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Lucretia's Purity (Castitas) Over the King's "Crime" (Flagitium, an Image That Usually Suggests Sexual Transgression in Latin Literature)

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Lucretia's Purity (Castitas) Over the King's Page 65 Lucretia's purity (castitas) over the king's "crime" (flagitium, an image that usually suggests sexual transgression in Latin literature). In a refiguration of Lucretia's rape and suicide that is entirely her own, Cereta makes Lucretia's breast and its dripping blood (cruentum pectus . stillansque cruor) the agents that cleanse the state (delavit) by causing the king's expulsion. Thus in Cereta's alteration of the paradigm of Lucretia, it is the nurturing female breast and not male vengeance that washes away monarchy and enables the birth of the republic. In the epilogue to the letter, Cereta moves away from historical examples of the loyalty and devotion of women in marriage to an attack on the institution of marriage and its destructive effects on modern women. In a general indictment of marriage, Cereta describes how, between the sanctions of the Church and the dictates of nature, women are caught in a vise. Nature inclines women to choose marriage and children, but they must endure years of "wailing and all night vigils" as the consequence of this choice. In a much more pessimistic figuration of the maternal imaginary, Cereta, alluding to a passage in Pliny where a mother panther rolls over on her back and strikes a begging posture to persuade a passerby in the desert that she will not harm him if he helps save her cubs, describes wives as metaphorically rolling over like dogs (circumvolutat se, blandienti [cani] similis), in hopes that their husbands will show them some mercy. The advantages of matrimony are all on the male side, Cereta advises Zecchi: women debase themselves like animals in marriage, and the end they meet is widowhood, poverty, and grief. Yet in Cereta's tiger woman, a classically ambivalent figuration of the mother emerges: catlike, she is alternatively perceived by the men in her life as dangerous and cuddly, treacherous and nurturing, needy and giving, longing for satisfaction yet demanding punishment. XVII— On Entering into the Bonds of Matrimony To Pietro Zecchi1 The ascent of the planet Venus on your birthday is connected with the second appearance of Pisces, while the power of Venus rising in 1. Vat. 76 (fols. 63–65v); Ven. 66 (fols. 121–26v); Tom. 64 (pp. 178–87); Rabil 32. [See Introduction, note 1, for full citations] Vat. and Ven. name Cereta's correspondent as "Petrum Zeccum" (Pietro Zecchi); Tom. has "Petrum Zenum Patavinum" (Pietro Zeno da Padua). This is the only letter Cereta addressed to Zecchi. Copyright © 1997. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/12/2017 2:55 PM via UNIV OF GEORGIA AN: 35132 ; Cereta, Laura, Robin, Diana Maury.; Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist Account: uga1 Page 66 the house of good fortune is a benefit to your marriage bonds;2 for it is Venus and Pisces who control the process of procreation. But a fortunate wife will be given to you as a bride when Jupiter appears, and by her you will receive a grandson from a happy son. The discordant Great Bear moves toward the influences of these heavenly bodies, whose eightfold pairs of rays had begun to rise with you at the first darkness of the night. And although Chance might cause you to be deceived in a prior promise of marriage, still you will be consoled: in opposition to Fortune, you will soon evade the enemy and two hearts joined together under the law of chastity will enjoy themselves in an indissoluble knot of love for a long time to come. In the case of such happy auspices, who would not put aside second thoughts? Who would fail to obtain favorable omens with a sacrificial offering of a turtledove of noble purity for the god? Who from Cyprus would not give grain for a sacrificial offering to Isis of Phasis? You will prepare the cracking of nuts of Hymenaeus, who lies in ambush at virtuous weddings. You will repeat the fortunate name of Telamon; Picumnus and Pilumnus will receive the dowry gifts for the bride in their hands;3 and you will say pious prayers for peace to your god, Sleep. But if you do not believe in the friendship of favoring fate, if you accord very little weight to the oblique positions of the gliding constellations and the planets that wander in and out of various places among themselves, or if the migrations of the stars, which are perpetually in motion, do not impress you because you are someone who has a naturally suspicious mind that oscillates like a pendulum between skeptical deliberations, then I will point the way to love—to the extent that I can in a mere letter—by using examples in which the dignity and purity of women have caught fire with the flames of chaste love and a noble heart. Historians have handed down as a faithful record of the past the story that Dido Elissa, that unmovable rock of constancy, courageously chose to commit suicide because of her resolve to preserve the purity of her widowhood, and on that account she threw herself on her knife; and, as she lay on her funeral pyre while the Africans pressed around her menacingly, she repeatedly called out in an imploring tone the name Sychaeus, the husband she had longed for most.4 Who could oppose the well­earned praise of Penelope 2. The opening of this letter, though intact in Vat. and Ven., is missing in Tom.; Rabil, Laura Cereta, p. 50," provides the missing text. 3. Picumnus and Pilumnus: two early Italian deities who were associated as a pair originally with Mars (see Fabius Pictor, Iur. 5; Pliny, Nat. 18. 10; Festus, p. 205M). 4. Cereta takes this and her other exempla in this letter directly from Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women, trans. with an introduction by Guido A. Guarino [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963], chap. 38, pp. 81–83, hereafter referred to as (footnote continued on next page) Copyright © 1997. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/12/2017 2:55 PM via UNIV OF GEORGIA AN: 35132 ; Cereta, Laura, Robin, Diana Maury.; Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist Account: uga1 Page 67 when, after her conduct had remained pure and unbending in the face of a thousand proposals of marriage, she anxiously received her beloved Ulysses in Ithaca, home from Phaeacia, having waited for him twenty years?5 Did not Hypsicratea, a woman of unflagging loyalty, always stand beside her husband Mithridates, wondrously enduring tribulation on land and on sea through every battle, though he was as often vanquished as he was victorious.6 In the same way, when Lentulus was destitute, toiling, and proscribed, Sulpicia, his faithful companion, did not fear her husband's long exile in the interior of Sicily, though it meant the abandoning of her mother Julia and willfully turning her back on the many delights of her family's ancestral splendor.7 Curia among other women is also worthy of mention. She protected Quintus Lucretius, who was condemned to exile in the lists of the triumvirs; and, while keeping him safe in the inner recesses of her house and other most secret hiding places, she was just as good at masking her emotions as she was in carrying out her task with great cunning.8 The fervid love of an only daughter, Claudia, was shown towards her father, whom she rescued and set free from the violent hands of a tribune, (footnote continued from previous page) CFW). In focusing on Dido's chastity and devotion to her dead husband, Cereta follows here Boccaccio and not Virgil. On the donne famose tradition (catalogue of famous women) in humanist literature see Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of Renaissance Woman (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); my ''Space, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse," in Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, eds. Barbara K. Gold, Paul Allen Miller, Charles Platter (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming), and my Introduction to this volume. 5. See Boccaccio, CFW, chap. 38, pp. 81–83, on the most famous example in Greek myth of the faithful wife, Penelope, queen of Ithaca and wife of Homer's hero Odysseus. 6. See Boccaccio, CFW, chap. 76, pp. 170–72, on Hypsicratea, famed for having fought in battle by her husband's side dressed in a man's armor. Her husband, King Mithridates VII of Pontus (d. 63 B.C.), who engaged in battle with Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey, was famous for his cruelty. He murdered Hypsicratea and their children; and according to Plutarch, he massacred 150,000 Romans living in his dominions. 7. See Boccaccio, CFW, chap. 83, pp. 186–87, on the noble Roman Lentulus Cruscellio, who, after being proscribed by the triumvirs, hid in the wilds of Sicily; disguised as a slave, Sulpicia followed her husband to Sicily, where she lived with him in poverty. 8. See Boccaccio, CFW, chap. 81, pp. 183–84, on Quintus Lucretius, who was proscribed by the triumvirs, and his wife Turia (Curia in Vat., Ven. and Tom.), who hid him for years in her own bedroom. Cereta is vague on the details; she says "in sinu servavit incolumnem," which can mean that Curia (Turia) kept her husband safe in her bosom, in a sheltered place, or possibly under the folds of her skirt.
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