Pretext and Subversion: Lucrezia Marinella's Essortationi Alle Donne (1645)

Pretext and Subversion: Lucrezia Marinella’s Essortationi alle donne (1645) Amy Ellen Sinclair ORCID: 0000-0003-2268-5904 Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2018 School of Languages and Linguistics The University of Melbourne Abstract Seventeenth-century Venetian writer Lucrezia Marinella (c. 1579-1653) is a pivotal figure in the history of women’s writing in Italy, and in the history of women’s use of the pen to defend their sex. Her provocative and erudite treatise, La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini (1601) broke new ground in its cogent and forthright critique of misogynistic literary authorities and traditions. Almost half a century later, as an accomplished writer, Marinella published her second explicit contribution to the querelle des femmes, a book of apparently traditionalist exhortations entitled: Essortationi alle donne et a gli altri se a loro saranno a grado (1645). Relative to La nobiltà, the Essortationi has received significantly less critical attention. This complex, erudite, and elusive work, which has perplexed and divided modern scholars, is the subject of this thesis. The Essortationi appears at first glance to advocate highly traditionalist prescriptions for women’s conduct: an apparent volte face on the feminist principles of La nobiltà. Yet Marinella’s exhortations defy straightforward interpretation. As this thesis shows, close textual analysis reveals a persistent undertow of critique and subversion which problematises a reading of the text as a conservative recantation. The aim of this thesis is to argue through both close textual analysis of the Essortationi and evaluation of the contemporary cultural and literary context that Marinella’s posture of traditionalism in the text is best understood as an authorial alibi. Through a show of conformity to traditionalist prescriptions for women’s conduct, Marinella makes a claim of being ‘elsewhere’ to mitigate her accountability for the challenges posed in her writing to dominant discourses, authorities, and ideologies on womanhood. The alibi of traditionalism functions in this way as an exercise in strategic authorial self-representation; a way of negotiating authority and decorum to increase the likelihood of publication without backlash ii in a literary and cultural landscape that was increasingly antagonistic to the woman writer and particularly to feminist rhetoric. As well as offering a new interpretation of Marinella’s Essortationi, this study aims to show through comparative analysis the way in which the author intervenes in and disrupts a patriarchal tradition of defining and circumscribing women’s identity in Renaissance conduct and querelle des femmes literature. More broadly, and with insights from modern theories on discourse, identity, and gender, this study offers a theoretical and analytical framework to understand better how early modern women writers negotiated, in and through written discourse, historically contested subject positions of female authorship, authority, and defiance. iii Declaration This is to certify that: (i) The thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD, (ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) The thesis is fewer than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies, and appendices. Amy Sinclair iv Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my supervisors Andrea Rizzi and Stephen Kolsky for their enduring enthusiasm, encouragement, generosity, and intellectual rigour. I am forever grateful for all that they have taught me over the years. I would also like to thank Stephen for his undergraduate courses which initiated and inspired my journey to Marinella and her Essortationi alle donne. To my friend and colleague, Julie Robarts, thank you for our chats, which always made everything seem more manageable. I would also like to thank Catherine Kovesi for her support throughout my candidature and for her careful reading and helpful comments on drafts of this thesis. Eva Del Soldato also provided helpful feedback on a draft, for which I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Virginia Cox for the opportunity to discuss my project with her. Finally, I am grateful to the two assessors of this thesis for their careful readings, thoughtful and highly constructive comments. Several scholarships have provided financial support during my candidature. A Cassamarca Scholarship and an Emma Grollo Memorial Scholarship provided the financial support to conduct two research trips to Venice and Florence in 2012 and 2017. The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) provided a travel grant to enable me to present my research at the 2017 RSA conference in Chicago. Throughout my candidature, I have also benefited from the financial support of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Finally, to my mother Amanda, my partner Shawn, and children Felix and Phoebe, thank you for everything. This thesis simply would not have been possible without your encouragement, understanding, and support. v A Note on the Text In my quotations from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian sources, I have adopted a conservative approach. I have modernised the Italian by including accents but have retained the original punctuation and spelling. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... ii Declaration ....................................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... v A Note on the Text ........................................................................................................................vi Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 The Essortationi alle donne (1645) ...................................................................................... 3 1.2 Authorial Alibi .................................................................................................................... 12 1.3 New approaches to early modern women’s writing ......................................................... 15 1.4 Fashioning and dissembling authorial identities in the early modern period .................. 20 1.5 Discourse, identity, and gender ........................................................................................ 30 1.6 Methodology ..................................................................................................................... 37 Chapter 2: Marinella rewriting womanhood and tradition in Seicento Venice .......................... 47 2.1 Lucrezia Marinella (c. 1579-1653), her oeuvre and the querelle des femmes .................. 47 2.2 A changing climate for women’s writing and the Accademia degli Incogniti ................... 56 2.3 The Essortationi and the conduct literature tradition ...................................................... 68 Chapter 3: Domesticity and Learning .......................................................................................... 77 3.1 Repurposing discourses on women’s seclusion ................................................................ 79 3.2 Silent because ignorant because secluded? Parodying patriarchal reasoning ................. 92 3.3 The futility of women’s learning – critique through apparent acquiescence ................... 96 3.4 Celebrating and interrogating the “verità” of women’s “proprie arte”.......................... 106 3.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 118 Chapter 4: Modesty and beauty ............................................................................................... 120 4.1 A repurposed exhortation to modesty ............................................................................ 121 4.2 Exhorting virtue, rejecting beauty and its tyranny .......................................................... 147 4.3 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 164 Chapter 5: Prudence and authority ........................................................................................... 166 5.1 Re-reading Aristotle with Prudenza donnesca ................................................................ 167 5.2 Interrogating the authorities on marital harmony .......................................................... 184 5.3 Enacting prudential deliberation and authority – raising children and princes.............. 195 5.4 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 199 vii Chapter 6: The Essortationi as a ‘refunctioned’ conduct book ................................................. 200 6.1 The irony of the Essortationi ........................................................................................... 201 6.2 Literary and gender parody ............................................................................................

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