lui converso Né teme o fugge colpo o volta avverso.” Ibid., 3.37–38. 177 Stampino, “Introduction” to L’Enrico, 46. 178 “proge ad altrui tema e spavento.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 2.29; 3.25. 165
his import as a cipher for Venetian patriotism and bravery.179 Per his own report, “as soon as I realized that the pious Dandolo was driving a courageous multitude against the Romans … when men by illustrious wishes and noble and warlike works encircled their heads with glory, I as well was stung by generous envy and joined Enrico’s company.”180 In a rare Marinellan subplot,
Venier spends the majority of his page time on a troop-gathering mission to Cyprus.181 During this adventure he encounters the sorceress Erina, who predicts that he will perish if he returns to the crusade effort.182 In the face of this dire fate, Venier recklessly declares, “That the body dies is of little importance if honor lives.”183 While Erina, and through her Marinella, show regret for the harsh price exacted by human glory, Venier’s embrace of battle and its rewards functions first and foremost as an exemplar of citizenly loyalty and self-sacrifice. Even after he sees a vision of his own demise, Venier insists on returning to the crusader encampment and joining the final attack on Constantinople where he takes an enemy arrow.184 Before meeting death however, the bold Venetian knight cuts down a defensive squadron outside the city walls, paving a path toward the west’s victory and demonstrating Marinella’s ability to capture the tactics, visuals, and emotions of chivalric warfare.185
Like all heroes, Venier and his compatriots required a worthy opponent on whom to test the edge of their merit. After Lepanto, the most recent major Venetian military victory, civic
179 Historically, the Venier family did have a stake in the Fourth Crusade—they acquired Kythira and Crete as a result of Venetian territory grabs after the sack of Constantinople. Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire, 18. 180 Here Marinella uses “Roman” to refer to Byzantine people in reference to that state’s connection with the Eastern Roman Empire. From “Com’intes’io che ’l pio Dandolo spinse Contra I Romani coraggiose schiere … Che questo e quel il crin di gloria cinse Per voglie illustri ed opre alte e guerriere, Anch’io d’invidia generosa punto Con Enrico m’accolsi e agli altri aggiunto.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 5.70. 181 Ibid., 4.52–54. 182 Ibid., 7.62. 183 “Poco importa Purchè viva l’onor, la spoglia morta.” Ibid., 7.62. 184 Ibid., 22.62–64, 24.6–22. 185 Ibid., 22.79–82. While my work concentrates on the civic rather than martial aspects of Marinella’s warriors, her lengthy descriptions of heraldry, dueling, war machines, and battle throughout L’Enrico were essential to justifying that text’s claims upon the epic genre given the gender of its author. 166
print had depicted the Ottoman navy as infidel, wicked, and other, but also recognized the eastern fighting spirit and tactical skill that made the naval battle a monumental triumph rather than a trifling skirmish. Divine intervention was also deemed essential to the Holy League’s success against the Turks. In L’Enrico, Marinella ensures that Dandolo, Venier, and Claudia face similarly formidable opponents on the shores of the Golden Horn. In order to underline the chivalric caliber of her Italian cast, she forces them to prevail against the flower of Byzantine soldiery rather than a barbarous rabble. The crusaders’ foes thus include a doughty Hyrcanian warrior called Oronte, the sharp-eyed archer Emilia, and the aforementioned virgin cavaliere
Meandra. Meandra and Oronte command the enemy troops. Under their leadership,
Constantinople’s defenders fight bravely and even honorably, demonstrating a martial skill approaching that of Dandolo’s forces. Like the Ottomans in 1571 however, Marinella’s eastern characters cannot overcome the wishes of Providence. In keeping with Renaissance Venice’s perception of itself as a città divina, Marinella sets the European and Byzantine armies apart via religion, positioning the crusaders as true believers whose faith ultimately earns them the advantage in war. Where Mirtillo’s troops heretically adhere to Eastern Orthodoxy or worship no
God whatever,186 Dandolo and his followers take the Eucharist, pray to Mary before battle, and subscribe to Roman Catholicism.187 After they conquer Constantinople, Dandolo leads
“victorious Adria” in “offer[ing] thanks and sacred incense to Heaven for this triumph and gives the noble cloth of defeated banners and spoils to the temple.”188
186 This is the case with Oronte. 187 See 23.14–15, 23.21–25. As elected leader of the western army and the book’s foremost Venetian hero, the task of praying goes to Dandolo. 188 “Ved’Adria già vittrice offrire al Cielo Grazie per tal trionfo e sacri incensio E de’ tolti stendardi il nobil velo Donar al tempio e spoglie.” Ibid., 7.65. 167
As the leader of the Fourth Crusade and Doge of Venice, Dandolo’s spiritual authority functions as a metaphor for that of the state. Because Venice is devout, so too are her people.
And although Marinella allows that Byzantium’s sworn swords are not innately wicked, her verses intimate that as Byzantine clients they must suffer the divine punishment of the perfidious, disorganized polity that claims their allegiance. The religious superiority of
Dandolo’s army is one of the most important manifestations of Venetian myth in L’Enrico and the monograph works hard to position the Venetian and Byzantine states on opposite sides of a spiritual chasm. For example, when Venier meets Erina in canto five, he introduces himself by describing his homeland as the perfect Christian state. “I was born where a venerable city lies sublime and glorious in a gulf of great Neptune’s sea,” he says. “Her heart is no less full of love than of justice and faith, and she is called Venice. Who can fully name the ample gifts that heaven has granted to her? A perpetual cloud courteously rains grace and virtue into her lap.”189
Conversely, Marinella’s verses paint “the evil Thessalians” of Byzantium as guilty of fostering an “unreliable people … who don’t follow the truth faith or fear God.”190 These disparate characterizations further gilded Venice’s image while simultaneously exaggerating the heterodoxy of medieval Byzantium, salving the text’s otherwise problematic lack of an Islamic antihero.191
The primary vehicle by which Marinella illumed eastern heterodoxy was black magic, a device inspired by Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Where Tasso deployed the character Ismen, sorcerer and stooge of the Muslim king of Jerusalem, as a proxy for Islamic alterity, Marinella
189 “Naqui là dove al gran Nettun nel seno Sublime posa e gloriosa siede Venerabil città c’ha ’l cuor ripieno Non men d’amor che di giustizia e fede, Venezia detta. Or chi può dir appieno L’ampie doti che ’l cielo a lei concede? Poiche cortese piove nel suo grembo Di grazie e di virtù perpetuo nembo.” Ibid., 5.68. 190 “Tessali malvagi;” “infida gente…non sente la vera fede e Dio non teme.” Ibid., 6.16 and 1.68. 191 Note that Marinella genders Byzantium as male to contrast with feminine Venetia. 168
sends Esone’s devilish powers into battle on behalf of Constantinople. L’Enrico’s magician is the creature of Alessio III, who returns from exile after Mirtillo’s rise. With Esone’s help they govern Byzantium via cowardice and treachery in sharp contradistinction to mythic Venetian rectitude and valor. At roughly the same time that Venier first encounters Erina, Alessio and
Mirtillo plot to destroy the western fleet with inextinguishable hellfire. With a wicked flair indicative of Marinella’s dramatic skill, Esone conjures a Satanic demon laden with the unworldly weapon; during a ceasefire, Byzantine troops cravenly seize the moment to ignite the crusaders’ ships.192 And here Providence intercedes on Dandolo’s behalf for the first time. In a providential shift in weather reminiscent of the storied Boreas blow at Lepanto, an odd “wind blew breaking and uprooting the strange blaze. … [T]he blowing winds, which knew not the evil king’s plans and adverse wishes, carried the wicked flames onto the armor of the unjust
Thracians,” their fields, and nearby towns, allowing Claudia and company to stage a counterattack and make “such a tragedy of their enemies that their eternal destruction would last so long as the sun turns.”193 While L’Enrico’s narrator does not name the winds’ source, Esone himself crucially marks the tempest’s divine origins, crying “I executed my work and desire well, but God opposed it.”194 With these word, the godly righteousness of the Fourth Crusade is made patent.
While Constantinople’s men at arms fight credibly enough on the field, the errant state that governs them continues to rule by machination and black magic throughout the book.
Following the unsuccessful firestorm, Esone travels to the netherworld to barter with the devil
192 Ibid., 8.35–61. 193 “Il vento soffia e rompe e spezza e svelle Lo strano incendio … L’aure spiranti, che non san lo ’ntero Del re malvagio e sue nemiche voglie, Portan la trista fiamma dello ’nferno De’ Traci ingiusti sulle ferree spoglie.” Ibid., 8.96–97. 194 “Ben fu l’opra e ’l desio Compiuto e buon, ma vi s’oppose Dio.” Ibid., 10.2 169
for a demon army capable of lifting the European siege. In exchange he vows to sacrifice a virgin to “the scornful souls in Avernus,” the Italian entrance to Hell.195 That maiden is rescued by a
Venetian warrior later in the book, foiling Esone’s bargain, but not before Marinella’s reader has once again encountered the east as a site of alterity and iniquity. In L’Enrico’s final cantos,
Esone’s female pupil Eudocia underscores this otherness by working magic upon human remains to forecast the war’s end and Constantinople’s fall.196 Unlike her teacher, Eudocia is driven to heretical acts by sympathetic drivers such as love and despair (she is Mirtillo’s paramour) rather than sheer villainy, but she contributes nonetheless to L’Enrico’s mythic goal of exposing medieval Byzantine state as wild, uncivilized place divorced from Catholic morality’s saving grace and therefore a legitimate epic target.
Oppositely, Dandolo and his men labor at crusade in hopes of “seeing God and experiencing joyful delight … on the great day when he will render judgement on souls from the highest summit.”197 Where Esone and Byzantium look to Hell for aid, Venice “depends on God and derives nothing from others; her independent strength must be ascribed to Heaven alone.”198
And indeed Marinella’s God grants continual aid to the Christian army. The best example of this occurs in canto sixteen, in which section Saint Mark, the Virgin Mary, Venice personified and
God himself join L’Enrico’s cast to validate the action of the Fourth Crusade and affirm the
Republic’s mythic affinity with the divine. In this episode, readers observe a mystic called Criso praying for the crusaders’ victory at Constantinople from his hermit’s cave. Criso’s piety and the justice of Dandolo’s cause impress God and move him to “shape his holy will to [Criso’s]
195 Ibid., 10.15–19. Stampino, “Introduction and Notes” to L’Enrico, 213 n.14. 196 Ibid., 25.45–52. 197 “Vedranno Dio, n’avran gioie e diletti” and “nel gran dì la somma altezza All’alme … Darà la sentenza.” Ibid., 6.68. Erina is the speaker of this quote. She and Venier have a theological discussion of salvation, demonstrating the crusader’s and thus the West’s knowledge of Catholicism and Marinella’s personal concern for reformation orthodoxy. 198 “Da Dio dipende, né d’altrui deriva, Sua forza indipendente al Ciel s’ascriva.” Ibid., 7.8. 170
wishes.”199 His aid comes in the form of a rescue; specifically, he helps the hermit rescue
Dandolo’s son and fellow crusader Rainiero, a secondary character who had been injured in a duel some octaves earlier. Rainiero’s plight and Marinella’s pen prompt God to cry “oh, may it not be true that my good defender remains there deprived of aid!”200 While Criso as God’s envoy searches for the dying warrior, Rainiero dreams about Venice and her celestial patrons. As he slumbers, “a great knight seated on a lion” approaches him.201 This is Saint Mark. He assures the knight that “I will never cease adorning [Venice’s] crown with new glory through divine grace.”202 Next, the spirit of Venice approaches. Marinella describes her as “a gentle Virgin” with “royal appearance and pious aspect.”203 She asks Saint Mark to introduce her to the Virgin
Mary and the dreamy trio depart to “revere the august face of the goddess of Heaven.”204 When they reach her, Venice asks Mary to grant her Republic eternal virtue, virginity, and life.205 Mary agrees and proclaims that Venice will “live until the world dies,” which news Rainiero conveys to Criso when the hermit finally finds and revives him.206 Criso heals Dandolo’s son and helps him return to the Christian encampment where they share their supernal knowledge of
Providence’s blessing.207 When the last battle arrives, Heaven’s might fuels that of the Christian fighters and God himself commands his cherubim to ensure “that [Dandolo] returns from the battle victorious and safe. Let him cease toil and leave the great city as a prize, the shore runs
199 “Formò al di lui voler sue voglie sante.” Ibid., 16.33. 200 “Ahi, non sia ver che resti Il mio buon difensor privo d’aita.” Ibid., 16.35. 201 “Gran cavalier sopra un leone assiso.” Ibid., 16.58. 202 “Né cesserò con grazie ancor divine Sempre di nuova gloria ornarle il crine.” Ibid., 15.60. 203 “Vergin gentil, D’apparenza real, di aspetto pio” Ibid. 15.62. 204 “La faccia augusta della dea del Cielo, Riverir lei” Ibid., 16.62, 16.63. 205 Ibid., 16.70. 206 From “Vergin vivi, o Vinegia, finché ’l mondo Caggia.” Ibid., 16.84. 207 Ibid., 16.90–96. 171
with enemy blood … let happy Adria relish such a Doge since her valor well permits such grace.”208
Like Marinella’s reimagination of the Fourth Crusade’s prehistory, these scenes are vital to her authorial agenda. Civically, they conform to the myth of Venice and depict the Republic and her citizens as favored, devout people of God. They also reinforce state pride in Venice’s legendary longevity. Where epic is concerned, Marinella’s juxtaposition of Byzantine black magic with the spiritual visions of Rainiero and Criso conditioned early modern readers to perceive medieval Byzantium as a backward state and appropriate eastern enemy whose rotten government was in dire need of replacement in 1204. At the same time, L’Enrico’s religious interludes fused a culturally normative celebration of Venetian myth with deviant female speech.
Marinella’s verses salved her tradition-defying intervention in epic as a woman writer with the balm of patriotism; they also combine a gender normative interest in spirituality with an outlandish female dictation of theology. As the paragraphs above illustrate, Marinella dared to script the voice of God in two instances totally divorced from any ameliorating biblical, scriptural, or dogmatic source. Moreover, she used these scenes to re-envision the Virgin Mary, patron of Venice and Renaissance symbol of female humility, as a militant goddess in her own right. Marinella’s Dandolo prays to Mary as alta guerriera, noble warrioress; the dreaming
Rainiero experiences her as an autonomous deity rather than a simple intercessor between God and man.209 In L’Enrico’s vision of the world, “empires, provinces, and kingdoms served her and her gestures, as well as the earth and the sea and the most humble and noble people in the world, and the dark rulers of hell; in authority and in the power of her aims and motions she yields only
208 “Fà, che vittorioso, e sano rieda Da la battaglia il Capitan gradito; Cessi de la fatiche, e resti preda La gran Città, scorra, di sangue il lito: Scorri il sangue inimico … E goda di un tal Duce Adria felice, Ch’al suo valor ben tanta gratia lice.” Ibid., 27.62, 27.63. 209 Ibid., 23.24. 172
to him whose supreme power made the world and the heavens.”210 Mary’s potency and the inimitable righteousness of the Venetian crusaders in Marinella’s narrative clearly showcase the woman writer’s ability to positively contribute as an epic speaker and civic state-maker.
The final part of L’Enrico’s civic equation is Erina, who plays upon the prophetic example set by Fonte’s good sorceress to recount Venetian history for a shipwrecked hero. Like
Circetta, Erina inhabits a “solitary and wild place” from which she observes the world of men and the siege at Constantinople.211 She also owes her wide-ranging education in such subjects as astrology, history, and geography to a wise parent, in her case a deceased natural philosopher of
Venetian heritage called Fileno.212 Like Circe’s daughter, Erina is the inheritor of her father’s island domain, which space frees her to pursue the life of the mind as a woman. Unlike the infamous palaces of epic literature’s assembly of wicked enchantresses and beguiling seductresses (i.e. Calypso, Alcina), Circetta and Erina’s homes function as bastions of learning, magic, prophecy, and virtue. L’Enrico embarks on the prophetic section of its myth-affirming exposition after Erina finds Venier wandering the isolated shores of her land and grants him shelter. She puts both her hospitality and erudition at the lost crusader’s disposal and counsels him to “be in peace and end the labor and pain that shake your heart,” setting aside warfare to
“live blessed, happy, and cheerful here among wild beast and trees.”213 Where wicked enchantresses entice men to abide with them via sex, Erina offers Venier knowledge, stating that
“man becomes divine by contemplating the main principles of hidden causes and incredible
210 “A lei gli imperi, le province e i regni Servono ubbidienti, e ai cenni sui la Terra e ’l mar con gl’nfimi e i più degni Del mondo, e i regnatori inferni e bui; In dominio e ’n poter le mete e i segni Passa d’ogn’altro, e solo cede a lui, A lui sol cede il cui sovran potere Formò già il mondo e le superne sfere.” Ibid., 16.67. 211 “loco ermo e selvaggio” Ibid., 5.59. 212 Fileno may be an autobiographical reference to Marinella’s own father Giovanni Marinelli, who oversaw and condoned her education. Meredith Ray, Daughters of Alchemy, 107. 213 “‘Datti pace,’ diss’ella, ‘e cessi intanto Il travaglio e ’l doler che ’l cuor ti scote…qui tra fiere e tronchi ancora lice Viver beato e ’n sé lieto e felice.’” Ibid., 5.80. 173
works … come to my home, in which great knowledge has established the highest beauty … stay your immoveable destiny [by keeping] near us.”214 Although Venier ultimately rejects this path, he does accept Erina’s offer of instruction, much of which takes the form of ekphrastic lessons.
Where Floridoro’s Silano gazed at Venice’s “future” upon the walls of Circetta’s palace, Venier sees images of the state in a crystalline wall built into Erina’s home. Like Ciretta, Erina applies her preternatural wisdom to those images to reveal the glorious past, present, and future of
Venice
As the first Venetian history penned by a woman, Fonte’s iteration of civic myth via a female mouthpiece was undoubtably a key model for Erina’s speech. Like Circetta, Erina begins her account with the barbarian invasions of Italy and Venice’s origin story. In Floridoro, Circetta reports that these incursions forced the peninsula’s nobility to seek refuge amongst the rocks and reads of the Veneto. L’Enrico’s verses repeat this narrative; because the book is set in a much later period than Floridoro, Erina must look backward as well as forward to reveal the totality of
Venice’s story. She starts by making Venier gaze upon a sculpted group of refugees huddled on rocks near the sea, saying “an unvanquished people fled wars and their paternal homes and settled their excellent hopes on rocks here by the salty shore … while a barbarian throng burned and overran all Italy with iron and fire.”215 Several octaves later, Atilla the Hun descends on Italy in a blaze of death and destruction.216 Like Fonte, Marinella personifies the nascent city who escaped such ruin as a happy young woman set in stunning natural surrounds. Together Erina and Venier watch as the feminine polity who “lies among sand, waves, and the colocynth plant
214 “Col contemplar delle cagioni ascose Gli alti principi e le mirabil opre, Vien l’uom divin … Vieni al mio tetto, in cui gran saper pose Somma bellezza … appresso noi stan le tue sorti immote.” Ibid., 8.80–81, 6.19. 215 “Fuggon di guerre e la paterna soglia E di que’ sassi sul salato lembo Ferma popolo invitto eccelsa voglia … Mentre barbara torma Italia tutta Con ferro e fuoco intorno arde e trascorre.” Ibid., 7.3–4. 216 Ibid., 7.9–10. 174
… grow[s] similarly to a beloved daughter in the bossum of her gentle mother; fate and the elements are propitious to her, destiny is her dear friend, and the sky serene”217 If these flattering lines sounds familiar, it is because they resemble the Floridoran lines that open this chapter and depict Venice as a growing maiden rooted in the waves and covered by the heavens.218
As previously discussed, Venice’s unique watery environ was an integral pillar of its civic mythology. Fonte’s book with its specific discussions of the Sensa and natality of Venus devotes more attention to this aspect of Venetian myth than the pages of L’Enrico, but Marinella and Erina do pay homage to the Republic’s wondrous geography. They celebrate Venier’s homeland as “a handsome city enclosed by waves” who “burned like clear lighting” “over whose beauty the heavens moved stable and merry winds of peace.”219 When Erina takes Venier on a flying tour of the globe later in the narrative, she informs him that Heaven itself oversaw
Venice’s creation.220 Together they observe the Veneto’s mainland rivers, the gulf in which La
Serenissima sits, and the lagoon islands that form its heart.221 Erina divides her praise between the state’s natural marvels and the manmade “wharves and venerable temples … superb buildings, huge and admirable bridges, and lavish sepulchers” that dot its landscape.222 Of these,
Saint Mark’s Basilica in particular stands out as a Venetian edifice so magnificent that “there is nothing similar to it any place where the sun kindles the day with the light from its rays.”223
217 “Tra sabbia e flutti, ed apio amaro posa … E crescer … non altrimenti Che cara figlia a dolce madre in seno Ch’abbia propizio il fato e gli elementi, Cara amica la sorte e ’l ciel sereno.” Ibid., 7.5, 7.7. 218 Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 12.19. 219 “Pargoletta città, cui cingon l’onde”; “qual chiaro folgor…ardea”; and “Sopra la cui bellezza il ciel scuotea Aure di pace stabili e gioconde” Marinella, L’Enrico, 7.5. 220 Ibid., 22.12. 221 Ibid., 22.13–15. 222 From “Ecco l’eccelse moli e i venerandi Templi … Li superbi edifici o gli ammirandi Ponti, le moli e i sontuosi avelli.” Ibid., 22.16. 223 “Simil non è ovunque intorno il sole Con lume de’ suoi raggi il giorno accenda.” Ibid., 22.20. 175
In addition to lauding Venice’s miraculous appearance, Erina gives a rough chronological overview of its doges that culminates in a Lepanto prophecy. This section is shorter than
Circetta’s exhaustive ducal history, but as Maria Galli Stampino has pointed out, nonetheless reinforced Marinella’s writerly authority as an act of political knowledge recitation.224 Erina names twenty-five historical doges and one fictionalied Venetian leader called Pietro Candiano, her ancestor and link to the Republic. Strikingly, Erina’s stories defame a number of these figures as often as they lionize others. Candiano, Teodato Ipato, and Ottone Orseolo for example are all criticized as former doges with despotic tendencies. This strange negativity led Virginia
Cox to diagnose L’Enrico’s civic schema with a case of ideological dissonance. She argues that
Marinella’s “reprise of Moderata Fonte’s ekphrastic encomium of Venice has almost the opposite effect to that generally intended … more than the praise of a triumphant and inspirational city, we have something more like an argument for retreating from civic life altogether … a mixed account of [Venice’s] successes and failures.”225 I will offer an alternative reading.
Early in her account, Erina describes Venetians as an innately peaceful people free of
“the bite of ambitious desire … in their kingly hearts,” a characterization which alludes to the state’s mythic liberality and republicanism, a desirable quality in any polity’s general citizenry.226 Where the Venetian patriciate is concerned however, Erina finds that in them “a noble will to rule boils perpetually.”227 Given that Venice’s government depended on the bureaucratic participation of its elite men, such a desire was no bad thing when tempered by the
224 Maria Galli Stampino, “The Woman Narrator’s Voice: The Case of Lucrezia Marinella’s Enrico,” Italian Studies 69, no. 1 (March 2014): 90–91. 225 Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 176–177. 226 From “Popol di pace … a cui non voglia ambiziosa porga morso … ai petti regi.” 7.13. 227 From “del regnar continuo bolle Ne’ magnanimi petti alto desio.” 6.24. 176
love of God and state; only an unadulterated liking for power was inimical to serving the
Republic personified in Rainiero’s dream. With this distinction in mind, I contend that Erina’s ducal history was meant to function as a Marinellan civics lesson on good leadership in keeping with canto one’s declaration that L’Enrico’s contents should “awaken noble minds to just work and glorious feats.”228 Marinella dedicated the book to doge and senate and they, presumably, were the intended audience of Erina’s musings on power and its pitfalls. Crucially, Erina informs
Venier that her own ancestor was a good man until the lure of political dominion corrupted him, lamenting “alas, his unbridled wish to rule twisted him from right and made him turn from reason … so in arrogance he loved only his lofty mind, disdained the world, and little esteemed
God.”229 The price of such arrogance was exile. Similarly, she explains that the eighth century doge Teodato Ipato was overthrown “because his citizens feared that he would become a tyrant at the end.”230
If these stories are grim, Erina’s discourse is not limited to coups and criticism—those doges who consistently put the Venice’s needs above their own and who emulated virtues like piety and valor, especially when faced with the eastern other, receive heaps of praise. Hence we see Erina smile on Pietro Ziani (the doge after Enrico Dandolo) for his “goodness and wisdom in governing and leading his faithful people.”231 Additionally, Erina praises an early doge named
Orso for putting his earthly possessions at the state’s disposal and for desiring nothing more from life than the opportunity “to consecrate himself to God.”232 Her palace wall shows a Partecipazio doge “ruling prudently and wisely” and “courageously longing for heaven.”233 Where Venice’s
542 “destar … inclite menti Ad opre giuste, a gloriosi eventi.” Ibid., 1.3. 229 “Ahi, d’imperar troppo sfrenata voglia Dal dritto e da ragion lo torce e svoglia … Così superbo l’alta mente estolle Che ’l mondo sprezza e poco apprezza Dio.” Ibid., 6.23–24. 230 A loose translation of “Perché temendo i cittadini sui Che di tiranno al rin non dasse avviso.” Ibid., 7.20. 231 From “Quegli è Pietro Cian, che buono e saggio Il popol suo fedel governa e regge.” Ibid., 7.25. 232 “Sacrarsi a Dio” Ibid., 7.40. 233 “Reggere il regno suo, prudente e saggio … ecco come animoso al Cielo aspira.” Ibid., 7.42. 177
eastward-facing empire is concerned, Marinella directs Erina to honor Domenico and Vitale
Michele for their contributions to the fight for the Holy Land and, in Vitale’s case, for his successful claiming of Samos, Rhodes, and Chios for Venice.234 Domenico Contarini is applauded for conquering Zara.235 Sebastiano Venier and Marcantonio Bragadin are honored as willing combatants in the War of Cyprus and as exemplars of western heroism and patriotism.
Bragadin, who was killed by Turkish forces at Famagosta during the early struggle for Cyprus, is eulogized as a Venetian martyr who dared “to hurl himself at the strong barbarians with his sword” despite the knowledge that the Turks’ superior numbers guaranteed his death.236
Sebastiano Venier and the Serenissima fleet sail past Erina and Venier to battle the Ottoman
“swollen dragon that vomits and breathes black poisonous smoke and violent lightning.”237 In the face of cannon fire, sinking ships, and human mortality, the Lepanto hero acts as an indomitable leader who “encourages his men, shoots down the moon (a reference to the Ottoman crescent) and deprives the Thracians of color.”238
To fully understand the significance of these scenes, we must consider them next to the book’s central plotline, the medieval siege of Constantinople. When taken as a whole, Erina’s ducal stories and L’Enrico’s greater Fourth Crusade narrative merge to create an impression of a western state that has weathered bad leaders and civil unrest but never succumbed to vice.
Instead, Venice has consistently proved its merit by rebounding from such challenges with a renewed commitment to order, piety, and republican excellence. The Marinellan paradigm which elevates virtue as the lodestar of Venetian destiny provided a meaningful and striking contrast to
234 Ibid., 7.30, 7.43. 235 Ibid., 7.44. 236 “che sol col brando Tra barbari si scaglia” Ibid., 7.57–58. 237 “Del tumido dragon, che vome e spira Funo d’atro velen, fulmini d’ira.” Ibid., 7.54. 238 From “V’è’l gran Sebastian che I suoi rincuora, La luna abbatte, e i Traci discolora.” Ibid., 7.56. 178
the disorganized, perfidious Byzantine empire featured in L’Enrico’s pages. Where Venice rejected tyranny, Dandolo and his literary crusading compatriots could not trust autocratic
Byzantium to find its own way to just, Christian governance. Thus by acknowledging a number of her homeland’s past failures alongside its successes, Marinella did not scorn civic life so much as highlight the fact that state-making is a fraught business whose success depends upon the civic commitment of citizens and their leaders alike.
In making the female sorceress Erina the mouthpiece of that argument, Marinella like
Fonte before her further revealed that the minds and words of women had their own role to play in unveiling the glories of Venice, fashioning the contours of myth and history, and guiding the early modern state farther down the road of excellence. This fundamentally feminist argument brought women under the umbrella of citizenly belonging and incontrovertibly entangled the acuity of the epic tales’ masterful, flattering rendition of Venetian myth with both the female speakers’ legitimacy as civic accountants and the reader’s willingness to accept them as such. In other words, contemporaries could not buy into the vision of Venetian greatness on offer in
Floridoro and L’Enrico without also accepting the texts’ distinctly untraditional view of femininity as embodied by its civic storytellers. This entanglement was no accident, for as an analysis of the books’ characters will reveal, Fonte and Marinella understood civic discourse as a rhetorical gateway to a subversive reimagining of the nature of gender and the scope of respectable femininity.
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE FEMINIST POLITICS OF VENETIAN EPIC
If early modern readers confronted the lyric woman writer as a newly political authority figure with the publication of Tredici canti del Floridoro and L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato, so too did they encounter a newly non-binary conception of womanhood in the dynamic female characters who populate the texts’ tales of daring, romance, and war. While
Renaissance historiography has often brushed aside the dynastic and political themes that infuse
L’Enrico and especially Floridoro as so much antiquated literary garnish, their preoccupation with gender roles has been well documented. Meredith Ray, for example, has shown that
Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella used their epic work in part to position women as students of alchemy, science, and secrets. In Poesia epica e scrittura femminile nel Seicento,
Laura Lazzari examined how the letterate used the fantastical islands cum female domains of sorceress characters Erina and Circetta to invert the early modern trope that framed amorous femininity as a threat to men.1 Such studies proffer vital spadework on the ways in which epic lyric and feminist querelle ideology intersect in Floridoro and L’Enrico; however, I believe that the full meaning of Fonte and Marinella’s pro-woman agenda cannot be fully understood when analyzed in isolation from their civic activity. In other words, Fonte and Marinella’s adoption of civic themes and their manipulation of feminine norms cannot be divorced. The heterodox principle that an early modern Venetian woman could contribute in a public, citizenly capacity to
1 Meredith Ray, “Scientific Culture and the Renaissance Querelle des Femmes: Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella,” in Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Lazzari, Poesia epica e scrittura femminile, 115–119. 180
the state’s image-making campaign was itself a progressive stance and one that generated the intellectual grounds necessary to inspire and legitimate additional challenges to contemporary gender norms. Chapter Three demonstrated that Fonte and Marinella’s use of civic discourse as passport to print was crucial to their ability to traverse gender spheres and experiment with the traditionally virile genre of epic poetry. Chapter Four continues this vein of analysis to explore how Fonte and Marinella deployed the cover of civic speech to interrogate contemporary gender categories and remake the stock epic characters of guerierra and sorceress as ambassadors of feminism. I argue that Fonte and Marinella’s decision to intermix Venetian myth with pro- woman discourse gave balance to their texts, grounding the Renaissance reader’s encounter with transgressive gender ideology in the culturally authoritative sphere of civic rhetoric. Moreover, if the Venetian cittadine’s audience accepted them as legitimate speakers and knowledge-makers based on their civic fluency, that authority by proxy lent credibility to Floridoro and L’Enrico’s implicit argument that early modern women were capable of far more than the hearthside pursuit of orthodox feminine virtues.
When Fonte published the fantastical tale of an Armenian warrior-queen's quest to reclaim her inheritance and Marinella her account of Enrico Dandolo’s crusade adventures alongside a colorful cast of medieval characters including several guerriere in 1581 and 1635 respectively, they joined a literary tradition long accustomed to the incorporation of female actors. If woman-authored epic was a rarity, the pages of the chivalric cannon were littered with trailing blond tresses, flashing limbs, fair skin disguised by cold metal armor, and shining
Petrarchan eyes. The sword-wielding woman warrior and magical enchantress who fought with and cast spells upon epic male protagonists by turn were the most ubiquitous female character types. Typically, their plotlines and personas were defined by binary gender ideology that limited
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female potential to the poles of human nature—essential purity or essential wickedness. Female characters weaponized the body to seduce male protagonists or wore their chastity like a shield.
Enchantresses resident in the liminal spaces of the world martialed their powers to corrupt or selflessly serve others. Militant women proffered tragic drama by dying romantically and often accidentally at the hands of their male paramours; those who survived to the end of the book and a “happy” ending almost inevitably received one that entailed marriage and the resurrection of patriarchal social mores. While Fonte and Marinella could not eschew epic tropes and character types altogether, writing themselves out of their episteme and chosen genre, they did reject these binary stereotypes. Their lyric emphasizes feminine merit and redistributes female traits to the rational, moderate middle of the premodern identity spectrum to expand the scope of female possibility.2
The first section of this chapter will explore the figuration of the woman warrior in
Floridoro and L’Enrico. As Gerry Milligan points out in Mortal Combat: Women, Gender, and
War in Italian Renaissance Literature, chivalric epic poetry saw a proliferation of militant female characters in the sixteenth century.3 This was due in part to elite women’s increasing cultural and political power at Italian courts and the real if rare martial activity of persons like
Caterina Sforza and Isabella Colonna. Scholars also theorize that the literary adoption of fighters from the “weaker” sex was linked to the diminution of Italian might and contemporary perceptions of Italian masculinity as derelict in the century of the Italian Wars.4 While these
2 Contemporary body theory positioned heat, temperament, and reason along a spectrum of metaphysical perfection with hot, moderate, rational masculinity occupying the middle position. Femininity was defined by both excess (i.e. excessive passion) and lack (i.e. lack of willpower) and therefore occupied the poles. However, if this identity model typically reinforced patriarchal supremacy, it also created a theoretical space of flexibility whereby a woman might approach male virtues and values depending on her positioning along the spectrum. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity, 20–25. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 135–137 3 Gerry Milligan, Mortal Combat: Women, Gender, and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2018), 43–44. 4 Ibid., 5–6, 29, 43–69. 182
shifts did not propel historical women onto the earthen battlefields of Europe in statistically significant numbers, it did facilitate the normalization of virile womanhood on the page.
Traditionally, women warriors were defined by an alterity that could range from the simply primitive to the monstrous. From the wild, marriage-eschewing followers of Diana to the ferocious, man-hating Amazons reputed to hack off their breasts in the name of military efficiency to the cave-dwelling terror of Grendel’s mother, the militant women of western literature long functioned as impediments to social order and foils to proper femininity. The female warriors of medieval romance signaled their disruptive difference as defenders of pagan or infidel regimes. While heretical heroines, sylvan archers, and cultural anxieties around sex difference survived into the hybrid romance-epics of the Renaissance, the correlation between fighting women and the grotesque shrank. The querelle des femmes posited a possible if rare female capacity for arms and prominent Italian intellectuals such as Sperone Speroni, Lodovico
Domenichi, and Torquato Tasso debated the utility and artificiality of cultural proscriptions on female militancy.5 J. Chimène Bateman and Eleonora Stoppino have shown that sixteenth- century poets led by Lodovico Ariosto further destabilized patriarchal gender dichotomies by populating their epic stories with cavaliere whose temperaments combined a deviant armored ferocity with maidenly virtue and Christian piety, creating a viable literary space for exemplary women warriors.6 Thus the Bradamante archetype for example, which had been defined by Arab ancestry and, usually, illegitimacy, in the medieval era became an honorable Carolingian paladin, the matriarchal founder of the d’Este lineage, and spur to Saracen warrior Ruggiero’s conversion to Christianity.7 This transformation did come at a price however: increased susceptibility to
5 Ibid., 24–36. 6 J. Chimène Bateman, “Amazonian Knots: Gender, Genre and Ariosto’s Women Warriors,” Modern Language Notes 1, no. 2 (January 2007):1–3, 20–22. Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction, 29–33. 7 Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction, 27–29. 183
defeat and domestication. If Bradamante and the Furioso’s titular hero both spend their plotlines chasing itinerant love interests around the globe in lieu of fulfilling their knightly duties to
Charlemagne and warding off the African attack on Paris, they receive wildly disparate narrative ends. Orlando concludes his tale by shaking off the madness of love, resuming his martial career, and killing the Saracen king Agramante, leaving him free to pursue new adventures in future;
Bradamante by contrast trades in her sword for a domestic life focused around matrimony and motherhood.8 There is a certain resonance between the epic woman warrior’s surrender of her arms and the early modern world of letters in which women writers were encouraged to eschew print and give up their pens upon marriage. Just as Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte contravened that norm in their publishing careers, so too did they reject standard epic scripting for L’Enrico and Floridoro’s leading militant female characters. This is especially true in the case of Fonte and her depiction of the warrior queen Risamante, which character’s epic quest to claim the throne of the fantastical kingdom of Armenia made patent the feminist message embedded in Floridoro’s civic passages that women could be potent political actors in their own right.
The guerriere of Renaissance epic poetry, be they products of feminist pens or no, highborn noblewomen or untamed daughters of the forest, all got their metaphorical start via the opportunity to pursue one thing: a martial education. Their mastery of swordsmanship, archery and, often, courtly manners referenced a western debate over whether women could (or should) be trained in skills beyond the domestic arts that dated back to antiquity. Aristotle, father of
8 Orlando furioso also features the female knight Marfisa; although she walks away from the plot unmarried, her potential as a feminist icon is debatable. She is Muslim in the first instance and was raised by a lion, aligning her with older warrior woman-wild nature tropes. Pamela Benson and Ita Mac Carthy argue that Marfisa is an Ariostan cipher that encourages the consideration of female independence and virility in way that recognizes gender difference but never resolves its nor adopts a definite protofeminist stance. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman, 147. Ita Mac Carthy, “Marfisa and Gender Performance in Orlando Furioso, Italian Studies 60, no. 2 (2005): 179–182. 184
Renaissance philosophy and misogyny, precluded any theoretical space for bellicose womanhood by insisting on the other sex’s physical frailty, mental weakness, and natural subjectivity to male rule. Platonists by contrast believed that women, though feebler than men, could contribute to social goods like the defense of the polis and that they should receive the education necessary to realize that capacity accordingly.9 This debate continued in the catalog tradition that informed the querelle; case in point, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris painted the virago as an alternatively unnatural or dangerous being. For Boccaccio, the rare woman whose virtue thrived in the public sphere possessed a divergent virility that functionally rendered them non-women; their exception proved the rule that an average woman’s attempt to disregard gender norms risked corruption to both self and state. Thus Semiramis’ misgendered roles as queen and general seeded sexual depravity while Athaliah of Jerusalem’s immoderate desire for power led her to cut down the line of David.10 Fonte and Marinella marshalled the auctoritas of epic poetry to intervene in this debate and assert collective womanhood’s positive potential both martial and mental.
In Floridoro, Risamante is the vehicle of this argument. As “a warrior of bold and frank aspect,” she enjoys a reputation in many lands for “win[ning] all difficult battles.”11 And indeed in her first appearance in the book Risamante undertakes and prevails in a joust-turned-duel against a giant. Soon after, readers learn that the strong-willed character will eventually found the dynasty from which the Medici, one of Renaissance Italy’s most powerful families, will spring. The most famous octaves of Floridoro, which occur early on and open canto four, play on Risamante’s virtue and valor to assert that martial prowess and bookish intelligence are
9 Milligan, Mortal Combat, 12–14. 10 Ibid., 64–69. See Boccaccio, Famous Women, 8–12, 102–106. 11 “un guerrier d’aspetto ardito, e franco” and “vince tutti i casi gravi.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 1.51, 1.52. 185
equally attainable for both sexes rather than the provenance of men, assuming women are allowed to reach their full potential.12 Fonte writes:
Women in every age were given great judgement and spirit by nature; they are born no less able than men to prove their wisdom and valor with study and care; so why if their bodily form is the same [as men’s] and their substances are not varied, if they have similar food and speech must they then have different courage and wits? One has always seen and still sees (provided that a woman wished to fix her thoughts on it) more than one lady succeed in the military and take merit and fame away from many men; And thus in letters and in every task that man practices women have achieved and achieve such good results that they have no reason to envy men. And although there are not many women of such worthy and famous condition, it is because they have not turned their hearts to heroic and powerful acts for many reasons. … If when a daughter is born the father set her with his son to an equal task she would not be inferior nor unequal to her brother in lofty and gallant deeds whether he places her among armed squadrons with him or set her to learn some liberal arts, but because she is raised to other employments she is little esteemed for her education.13
The argument that culture and education rather than nature determine the pursuits, skills, and weaknesses of women also appears in L’Enrico, though less overtly than in Fonte’s address.
Marinella’s commentary on martial femininity primarily revolves around the Christian warrior
Claudia, one of three female fighters in the book but the only one from the west. In canto two,
Marinella implies that Claudia achieved her station as the beneficiary of precisely the type of open education promoted by Fonte. While Claudia is processing before Dandolo with her fellow
12 The passage that follows is the most commonly quoted section of Floridoro given its explicit feminism and connection to the ideas of Il merito delle donne. It also enjoyed an afterlife in the seventeenth century; while Floridoro was not reprinted, this passage was featured in texts like Cristoforo Bronzini’s Della dignità, & nobiltà delle donne (Florence: Zanobi Pignoni, 1624), 37–38. See also: Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 196–198, 290–294. Price, Moderata Fonte, 108–110. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 177–179. Finucci, “Moderata Fonte and the Genre of Women’s Chivalric Romances,” 22–25. 13 “Le donne in ogni età fur da Natura Di gran giudicio, e d’animo dotate, Né mē atte à mostrar con studio e cura Senno, a valor degli uomini son nate; E perche, se comune è la figura, Se non son le sostanze variate, S’hanno simile un cibo, e un parlar, denno Differente haver poi l’ardire, e ’l senno. Sempre s’è visto, e vede (pur ch’alcuna Donna v’habbia voluto il pensier porre) Ne la militia riuscir più d’una, E’l pregio, e’l grido à molti huomini torre, E così ne le lettere, e in ciascuna Impresa, che l’huom pratica, e discorte, Le Donne sì buon frutto han fatto, e fanno, Che gli huomini a invidiar punto non hanno. E benche di sì degno, e sì famoso Grado di lor non sia numero molto, Gli è perche ad atto heroico e virtuoso Non hanno il cor per più rispetti volto. … Se quando nasce una figliuola al padre, La ponesse col figlio à un’opra eguale, Non saria ne le imprese alte, e leggiadre Al frate inferior, nè disuguale; O la ponesse in fra l’armate squadre Seco, ò à imparar qualche arte liberale; Ma perche in altri affar viene allevata, Per l’education poco è stimata.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 4.1–4.4. 186
crusaders, Marinella writes that “The last is lofty Claudia, who is said to come from noble Latin blood of Augustan descent; She in her first years avidly learned the lofty virtue of ancient heroes
… she demonstrates that custom and not nature put fear into one sex and valor into the other.”14
That sentiment echoed Fonte’s words as well as Marinella’s prior ruminations on the question of female learning in La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne (1601). In chapter five of that text,
Marinella quotes a section of Floridoro’s disquisition on education ala Fonte—whom Marinella somewhat haughtily describes as “cognizant to some extent of the excellence of our noble sex”
—before enlightening La nobiltà’s audience with her take on the matter.15 Like her predecessor,
Marinella admits that few contemporary women work in weapons and letters, a paucity she blames on men who, “fearing to lose their authority and become the servants of women[,] frequently forbid them even the knowledge of how to read and write.”16 After comparing
Aristotle and Plato’s opinions on this issue (unsurprisingly, Marinella sides with Plato), she declares, “Oh would to God that in our times it was lawful for women to practice arms and letters! We would see marvelous things … who would be readier than women to take up arms with intrepid spirit in defense of the country? … I wish that these men would undertake this experiment, that they would train a boy and girl of similar age, good nature, and intelligence in letters and arms so they could see how quickly and more expertly the girl would learn than the boy, causing her to surpass him by far.”17
14 “L’ultima è Claudia altera, che dicese Dal gran sangeu latin, progenie augusta; Costei ne’ suoi primi anni avid’ apprese De’ prischi eroi l’alta virtù vetusta … Mostra che l’uso e non natura ha messo Timor nell’un, valor nell’altro sesso.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 2.29. 15 From “Et Moderata Fonte, che in qualche parte conobbe la eccellenza di un tanto sesso.” Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne, 32. 16 From “Percioche gli huomini, temendo di no perdere la signoria, et di divenir servi delle donne, vietano à quelle ben spesso ancho il saper leggere, & scrivere.” Ibid. 17 “O Dio volesse, che à questi nostri tempi fosse lecito alle donne l’essercitarsi nelle armi, et nelle lettere. che si vedrebbono cose meravigliose … & chi sarebbe piu pronto di fare scudo con l’intrepido petto in difesa della Patria delle donne? … io vorrei, che questi tali facessero questa esperienza, che essercitassero un putto, & una fanciulla d’una medesima età, & ambidue di buona natura, & ingegno nelle lettere, & nelle armi, che vedrebbono in quanto 187
Fonte had of course proposed this experiment in 1581, but where she “contented herself with making [women] equal,” Marinella insisted on the other sex’s superiority.18 Chapter Five will investigate binary gender ideology and the question of which author was the more radical, but for now what I want to emphasize is that for all of Marinella’s insistence on her own subversion in 1601, Risamante is the bolder, more transgressive warrior of the two epic heroines discussed here.19 For example, where Fonte’s warrior commands her own army and engages in warfare for the express purpose of claiming Armenia’s throne for herself, Claudia is one servant among many to follow Enrico Dandolo to Byzantium and war. Both women are educated, but
Risamante has the added benefit of being a magician’s pupil and presumably possesses skills otherwise off limits to mortals.20 Additionally, as Maria Galli Stampino points out, martial tendencies aside much of Claudia’s behavior aligns with seventeenth-century notions of female decorum. For instance, she is a model of proper womanly reticence who does not speak until spoken to, and even then only does so in the final cantos of the book.21 The same cannot be said of Risamante, who treats with kings, topples cities, and rescues adulteresses. Still, Claudia’s fighting spirit and civic service to the Venetian Republic as crusader bespeak an unorthodox tutelage and public display of womanly potential. And if the guerriera’s lips and tongue are silent, one could argue that she is riotously vocal through her sword. Where Risamante can demonstrate her bravery on the field of battle and in public rhetoric like her cocky proclamation
minor tempo più peritamente sarebbe instrutta la fanciulla del fanciullo. & anzo lo vincerebbe di gran lunga.” Ibid., 33. 18 “Ella si contentò, che divenissero equali.” Ibid., 34. 19 I use “western” in reference to Risamante in view of her dynastic ties to Christendom and Europe. 20 The wizard Celidante stole Risamante from her cradle prior to the book’s action because he foresaw that “the stars inclined her to lofty and gracious works.” Fonte does not describe her education beyond saying Celidante trained her “in every trial and military art,” but her political destiny and supernatural upbringing imply a far-reaching, rich education. “Le stele La inclinavano ad opre alte e leggiadre” and “in ogni prova e arte militare.” Fonte, Floridoro, 2.31, 13.53. 21 Stampino, “A Singular Venetian Epic Poem,” 47–48. 188
that “when I find a way to expose myself to some dangerous feat I don’t draw back, on the contrary I relish it more when it’s held as an impossible thing,” Claudia must speak through her actions.22 She is most “eloquent” when Byzantine fighters belittle her boundary-breaking occupation and bring battle to her on the assumption that a woman-at-arms must be less powerful than they. For instance, when the warrior Argalto spies Claudia dealing death to his compatriots during a pitched battle outside Constantinople’s walls, he spurs his destrier toward her yelling
“so much better would you have been among threads, needles, and spindles, pomp and labor worthy of your hand … under concealed and closed roofs … and that you always avoided the uses of bitter war and martial honors that now materialize by my hand.”23 In response, Claudia sticks her blade in Argalto’s heart.24 She does not speak however until canto twenty-four (of twenty-seven), and then only after the enemy commander Oronte addresses her.25
One regard in which Marinella deviated from gendered literary norms where Fonte did not is her rejection of the gender reveal scene or the dramatic epic trope in which female warriors costumed and perceived as men suddenly and spectacularly display their sex, usually by removing their helm to reveal a woman’s rippling pale tresses. These transitions often came as a surprise to characters and audience alike, as when an Ariostan envoy discloses Bradamante’s identity after she enters into her first duel as a man dressed in white, triumphs, and rides away.26
Sometimes readers are in on the secret, an epic plot device used to imbue scenes like the Tassean
22 “All’hor ch’io trovo il modo D’espormi a qualche impresa perigliosa, Non mi ritiro indietro, anzi più godo Quando si tien per impossibil cosa.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 5.71. 23 Marinella, L’Enrico, 3.51. 24 Ibid., 3.53. 25 Ibid., 24.26–30. In contrast, Claudia’s Byzantine counterpoint Meandra is both brave and verbose; however, as a constituent of the east the progressive quality of her feminine assertiveness is counterbalanced by her otherness. 26 Ariosto, Orlando furioso, 1.60–64, 1.69–70. 189
episode in which the crusader Tancredi slays the Saracen warrioress Clorinda, his beloved, after mistaking her for just another armored enemy with extra poignancy.27 Gender reveal episodes played into the genre’s divertive function while reinforcing contemporary associations of war, strength, and weaponry with masculinity. The typical armored woman was indistinguishable from a man, an illegible outlier who functioned as exception rather than model relative to the
“other” sex (see Figure 3). As a result, her alterity and seemingly subversive act of cross- dressing could be understood as literary safeguard of patriarchal order. Tredici canti del
Floridoro replicates this device. L’Enrico does not. Fonte’s audience confronts rumors of
Risamante’s existence before encountering her on the page and then only as a figure known for
Figure 3: Plate 36 and Plate 10 of Orlando Furioso di M. Lodovico Ariosto novamente adornato di figure di rame da Girolamo Porro padovano et di altre cose che saranno notate nella seguente facciata. Venice: Francesco Sanese, 1584. 402, 90. Newberry Library. On the left, the Ariostan woman warrior Marfisa is depicted among a group of male knights from whom she is visually indistinguishable. On the right we see a legible, proper woman.
27 Tasso, 12.52–68. 190
their valiant reputation and snazzy insignia, a white flower on a green cloth. Grammatically, the
Armenian royal is referred to by male nouns and pronouns such as “lo,” “il cavalier,” and
“lui.”28 That the character bears a partially white device, the traditional color of female warriors, hints at her secret identity, but readers must wait for the guerierra to discard her chivalric accoutrement to be certain of her sex and learn her name. She does so after killing the Parthian king Macandro at the Athenian court home to Floridoro’s love, the princess Celsidea, whose honor was at stake in the contest won by Risamante. During the ensuing jubilation, Risamante
“removed his helm and revealed that the warrior so strong in the saddle was a noble maiden” with hair “more luminous than gold,” crimson cheeks, and starry eyes.29 In Marinella’s L’Enrico by contrast, Claudia’s identity and that of her female Byzantine counterparts are never sublimated by their armor, as evidenced by Claudia’s battlefield disputes over swords and spindles with Argalto and Oronte. Because Marinella’s guerriere are legible as women and fighters simultaneously, in this regard they are better able to represent womankind’s collective potential to embody traits like martial vigor traditionally understood as virile.
It is vital that civic discourse, that most upright and respectable form of Venetian discourse, grounded Claudia’s distinctly feminine militancy, Risamante’s imperial campaign, and the sword and pen rhetoric borrowed from the querelle in L’Enrico and Floridoro. This is especially true of Fonte’s epic offering, in which citizenly speech and invocations of the myth of
Venice clearly juxtapose transgressive feminine behavior. In L’Enrico, the historical setting of the Fourth Crusade and Marinella’s partisan reimagining of that event as a crucible of Venetian
28 Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 1.51, 2.4–2.5. 29 “l’elmo si tolse, Et mostrò, chel guerrier sì forte in sella Era una gentilissima donzelle” and “de l’or più … luminose.” Ibid., 2.25, 2,26. 191
magnanimity and religiosity provide Claudia’s every sword stroke with a legitimating civic backdrop. In Floridoro, this is achieved via prophecy. If Risamante’s physicality fit within epic norms, as the matriarchal founder of Florence and protagonist of a gender-bending quest for womanly political power, Risamante personified a more subversive femininity than her
Marinellan counterpart in that she marched into battle on her terms rather as the loyal subordinate of a man or state. Prophetic civic verse allowed Fonte to juxtapose Risamante’s digressive female ambition with the conformist tenants of Venetian myth, distilling those tenants into a concentrated form resemblant of the civic oration in content and priming her reader to accept autonomous womanhood as a condition of epic storytelling. Thus we see a narrative episode about adultery and canto four’s progressive disquisition on female learning for example sandwich the cave scene in which the book turns its attention to Venice’s glorious future for the first time. Because these passages are interdependent, the feminist poetics of one draw on the civic authority of the other; crucially, the reverse is also true. It is in that balance that Fonte’s authorial genius lies.
As discussed in Chapter Three, the fay prophecy of canto three describes Venice’s foundation “in the glorious and fortunate bossum of the Adriatic;” it also celebrates the birth of local noblewoman Bianca Capello, the “noble, courteous, and beautiful lady, abode of wisdom and eloquence,” whose marriage to Francesco de Medici was the occasion of Floridoro’s publication.30 Risamante receives the prophecy as a gift of sorts. The fantastical being who wards the magic mirror capable of showing these scenes grants the Armenian warrioress a glimpse of the future as a reward for her efforts to slay a dragon and liberate a foreign queen trapped in an underground tomb several octaves earlier. The tomb is set in a garden that evokes that of the God
30 “Nel glorioso e fortunato seno De l’Adria” and “gentil, cortese e bella Donna, di senno albergo e d’eloquenza.” Ibid., 3.63, 3.66. 192
of Love in the Roman de la Rose, and indeed the Anatolian queen trapped beneath its boxy hedges and thorny roses suffers such exile because she is a victim of that God.31 In a time outside
Floridoro’s action, Love pricked the queen’s heart and set her on the path to adultery, for which sin her husband attempted to kill her. The queen fled west where she was forced to live in an underground cave until the time of his passing (symbolically marked by the demise of the serpent whose presence both protected and imprisoned her), at which time the world would be safe for her once more.32 Fonte’s stanzas assign blame for the queen’s predicament to male sexuality and vice as personified by the deity Love, most powerful of all Gods, and the paramour whose overpowering lust led him to seduce another man’s wife.33 Contrary to social custom,
Fonte directs both Risamante and the Fay prophesier to decline to pass judgement on the “fallen” woman’s deeds including the illegitimate pregnancy that resulted from her affair; the author also granted the character a second chance at life or the freedom to “go and stay among people” through her resurrection above ground thanks to the guerriera’s martial skill.34 That Risamante repurposes her blade for a domestic act of heroism also gestures to a feminist belief on Fonte’s part that strength has distinctly womanly qualities, as does the author’s famous direct address on women’s educative capacity that follows.
31 Ibid., 3.29–33. Valeria Finucci and Julia Kisacky believe that this garden in inspired by the Orlando furioso and the flowery grove in which Angelica rests in canto one; I think it is more likely that both spaces were modelled on the Roman de la Rose. Fonte’s garden closely matches that of de Lorris and De Meun in design: an enclosed garden with hedges with a special rose garden at its center subject to a masculine threat as a result of the God of Love’s trickery (in Fonte, the dragon; in de Meun the Lover). For a description of Fonte’s garden see Tredici canti del Floridoro, 3.10–14. Finucci, and Kisacky, Notes to Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, 122 n. 5. 32 .” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 3.33–36. 33 From “in ciel vince anco i dèi. Ibid., 3.29; 3. 30-31. 34 From “Or puoi gir e star fra le persone.” Ibid., 3.70. Interestingly, the story of the adulterous queen who is allowed to rejoin society rather than bear persecution for breaching contemporary injunctions to female chastity resonates with the life of Bianca Capello, who had an affair with the Florentine Pietro Bonaventuri before marrying him, and then with Francesco de Medici. Else, “Staging Bianca Capello, 280–281. 193
The second instance in which Fonte explicitly interwove feminist gender ideology with civic discourse is marooned sorceress Circetta’s civic history of Venice and Lepanto, which account presages the conclusion of Risamante’s story and her successful conquest of the kingdom of Armenia. After showcasing her authority as civic rhetor and author through
Circetta’s ekphrastic description of Venice’s miraculous foundation, splendid geography, republican government, and Christian heroism in the face of imperial Ottoman aggression, most notably at Lepanto, Fonte redirects her attention to the issue of the powerful, political woman.
Even as Circetta used cantos twelve and thirteen’s octaves to teach Silano about the future of
Italy, Risamante moved ahead behind the scenes on her mission to unseat her twin sister
Biondaura from the throne of Armenia in punishment for Biondaura’s refusal to acknowledge her identity or grant her a position at court.35 Unlike the “soft and delicate” Biondaura who chooses to wage war by male proxy while hiding out in a castle, Risamante is the embodiment of strength and vigor; fully armored, she rides to battle at the head of an army gathered in previous cantos through her daring and feats of valor in defiance of traditional limits on respectable women’s mobility, vigor, and independence.36 By the time the reader catches up with Risamante and her troops in canto thirteen, they have cut a swathe across Asia Minor so wide that “[i]n every place, whether cities or castles of that realm … the banners of the white lily (Risamante’s standard) waved.”37 Only Artemita, the capital city of the disputed realm, remains undefeated; its fate is already in the process of being decided by way of a Herculean single combat battle fought by the guerierra and an eastern king named Cloridabello, Biondaura’s champion. “Driven by great furor” and “wrath,” Risamante prevails.38
35 “la vittoria, e fortunata à pieno, Che consegui nel salso Ambraccio seno.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 13.3 36 “molle e delicata” Ibid., 2.30. 37 “In ogni loco, o sian cittò o castella Di quel realme … l’insegne sventolar del bianco giglio.” Ibid., 13.45. 38 “Spinta da gran furor” and “sdegno.” Ibid., 13.62, 13.61. 194
Floridoro concludes with this distinctly unfeminine, political, and public act. Its ending is anomalous in a genre that subjected virtuous female warriors who managed to survive to a poem’s end to the prototypical fate of a “good” woman—the trade of armor for marriage and the restoration of the patriarchal status-quo. Eleanor Stoppino calls this epic convention the marriage by duel trope. It is achieved by the woman warrior’s defeat in single combat at the hands of her love interest or another male character whose victory grants him the inalienable right to claim his opponent in marriage and subdue her martial qualities.39 Readers see this trope acted out in the
Furioso for example when Bradamante accedes to her parents’ wish that she marry and takes up the role of matriarch to the d’Este lineage after losing a duel to the warrior Ruggiero. The marriage by duel motif reasserted warfare’s orthodox gendering as male and ameliorated martial femininity’s anxiety-inducing deviance by moving women warriors into the private sphere as brides.40 Epic poetry’s function as dynastic chronicle played into its use, restricting the subversive potential of strong women and reinforcing the generative purpose of the female body.
Like Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata, Floridoro outlines the fantastic prehistory of a famous Italian family sprung from the womb of a woman warrior, but Fonte avoids subjecting
Risamante to domestication by omitting to name or conjure the amour with whom she is destined to generate the Medici line in a future period that goes unrealized on the page. The marriage by duel trope is not totally absent from the text—its echo informs Fonte’s decision to structure canto thirteen’s action around an old-fashioned law designed to enforce gender conformity. That is,
Risamante’s duel with Cloridabello is governed by a local precept that grants her control of
Artemita if she prevails, but forces her to reinvest Biondaura and give up the war if the
39 Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction, 22–45. 40 Ibid., 20–29. 195
Babylonian king triumphs.41 Unlike her epic female predecessors however, Risamante does not lose and so retains her identity.
Several decades later, Lucrezia Marinella would also reject the marriage by duel fate for
L’Enrico’s women fighters, as well as the similarly popular epic fate in which guerriere suffered tragic deaths in battle at the hands of men; however, the book’s historical vision of western society could not sustain the dissident femininity of Claudia and her Byzantine peer Meandra.
Where Risamante conquers all on the printed page, Marinella’s warrior women fight each other to death in an isolated arena, removing themselves from the public sphere and surrendering life to preserve their liberation from male dominion.42 Because Fonte and her guardian Nicolò da
Ponte described Floridoro as unfinished, scholars speculate whether Fonte really intended
Risamante’s story to conclude on such a feminist note and as to what the potential storyline of the text’s “missing” cantos might have been where she is concerned.43 I think this is a fruitless endeavor. Additionally, given the overlap of Floridoro’s publication with the ten-year anniversary of Lepanto and the poem’s pronounced resonance with that event, I want to trouble the theory that the book is truly incomplete, its end haphazard rather than purposed. Floridoro’s civic content indicates that Fonte anticipated going to print in or around 1581, and if Fonte could neither meet some original length goal or write herself out of epic’s defining dynastic nature to reject a domestic future for Risamante altogether, the stark halt in action after the Lepanto diegesis and her imperial conquest constitutes a functional narrative climax. A failure to finish
41 Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 13.59. 42 For the duel between Claudia and Meandra in an isolated meadow cum amphitheater, see Marinella, L’Enrico, 24.38–49. There is a third martial woman in L’Enrico, a sylvan archer named Emilia who is neither lay woman nor guerriera as she takes part in the war for Constantinople, but from a remove. Emilia survives the end of the book, but is not a viable exemplar of a respectable public woman because she makes her home both before and after the war in a liminal wood separate from cultured society. 43 Kolsky “Moderata Fonte’s Tredici Canti del Floridoro,” 169. 196
allows the text to emphasize its civic intent and its woman author to proffer characters and readers alike with an exemplar of a new kind of womanhood from within the epic genre.
The far-sighted sorceresses Circetta and Erina, the leading civic speakers of Floridoro and L’Enrico respectively, also provided their authors a canvas on which to explore feminist themes counterbalanced or legitimated by their munificent propagation of the myth of Venice.44
Traditionally, epic enchantresses were limited, essential beings who lived apart from civilization and were defined by their total virtue or wickedness. Preternatural women in the mode of the
Cumaean sibyl or Ariosto’s Melissa were honorable, chaste figures who used magic for limited ends; the amoral sorceress who combined occult power, unfeminine erudition, and overt sexuality to wreak havoc on protagonists and plotline alike was her literary foil. While Circetta and Erina are physically constrained to engage with the world from a geographic remove, Fonte, and to some extent Marinella, rejected this binary behavioral stereotype when crafting their temperaments and storylines. For example, Marinella’s island-bound sylph combines prescient magic with virile academic knowledge of science, woodcraft, and geography, although her unthinking Artemis-like dedication to virginity echoes traditional feminine norms. When the
Venetian crusader Venier washes ashore on her coastline, Erina takes up the role of teacher of men in defiance of contemporary gender norms that privileged male bodies as sites of reason and learning. Erina herself was educated by a scholarly man (her father), but as an adult and sole ruler of her island, occupies the position of academic master for the duration of the book’s action. As Meredith Ray points out in Daughters of Alchemy, Erina’s academic trajectory resembles that of her creator, whose father (a doctor, letterato, and author) facilitated her
44 Although Erina denies being more than a mortal woman, Venier refers to her as “dea,” goddess, and her skills in archery, animal husbandry, and woodcraft transcend human ability. She is also able to communicate with the dead (her father) and interpret the future via ekphrasis. For the Venier reference, see Marinella, L’Enrico, 5.66. 197
education.45 Marinella and Erina teach Venier that “man becomes divine by pondering the main principles and wonderful workings of hidden causes,” and the sorceress attempts to convince the soldier to give up violence in favor of a life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.46 Erina and the damsels who inhabit her palace offer Venier domestic shelter and entertainment, but rather than flirt, shrink, or dally with their male guest they sing him songs about astronomy and natural philosophy and teach him to hunt and fish.47 And in accordance with the lost crusader’s desire to learn “of the peaceful and warlike times of my famous fatherland,” Erina relays the history and future of Venice to character and reader alike.
In addition to canto seven ekphrastic history in which “the beautiful Erina reveals the noble origins of Adria and how she grew … and increased her wealth and glory together to good
Venier,” the Marinellan sorceress also takes the her male guest on a magical chariot tour of the globe.48 The sight of the sparkling Venetian lagoon is the highlight of the trip. Analyzing this venture is crucial to understanding the extent to which feminist argument is inextricably intertwined with civic patriotism argument in the poem. During this episode, Erina and Marinella emphasize the Republic’s greatness in oration-esque rhetoric like the proclamation that “virtues
… more numerous than stars in the sky will adorn the fertile gulf of Venice.”49 After flying over the Arabian Sea, Ethiopia, China, and India, they arrive at the Italian peninsula, “a place happier
45 Meredith Ray, Daughters of Alchemy, 93–94, 104–107. A possible second, literary model for Erina may be Plato’s Diotima. Diotima is a tertiary speaker in Plato’s Symposium; she is described as a learned woman and possible priestess from Arcadia whom Socrates credits with tutoring him in the philosophy of love, from which theorizing the principles of platonic love derive. Marinella included Diotima as an exemplar of female wisdom in La nobiltà, supporting this theory. Plato, The Symposium of Plato, trans. Suzy Q. Groten, ed. John A. Brentlinger (University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 78–94. Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne, 39. 46 “Col contemplar delle cagioni ascose Gli alti principi e le mirabil opre, vien l’uom divin.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 5.81. 47 Ibid., 5.89–93, 21.10–12, 21.16. 48 “La bella Erina al buon Venier discropre D’Adria gli alti principi e come cresca … E l’oro insieme e la sua gloria accresca.” Ibid., 71. (argomento to canto 7) 49 “Virtù … che più assai che ’l ciel le stelle Orneran di Vinegia il sen fecondo.” Ibid., 21.25. 198
than any other” in the world.50 Erina calls Venier’s attention to the islands of Venice, saying
“admire with what diligence and mastery heaven founded it” and “[t]his is [the city] that greatness encompasses and which removes impediments and thorns from her people, whose attire is inscribed and painted with laurel, and divine grace flows from her eyes; may she always be revered until the earth, sky, and all things are pushed into decline by a celestial hand at the end and a new world renews this one.”51 Besides recalling the statist blessings seen in Fonte’s Le feste and Venetian civic performance plays, Erina’s speech evokes cherished tenants of
Serenissima myth including the state’s natural beauty, special relationship with Providence, and munificent treatment of its citizens. Her words also illuminate the other sex’s facility as public civic speaker and erudite teacher, as do the following stanzas in which she conducts a guided tour of the lagoon’s splendors. Erina touts the artistic wizardry of Murano glass-blowing, the stately grandeur of Saint Mark’s columns and marbles, and the pomp of a ducal procession, a practical touristic checklist of the Republic’s greatest hits.52 As such, her verbal survey resonates with the early modern Venetian book market’s greater preoccupation with plotting and propagating the state’s spectacular nature for residents and outsiders alike via visual media such as maps, island books, and engravings like the exemplary print of Piazza di San Marco shown on the next page (Figure 4). Like Erina’s speech, the engraving enumerates important local landmarks for readers and celebrates the Piazza as the foremost spatial, architectural, political, and religious signifier of Venetian greatness. Marinella’s decision to deploy the traditionally fraught literary figure of the sorceress to celebrate the state, draw an explicit connection between
50 From “La terra là (that land there) … è sito più ch’altro felice” Ibid., 22.4. 51 “Mira con quanto studio e magistero Fondolla il Ciel.” And “Quest’è colei che di grandezze cinta Qual del suo popol svelle intoppi e spine, C’ha la vesta di lauro intesta e pinta, Versa dagli occhi suoi grazie divine; Riverita sia ognor finchè sospinta Sia terra e cielo e ’l tutto al fin decline Celeste mano, a nuovo mondo al mondo rinnovi.” Ibid., 22.12, 22.14. 52 Ibid., 22.15–24. 199
epic narrative and civic print, and insist on the non-binary nature of womanhood enabled her to bride gender boundaries and plant the seed of feminist argument in the reader’s intellectual frame.
Figure 4: La Meravigliosa Piazza de San Marco di Venetia. Venice: Donato Rasciotti, c.1599. Newberry Library. The map, which is dedicated to Henri de Rohan, is a lettered guide to Saint Mark’s Square and describes its layout as well as the significance and technical specs of its key sights including the Campanile (D), Basilica (B), and Torre dell’Orologio (H)
L’Enrico does not articulate a formal feminist defense of women, Erina’s mobility, role as a teacher of men, and scholastic expertise in natural philosophy, geography, and classics constitute a pro-woman argument in the spirit if not the style of querelle literature. Literary critic Laura
Lazzari was the first scholar to interpret L’Enrico’s action and characters as a literary rendition
200
of the debate on women and of the abstract feminist theories articulated in La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne specifically.53 Where Erina is concerned, Lazzari construes the maga’s feminine erudition as the epic personification of Marinella’s belief that academic intelligence was the mental inheritance of women as a whole rather than of the singular virile woman.54 She also reads Erina as a cipher for the benefits of secular celibacy and female-only social organizations like the tertiary religious orders of the late Renaissance.55 I agree with Lazzari’s assessment of the character except in the privileging of her social isolation as feminist good. The geographic segregation of the enchantress was standard to the genre, making it is difficult to assess to what extent Marinella’s (and Fonte’s) adoption of it had special meaning. Additionally,
Erina’s liminal positioning allowed her creator to emphasize female merit within a plot otherwise focused around Enrico Dandolo and the historic conquest at Constantinople. And while insular, gendered bounds do shape Erina’s daily life, far more important in my view is the fact that
Marinella imbued her interlocutor with the knowledge and means to occasionally break those limits and travel the world.56 It is likewise significant that Venier, a male visitor to her island, inhabitant of the public sphere, and well-traveled crusader ultimately cannot equal Erina in mobility, nor in intellectual authority. Thus when the epic duo take flight in Erina’s magical chariot, it is she who teaches the crusader about “the sky’s handsome forces, the deep ocean’s movements, currents, and roaring,” and the landscapes of Africa and Europe.57 Erina also catches
Venier up on the events of the Fourth Crusade, informs him of the “true” story of Odysseus
53 Lazzari, Poesia epica e scrittura femminile, 180–212. 54 Ibid., 183–184, 199–201. 55 Ibid., 199. 56 The maga and/or her maids as mover of men was also not unique to Marinella’s story, but as Stampino points out, Erina is special in that her mobility extends beyond spaces of alterity to known lands, imposing a distinctly feminine filter on movement and imperial knowledge. Stampino, “A Singular Venetian Epic Poem,” 60. 57 “le belle Forze del ciel, dell’ocean profondo I moti, i corsi, i fremiti.” Marinella, L’Enrico, 21.43–49, 22.1. –7; 21.25. 201
(correcting Homer), and facilitates his return to Byzantium.58 She undertakes the latter against her better judgement, advising Venier that a life defined by peace, the pursuit of knowledge, and intimacy with nature would be a nobler fate for him than the traditionally acclaimed path of fame, which livelihood engenders war, death, and enemies.59 Venier rejects Erina’s feminine philosophy (to his peril), but his actions nonetheless provided Marinella’s seventeenth-century audience with a feminist exemplar in that he does accept Erina’s advice as worthy of consideration and the maga herself as a viable actor and teacher. It is also worth noting that because the chariot episode stood as both querelle argument and metaphor for Venetian excellence, specifically where the Republic’s imperial gaze and function as “theatre of the world” or locus of trade, maritime exploration, and printed knowledge-making were concerned, the episode’s vindication of civic myth is inextricable from its subversion of patriarchal gender norms.
If Erina was progressive in her erudition and mobility, she was conventional in her innate chastity. Marinella describes her as a woman “with chaste eyes and saintly manners [who] set her heart pitilessly against love … [and] scorned even a heavenly lover.”60 In this Marinella aligned the character with contemporary notions of the essential woman, evoking the gender binary that linked female virtue with maximal or excessive physical purity. Moderata Fonte, by contrast, rejected essential womanhood both mental and sexual in her take on figure of the epic sorceress.
As Virginia Cox and Stephen Kolsky have pointed out, Floridoro’s enchantress Circetta is an
58 Ibid., 21.33–35, 22.40–57. By positioning Erina as the instrument of Venier’s return to Constantinople, Marinella retooled the female witch as an ally to men, a pointed contradiction of the Gerusalemme liberata’s (her textual model) portrayal of the sorceress (Armida) as antihero. In L’Enrico, that role is filled by a man, the eastern magician Esone. Lazzari, Poesia epica e scrittura femminile, 211–212. 59 Ibid., 5.81, 21.37–40. This feminine philosophy is reinforced by L’Enrico’s minor civilian female characters like the military wives Areta (a Byzantine woman) and Clelia (a Christian Cyprian) who are unnecessarily widowed as a result of their husbands’ desire for glory. 60 “Con gli occhi casti e con maniere sante; Crudo ha ’l cuor contra amor … celeste amante Par disprezzar.” Ibid., 5.63. 202
amalgam of epic femininity: virginal and desiring, innocent and scholarly, Alcina with Melissa, her Homeric namesake made humane.61 When Fonte’s reader, along with the shipwrecked Latin prince Silano, first encounter her in canto five, that complexity is veiled. At first glance, Circetta reads as the literary wicked woman incarnate. She exits a stony wall and frog marches an unnamed male prisoner “bound with a chain of gold” to a secluded grove.62 Upon arrival, she promptly changes him into a tree.63 Like the iniquitous enchantresses of Homer and Ariosto,
Circetta has a habit of ensnaring and transforming foolhardy male travelers who breach the threshold of her domain, but—she does so by curse, not choice.64 In addition, it is masculine vice, most prominently the immoderate love of fame, that carries the blame for provoking such
Ovidian spell work. As Circetta kindly rushes to inform her audience, only those vainglorious adventurers who seek (and fail) to claim the island and its lady for themselves in a fantastical and entirely voluntary quest of arms undertaken with full knowledge of the cost of failure wind up in her leafy grove. The humble, in other words, are safe.
In a sense, this revelation renders the episode and Circetta’s possession of her character type’s defining attribute—magic—functionally incidental to her true nature, a purposed authorial misappropriation of genre norms that defanged the sorceress-as-bad-woman trope so common to epic storytelling. By doing so, Fonte signals that Circetta cannot be read or reduced to an essential vision of femininity; instead the reader must look beyond the character's surface
61 Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 184. Kolsky, “Moderata Fonte’s Tredici Canti,” 170. 62 The man is described as a “cavalliero,” knight, “[c]he di catena d’or legato serba.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 5.24. 63 Ibid., 5.22–27. 64 Ibid., 8.14–30. Circetta tells us that Circe laid the curse after being seduced and abandoned by Odysseus, a feminist take on the Homeric legend. The curse is designed to protect Circetta from similarly fickle lovers; it binds her to the island and places a forfeit (transformation) on all visitors who try to claim the land for themselves but lack Ulysses’ cunning and a good man’s valor. Circetta’s family history is reminiscent of Fonte’s disquisition against male lovers in Il merito and indeed reads as a querelle argument itself in that it positions male profligacy as more dangerous than autonomous femininity, even when the latter is laced with beauty and magic. 203
attributes to her interior life, intellectual ability, and decisions to determine her nature. Like
Erina, Circetta is an educated virgin. She is skilled at woodcraft, ekphrasis, and the white magic of herbs, science, and lore, a tutelage gained through the devotion of a parent, in her case her mother Circe. The handmaidens who act as her companions on Ithaca excel at the arts of embroidery, music, and hospitality. As a woman painstakingly raised to the life of the mind,
Circetta bears little resemblance to the exceptional virile woman of the exempla tradition; she serves instead as the personification of Fonte’s feminist belief that all women are capable of an intellectual life if trained to it.65 In contradiction to Renaissance social anxieties, the character’s exposure to learning does not pervert her mind nor her innocence. Rather than pass through life with the innate, impersonal purity of a Madonna or an Artemisian alcolyte however, Circetta uses reason to govern her body and decide between abstinence and desire rather than fall subject to either unwittingly. We know this because Fonte allows Circetta to feel physical attraction for her Italian guest, to flirt with him, sneak glances at him, and still retain her commitment to a chaste life. And while she possesses the voice of a siren, an instrument powerful enough to bend animals to her will and mellifluous enough to ease men’s hearts, the maga’s moderate temperament allows her to eschew coquetry in favor of discussing the future of Venice in the name of her guest’s intellectual education. And indeed, as a self-interested charmer and unrepentant practitioner of false love, Circetta’s Latin guest is far more dangerous than his blushing host.66
That Circetta’s virtue is self-willed rather than dictated by any subscription on her creator's part to the patriarchal gender binary that tied early modern femininity to the polar states
65 In this Stephen Kolsky understands Circetta as “an anticipation” of Il merito’s arguments. Kolsky, “Moderata Fonte’s Tredici Canti,” 170–171. 66 Fonte comments on this in Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 11.93–95. 204
of excess and lack (in chastity’s case, the former) rendered her a viable ambassador of the female voice. Like Circetta, Fonte was a single, educated woman who used her voice to breach gender norms and disseminate a mythic account of Venetian excellence in 1581. Her delineation of the
Republic’s foundation, ducal dealings, and leadership at the Battle of Lepanto represent the first known Italian history penned by a woman. That history, described in detail in the previous chapter, honored Venice as an "immortal republic" and insisted that its female citizenry could partake in the state's myth-making project as active civic authorities and weavers of printed discourse rather than passive vessels of Venetian ambition.67 As a proficient civic historian, multi-faceted woman with the brain power to make her own decisions, and Fonte's epic mouthpiece, Circetta demonstrated that the other sex could be effective rhetors and knowledge makers precisely because femininity was fluid rather than essential. In this she also anticipated the eloquent, strong-willed cast of semi-historical Venetian women who populate Fonte's Il merito delle donne and the feminist arguments of the querelle tracts of 1600, which texts stood on the progressive intellectual foundation erected by Floridoro's gender nonnormative characters.
67 "Questa immortal Republica" Ibid., 12.16 205
CHAPTER FIVE
PATRIARCHY ON TRIAL: THE QUERELLE TRACTS OF 1600
“Dearest and most beloved men … I am certain that you will willingly listen to me, [who speaks] in the name of all women. … The case is this: That you, as you well know, have until now been so contrary towards us that you have ceaselessly sought to oppress and abuse [women] by all the words and deeds that lie in your power.”1
- Moderata Fonte, 1600
“I am desirous that this truth may shine forth to everyone, that the female sex is nobler and more excellent than that of men. I hope to demonstrate this with reasons and exempla so that every man, however pigheaded, will be obliged to confirm it with his own mouth.”2
- Lucrezia Marinella, 1600
In the fall of 1600, Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella’s querelle tracts debuted on the Venetian book market.3 If the Myth of Venice touted the early modern Republic with its sublime natural setting, pompous processions, exotic international port, Carnival masques, and
1 “Carissimi, & amatissimi huomini … son certa , che voi tutti volentieri ascoltarete me sola in nome de tutte le donne. … La causa è questa; Che voi, come ben sapete, fino hora ci sete stati sempre cosi contrarii, che sempre hauete cercato di abbassare, & offenderci à tutto vostro potere in parole, e in fatti.” Moderata Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 113. 2 [D]esiderosa, che questa verità risplenda appresso ad ogn’vno, la quale è, che il sesso feminile fra più nobile, & eccellente di quello de gli huomini; & spero cosi manifestarla con ragioni, & essempi, che ogni huomo, ancor che pertinace, sarà sforzato con la propria bocca à confermarla.” Lucrezia Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne, 2. 3 We know Il merito and La nobiltà were published in the fall thanks to their dedications, which date to November and August 1600 respectively. 206
ranks of erudite letterati as the European hub of novelty and spectacle, Fonte and Marinella’s progressive monographs more than fit the bill for Serenissima originality. The cittadina authors were not only the first respectable veneziane to participate in the debate on women in a century, but also the first Italian women writers to stake a claim to intellectual and ethical parity with men on behalf of the entire female sex. The unique quality of Fonte and Marinella’s apologias also extend to form and style. Both authors wrote in the vernacular rather than Latin, the language traditionally used by the peninsula’s female querelle rhetors, and both appropriated masculine genres as vehicles of feminist argument. Fonte’s sprightly Il merito delle donne deployed polyphonic dialogue to dissect the pros and cons of men and marriage, and it was one of the first western texts to feature exclusively female interlocutors. Marinella’s exhaustively argued polemic La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne was and remains the only formal debate treatise penned by a Renaissance woman.4
The Venetian authors’ decision to transform conventionally masculine print media into vehicles of feminist argument followed the boundary-busting precedent set by Fonte with the publication of Tredici canti del Floridoro in 1581.5 So too did their interrogation of patriarchal social norms and robust promotion of the Floridoran principle that “women in every age were given great judgement and spirit by nature [and] are born no less able than men to prove their wisdom and valor with study and care.”6 This sentiment and the censure of Aristotelian gender ideology it implies reached its mature form in the pages of Il merito and La nobiltà. Where
4 Letizia Panizza, Introduction to The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, by Lucrezia Marinella, trans. and ed. Anne Dunhill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2. 5 Floridoro was the second woman-authored Italian epic and the first whose content is neither derivative not contested re its attribution. The only earlier, extant printed female epic is the courtesan Tullia d’Aragona’s Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino (1560), a lyric take on the fifteenth-century chivalric romance Il Guerrin Meschino. 6 “Le donne in ogni età fur da Natura Di gran giudicio, e d’animo dotate, Né mē atte à mostrar con studio e cura Senno, a valor degli uomini son nate.” Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, 4.1. 207
Fonte’s epic characters Risamante and Circetta functioned as metaphoric ambassadors of female virtue through their learning, morality, physical autonomy, and liberation from male oversight, the querelle tracts of 1600 jettisoned analogy to delineate the parameters of female identity in explicit detail, undermining humoral justifications for the oppression of women and critiquing the misogyny inherent to Renaissance systems of governance, identity, history, and natural philosophy. Both authors strove to subvert the then-standard cultural association of masculinity with auctoritas, and both rejected the essentializing principle ubiquitous to Italian literature protofeminist and sexist alike that defined “virile” (aka moderate) womanhood as exceptional rather than broadly attainable, relegating most women to incontrovertible otherness. Where
Circetta embodied this destabilization in Floridoro, the debate tracts manifested feminism on multiple fronts, using rhetoric, exempla, and, in Fonte’s case, characters to insist that “one observes [female] merit every day, not just that of some queen or great lady, but that of every lowly woman in the organization of their homes and families.”7 In doing so, Fonte and
Marinella’s writing remade the querelle des femmes as a radical venue of intellectual resistance and sincere social criticism. Although the pro-woman sentiments they espoused in Il merito and
La nobiltà did not generate material change for contemporary Italian women, their work marks a vital step in women’s struggle to be recognized as fully human and provides feminist scholars a vital window onto the methods by which marginalized persons navigated culture and identity in the early modern world.
The goals of Chapter Five are threefold. Because the manifold strategies by which Fonte and Marinella subverted the Christian legacy of Aristotelian gender ideology and reimagined the condition of Renaissance women at the turn-of-the-century have not been fully explicated in
7 “Ma si scuopre la prudenza tutto il giorno non dirò di alcuna Reina, ò Signora, ma d’ogni vil donniciuola nel reggimento delle case, & delle famiglie loro.” Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne, 67. 208
modern historiography, I will perform a close reading of their works using gender as a category of analysis.8 Both writers approached questions of sex, social supremacy, and alterity in terms of the longstanding epistemological binary that privileged masculinity as logical, moderate, and ministerial while relegating femininity to the private sphere and patriarchal regulation. The querelle tracts of 1600 challenge that binary and defend woman’s ability to govern body and mind herself, Il merito by claiming parity between the sexes, La nobiltà by inverting the gender hierarchy to privilege women. Because inserting one’s voice in the public sphere as a Venetian woman constituted a radical act in the early modern period, I contend that Fonte and Marinella’s feminist reclamation of personal sovereignty for women must be understood as the product of gendered argument and the mechanical act of writing itself. And finally, this chapter will explore the scope of each author’s querelle arguments relative to the other’s, partly because Marinella thought in these terms, but largely because modern historiography has framed academic discussion of the veneziane around the issue of whose views were most progressive.9 The prevailing wisdom on this matter is that Marinella was the more hard-hitting author. This theory originated in the Renaissance. It derives from Marinella’s own declaration that Fonte’s advocacy for sexual equality rather than female superiority was lacking, as well as early modern cultural norms that privileged exempla-based argument ala the formal debate treatise as the more authoritative medium. Modern historians and literary critics have adopted this thinking, an interpretive move that overlooks the patriarchal tones embedded in the exemplary tradition and accepts the problematic equation of feminism with binary thinking. I will trouble this theory and
8 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–1075. 9 Fonte died in 1592. It is unclear if she was familiar with Marinella as an educated peer, though it is likely given the academic ties between their patrons Nicolò Doglioni and Lucio Scarano, cofounders of the second Venetian Academy. As demonstrated in Chapter Four however (see p8–9), Marinella absolutely saw Fonte as her competition, a fact first made apparent in La nobiltà’s direct comparison of their feminist views and later in L’Enrico’s veiled references to female epic forerunners out-performed by Marinella as siren singer of Venetian myth. 209
contend that Fonte, whose text feminized the dialogue genre, rejected essential notions of identity, and approached cultural understandings of gender, was the more radical author. I do so not from a desire to praise or condemn historical women actors but as a way of questioning who gets to set the terms of academic evaluation and the lasting ability of patriarchal forms to shape definitions of what constitutes feminism.
Hot off the Press: Contextualizing 1600
To borrow the words of the Italianist Stephen Kolsky, when Moderata Fonte and
Lucrezia Marinella’s querelle tracts hit the Venetian book market in 1600, “never before had there been such an occurrence. [I]t is highly unlikely that the appearance of two such works, both critical of patriarchal society, can be ascribed to chance.”10 State demand for mythic discourse in the wake of Lepanto and the War of Cyprus combined with Fonte’s initial literary activity in the
1580s had opened a discursive space for respectable local women on the Venetian print market by the turn of the century, but it was nonetheless unusual for multiple texts by Serenissima women to be published in the space of a single year. In the case of the querelle tracts of 1600, the reality of their synchronous timing seems particularly aberrant given Il merito’s composition date
(1592) and the fact that its author died in childbirth eight years before its publication.11 How then did Il merito delle donne and La nobiltà, et eccellenza delle donne come to press at the same time?
Answering this query is necessary in any study of Fonte and Marinella’s querelle careers.
Although the historical record is silent on the specific commercial and social transactions that resulted in Il merito and La nobiltà’s publication, scholars know enough about Marinella’s
10 Kolsky, “Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi,” 973. 11 Doglioni, “Vita della Sig. Modesta,” 5. 210
motivation for writing and the authors’ immediate intellectual networks to offer a credible hypothesis. To begin, it is clear from the title, structure, content, and timing of Marinella’s work that she wrote it in direct response to Ravanesse author Giuseppe Passi’s virulently misogynist monograph I donneschi difetti (1599), which treatise exhorted women to silence and cataloged female vice over the course of thirty-five chapters. Marinella’s equally polemic text flips the script to insist on female excellence, devoting the same number of chapters to the delineation of masculine faults.12 In addition, La nobiltà’s subtitle co’ difetti et mancamanti degli uomini derives from Passi’s title. And while Marinella incorporated critiques of other Italian debate writers such as Torquato Tasso and Sperone Speroni into her argument, the sections of La nobiltà that explicate female merit mirror Passi’s topically; for example, both writers launch their cases with diegeses on etymology. Because Fonte composed Il merito at least seven years before the Somasco printshop released Passi’s text in Venice, it is impossible to consider her defense of women a purposed response to his vitriol. Historians are unaware of any one text that functioned as singular prompt for Fonte’s intervention in the querelle; however, the misogynist shift that occurred within the greater Italian debate on women late in the century offers a viable possible motivation for her writing.13 It is also worth noting that as a discursive reimagining of feminine community and Venetian society achieved via the cultural metaphor of the literary brigata,
Fonte’s text was equally if not more au fait with the dialogue tradition fronted by Boccaccio and
Castiglione.14 And finally, as early modern scholars like Virginia Cox and Paola Malpezzi Price
12 This number reflects the second edition of La nobiltà, which came out in 1601. 13 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, xvii–xix, 168–173. Panizza, Introduction to The Nobility and Excellence of Women, 25. 14 It is worth noting here that Celia Zorzi, Fonte’s daughter, dedicated Il merito to Livia Feltria della Rovere, the Duchess of Urbino. The court of Urbino was of course the setting of Baldessar Castiglione’s Il cortegiano; besides forging a gendered patron-client tie appropriate to a female-authored work, the dedication highlights a link between Fonte’s text and a masterpiece in her chosen genre. For an overview of Fonte’s connection to the dialogue tradition, see Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 190–196, 215–230, and Katherine McKenna, “Women in the Garden: The Decameron 211
have argued, Il merito’s pointed critique of Renaissance woman’s position relative to social institutions like marriage, the dowry, prostitution, and fashion was as much a response to the condition of female life in contemporary Venice as it was to the formal literary tradition.15
If Fonte did not write Il merito with Passi in mind, its print date absolutely suggests a secondary function as reply to I donneschi difetti. Led by Kolsky, early modernists hypothesize that Fonte and Marinella’s querelle tracts were published, and in Marinella’s case, commissioned as part of a coordinated Venetian response to Passi’s misogynist overtures spearheaded by the second Accademia Veneziana. Nicolò Doglioni and Lucio Scarano, Fonte and Marinella’s respective patrons were founders and members of that group, as were Marinella’s father
Giovanni and brother Curzio. Giovanni Battista Ciotti, the publisher of La nobiltà, was the
Academy’s official printer. These ties along with Marinella’s allusion to a tight deadline set by
Ciotti in the 1600 edition of La nobiltà lead scholars to believe that the Venetian Academy formally recruited Marinella to author a querelle tract on its behalf and that of Venice. 16 As guardian of Fonte’s literary bequest, Doglioni is thought to have hired Domenico Imberti to release Il merito as part of that effort.17 Imberti had previously published Fonte’s La
Resurrettione di Giesu Christo in 1592. This argument makes sense on several levels. Given that
Passi belonged to academies in Ravenna (a former Venetian territory lost in the Italian Wars) and
Padua (a client city), under whose auspices he released I donneschi difetti, a corresponding institutional Venetian response seems called for.18 Passi’s Paduan group coalesced the same year
Reimagined in Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 60–81. 15 Virginia Cox, introduction to The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Superiority to Men, by Moderate Fonte, trans. and ed. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 12–17. V. Cox, “The Single Self,” 513–581. Price, Moderata Fonte, 27–39, 51–84 16 Kolsky, “Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi,” 975–977. 17 Ibid. 18 The 1599 frontispiece refers to Passi by his academic sobriquet “L’Ardito” and marks his association with the Informi; later editions also cite his membership with Padua’s Accademia dei Ricovrati. 212
as I donneschi difetti’s initial print run; that city rivaled Venice as a hub of northern Italian intellectual life, housing a university, multiple intellectual societies, and a growing contingent of women writers including Valeria Miani, Giulia Bigolina, and the already famous actress and playwright Isabella Andreini. As Androniki Dialeti and Lyndan Warner have argued, most pro- woman male participation in the querelle des femmes was motivated less by feminist sentiment than by the desire to showcase the literary chops of a person or place and as veiled commentary on the condition of mankind or masculinity.19 The hypothesis that the second Accademia
Veneziana commissioned or sponsored the debate tracts of 1600 in order to highlight Venetian excellence accords with that trend. A formal commission also explains the conspicuous lack of legitimating civic rhetoric in La nobiltà. Expositions on the myth of Venice lent female writing an air of respectability and authority, but they had little place within the strict genre conventions of the debate treatise; moreover, as muse of the eponymous intellectual society and thus of
Venice itself, Marinella would have been automatically imbued with that veil. Fonte by contrast had no such protection when writing Il merito in the early 1590s. Not unexpectedly then, a thread of civic rhetoric runs throughout her monograph from page one on, establishing the Republic as the dialogue’s locus amoenus and that polity which “exceeds all other ancient and modern cities in nobility and dignity so that it may in all justice be called the Metropolis of the universe.”20
Written at least seven years before La nobiltà and set during the dogeship of Pasquale Cigogna
(1585–1595), one time governor of Crete and bureaucratic player in the War of Cyprus, Il merito was also temporally and thematically that much closer to the era of Lepanto and civic speech’s inception as bridge to respectable female authorship than Marinella’s text. While the second
19 Warner, The Ideas of Man and Woman, 5, 51, 80–87, 224. Androniki Dialeti, “Defending Women, Negotiating Masculinity in Early Modern Italy,” The Historical Journal 54, no. 1 (March 2011): 1, 5–6. 20 … in nobiltà, e dignità avana tutte le altre città del Mondo, sosi antiche, some moderne, onde drittamente può chiamarsi Metropolo dell’universe.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 10. 213
Venetian Academy had yet to form at the time of Fonte’s death in 1592, Il merito’s civic undertones link the book to her mythic corpus (Le feste, Floridoro, and the ducal oration of
1585) and suggest that Fonte herself intended that the dialogue be published.
Male Forms, Feminist Structure
If Fonte and Marinella’s querelle tracts shared ties to the traditionally masculine world of
Italian academies, they also held a mechanical fixation with classically male forms of writing in common. In this they follow the precedent for genre experimentation set most prominently by
Fonte’s incursion into epic writing in the 1580s.21 As argument-driven social commentaries, both texts eschew stereotypically “feminine” genres such as lyric poetry and letters in contradiction to the early modern commonplace that “rhetoric in all its forms—public discourse, forensic argument, logical fence, and the like—lies absolutely outside the province of women.”22 Put another way, Il merito delle donne and La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne’s technical construction as dialogue and polemic represent a transgressive defiance of contemporary norms in their own right. The association of both genres with masculinity dates to antiquity. Classical dialogue stemmed from the work of figures like Plato, Cicero, and Lucan, assumed an exclusively male audience, and featured no speakers of the “other” sex.23 The addition of woman interlocutors was a Renaissance innovation seen first in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron
(1348–51) and later famously deployed in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528); in both cases no transcribed female discourse occurs without the mediating presence of a rational and masterful male figure.24 Although the Decameron is the older text, it is the most immediate
21 Remember that Fonte was the first Italian woman to author and publish an original epic. 22. Bruni, “The Tractate of Lionardo Bruni d’Arezzo,” 126. 23 Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation, 16. 24 Ibid, 190–191. 214
inspiration for Il merito’s cast of prolix female characters.25 The novella collection is framed by the story of an Italian speaker group composed of semi-historical persons, seven of whom are women.26 They invent the monarchical government and story-telling that structure the
Decameron and engineer the temporary erection of a cultured mini-society in the Florentine countryside. Lest their company be deemed illicit, they also recruit male confederates to accompany them. To write Il merito, Fonte borrowed the Boccaccian device of a semi-real cast comprising “a group of noble and courageous ladies of different ages and marital states, but of similar lineage and taste” who are seven in number and who decide to establish an intellectual polity governed by a queen within the garden of a Venetian villa.27 Where Boccaccio subjected his female narrators to masculine oversight however, Fonte jettisoned all such male roles to inscribe women’s voices only on page after page of discursive exchange, an unprecedented flood of literary femininity for the period. Il merito’s cast celebrates this autonomy, rejoicing that “here we are able to speak pleasantries in order to laugh amongst ourselves and do what we desire because there is no [man] here to observe and reprimand us.”28 Fonte’s stylistic decision to feminize her speaker group critically destabilized the dialogue genre’s previously masculine associations and grounded the text’s rhetorical attack on patriarchal society, marriage, and the nature of male-female relationships within a newly liberal if imagined backdrop.
La nobiltà’s format, the polemic literary treatise, was also a longstanding masculine type whose use “presupposed immersion into an erudite literary tradition familiar with the classics, as
25 McKenna, “Women in the Garden.” 26 “[T]utte l’una all’altra o per amistà o per vicinanza o per parentado congiunte, delle quali niuna il venti e ottesimo anno passato avea né era minor di diciotto, savia ciascuna e di sangue nobile e bella di forma, e ornata di constumi e di leggiadra onestà.” Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 4, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1976), 19. 27 “alcune nobili & valorose Donne di età, & stato diferenti, ma di sangue, e costumi conformi, gentili, virtuose, & di elevato ingegno.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 10. 28 “[P]ossiamo dire delle piacevolezze così per rider tra noi e far ciò che più ne aggrada, che qui non è chi ci noti, o chi ci dia la emenda.” Ibid., 13. 215
well as practice in debating skills learned by the study of rhetoric and dialectic.”29 The genre was defined by argument via exemplum or the sustained deployment of illustrative stories, arguments, and quotes taken from culturally canonical works in service of the author’s point.
According to Michel Foucault, polemic juxtaposes its author and her claims with the ideological target of an other, a figure portrayed “not [as] a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For [the writer], then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue.”30 While this critical assessment dismisses the possibility that polemic might be motivated by a real aesthetic quality, an element that certainly shaped the Renaissance debate on women with its insistence on pro et contra argument and splashy rhetorical (rather than material) moves, it nonetheless captures
Lucrezia Marinella’s drive to extirpate Giuseppe Passi’s misogynist claims. It similarly encapsulates her attempt to overwhelm the reader with an exhaustive litany of famous women whose exemplary traits bespoke a superior brand of femininity. Like the dialogue, Marinella’s chosen genre owed its Renaissance iteration in large part to the work of Boccaccio, whose much- copied De mulieribus claris had inspired the contemporary praxis of arbitrating female merit through praise and blame narratives distilled through famous women’s lives.31 While the veneziana martialed assorted literary exempla to her cause including fragments of antique natural philosophy, Petrarchan verse, and Ariostan tales, female lives constitute the preponderance of her pro-woman exempla. Early female debate writer Christine de Pizan had also certified female worth through biographic models, but the breadth and systematic structure of Marinella’s
29 Letizia Panizza, “Polemical Prose Writing,” 65. 30 Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations,” Interview by P. Rabinow, May 1984, in Essential Works of Foucault vol. 1 (The New Press, 1998). 31 See Chapter 1, p11–14. 216
polemic argument was unprecedented. That she and Fonte annexed traditionally masculine literary forms as feminist platforms represents an important first step in the querelle tracts of
1600’s radical attempt to undermine the patriarchal subordination of early modern women.
The Venetian authors’ sophisticatedawareness that Renaissance Italian society oppressed women as a collective and of the cultural or unnatural character of that suppression is clearly articulated in the pages of Il merito and La nobiltà. As a female interlocutor in Fonte’s dialogue proclaims, both writers recognized that “if [women] are [men’s] inferiors in authority but not in merit, this is an abuse that has been put into the world and then over time made law and custom by them.”32 Fonte and Marinella contend that patriarchal society had historically and pointedly striven to control the female sex and that contemporary women’s paucity of functions outside the domestic sphere resulted directly from masculine despotism. According to Fonte, the male sex’s
“preeminence is something they have arrogated to themselves” due to a “wish to be tyrants over us, arrogantly usurping the dominion that they wish to have over us, but which should be ours.”33
Marinella argues that patriarchal oppression makes itself manifest in the social negation of women’s ability to attain the time-honored talents of elite public men: martial skill and humanist erudition. “There are few women” she writes, “who give themselves to study or the military arts in our time, since men, fearing to lose their authority and become women’s servants, often forbid them to learn to read or write.”34 If these obstacles to female advancement were to be overthrown
32 “Percioché, se siamo loro inferiori d’auttorità, ma non di merito, questo è vn abuso, che si è messo nel Mondo, che poi a lungo andare si hanno fatto lecito, & ordinario.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 22. 33 “Questa preminenza si hanno essi arrogata da loro … & ci vogliono tiranneggiare, vsurpandosi arrogantemente la signoria, che vogliono havere sopra di noi; & la quale anzi douremmo noi havere sopra di loro.” Ibid., 20–21. 34 “Ma poco sono quelle, che dieno opera à gli studi, ouero all’arte militare in questo nostril tempi; percioche gli huomini, temendo di non perdere la signoria, et di divenir serui delle donne, uietano à quelle ben spesso ancho il saper leggere, & scrivere.” Marinella, La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne, 32. 217
she continues, “how many women there are, who with their greater prudence, justice, and experience of life, would govern empires better than man!”35
If Fonte and Marinella’s female contemporaries were to transcend the restrictive
“virtues” of obedience, chastity, modesty, and silence imposed on them by early modern gender norms, the patriarchal system that advanced and enforced such a narrowly defined female identity had to be undercut. Modern historiography on the Venetian querelle des femmes maintains that Marinella accomplished this demotion best by dint of her use of the formal debate treatise.36 A debate treatise’s value and level of effectiveness rose or fell with the fluency and persuasiveness of its exemplary campaign. Renaissance scholars like Letizia Panizza have judged La nobiltà a literary tour de force because of the “stunning range of authorities, examples, and arguments” it accesses in order to “mount a blistering attack on men.”37 As a highly learned woman and probably spokesperson for the second Accademia Veneziana, Marinella herself clearly saw the formal debate treatise as the most appropriate venue by which to engage the querelle and the literary scene of northern Italy. Indeed, in La nobiltà’s introduction Marinella asserts that her writing can prove “that the defects of men surpass by far those of women” because it makes expert use of “true reasoning and various examples from innumerable ancient and modern historical texts.”38
Marinella’s decision to structure her response to I donneschi difetti as a polemic treatise in which misogynist tropes are countered with canonical exempla of good women did allow her to metaphorically supplant male authority with her own, a credibly feminist act. To argue via
35 “O quānte ne sarebbono, che con più prudenza, essempio di vita, & giustitia gouernerebbono gli imperii, & meglio, ch non fanno molti, e molti huomini.” Ibid., 33. 36 Cox, Women Writing in Italy, 174. 37 Panizza, Introduction to the Nobility and Excellence of Women, 2. 38 “[S]i conferma co’uere ragioni, & co’uarij essempi da innumerabili Historici antichi, & moderni tratti, Che i Diffetti de gli huomini trapassano di gran lunga que’della Donne.” Marinella, La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne, front matter. 218
polemic was to present herself as a qualified philosophical combatant, subverting traditional gender ideology that placed women in an antipathetic relationship with public discourse and knowledge exchange. The pages of La nobiltà assail readers with a battery of exempla that pithily denounce male vice and illuminate “new” female attributes like statesmanship and business acumen.39 To do so, Marinella extracted exempla from an expansive range of texts widely acknowledged by Renaissance intellectuals as loci of auctoritas including Aristotle’s
History of Animals, Plato’s Republic, Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Plutarch’s Lives, Livy’s History of
Rome, and the epics of Ariosto and Tasso. Yet herein lies the intrinsic theoretical dilemma of exemplary argument as challenge to patriarchal socio-intellectual hegemony: correct use of the form was necessarily legislated by strict adherence to a mode of discourse and a knowledge base whose conventions were themselves inherently patriarchal. For an author’s argument to hold water, it had to adopt positions articulated by already-established experts who were invariably men. Thus if La nobiltà criticizes the misogyny of such figures as Boccaccio, Sperone Speroni, and Aristotle (to name a few), it also oppositely deploys them as scholastic authorities when rhetorically convenient. Such manipulation was in a sense the very art of the genre. In result however, Marinella’s effort to redefine the scope of Renaissance womanhood and displace male jurisdiction over the meaning of femininity with her own paradoxically relied on the reader’s continued acceptance of the very authority she wanted to challenge, the command of the rational male intellectual.
In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” feminist theorist Hélène Cixous observes that definitions of good writing past and present have been dictated by patriarchal forms, writing that “nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect,
39 Ibid., 64–67. 219
the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism.”40 This theory bears thinking about when studying the Venetian querelle des femmes. Early modern scholars have sometimes deemed Moderata Fonte’s viewpoint as less feminist than Marinella’s precisely because Il merito delle donne “hides its attacks against men’s oppression of women behind its playful frame and the characters’ ambiguous statements;” in other words, because the text is not a cut and dry polemic defense of female virtue in line with the premier rhetorical tradition of the period as defined by the Renaissance intelligentsia.41 Historiographic narratives like this fail to account for the problematic relationship between the exemplary tradition and women, one that Fonte was aware of. Il merito’s contents clearly illuminate the disjunction between pro-woman argument and masculine words, a revelation seen for example in the interlocutor Cornelia’s observation that “the majority of men, believe me, who have taken on the task of praising us (women), do it more for their own use and honor than for ours.”42 Fonte reinforces the hypothesis that male authority figures’ written discussion of women can’t be trusted by further directing Cornelia to argue that misogynist male writing was also driven by ulterior motives. Together they inquire, “do you believe … that everything the historians tell us about men and women is really true? You must know that these histories were written by men, who never tell the truth unless by accident and because of the jealousy and ill will they bear towards us; they rarely speak well of us and instead praise their sex generally and particular
40 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. and ed. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 879. 41 Paola Malpezzi Price, “Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella and their ‘Feminist’ Work,” in Italian Culture 12, (1994): 200–214. 42 “Io credo, rispose Cornelia, come de gli altri, che alcun non sia, che l’abbia fatto per molto amore, ma la più parte, credetemi, si ha messo a tale impresa più per suo vtile, & honor proprio, che per il nostro.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 36. 220
members of it in order to praise themselves.”43 This statement shows an acute awareness on
Fonte’s part, even as a person embedded in Renaissance Venetian society, of gender’s rhetorical or cultural nature and of language and writing’s function as creator rather than reflection of patriarchal legitimacy. To borrow the words of Valeria Finucci, Il merito illumes the contemporary literary reality in which “it was woman's dependence on man—his authority and his utterances—that in a sense allowed man to cast himself as a unified social being. In this construction, woman was the necessary non-self man needed in representation to define both who he was and who he was not.”44 The exempla tradition was integral to this process. By largely avoiding its use in Il merito, Fonte rejected the rhetorical reduction of contemporary womanhood to a receptacle of masculine ideas and ambitions.45
While the dialogue format was also masculine in origin, it granted its users greater constructive freedom and allowed Fonte to defend female merit and erudition through women’s voices rather than stories and citations authored by men. This is not to say that she did or could avoid the male canon entirely. Historical actors can never operate outside their cultural context and period; fluency in orthodox western philosophy and literature was vital to the early modern person’s ability to engage the world of letters and the provided the litmus test by which woman’s scholastic potential could realistically be arbitrated with cultural credibility. However, by
43 “Credete voi, ella rispose, che tutto il ben de gli huomini, e tutto il ben delle Donne, che dicono gli Historici, sia cosa vera? Dovete sapere, che son huomini quei, che l’hanno scritte, i quali non dicon mai verità se non in fallo; & anco per la inuidia, e mal uoler loro verso di noi; pensate pur, che rare volte ne dicon bene, ma laudano il lor sesso in generale, & in particolare per laudar se medesmi.” Ibid., 14. 44 Valeria Finucci, The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 12. 45 I say largely because Il merito does include brief exemplary diegeses; however, they receive minimal page space. Far more attention is placed on her brigata as metaphor for feminine potential. Unlike the mainstream exemplary tradition which usually highlighted antique, mythical, and Christian women’s lives, Fonte also elevated real Venetian women as symbols of honorable femininity, short circuiting the literary risk for those examples at least of unintentionally evoking any underlying patriarchal motivation that had originally motivated their translation into exempla. 221
filtering all discussion of the canon through her exclusively female interlocutors, an almost unprecedented mutation of the dialogue genre, Fonte opened a space for the other sex to more comfortably occupy positions of autonomy. Thus when the conversation of Il merito’s second day takes up a diegesis on women’s grasp of scientific, historical, and literary knowledge ranging from astrology to the medicinal properties of assorted plants and herbs, that information is processed through women’s human experience of the world and related by female voices.
Fonte’s characters also spend a significant amount of page time serving original critiques of early modern Italian society, men, and marriage praxis to the reader. By arguing female merit through polyphonic female speech and personal cultural insight, Fonte manifested what I perceive as a stranger but less contingent feminist ideology than that of La nobiltà. She also achieved what we might call an early écriture feminine or mechanically altered style that allowed “woman [to] write her self” and “put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.”46
Challenging Aristotle
In order to subvert patriarchal society’s claims to legitimacy and envision new models of womanhood, Fonte and Marinella needed to deconstruct the classical gender binary that positioned woman as the immoderate, vice-prone counterpart to virtuous masculinity. In La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, Marinella fashioned a prodigal version of femininity that inverted this binary so that woman superseded man in excellence. As indicated by the epigrams that open this chapter, her querelle intervention revolved around the thesis that “the female sex is nobler and more excellent than that of men,” a view she resolved to defend until “every man,
46 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 875. 222
however unyielding, will be obliged to confirm it with his own mouth.”47 To do so, Marinella used carefully selected exempla to undermine femininity’s traditional association with irrationality, excess, weakness, and moral frailty while maintaining conventional ideation of the sexes as opposite.48 Her chapters draw on etymology, a reimagined account of Adam and Eve, and rogue natural philosophy to challenge Aristotelian science’s Renaissance afterlife and upend the gender binary, toppling man from the pedestal of human supremacy and replacing him with woman.
As Marinella points out in La nobiltà’s first chapter, it was a Renaissance truism that “the proper names by which things are called reveal the nature and essence of those things.”49
Querelle tracts (including Passi’s) regularly drew on etymological arguments when weighing women’s worth; that La nobiltà opens with a discussion of names and their meaning accords with that trend. Marinella begins by replicating the general, inoffensive notion that “the most noble and unique object will be adorned by the most worthy and honorable name” and then proceeds to claim that status for five Latinate terms related to womanhood: donna, femina, eva,
Isciah, and mulier.50 By discussing these “rare, marvelous, and worthy names,” Marinella made the deductive case that her sex was collectively possessed of an inherent virtue from which all feminine traits discussed later in the book stemmed.51 One such etymological manifestation of female merit is “donna,” the ubiquitous Italian word for woman, which Marinella links to the
47 “[I]l sesso feminile sia più nobile, e eccellente di quello de gli uomini … ogni huomo, ancor che pertinace, sarà sforzato con la propria bocca à confermarla.” Marinella, La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne, 2. 48 Panizza, Introduction to the Nobility and Excellence of Women, 19–20. 49 “i propri nomi, co’quali si chiamano le cose, dimostano e fanno manifesta la natura e essenza di quelle” Marinella, La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne, 3. For support of Marinella’s claim, see Panizza, Introduction to the Nobility and Excellence of Women, 20. The belief that names signify the nature of a thing derives from Aristotle’s discussion of a thing’s name, definitions, substance, and form in book VIII of his Metaphysics. See Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2 trans. and ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1645–1648. 50 “onde senza alcun dubbio noi affermeremo quella cosa esser più nobile, e singulare, laquale sarà ornate di più degno e honorato nome” Marinella, La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne, 3. 51 “nomi rari, meravigliosa, e degni” Ibid., 8. 223
Latin term domina, dominae meaning a lady or mistress of a household but also imperial power.
Marinella privileges the latter definition and informs us that both the Latin term and its Italian cognate specifically refer to a distinctly feminine “peaceful dominion, corresponding to the nature of she who dominates.”52 To account for the average Renaissance woman’s estrangement from any such function, Marinella contends that patriarchal western society has perverted the word’s meaning. She argues that men, jealous of woman’s positive nature and easily corrupted by power, bastardized domina over time into a vocabulary capable of justifying male supremacy and political tyranny (hence the Italian word il donno or lord, for example).53
Marinella’s analysis of the linguistic semiology of female virtue also accounts for terms associated with motherhood, that most prized function of early modern femininity. According to
Marinella, words associated with gender such as eva and femina possess intrinsic value because they represent life or generation. She argues that woman’s role as child bearer broadcasts her fundamental superiority, avowing that “it is only right that [these] name[s] should be given to the feminine sex, considering that it gives life to the masculine one.”54 Biologically, the claim that woman gives life to man will appear unremarkable to modern audiences; however, in the early modern context this statement referenced ongoing philosophical debate over the extent to which woman contributed to the animate or nonmaterial generation of children, if at all. I will discuss
Marinella’s manipulation of Aristotelian theory at length later in this chapter, but here wish to emphasize that most moderns believed that man was the primary actor where reproduction was concerned.55 Per this viewpoint, the male sex created and gave form to the world while women
52 “placido dominio à punto corrispondente alla natura della Dominante” Ibid., 5. 53 Ibid., 4–5. 54 “e pero con ragione è attribuito questo nome al sesso feminile, si come quello: che da l’essere e la vita à maschi” Ibid., 7. 55 The competing Galenic theory of reproduction gave woman more generative credit in that that her ovaries were considered to produce seed, though a less vital varietal than men’s. Sophia Connell, “Aristotle and Galen on Sex 224
merely provided the material to be worked.56 Marinella reversed this system in accordance with her general inversion of the hierarchical gender binary and assigned her sex the leading role in animating new life. Thus through the etymological scrutiny of several small nouns, Marinella insisted on the legitimacy of woman’s individual right to personal autonomy as well as a universal female ability to rule and fashion the world. As the only female-authored treatise of the querelle, La nobiltà’s interrogation of naming words on feminist terms does represent a bold upheaval of the cultural status quo in which womanhood was most often ideated as “a role, an image, a value imposed upon women by male systems of representation.”57
After asserting the immanent worth of women though the epithets that refer to them,
Marinella tackles the contradictory biblical postulate that the female gender was divinely conceived as a subservient being at her creation, a helpmeet to men only.58 Her rhetorical counterargument to this belief, a stanchion of misogynist argument, rests on a reimagination of the Genesis story. Also, the manipulation of classical body theory as upheld by Christian dogma and exemplary praise of famous women. According to traditional Catholic teaching, Eve as both individual person and metaphor for the female sex generally was inferior to man because she was created last, took her being from man, and was designed to serve rather than rule. Marinella was not the first querelle author to rehabilitate the Eve figure, but she did so effectively, using
Platonist reasoning to position woman as God’s finest creation and declaiming that “woman’s proper purpose is not to gratify man, but to understand, govern, generate, and adorn the world.”59
Difference and Reproduction: A New Approach to an Ancient Rivalry,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 31, no. 3 (September 2000): 405, 410–414. 56 For a brief explanation of Aristotelian biology see Jordon, Renaissance Feminism, 30–31. 57 Luce Irigaray, “Interview: The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 130. 58 See Genesis 2:18. 59 “[I]o dico che il proprio fine della Donna non è di esser fatta in gratia dell’huomo, ma d’intedere, e di gouernare, di generare, et di adornare il mondo.” Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, 123. 225
She denied the theory that “woman does not possess her own being, given her by God and nature, though I concede that man’s rib was the material for it, as was mud for man” and argued that woman “will certainly prove more excellent than man, as a rib is without a doubt nobler than mud.”60 Here Marinella cleverly subverted biblical justifications for patriarchal supremacy by molding Aristotelian ideals of being to fit her agenda, overturning the claim that Eve/woman was a defective version of Adam/man by maneuvering Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes to support an alternative interpretation of the Creation tale.61 Aristotelian science dictated that every object in existence has four causes: the material cause or substance from which it derives, the formal cause that shapes the material, the Efficient cause or agency behind this process (Christians understood this to be God), and the final cause or the purpose towards which the process worked.
Marinella hoped to demonstrate to her audience that if women (a final cause) were shaped by
God from a superlative material (a rib as opposed to mud, then surely their souls were created nobler than men’s.62
After using the biblical example of Eve to lay the theoretical grounds for reconceptualizing womanhood’s meaning via distorted Aristotelian doctrine, Marinella attacks man’s traditional status as the formal cause or generative animator of new life. Classical models of reproduction positioned the other sex as little more than human incubators or the material cause of generation while elevating men as the generative mainspring of humanity. In The
Generation of Animals, Aristotle wrote that “there must needs be that which generates (man) and
60 “[S]i nega, che la Donna non habbia il proprio essere datole da Dio, et dalla natura, cōcededo però che la costa dell’huomo le fosse Materia, si come fù il fago all’huomo.” and “...sarà certamente più del Maschio eccellente essendo la costa più del fango senza comparatione nobile” Ibid., 123; 11. 61 Aristotle on women: “Now a boy is like a woman in form, and the woman is as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female, being incapable of concocting the nutriment in its last stage into semen (and this is either blood or that which is analogous to it in animals which are bloodless) owing to the coldness of her nature.” Aristotle, The Complete Works, 1130. 62 Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, 9–11. 226
that from which it generates (woman) … the male contributes the principle of movement and the female the material. This is why the female does not produce offspring by herself, for she needs a principle, i.e. something to begin the movement of the embryo and define the form it is to assume.”63 Marinella further advanced her argument that woman was the superior sex by inverting this theory to allot the role of formal cause to woman, undermining a central tenant of
Aristotelian gender ideology while relying on quotidian cultural awareness of that model’s basic binate framework to lend authority and legibility to her line of reasoning. She writes that
“woman produce[s] the ungracious man, gives him soul and life, illuminates him with the splendor of divine light, [and] confers on him heat and light on this bare earth.”64 In so claiming,
Marinella deprived men of their customary preeminence and assigned a powerful new role to her sex. If only contemporary society would recognize woman’s generative potency, she goes on to say, Italian men would be forced “to honor worthy women with words and writings and praise them to the skies” in spite of themselves.65
Marinella concludes her revision of Aristotelian gender norms by addressing the final cause itself, the body. Early modern natural philosophy dictated that male bodies were hot and dry, predisposing men to rational thinking and virtuous action, while women were naturally cold and moist and thus prone to mental and moral feebleness.66 Patriarchal society’s juridical subjugation of women and functional relegation of feminine potential to the domestic sphere was predicated on this conception of identity and the humoral elision of physicality with
63 Aristotle, The Complete Works, 1132–1133. 64 “La donna produca il poco cortese maschio, li dia anima, & vita; lo illumini con lo splendor della divina luce; lo conserui in questa terrena spoglia co’l calore, & con luce” Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, 8. 65 “honorare, & con detti, & scritti inalzar fino al Cielo le meritevoli donne” Ibid., 24. 66 Ian Maclean, “The Notion of Woman in Medicine, Anatomy, and Physiology,” in Feminism and Renaissance Studies, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 132. For a review of the advent and evolution of humoral thinking in antiquity see Lesley Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). For more on Renaissance humoral thinking and its implications, see Katherine Crawford, “The Science of Sex,” chap. 3 in European Sexualities, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 227
temperament.67 Marinella inverted the gender binary ingrained in this system to rehabilitate the female body as signifier of excellence and honor. For example, instead of challenging the culturally inviolable belief that temperature played an essential role in shaping human character, she swapped the traits linked to hot and cold. She writes, “nearly all of [the body’s] virtues and defects depend on its temperature … a temperate body like a woman’s is most suited to moderate workings of the soul, as the hot temperature of man is not.”68 La nobiltà’s pages further explicate that such mildness constitutes the most “fitting dwelling for kindness and virtue” and profess that it is precisely because women are cool that “we never see or read about … them giv[ing] themselves unrestrainedly to pleasure (or vice); they are moderate in all things.”69 Not so men.
To cement her claims, Marinella alleged that man’s hot nature precluded temperance, making him mercurial and subject to “the vice of proud and precipitate wrath.”70 In keeping with the style conventions of the debate treatise, she draws on exempla from famous Italian literature to support her argument, including Petrarch’s discussion of Herod as wife-killer and the Orlando furioso’s direct address on anger.71 To clinch her analysis of the female body’s function as indicator of woman’s inborn goodness, Marinella invokes physical beauty, observing that “the
67 Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 286. For an example, consider poet Torquato Tasso’s statement that “As nature has produced men and women of very different temperature … they are not likely to be suited to the same tasks. Men, as stronger, is inclined to some, and women, as more delicate, to others. Thus bravery and liberality would be male virtues, and modesty female”… they should favor “a retiring life and private and solitary places.” Torquato Tasso, “Discorso della virtù feminile, e donnesca,” In Women in Italy, 1350-1650, ed. Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 26. 68 “percioche dalla sua temperature dipendono quasi tutti i vitru e diffetti … percioche un corpo temperato come è quello delle donne, è molto atto alle aperationi modera te dell’anima” Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, 31. 69 “la compositione del corpo di gentilezza è virtù, & proprio albergo” and “[P]erche non si vede, ò legge ... che sfrenatamente si dieno ad altri piaceri, anzi in tutte le cose sono moderate.” Ibid., 31; 44. 70 “il vitio della fiera, & precipitosa iracondia” Ibid., 166. 71 Ibid., 166–168. Marinella quotes canto 30.1 of the Furioso, the opening lines of an address in which the poet apologizes for allowing angry feelings to guide his pen in the previous section. Interestingly, Marinella does not contextualize the quote, which was in fact an apology to women for having wrathfully condemned the other sex collectively (seemingly in keeping with Marinella’s diagnosis of masculine temperament) as wicked and unkind in love. 228
most elegant poets have clearly taught us that the soul shines out of the body like the rays of the sun do through transparent glass.” 72 In other words, beautiful souls equal beautiful bodies. With full polemic vigor, Marinella avers that the ugliest woman is prettier than the most handsome man. And “if women are more beautiful than men … who can ever deny that they are also more excellent?” she asks.73 Although it is not a traditional actor, one might say the western canon stood in opposition to this statement. Marinella hammers home La nobiltà’s subversion of classical body theory by directly confronting Aristotle, father of western philosophy and ultimate inveigher of feminine humors and female autonomy. “Thus it appears to me” she concludes “that
Aristotle goes against all reason … when [he states] that women are imperfect in comparison to men” for “nature, knowing the perfection of the female sex, produces a greater abundance of women than of men, as it always does when objects are better and more perfect.”74
Establishing a strong metaphysical case for female superiority allowed Marinella to confidently posit an empowered model of womanhood for the seventeenth century reinforced by the exemplary precedent of famous women. Most of La nobiltà’s chapters on femininity are dedicated to cataloging the qualities of mythological, biblical, and historical women whose accomplishments denote female worth and inscribe a range of feminine gender roles, some traditional, some less so. In a section entitled “Learned Women and Those Who Are Illustrious in Many Arts,” Marinella engaged the ubiquitous querelle motif of female intelligence. She acknowledges the statistical paucity of highly learned women in contemporary society but asserts
72 “[M]a piu chiaramente ci hanno insegnato questa cosa i leggiadrissimi Poeti, che hanno mostrato, che l’anima splede fuori del corpo, come fanno i raggi del Sole fuori di un purissimo vetro.” Marinella lists twenty-one poetic exempla that verify the connection between beauty and goodness. Marinella, La nobiltà e eccellenza delle donne,13; 12–18. 73 Se le donne adunque sono piu belle de gli huomini … chi negherà giamai, che quelle non sieno piu singolari de’maschi?” Ibid., 17. 74 “Onde la natura, conoscendo la perfettione del sesso femenile, produce piu copia di donne, che di huomini, come quella che sepre ò per lo più genera in tutte le cose quell, che è migliore, & piu perfetto. & però mi pare, che Aristotile contra ogni ragione … voglia che, le donne sieno imperfette in comparatione de maschi.” Ibid., 23–24. 229
that “the few women who are interested in (aka allowed access to) learning become so skilled in the sciences that men envy and hate them, as lesser people tend to detest greater ones.”75 Like the
Floridoran passages on education which attribute this lack to patriarchal structures in the home and classroom, Marinella argues that “if [women] do not employ their skills … it is because it is forbidden them by men.”76 And if a Renaissance woman should receive formal training in letters,
Marinella finds that all too often “the yoke of men’s tyrannical dominion” forces her achievement to “be concealed within the walls of houses,” a cultural diagnosis particularly reflective of the author’s own homeland.77 In order to counter this trend and illume female intellectual potential, Marinella weaponizes the stories of Athena, Cassandra of Troy, the Greek muses, Sapho, Damone (Pythagoras’ daughter), Cassandra Fedele, and Isotta Nogarola as proof positive of her sex’s mental acuity.78 The women listed here excelled in diverse intellectual pursuits such as law, invention, drama, geometry, poetry, and philosophy; quattrocento Italians
Fedele and Nogarola were notably “modern” examples of learned women. Collectively, their example spoke to an alternative version of femininity in which woman could legitimately pursue the same scholarly activities as man and police her own their own mind rather than submit to the premodern commonplace that the “somewhat credulous and easily deceived” other sex requires strict male oversight.79
75 “[A]nzi quelle poche, che alle dottrine attendono, divengono tanto delle scienze ornate, che gli huomini le invidiano, & le odiano, come soglio no odiare i minori i maggiori.” Ibid., 37. 76 From “Se non si adoprano in questo, avviene; perche non si essercitano, essendo ciò à loro da gli huomini vietato.” Ibid., 33. 77 “il collo dalla tirannesca signoria del maschio” and “stanno celate tra le parete delle case” Ibid., 124. 78 Ibid., 38–39, 40–42. 79 These are the words of Sienese author Alessandro Piccolomini, who also castigated women for ‘debat[ing]matters and siz[ing] things up quickly, swiftly resolving points at issue and deciding almost immediately about the best options before them.” Alessandro Piccolomini, “Excerpt of Tre Libri dell’educazione cristiana dei figliuoli,” In Women in Italy, 1350–1650, ed. Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 23. Popular author Juan Luis Vives used the writings of Saint Paul to support limiting the reading women’s learning, opining “Let a woman learn in silence with all subjection. I do not allow a woman to teach or to usurp authority over a man, but to stay silent … since woman is a frail thing and of weak judgment and may easily be 230
La nobiltà continues this enumeration of accomplished women in additional chapters devoted to female continence, militancy, and citizenly feeling. In “Temperate and Continent
Women,” Marinella celebrates a second normative female trait—chastity. Like Boccaccio,
Agrippa, and other commentators on female lives, she praises the noble if extreme example set by figures such as Lucretia and the Ovidian nymph Daphne, both of whom sacrificed themselves in order to preserve their chastity and, in Lucretia’s case, familial honor.80 While urging female reader’s to be virginal was nothing new, Marinella stresses that she does so from a practical desire to prove that women possess the stereotypically masculine ability to use “their reason to oppose the delights and pleasures of the senses.”81 To this end, Marinella commends a long list of exemplars whose bodily integrity was their greatest claim to fame (Penelope, Brandimart,
Syrinx etc.) but also Zenobia the warrior-queen of Palmyrenes, a classical figure who combined sexual purity with political know-how, ruling an empire and waging war with the Romans after the death of her husband. According to Marinella, Zenobia’s example demonstrates woman’s ability to be “a most noble and valiant captain and a brave warrior.”82 In praising her example,
Marinella undercut early modern notions of women as mentally and physically unfit to participate in public life, reinforcing La nobiltà’s dramatic pronouncement that if “it were
deceived.” Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, trans. and ed. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 72. Derived from I Tim 2:11–14. 80 Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, 49, 51. According to mythology, Daphne was a follower of Diana or Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and chastity. When the god Apollo fell in love with her, she begged a river god to relieve her and was so transformed into a laurel tree. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1973), 16–20. Lucretia was made famous by Roman historian Livy; a married woman, she was raped by the son of the last Tarquin king. To demonstrate her innocence to her husband and father, she stabbed herself rather than live with the shame of submitting to another man, saying “[n]ever shall Lucretia provide a precedent for unchaste women to escape what they deserve.” Livy, The Early History of Rome: Books I–V of “The History of Rome from its Foundations,” trans. Audrey de Sélincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 100–102. 81 I’ve taken this quote from a sentence in which Marinella states that men labeled temperate are those who “si oppongono con la ragione à diletti, & à piaceri de’sensi.” Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, 44. 82 “nelle guerre mostrò valore di nobilissimo Capitano, et di prode guerriero” Marinella, La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, 44. 231
permitted for women to be skilled at arms … what marvelous feats we should see, the like of which were never heard, in maintaining and expanding kingdoms.”83
While historians should deploy caution in judging the sincerity of such emotive rhetoric, I believe the fact that La nobiltà later presents two chapter’s worth of political women (militant women and women who love their country) is significant. Marinella’s list of civically minded women includes famous epic characters like Bradamante and Marfisa, ancient persons like
Cleopatra, and mythologized Italians like Orsina Visconti who supposedly fought in a fifteenth- century war between Venice and Milan.84 Marinella also supports the Platonist notion that ordinary women high and low alike could be public actors in times of war, defending their homelands, most especially in times of east-west conflict.85 Like the celebration of female chastity, the listing of militant women squares with the exemplary tradition, particularly in the sixteenth century context, which period saw the proliferation of epic storytelling featuring female fighters, most notably in the work of Ariosto and Tasso. However, it also accords with the rise of
Italian women as civic speech makers and Marinella’s own later self-positioning as singer-siren of Venice in L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato. As a learned Venetian woman, author, and only published female writer of polemic, Marinella herself was La nobiltà’s unnamed but clearly cardinal exemplar of feminine public potential. In this, the text transcended the epideictic function of Renaissance treatise writing at least in part to imbue printed text with a newly real insinuation that contemporary women could and should exceed Aristotelian limits on their personhood and breach traditional patriarchal social bounds.
83 From “O Dio volesse, che à questi nostri tempi fosse lecito alle donne l’essercitarsi nelle armi … che si vedrebbono cose meravigliose e non piu udite nel conservare i regni, e nell’ampiarli.” Ibid., 33. 84 For Marinella’s discussion of Orsina, see Ibid., 79. See also Milligan, Moral Combat, 189–193. 85 To support this theory, Marinella makes a brief but fascinating reference to an undated Ottoman attack by one “Mustafa” on the Cyprian city of Famagusta; could this be a reference to the War of Cyprus? Ibid., 83. 232
In 1600, the posthumous publication of Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne similarly introduced a progressive model of womanhood to literate Venetian society. The bipartite text uses polyphonic dialogue to ventriloquize feminist criticism of early modern gender norms and deconstruct the classical male-female sex binary, replacing it with an identity model defined by female equality with rather than superiority to men. Fonte’s writing stresses the malleable nature of identity and imagines her audience as at least partly feminine; her characters strive to convince each other and thus women readers of their intellectual autonomy lest “we remain deceived, letting our free will fall into the grip [of men] together with honor, the soul, and life.”86
To realize this newly independent version of womanhood, Fonte feminized dialogue as genre and constructed an alternate vision of Venetian society, surpassing the achievement of her contemporary where radical engagement with a patriarchal literary form and facilitation of a cultural understanding of gender are concerned. In order to conduct a comprehensive study of Il merito, I will first address the monograph’s relation to La nobiltà—that is, I will consider where the querelle tracts’ thematic concerns overlap, as they do in regard to the Adam and Eve story, attention to Aristotelian convention, and the listing of noteworthy female figures. To end, I will explicate the other functions of gender in Il merito to illuminate the extent of Fonte’s f reconstitution of rhetoric, body, and being under the umbrella of womanly sovereignty.
Like Marinella, Fonte informed her readers that woman was not created inferior to man.
Through Corinna, the interlocutor most closely associated with her authorial voice, Fonte averred that “they (man) were born before us … not on account of their nobility, but because of ours, for they were born from the lifeless earth so that we could then be born from living flesh.”87
86 “per ciò ne rimaniamo ingannate, lasciando cadere e precipitare in lor balia la nostra volontà con l’onor, l’anima e la vita insieme” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 36. 87 “Sono nati inanzi di noi – rispose Corinna – non per dignità loro, ma per dignità nostra; poiché essi nacquero dell’insensata terra perché noi poi nascessimo della viva carne.” Ibid., 26. 233
Although Fonte did not specifically tie this sentiment to the Aristotelian doctrine of four causes as Marinella did, the fact that she privileged the substance or material cause from which woman derived indicates a familiarity with the classical theory. In the course of Il merito’s greater discussion of marriage and the relationships between the sexes, Fonte also refuted the standard belief that women were formed as man’s helpmeet, contending instead that God meant for the sexes to aid each other equally and without coercion.88 As Corinna recites in a poem on woman’s ideal state of being, “A free heart dwells in [Woman’s] chest, I serve no one, I belong to no one but myself.”89
Fonte completed her reimagining of the Adam and Eve narrative by subverting conventional interpretations of the story of original sin. Traditionally the Church blamed Eve and her female “descendants” for the fall of man because she was the first to eat of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.90 Such rhetoric was commonly used in Fonte’s time to justify the suppression of women as public actors. Early modern men portrayed the female sex as weak- minded, carnally inclined daughters of Eve and argued that such creatures were apt to wreak chaos on social stability if not overseen by rational and authoritative male figures.91 Such
88 Ibid., 26, 113. In these pages, the character Leonara puts forth the idea that Eve was designed as Adam’s helpmeet and companion, and that he in turn was specifically created to be of aid to her. 89 “Libero cor nel mio petto soggiorna, Non servo alcun, né d’altri son che mia” Ibid., 18. 90 For example, the sixteenth-century Milanese writer Galeazzo F. Capra wrote that “[t]he ranks of Heaven would have been filled had they not been emptied by the pride of Lucifer … and had it not been woman who dared to eat the forbidden fruit, with such disobedience and temerity. From this sin followed the universal damnation of all people.” Galeazzo F. Capra, Excerpt from “Della eccellenza et dingità delle donne,” in Women in Italy, 1350–1650, ed. Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 13. 91 King, Women of the Renaissance, 2, 38–42. In Fonte’s time, a plethora of advice manuals existed to help men restrain woman’s troublesome nature. One manual said that a father “should strive to see that she is trained in virtuous practices and in activities appropriate to a future housewife. Of the [virtuous] practices, we would place the knowledge of God and of chastity first ... in my daughter I would look for timidity and modesty, which should almost be the basis and foundation of the entire fabric of virtue with which we intend to construct her and without which, I believe, the whole edifice would fall.” Such sentiments illuminate the masculine desire to shape and control women. “secondo questi due fini s’affatichi di fare, ch’ella si ammaestri nelle discipline virtuose a ne gli esserciti che canvengono a chi ha ad essere Donna de famiglia. nelle discipline porremo la contezza di Dio e dell’honesto...io di questi ragion voglio direi che cose ricercarei nella mia fanciulla, timidita e vergogna, legqualie habbiano ad esser quasi base e fondamento di tutta la fabrica delle virtù in che noi intendiamo disciplinarla e senza queste e da credere, che tutto lo edificio rovinera” Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della institution delle donne (Venice: Giolito: 1560), 14. 234
attitudes directly challenged Fonte’s desire to prove that women possessed human dignity and were capable of self-determination; to counter them, she boldly reassigned blame and made man accountable for humankind’s fall. She twisted the biblical tale, lessening Eve’s culpability
“because it was to a good end—the desire of learning the knowledge of good and evil—that
[Eve] allowed herself to be carried away and eat of the forbidden fruit.”92 In Fonte’s retelling,
Adam “was not moved by this, but by greed.”93 Fonte concluded the case for man’s guilt by emphasizing the fact that Adam was not corrupted by Satan as Eve was, but by mere human words, writing “and thus it was that God did not throw them from paradise as soon as Eve sinned, but after Adam did.”94
To further discredit seventeenth-century notions of female inferiority and encourage
Italian society to abandon the hegemony of masculinity to “allow things to be equal and for there to be some parity,” Fonte manipulated Aristotelian views of the body.95 Here again her tactics were similar to Marinella’s, although the specific ways in which the authors reinterpreted classical theory sometimes differed. For example, where Marinella upended Aristotelian norms by allotting women the role of formal cause in reproduction, Fonte did not. She allowed man to keep his elevated function, but deployed his association with the formal cause to explain the bountiful existence of wicked men as postulated by the anti-marriage camp of her dialogue. She wrote, “it is said that the father has the greater part in generating the son than the mother, from which it follows that the son more strongly resembles the father and in consequence is badly
92 “Anzi fu Adam—rispose Corinna—poiché ella a buon fine desiderosa d’intender la scienza del ben e del male si lascò trasportar a gustar del vietato frutto.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 56. 93 “Ma Adam mon per ciò mosso, mas per avidità.” Ibid. 94 “E per ciò si trova che non subito, che Eva peccò, Iddio li scacciò del Paradiso, ma dopo Adam le ebbe disobedito.” Ibid. 95 “volessero almanco che le cose andassero equalmente a vi fusse qualche parità.” Ibid., 27. 235
made.”96 From this postulate she deduces that contemporary Venetian society was plagued by men riddled with such vices as miserliness, deception, gaming, theft, and bloodlust, and who were wholly undeserving of positions of power over women.97
Such one-sided logic may seem problematic to modern readers unfamiliar with intellectual Renaissance thinking. Surely if man has the greater part in generation, then his daughters should also be poorly made and inclined to vice rather than to the gentleness and kindness which Fonte ascribes to them.98 Fonte’s selective incrimination of fathers and sons via bastardized Aristotelian science is representative of early modern rhetorical technique’s often paradoxical nature. Fonte and her fellow querelle participants exploited any and all materials relevant to their cause and manipulated them to fit their arguments. Such practice was widespread and so long as authors did so eloquently, any inconsistencies resulting from a wider application of their reasoning were overlooked.99 Thus Fonte was able to convincingly argue on a literary plane that man’s role as formal cause resulted in the production of vile sons without concomitantly casting a pall upon her own sex.
Fonte’s adaption of classical understandings of the body more closely mirrored
Marinella’s on the subject of temperature. Like her contemporary, Fonte did not dismiss the idea that a person’s hot or cold nature influenced their disposition, but inverted the conventional association of virtue with heat and vice with cold. Thus she described men as “hot and dry, dominated by choler, being all flames and fire” and therefore “more inclined to err” than to
96 “[S]i dice che’l padre nel generare ha più parte nel figliuolo che la madre, di qui nasce che’l figliuolo riesce più simile ad esso padre e per consequenzia così malvagio di maniera” This is said by Cornelia, a member of the anti- marriage/men side of the debate. Ibid., 55. 97 Ibid., 28, 36. 98 Ibid., 49. 99 Floyd Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture, 13. I disagree with Gray’s interpretation of the querelle as a largely insincere intellectual game, but his description of early modern rhetorical strategies is useful. 236
behave rationally or honorably.100 In contrast, Fonte found that woman’s “cold and phlegmatic” bodily composition rendered her “more calm, delicate, and apprehensive” than man and so better able “to govern [her]self by reason and not by appetite.”101 This feminist revision of classical ideas of the body cast woman’s physical nature as superior to man’s; however, unlike Marinella,
Fonte did not doom the male sex to unmitigated mediocrity. Fonte composed Il merito to establish her sex’s worth and right to operate independently in society; thus an inversion of anti- woman Aristotelian norms was required. However, Fonte did not believe temperature to be the final determinant of human character and the lasting impression given by her interlocutors’ debate over mankind’s ability to overcome the urges of the body is that both sexes could live virtuous lives if they sublimated nature via willpower and the rational mind.102
Contextualizing Identity: Women and Culture
In Fonte’s gender ideology, to be a superior or degenerate human was more complicated than to be biologically female or male. As an early modern person, the Venetian author could not entirely escape the mental framework characteristic of the time—thus her need to reimagine rather than discard bible stories and classical doctrine of the body in order to demonstrate female value. However, Fonte’s nuanced discussion of the sexes outstripped Marinella’s in its rejection of essential thinking and recognition of socialization’s part in shaping gender roles. Fonte’s cognizance of the interplay between gender and society is made manifest throughout the pages of
Il merito delle donne. For example, after Fonte first identifies the existence of male hegemony,
100 “[D]ove all’incontro gli uomini di complession calda e secca, signoreggiati dalla colera, essendo tutti fiamma e fuoco, sono anco più inclinati ad errare” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 47. 101 “Derived from: “nostra natural disposizione e complessione, la qual per esser … fredda e flemmatica, ci rende per consequenzia più quiete, più deboli, più apprensive,” also “si governano per ragione e non per appetito” Ibid. 102 Ibid., 46–49. 237
she directs an interlocutor to comment that contemporary ideals of male supremacy were not representative of fact but of an injustice that men “have over a long time made law and custom.”103 In other words, the persistence of illegitimate masculine dominance in Venetian society had caused its husbands, fathers, and sons “to claim to be theirs by right what is actually an abuse of power.”104 Leading interlocutor Corinna further illuminates the artificiality of patriarchal dominance by declaiming that “when it is said that we (women) are subject to [men], the phrase must be understood in the same sense that we are subject to natural disasters, illness, and the other accidents of this life: that is to say, it is not a subjection of obedience but of fortitude.”105
These statements showcase Fonte’s understanding that a human’s place in the world, be they male or female, was largely determined by social factors external to any inherent nature of the self. The Venetian author’s vision of gender as socially malleable is best seen in her speakers’ discourse on the subject of male dignity. The maiden Virginia, a member of the pro- marriage faction, inquires of her fellows: “couldn’t we come up with some remedy to improve
[men] a little?”106 After all, “if one has a ragged dress, repairs can make it good again” and “if there is a displeasing meal, adding butter and spices can make it palatable.”107 Why should such a panacea not exist for unwholesome masculinity? A close reading of Il merito reveals just such a transformative physic: the long-term association with a good woman. As the character Leonora avers, “the man that is alone is noxious, but the company of a woman is his cure.”108 Fonte found
103 “che poi a lungo andare si hanno fatto lecito ed ordinario” Ibid., 27. 104 “e tanto è posto in consueto, che vogliono e par loro, che sia lor di ragione quel che è di soperchiaria” Ibid. 105 “[S]e ben dicono che dovemo star loro soggette, si deve intender soggette in quella maniera, che siamo anco alle disgrazie, alla infermità ed altri accidenti di questa vita, cioè non soggezione di ubidienza, ma di pacienza.” Ibid., 26. 106 “[N]on vi sarebbe qualche remedio, di grazia, per farli deventa un poco buoni?” Ibid., 112. 107 “[S]e si ha una veste trista, racconciandola ci scusa per buona, se vi è una cattiva vivanda, mettendoci del bottiro e delle spizierie si fa deventar saporita.” Ibid. 108 “[L]’uomo che solo è mortifero, ma la compagnia della donna è la sua teriaca.” Ibid., 115. 238
that “when a man contains in himself some good values and morals, the woman with whom he lives, be she mother, sister, nurse, or wife, gave them to him.”109 Female worth is admittedly privileged in these scenarios, but they nonetheless elucidate Fonte’s comprehension of the ultimately unfixed nature of masculinity and hence gender as a whole. Like Marinella, Fonte successfully used her writing to deconstruct the male-female binary, undermine male authority, and assert female worth; however, where Marinella simply reassembled the binary after placing woman in the position of preeminence, Fonte left it in pieces. In her view, although the bodily nature of the sexes differed, the social component of gender made it possible for men and women to share roles and find a way “to reconcile and live in peace with each other.”110 In sum, Il merito’s depiction of gender approached the modern understanding that “masculine and feminine are not inherent characteristics but subjective constructs.”111
The radical nature of Fonte’s vision of gender is further revealed in her attempt to construct a new model of womanhood for her female readers’ consideration. Here again, comparing Fonte’s work to Marinella’s will help us better understand the extent to which Il merito subverted seventeenth century norms. As this paper has shown, Marinella utilized an extended discussion of exempla to craft an archetype of empowered womanhood in La nobiltà e eccellenza delle donne. Drawing upon a broad range of examples of great female figures,
Marinella assigned women a variety of meritorious gender roles, some orthodox, some not. In the discourse of Il merito’s seconda giornata, Fonte also employed exempla to build her model of autonomous femininity. Her interlocutors briefly list famous women commonly cited in pro- woman querelle literature to show that females “are a source of the greatest value to the world
109 “[C]osì, se l’uomo contiene in sé qualche buon costume, lo ha dalla donne con cui pratica, o madre, o sorella, o balia, o moglie che ella di sia.” Ibid., 25. 110 “si accordassimo un tratto e facessimo questa santa pace insieme” Ibid., 158. 111 Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” 1064. 239
through their wisdom, virtue, and goodness.”112 The characters extol many of the same figures as
Marinella, praising female bravery in the form of Queen Zenobia and female chastity in the guise of Lucretia.113 The ubiquitous Sappho is raised as a model of feminine intellectual vigor.114
Fonte’s interlocutors also recite odes in honor of such local women as Chiara Dolfin and Elena da Mula, the patrician wives of contemporary Venetian political leaders.115 Such instances of distinguished native women are noticeably not present in Marinella’s lengthy discussion of female exempla. Ostensibly, Fonte included their names in Il merito to demonstrate woman’s ability to combine mental and physical beauty, but their discussion also served to underline the immediate social relevance of her writing. In Fonte’s tract alone, women of virtue deserving of a status equal to that of men were blatantly not a chimera of history and myth, but living persons who could be encountered in the reader’s Venice.
Fonte’s discussion of exemplary women and gender further exceeded that of Marinella in her treatment of the vibrant cast of exclusively female characters that populate her dialogue. As creations of Fonte’s intellect rather than history or literature, the interlocutors of Il merito provided a tabula rasa through which Fonte could complicate the simplistic virtues associated with traditional querelle exempla. For example, while both Fonte and Marinella extolled sexual purity, Fonte used her characters to deepen the trait’s meaning and make even this most conventional feminine virtue subversive. In the discourse of Il merito, her speakers explain that the true point of female celibacy was not the preservation of women’s virginity and reputations, but its theoretical ability to allow women to escape male rule (aka the husband) and so retain
112 From “[N]on si può dire con vertità che le donne siano di danno al mondo, anzi di grandissimo utile per lor sapere, virtù e bonta.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 62. 113 Ibid., 62, 67. 114 Ibid., 62. 115 Ibid., 151, 153. 240
their agency as fully-human individuals. As the young widow Leonora avers, “a woman segregated from masculine contact is a semi-divine creature and can work miracles.”116 The avoidance of male company enabled by chastity allowed Fonte’s foremost character Corinna to
“delight and train in excellent pursuits, devoting [her] lofty thoughts to the study of letters, human and divine.”117 Fonte’s depiction of female independence and rejection of male supervision in the secular sphere was deeply inflammatory in a culture whose familial and political structures were dependent upon the maintenance of subservient female positions as wives and daughters governed by a patriarch’s will.
The creative license granted by the use of imagined dialogue characters also allowed
Fonte to nuance her vision of an independent womanhood by setting her speakers discourse on marriage in a theoretical Venetian society characterized by female self-determination and social cohesion. Unlike Marinella, whose writing was inevitably shaped by the strict rules of proper treatise construction and her desire to directly combat the work of Giuseppe Passi, Fonte was free to direct her apologia in any direction she chose so long as she portrayed a two-sided debate.
Thus her seven characters come together to celebrate the joys of female companionship and analyze the harm done their sex by patriarchal society in an alternate version of Fonte’s Venice.
The outspoken women travel from various parts of the city to meet in a contemporary Venetian
116 “Poiché la donna segregata dalla viril conversazione è una creatura quasi divina e può operar cose maravigliose” Ibid., 54. 117 “vi dilettate ed essercitate nelle virtuose azioni e impiegando i vostri alti pensiere nei cari studi delle lettere, così umane, come divine” Ibid., 18. Corinna’s independence is made additionally interesting by Fonte’s description of her as a dimmessa (see page 15). There is an interesting problem of translation regarding this term and the strength of its disassociation with men; while dimmessa could broadly refer to an unmarried female, it could also indicate a member of a sixteenth century Venetian tertiary order that housed unwed women disinclined to the confinement and religiosity of convent life. Both definitions of the term promote female autonomy, but the second constitutes an especially strong endorsement of female disassociate with men. We cannot ask Fonte which definition is correct; perhaps the text is purposefully ambiguous. I subscribe to the stronger definition of dimmessa because Il merito fiercely criticizes any relationship in which woman is made subordinate to a male figure. See Smarr, Joining the Conversation, 216 and Virginia Cox, introduction and notes to The Worth of Women, 45 n.5. 241
palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal (a hub of Venetian public life) and utilize their female agency to elect the matriarch Adriana queen of their two day conversation.118 Under the benign rule of this female authority, each character was granted room to argue her views and suggest additional topics for discussion. For Fonte to so force her audience to confront an ensemble of autonomous early modern females free to navigate the public spaces of Venice, assemble, and engage in debate sharply contravened Venetian social norms. As the literary scholar Ann
Rosalind Jones writes, the condition of respectable Renaissance females in the humanist and bourgeois tradition was a blank: “the proper woman is an absence: legally she vanishes under the name and authority of her husband … she is silent and invisible; she does not speak and she is not spoken about.”119 Fonte’s autonomous interlocutors defy such expectations and indeed condemn, attacking Venetian men’s insistence on “having such absolute power over us … and acting as if we are their slaves who cannot take a step without asking their permission nor say a word without them making a thousand comments.”120 In doing so, they furthered both Fonte’s subversive condemnation of patriarchal hegemony and her vision of independent womanhood more than any catalog of exempla could do.
Finally, Il merito’s interlocutors advanced Fonte’s vision of womanhood and belief in female social cohesion by daring to label the relationships between them true friendship. Like the dialogue, genuine friendship was customarily believed to be an exclusively male phenomenon.
The western roots of friendship date to antiquity and the writings of such Greek philosophers as
118 Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 15, 23–24. 119 Ann Rosalind Jones, “Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women’s Lyric,” in Feminism and Renaissance Studies, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 317. 120 “non ci volessero aver tanto imperio sopro [noi] … che vogliono, che siamo loro schiave e non possiamo far un passo senza domandar loro licenzie; né diciamo una parola, che non vi facino mille comenti.” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 27. 242
Plato, Zeno and Aristotle. 121 Aristotle classified all positive human interactions under the term philia or friendship, but limited the lofty bond of virtuous or true friendship to rational men.122 In the classical and early modern periods it was felt that woman’s supposedly passionate and irrational disposition rendered her participation in such elevated human connections impossible.123 Fonte’s querelle text dismissed this conception of amity and boldly portrayed its female speakers as participants in “a dear and attentive friendship.”124 While the text’s speakers range on opposing sides of the book’s debate on marriage, they always pay their companions the courtesy of listening to their arguments because “by conversing with good people” it is possible to “learn good habits and become better people through their example.”125 Through this depiction of amicable and respectful interpersonal female exchanges, Fonte displaced men with women as the true acolytes of friendship, stating that “women are more inclined to love than [men] because women are subjects more disposed by nature to compassion and love;” “thus it can be seen in friendships that a woman is quicker to make friends with another woman and better maintain the relationship than men do amongst themselves.” 126 It was important that Fonte advocate such tight bonds between Venetian women, fictional or otherwise, for if her contemporaries were to follow her transgressive exhortation for the female sex to “wake-up and recover our liberty, along with the honor and dignity that [men] have held usurped from us for so long,” such ties
121 Dirk Baltzly,and Nick Eliopoulos, “The Classical Ideals of Friendship,” in Friendship: A History, ed. Barbara Caine (London: Equinox Publishing, 2009), 2–6. 122 Ibid., 22–24. 123 Ibid., 14. See also Neville Chiavaroli and Constant J. Mews, “The Latin West,” in Friendship: A History, ed. Barbara Caine (London: Equinox Publishing, 2009), 76. 124 “avendo tra loro contratto una cara e discreta amicizia” Fonte, Il Merito delle donne, 14. 125 “perché conversando con persona da bene, impari buoni costumi ed abbia occasione di andar di bene in meglio con tale essempio” Ibid., 79. 126 “Così si vede anco nelle altre amicizie, che una donna presto se amicherà con un’altra e mantenirà meglio l’amore che non fanno gli uomini tra essi.” Ibid., 76. 243
would be needed.127 While Marinella also supported such a claiming of female independence, it is Fonte’s radical portrayal of her characters as a close-knit society of autonomous individuals that truly advances this cause and secures her position as the more progressive author.
The French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray once said “when women’s movements challenge the forms and nature of political life, the contemporary play of powers and power relations, they are in fact working towards a modification of women’s status. On the other hand, when these same movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are re-subjecting themselves … to a phallocratic order.”128
The querelle texts of 1600 represent the first female effort to dismantle accepted gender norms and the repressive institution of patriarchy in Venetian society. Fonte and Marinella’s determined effort to undermine male authority and reshape early modern notions of womanhood to promote female superiority or equality to men far surpassed the largely rhetorical stakes of the early querelle. While the letterate’s call for social change in Il merito and Là nobiltà did not translate from the literary world into material action in the seventeenth century, their powerful words mark a vital moment in which women were able to recognize and challenge their collective suppression. The feminist authors’ compositions also delineate the fact that women, whom are so often described as culturally and intellectually dormant prior to the modern period, were actively doing or engaging with their intellectual and cultural setting in earlier times. Going forward, it is important that historical analysis continue to be performed on Fonte and Marinella’s writing in order to shine a light on early modern women’s actions and cement the authors’ rightful place in our cultural memory of women’s historic struggle against social oppression.
127 “Deh di grazia, svegliamoci un giorno e ricuperamo la nostra libertà, con l’onor e dignità che tanto tempo ci tengono usurpate.” Ibid., 169. 128 Irigaray, “Interview: The Power of Discourse,” 128. 244
CONCLUSION
Venetian and Veneto women’s cinquecento civic productions and feminist defenses of the “other” sex mark an important moment in the history of women’s struggle to be recognized as fully human, a contest that continues today as women’s physical autonomy, reproductive science, and the perennial questions of which voices count, where power should reside, and how and to what extent different bodies should access the spheres of economy, government, and sex are arbitrated across the courtrooms and legislatures of the western world. The Renaissance querelle des femmes and the fourth wave of the modern feminist movement are distinct entities in that history, each shaped by the mutable variables of place, players, and the intellectual politics of their respective periods, but both illustrate the continuing importance of humanities research and the scholastic attempt to recover past women’s words and lives. Through the illumination of early modern Venetian women writers’ wit, civic fluency, humor, sharp social commentary, etc. and other acts of academic recovery, humanities scholarship can diversify classroom and canon alike, providing a critical counternarrative to the great man theory of history and the mainstream resurgence of patriarchal constructs such as “natural law” and
“natural order.” Within the narrower realm of professional historical study, the analysis of sixteenth-century authors like Issicratea Monte, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella also delineates the fact that secular Renaissance women living within the imperial bounds of a patria that sought to precept aut murus, aut maritas were actively engaging with their political and cultural milieu to a greater extent than the prevailing historiographic rendering of the period currently allows.
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This dissertation strives to bridge the fields of gender history and Venetian civic myth in order to illuminate early modern Italian women from the peninsula, Veneto, and metropole as active knowledge-makers and weavers of Venetian civic discourse. It further demonstrates that the Republic’s deep-seated investment in printed image-making was entangled with the trajectory of the local iteration of the querelle des femmes. The advent of women-authored civic discourse in the wake of the Battle of Lepanto and the War of Cyprus combined with local printing presses’ attempt to breathe life into a triumphal figuration of the state through paper, verse, and prose denote a systemic contemporary fascination with identity as cultural construct.
They also gesture to a latent, previously unstudied subscription among educated members of
Venice’s professional and cittadino classes to the idea that the contours of contemporary womanhood could transcend traditional gender bounds to include the “masculine” mantle of citizen. That early moderns were able to imagine femininity in at least some part as a product of culture that departed from the heavily polarized male-female, public-private binaries trumpeted by the classical-Christian tradition directly anticipated the pro-woman arguments of the radical
Venetian querelle.
We see this for example in Rovigan author and Venetian subject Issicratea Monte’s 1577 and 1578 orations to Sebastiano Venier, admiral of the Republic’s Lepanto fleet and Doge thanks to the acclaim garnered by his quasi-mythic status as the hero of the Ottoman defeat. While
Monte’s ducal panegyrics neither fall within the rubric of the formal debate on women nor contain an explicit defense of women’s worth, the letterata’s authoritative command of Venetian myth, expert knowledge of Venice’s bureaucratic architecture, and relatively singular function as a public, vernacular woman rhetor stood as implicit evidence of women’s educative and citizenly potential. So too did the publication of Moderata Fonte’s civic epic Tredici canti del Floridoro in
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1581, the ten-year anniversary of the Venetian victory at Lepanto. While Fonte’s dynastic tale about the fantastical founders of Venice and Florence did not enjoy a second print run, the fact that it was published at all in sixteenth-century Venice indicates an expansion in categories of contemporary authorship and in the scope of contemporary femininity. The fact of Fonte’s exemplary intervention in the “virile” realm of epic poetry as a woman author was also preserved by the catalog tradition, which perpetuated her memory as a “woman of great virtue and worth
… [who] gave to the light a most beautiful heroic poem in ottava rime dedicated to Francesco de
Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany and Bianca his wife.”1 Most importantly, the book’s content, which mixed civic flattery of the state ala an extended history of La Serenissima’s “divine” incarnation and imperial growth as a Mediterranean polity with a rhetorical reimagination of epic womanhood as multivalent rather than one-dimensional, attest to the link between civic authorship and feminist argument in cinquecento Venice. Thus the morality, independence of mind, and desire for personal sovereignty that pushes the guerierra Risamante to claim her monarchical inheritance and generate the future rulers of Italy foreshadowed the strength of spirit that would characterize Il merito delle donne’s cast of cinquecento female characters. Veneziane all, the occupants of Fonte’s querelle tract are the functional inheritors of Risamante and
Floridoro’s political legacy. As residents of Il merito’s alternative ideation of the Venetian
Republic, a place in which the other sex possesses freedom of mobility and intellect if not total liberation from patriarchal social control, Fonte’s dialogic interlocutors personify a highly localized brand of feminism that advocated for gender parity at the collective level within the
1 Alberici, Catologo breve, 63. See also Bronzini, Della dignità, & nobiltà delle donne, 30. While Fonte and Marinella’s work was rarely reprinted after their deaths, the veneziane as well as their earlier Italian querelle predecessors did have an afterlife in the seventeenth-century iteration of the bibliographic tradition (relevant authors include Paolo di Ribera, Luigi Dardano, Francesco Agostino della Chiesa, and Giacomo Tomasini in addition to Bronizini) which perpetuated cultural memory of their learnedness and the fact of their contribution to the contemporary canon. Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 197. Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 103–111, 204–205, 291–294. 247
specific context of the author’s homeland. Given that contemporary Venice was famous for the
“unprecedented freedom of life” enjoyed by its citizens as constituents of one of Italy’s two republican states, and that its own mythos idealized that liberality of life, the Republic itself and its civic narrative were perhaps the strongest weapons in Fonte’s arsenal of arguments for realizing that parity.2 In other words, the chimera of Venetian civic myth was an instrument of early modern feminism in the capable hands of Fonte and her contemporary women writers.
As mentioned in Chapter Two of this dissertation, Moderata Fonte and her Rovigan civic predecessor Issicratea Monte were epistolary acquaintances. They also shared a mutual intellectual relationship with the cinquecento playwright and Hadrian ambassador to Venice
Luigi Groto, a civic author in his own right. Groto was also Monte’s teacher, and a likely promoter of both women’s careers. As with all academic projects, my investigation of the
Venetian querelle has unearthed new gaps in our knowledge of the time that require additional research. Therefore, I’d like to end by suggesting that the function of northern Italian academic networks as a force that helped move contemporary women into print is an avenue of historical inquiry that demands future attention. In order to further our understanding of the condition of educated Renaissance women, we need to know more about the social and intellectual groups they moved in, the men who supported their careers, and their interactions with each other. We must also find a way to expand the focus of our research to include less well-known literary figures whose limited archival legacy is such that conventional modes of analysis such as close reading are rendered largely fruitless in studying them. For example, if a significant percentage of Fonte and Marinella’s work survives today and we know something of their biographies, we know significantly less about the female Lepanto writers of the 1570s (e.g. Virginia Salvi,
2 From “la libertà del vivere … quanto sia rara” Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 10. 248
Hortensia Aliprandi). And there are others about whose intellectual and civic lives we know even less; for instance, when Luigi Groto compiled his own contribution to Venetian myth-making—a
1572 anthology of Lepanto texts—he included sonnets by Venetians Giannetta Trona and Rosa
Levi (Figure 5). Trona was a patrician, Levi a Jewish convert to Christianity; how they came to be included in his political tribute to the Republic’s 1571 military victory is a mystery.
Figure 5: Frontispiece and Excerpts from Trofeo della vittoria sacra ottenuta dalla Christianiss. lega contra Turchi nell’anno MDLXXI. Edited by Luigi Groto. Venice: Sigismondo Bordogna & Francesco Patriani, 1572.
My dissertation draws on printed sources, intertextual analysis, and close reading to examine the print careers of local women who penned single-author, monograph style texts.
Going forward, early modern historians may be able to broaden our knowledge of Serenissima women’s active participation in the life of the Republic as well as the record of if not actual copies of their currently unknown literary productions by tracing their individual historical footprints within the much larger tracks left by academic communities with tools like datamining
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and digital network mapping. In so doing, we can add new dimensions to our understanding of contemporary Venetian life and the answer to why the Republic hosted the feminist radicalization of the European querelle at the turn of the seventeenth century.
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