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 ii For my Florida family—Mom, Dad, & Michael iii 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. v 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. vii 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