Paternal Tyranny

PAT E R N A L TYRANNY

THE OT H E R V OI C E IN E A R LY M O D E R N E U R OP E

A Series Edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr. RECENT BOOKS IN THE SERIES

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Edited and Translated by Diana Robin M A R I E L E J A R S D E G O U R N AY

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Book for the Hour of Recreation Introduction and Notes by Alison Weber Translation by Amanda Powell

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Edited and Translated by Joan DeJean

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O LY M P I A M O R A T A

The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic

LUCREZIA TORNABUONI DE’ MEDICI

Edited and Translated by Holt N. Parker

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J A C Q U E L I N E PA S C A L

JUAN LUIS VIVES

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Edited and Translated by John J. Conley, S.J.

Edited and Translated by Charles Fantazzi

Sacred Narratives

A r c a n g el a Ta r a b o t t i

P AT E R N A L TYRANNY

 E d ite d a n d Tr a n s lat ed b y Le tiz ia Pa n iz za

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

C h i ca g o & Lo n d o n

Arcangela Tarabotti, 1604–52 Letizia Panizza is research fellow in the Department of Italian at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the editor of Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society and coeditor of A History of Women’s Writing in Italy. She also wrote the introduction to Lucrezia Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2004 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2004 Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN: ISBN:

0-226-78965-9 (cloth) 0-226-78966-7 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Tarabotti, Arcangela. [Semplicita ingannata. English] Paternal tyranny / Arcangela Tarabotti ; edited and translated by Letizia Panizza. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-78965-9 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-226-78966-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Monastic and religious life of women—Italy—Venice. 2. Women—Italy— Venice—Social conditions. 3. Patriarchy—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 4. Women—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. I. Panizza, Letizia. II. Title. BX4220.I8 T3713 2004 305.42—dc21 2003002121 ⬁ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 䡬 the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

CONTENTS

Ac know led g ments v ii Series Ed itors’ Introd uc tion

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Volume Ed itor’s Introd uc tion

1

Volume Ed itor’s Bib liog raphy

33

Paternal Tyranny

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Dedication 3 7 Book One 4 3 Book Two 8 5 Book Three 1 2 3

A pp end ix One: Arc ang ela Tara botti

155

A p p end ix Tw o: Ferrante Pallavicino

158

Series Ed itors’ Bib liog rap hy Ind ex 173

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M

y special thanks go to Francesca Medioli, friend and colleague, with whom I have shared numerous conversations about Tarabotti over many years. I would also like to extend warm thanks to Susan Haskins, Diana Robin and Elissa Weaver for suggestions and advice on a number of points; Roberto Bruni for generously sharing his expertise about early Italian printed editions; Donatella Diani and Katie Macrae for checking the Vulgate Biblical quotations; and finally to series editor Albert Rabil Jr. for his determination to bring Tarabotti to a modern English-speaking public. This translation was supported by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Letizia Panizza, London, October 2002

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THE OTHER VOICE IN E A R LY M O D E R N E U R O P E : INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr. THE OLD VOICE AND THE OTHER VOICE

I

n western Europe and the United States, women are nearing equality in the professions, in business, and in politics. Most enjoy access to education, reproductive rights, and autonomy in financial affairs. Issues vital to women are on the public agenda: equal pay, child care, domestic abuse, breast cancer research, and curricular revision with an eye to the inclusion of women. These recent achievements have their origins in things women (and some male supporters) said for the first time about six hundred years ago. Theirs is the “other voice,” in contradistinction to the “first voice,” the voice of the educated men who created Western culture. Coincident with a general reshaping of European culture in the period 1300–1700 (called the Renaissance or early modern period), questions of female equality and opportunity were raised that still resound and are still unresolved. The other voice emerged against the backdrop of a three-thousandyear history of the derogation of women rooted in the civilizations related to Western culture: Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian. Negative attitudes toward women inherited from these traditions pervaded the intellectual, medical, legal, religious, and social systems that developed during the European Middle Ages. The following pages describe the traditional, overwhelmingly male views of women’s nature inherited by early modern Europeans and the new tradition that the “other voice” called into being to begin to challenge reigning assumptions. This review should serve as a framework for understanding the texts published in the series the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Introductions specific to each text and author follow this essay in all the volumes of the series.

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Series Editors’ Introduction TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF WOMEN, 500 B.C.E.–1500 C.E.

Embedded in the philosophical and medical theories of the ancient Greeks were perceptions of the female as inferior to the male in both mind and body. Similarly, the structure of civil legislation inherited from the ancient Romans was biased against women, and the views on women developed by Christian thinkers out of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were negative and disabling. Literary works composed in the vernacular of ordinary people, and widely recited or read, conveyed these negative assumptions. The social networks within which most women lived—those of the family and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church—were shaped by this negative tradition and sharply limited the areas in which women might act in and upon the world. Greek biology assumed that women were inferior to men and defined them as merely childbearers and housekeepers. This view was authoritatively expressed in the works of the philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle thought in dualities. He considered action superior to inaction, form (the inner design or structure of any object) superior to matter, completion to incompletion, possession to deprivation. In each of these dualities, he associated the male principle with the superior quality and the female with the inferior. “The male principle in nature,” he argued, “is associated with active, formative and perfected characteristics, while the female is passive, material and deprived, desiring the male in order to become complete.”1 Men are always identified with virile qualities, such as judgment, courage, and stamina, and women with their opposites—irrationality, cowardice, and weakness. The masculine principle was considered superior even in the womb. The man’s semen, Aristotle believed, created the form of a new human creature, while the female body contributed only matter. (The existence of the ovum, and with it the other facts of human embryology, was not established until the seventeenth century.) Although the later Greek physician Galen believed there was a female component in generation, contributed by “female semen,” the followers of both Aristotle and Galen saw the male role in human generation as more active and more important. G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y A N D F E M A L E N AT U R E .

1. Aristotle, Physics 1.9.192a20–24, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, rev. Oxford trans., 2 vols. (Princeton, 1984), 1:328.

Series Editors’ Introduction In the Aristotelian view, the male principle sought always to reproduce itself. The creation of a female was always a mistake, therefore, resulting from an imperfect act of generation. Every female born was considered a “defective” or “mutilated” male (as Aristotle’s terminology has variously been translated), a “monstrosity” of nature.2 For Greek theorists, the biology of males and females was the key to their psychology. The female was softer and more docile, more apt to be despondent, querulous, and deceitful. Being incomplete, moreover, she craved sexual fulfillment in intercourse with a male. The male was intellectual, active, and in control of his passions. These psychological polarities derived from the theory that the universe consisted of four elements (earth, fire, air, and water), expressed in human bodies as four “humors” (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm) considered, respectively, dry, hot, damp, and cold and corresponding to mental states (“melancholic,” “choleric,” “sanguine,” “phlegmatic”). In this scheme the male, sharing the principles of earth and fire, was dry and hot; the female, sharing the principles of air and water, was cold and damp. Female psychology was further affected by her dominant organ, the uterus (womb), hystera in Greek. The passions generated by the womb made women lustful, deceitful, talkative, irrational, indeed—when these affects were in excess—“hysterical.” Aristotle’s biology also had social and political consequences. If the male principle was superior and the female inferior, then in the household, as in the state, men should rule and women must be subordinate. That hierarchy did not rule out the companionship of husband and wife, whose cooperation was necessary for the welfare of children and the preservation of property. Such mutuality supported male preeminence. Aristotle’s teacher Plato suggested a different possibility: that men and women might possess the same virtues. The setting for this proposal is the imaginary and ideal Republic that Plato sketches in a dialogue of that name. Here, for a privileged elite capable of leading wisely, all distinctions of class and wealth dissolve, as, consequently, do those of gender. Without households or property, as Plato constructs his ideal society, there is no need for the subordination of women. Women may therefore be educated to the same level as men to assume leadership. Plato’s Republic remained imaginary, however. In real societies, the subordination of women remained the norm and the prescription.

2. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 2.3.737a27–28, in The Complete Works, 1:1144.

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Series Editors’ Introduction The views of women inherited from the Greek philosophical tradition became the basis for medieval thought. In the thirteenth century, the supreme Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, among others, still echoed Aristotle’s views of human reproduction, of male and female personalities, and of the preeminent male role in the social hierarchy. Roman law, like Greek philosophy, underlay medieval thought and shaped medieval society. The ancient belief that adult property-owning men should administer households and make decisions affecting the community at large is the very fulcrum of Roman law. About 450 B.C.E., during Rome’s republican era, the community’s customary law was recorded (legendarily) on twelve tablets erected in the city’s central forum. It was later elaborated by professional jurists whose activity increased in the imperial era, when much new legislation was passed, especially on issues affecting family and inheritance. This growing, changing body of laws was eventually codified in the Corpus of Civil Law under the direction of the emperor Justinian, generations after the empire ceased to be ruled from Rome. That Corpus, read and commented on by medieval scholars from the eleventh century on, inspired the legal systems of most of the cities and kingdoms of Europe. Laws regarding dowries, divorce, and inheritance pertain primarily to women. Since those laws aimed to maintain and preserve property, the women concerned were those from the property-owning minority. Their subordination to male family members points to the even greater subordination of lower-class and slave women, about whom the laws speak little. In the early republic, the paterfamilias, or “father of the family,” possessed patria potestas, “paternal power.” The term pater, “father,” in both these cases does not necessarily mean biological father but denotes the head of a household. The father was the person who owned the household’s property and, indeed, its human members. The paterfamilias had absolute power—including the power, rarely exercised, of life or death—over his wife, his children, and his slaves, as much as his cattle. Male children could be “emancipated,” an act that granted legal autonomy and the right to own property. Those over fourteen could be emancipated by a special grant from the father or automatically by their father’s death. But females could never be emancipated; instead, they passed from the authority of their father to that of a husband or, if widowed or orphaned while still unmarried, to a guardian or tutor. R O M A N L AW A N D T H E F E M A L E C O N D I T I O N .

Series Editors’ Introduction Marriage in its traditional form placed the woman under her husband’s authority, or manus. He could divorce her on grounds of adultery, drinking wine, or stealing from the household, but she could not divorce him. She could neither possess property in her own right nor bequeath any to her children upon her death. When her husband died, the household property passed not to her but to his male heirs. And when her father died, she had no claim to any family inheritance, which was directed to her brothers or more remote male relatives. The effect of these laws was to exclude women from civil society, itself based on property ownership. In the later republican and imperial periods, these rules were significantly modified. Women rarely married according to the traditional form. The practice of “free” marriage allowed a woman to remain under her father’s authority, to possess property given her by her father (most frequently the “dowry,” recoverable from the husband’s household on his death), and to inherit from her father. She could also bequeath property to her own children and divorce her husband, just as he could divorce her. Despite this greater freedom, women still suffered enormous disability under Roman law. Heirs could belong only to the father’s side, never the mother’s. Moreover, although she could bequeath her property to her children, she could not establish a line of succession in doing so. A woman was “the beginning and end of her own family,” said the jurist Ulpian. Moreover, women could play no public role. They could not hold public office, represent anyone in a legal case, or even witness a will. Women had only a private existence and no public personality. The dowry system, the guardian, women’s limited ability to transmit wealth, and total political disability are all features of Roman law adopted by the medieval communities of western Europe, although modified according to local customary laws.. C H R I S T I A N D O C T R I N E A N D W O M E N ’ S P L A C E . The Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament authorized later writers to limit women to the realm of the family and to burden them with the guilt of original sin. The passages most fruitful for this purpose were the creation narratives in Genesis and sentences from the Epistles defining women’s role within the Christian family and community. Each of the first two chapters of Genesis contains a creation narrative. In the first “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27). In the second, God created Eve from Adam’s rib (2:21–23). Christian theologians relied

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Series Editors’ Introduction principally on Genesis 2 for their understanding of the relation between man and woman, interpreting the creation of Eve from Adam as proof of her subordination to him. The creation story in Genesis 2 leads to that of the temptations in Genesis 3: of Eve by the wily serpent and of Adam by Eve. As read by Christian theologians from Tertullian to Thomas Aquinas, the narrative made Eve responsible for the Fall and its consequences. She instigated the act; she deceived her husband; she suffered the greater punishment. Her disobedience made it necessary for Jesus to be incarnated and to die on the cross. From the pulpit, moralists and preachers for centuries conveyed to women the guilt that they bore for original sin. The Epistles offered advice to early Christians on building communities of the faithful. Among the matters to be regulated was the place of women. Paul offered views favorable to women in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul also referred to women as his coworkers and placed them on a par with himself and his male coworkers (Phlm 4:2–3; Rom 16:1–3; 1 Cor 16:19). Elsewhere, Paul limited women’s possibilities: “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor 11:3). Biblical passages by later writers (although attributed to Paul) enjoined women to forgo jewels, expensive clothes, and elaborate coiffures; and they forbade women to “teach or have authority over men,” telling them to “learn in silence with all submissiveness” as is proper for one responsible for sin, consoling them, however, with the thought that they will be saved through childbearing (1 Tm 2:9–15). Other texts among the later Epistles defined women as the weaker sex and emphasized their subordination to their husbands (1 Pt 3:7; Col 3:18; Eph 5:22–23). These passages from the New Testament became the arsenal employed by theologians of the early church to transmit negative attitudes toward women to medieval Christian culture—above all, Tertullian (On the Apparel of Women), Jerome (Against Jovinian), and Augustine (The Literal Meaning of Genesis). T H E I M A G E O F W O M E N I N M E D I E VA L L I T E R AT U R E . The philosophical, legal, and religious traditions born in antiquity formed the basis of the medieval intellectual synthesis wrought by trained thinkers, mostly clerics, writing in Latin and based largely in universities. The vernacular literary tradition that developed alongside the learned tradition also spoke about female nature and women’s roles. Medieval stories, poems, and epics also

Series Editors’ Introduction portrayed women negatively—as lustful and deceitful—while praising good housekeepers and loyal wives as replicas of the Virgin Mary or the female saints and martyrs. There is an exception in the movement of “courtly love” that evolved in southern France from the twelfth century. Courtly love was the erotic love between a nobleman and noblewoman, the latter usually superior in social rank. It was always adulterous. From the conventions of courtly love derive modern Western notions of romantic love. The tradition has had an impact disproportionate to its size, for it affected only a tiny elite, and very few women. The exaltation of the female lover probably does not reflect a higher evaluation of women or a step toward their sexual liberation. More likely it gives expression to the social and sexual tensions besetting the knightly class at a specific historical juncture. The literary fashion of courtly love was on the wane by the thirteenth century, when the widely read Romance of the Rose was composed in French by two authors of significantly different dispositions. Guillaume de Lorris composed the initial four thousand verses about 1235, and Jean de Meun added about seventeen thousand verses—more than four times the original—about 1265. The fragment composed by Guillaume de Lorris stands squarely in the tradition of courtly love. Here the poet, in a dream, is admitted into a walled garden where he finds a magic fountain in which a rosebush is reflected. He longs to pick one rose, but the thorns prevent his doing so, even as he is wounded by arrows from the god of love, whose commands he agrees to obey. The rest of this part of the poem recounts the poet’s unsuccessful efforts to pluck the rose. The longer part of the Romance by Jean de Meun also describes a dream. But here allegorical characters give long didactic speeches, providing a social satire on a variety of themes, some pertaining to women. Love is an anxious and tormented state, the poem explains: women are greedy and manipulative, marriage is miserable, beautiful women are lustful, ugly ones cease to please, and a chaste woman is as rare as a black swan. Shortly after Jean de Meun completed The Romance of the Rose, Mathéolus penned his Lamentations, a long Latin diatribe against marriage translated into French about a century later. The Lamentations sum up medieval attitudes toward women and provoked the important response by Christine de Pizan in her Book of the City of Ladies. In 1355, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote Il Corbaccio, another antifeminist manifesto, although ironically by an author whose other works pioneered new directions in Renaissance thought. The former husband of his lover

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Series Editors’ Introduction appears to Boccaccio, condemning his unmoderated lust and detailing the defects of women. Boccaccio concedes at the end “how much men naturally surpass women in nobility” and is cured of his desires.3 W O M E N ’ S R O L E S : T H E F A M I LY . The negative perceptions of women expressed in the intellectual tradition are also implicit in the actual roles that women played in European society. Assigned to subordinate positions in the household and the church, they were barred from significant participation in public life. Medieval European households, like those in antiquity and in nonWestern civilizations, were headed by males. It was the male serf (or peasant), feudal lord, town merchant, or citizen who was polled or taxed or succeeded to an inheritance or had any acknowledged public role, although his wife or widow could stand as a temporary surrogate. From about 1100, the position of property-holding males was further enhanced: inheritance was confined to the male, or agnate, line—with depressing consequences for women. A wife never fully belonged to her husband’s family, nor was she a daughter to her father’s family. She left her father’s house young to marry whomever her parents chose. Her dowry was managed by her husband, and at her death it normally passed to her children by him. A married woman’s life was occupied nearly constantly with cycles of pregnancy, childbearing, and lactation. Women bore children through all the years of their fertility, and many died in childbirth. They were also responsible for raising young children up to six or seven. In the propertied classes that responsibility was shared, since it was common for a wet nurse to take over breast-feeding and for servants to perform other chores. Women trained their daughters in the household duties appropriate to their status, nearly always tasks associated with textiles: spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidering. Their sons were sent out of the house as apprentices or students, or their training was assumed by fathers in later childhood and adolescence. On the death of her husband, a woman’s children became the responsibility of his family. She generally did not take “his” children with her to a new marriage or back to her father’s house, except sometimes in the artisan classes. Women also worked. Rural peasants performed farm chores, merchant wives often practiced their husbands’ trades, the unmarried daughters of

3. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, or The Labyrinth of Love, trans. and ed. Anthony K. Cassell, rev. ed. (Binghamton, N.Y., 1993), 71.

Series Editors’ Introduction the urban poor worked as servants or prostitutes. All wives produced or embellished textiles and did the housekeeping, while wealthy ones managed servants. These labors were unpaid or poorly paid but often contributed substantially to family wealth. W O M E N ’ S R O L E S : T H E C H U R C H . Membership in a household, whether a father’s or a husband’s, meant for women a lifelong subordination to others. In western Europe, the Roman Catholic Church offered an alternative to the career of wife and mother. A woman could enter a convent, parallel in function to the monasteries for men that evolved in the early Christian centuries. In the convent, a woman pledged herself to a celibate life, lived according to strict community rules, and worshiped daily. Often the convent offered training in Latin, allowing some women to become considerable scholars and authors as well as scribes, artists, and musicians. For women who chose the conventual life, the benefits could be enormous, but for numerous others placed in convents by paternal choice, the life could be restrictive and burdensome. The conventual life declined as an alternative for women as the modern age approached. Reformed monastic institutions resisted responsibility for related female orders. The church increasingly restricted female institutional life by insisting on closer male supervision. Women often sought other options. Some joined the communities of laywomen that sprang up spontaneously in the thirteenth century in the urban zones of western Europe, especially in Flanders and Italy. Some joined the heretical movements that flourished in late medieval Christendom, whose anticlerical and often antifamily positions particularly appealed to women. In these communities, some women were acclaimed as “holy women” or “saints,” whereas others often were condemned as frauds or heretics. In all, although the options offered to women by the church were sometimes less than satisfactory, they were sometimes richly rewarding. After 1520, the convent remained an option only in Roman Catholic territories. Protestantism engendered an ideal of marriage as a heroic endeavor and appeared to place husband and wife on a more equal footing. Sermons and treatises, however, still called for female subordination and obedience.

THE OTHER VOICE, 1300–1700

When the modern era opened, European culture was so firmly structured by a framework of negative attitudes toward women that to dismantle it was a

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Series Editors’ Introduction monumental labor. The process began as part of a larger cultural movement that entailed the critical reexamination of ideas inherited from the ancient and medieval past. The humanists launched that critical reexamination. T H E H U M A N I S T F O U N D AT I O N . Originating in Italy in the fourteenth century, humanism quickly became the dominant intellectual movement in Europe. Spreading in the sixteenth century from Italy to the rest of Europe, it fueled the literary, scientific, and philosophical movements of the era and laid the basis for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Humanists regarded the Scholastic philosophy of medieval universities as out of touch with the realities of urban life. They found in the rhetorical discourse of classical Rome a language adapted to civic life and public speech. They learned to read, speak, and write classical Latin and, eventually, classical Greek. They founded schools to teach others to do so, establishing the pattern for elementary and secondary education for the next three hundred years. In the service of complex government bureaucracies, humanists employed their skills to write eloquent letters, deliver public orations, and formulate public policy. They developed new scripts for copying manuscripts and used the new printing press to disseminate texts, for which they created methods of critical editing. Humanism was a movement led by males who accepted the evaluation of women in ancient texts and generally shared the misogynist perceptions of their culture. (Female humanists, as we will see, did not.) Yet humanism also opened the door to a reevaluation of the nature and capacity of women. By calling authors, texts, and ideas into question, it made possible the fundamental rereading of the whole intellectual tradition that was required in order to free women from cultural prejudice and social subordination. A D I F F E R E N T C I T Y . The other voice first appeared when, after so many centuries, the accumulation of misogynist concepts evoked a response from a capable female defender: Christine de Pizan (1365–1431). Introducing her Book of the City of Ladies (1405), she described how she was affected by reading Mathéolus’s Lamentations: “Just the sight of this book . . . made me wonder how it happened that so many different men . . . are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behavior.”4 These statements impelled her to

4. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards, foreword by Marina Warner (New York, 1982), 1.1.1, pp. 3–4.

Series Editors’ Introduction detest herself “and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature.”5 The rest of The Book of the City of Ladies presents a justification of the female sex and a vision of an ideal community of women. A pioneer, she has received the message of female inferiority and rejected it. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, a huge body of literature accumulated that responded to the dominant tradition. The result was a literary explosion consisting of works by both men and women, in Latin and in the vernaculars: works enumerating the achievements of notable women; works rebutting the main accusations made against women; works arguing for the equal education of men and women; works defining and redefining women’s proper role in the family, at court, in public; works describing women’s lives and experiences. Recent monographs and articles have begun to hint at the great range of this movement, involving probably several thousand titles. The protofeminism of these “other voices” constitutes a significant fraction of the literary product of the early modern era. About 1365, the same Boccaccio whose Corbaccio rehearses the usual charges against female nature wrote another work, Concerning Famous Women. A humanist treatise drawing on classical texts, it praised 106 notable women: ninety-eight of them from pagan Greek and Roman antiquity, one (Eve) from the Bible, and seven from the medieval religious and cultural tradition; his book helped make all readers aware of a sex normally condemned or forgotten. Boccaccio’s outlook nevertheless was unfriendly to women, for it singled out for praise those women who possessed the traditional virtues of chastity, silence, and obedience. Women who were active in the public realm—for example, rulers and warriors—were depicted as usually being lascivious and as suffering terrible punishments for entering the masculine sphere. Women were his subject, but Boccaccio’s standard remained male. Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies contains a second catalog, one responding specifically to Boccaccio’s. Whereas Boccaccio portrays female virtue as exceptional, she depicts it as universal. Many women in history were leaders, or remained chaste despite the lascivious approaches of men, or were visionaries and brave martyrs. The work of Boccaccio inspired a series of catalogs of illustrious women of the biblical, classical, Christian, and local pasts, among them Filippo da T H E C AT A L O G S .

5. Ibid., 1.1.1–2, p. 5.

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Series Editors’ Introduction Bergamo’s Of Illustrious Women, Pierre de Brantôme’s Lives of Illustrious Women, Pierre Le Moyne’s Gallerie of Heroic Women, and Pietro Paolo de Ribera’s Immortal Triumphs and Heroic Enterprises of 845 Women. Whatever their embedded prejudices, these works drove home to the public the possibility of female excellence. At the same time, many questions remained: Could a woman be virtuous? Could she perform noteworthy deeds? Was she even, strictly speaking, of the same human species as men? These questions were debated over four centuries, in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English, by authors male and female, among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, in ponderous volumes and breezy pamphlets. The whole literary genre has been called the querelle des femmes, the “woman question.” The opening volley of this battle occurred in the first years of the fifteenth century, in a literary debate sparked by Christine de Pizan. She exchanged letters critical of Jean de Meun’s contribution to The Romance of the Rose with two French royal secretaries, Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col. When the matter became public, Jean Gerson, one of Europe’s leading theologians, supported de Pizan’s arguments against de Meun, for the moment silencing the opposition. The debate resurfaced repeatedly over the next two hundred years. The Triumph of Women (1438) by Juan Rodríguez de la Camara (or Juan Rodríguez del Padron) struck a new note by presenting arguments for the superiority of women to men. The Champion of Women (1440–42) by Martin Le Franc addresses once again the negative views of women presented in The Romance of the Rose and offers counterevidence of female virtue and achievement. A cameo of the debate on women is included in The Courtier, one of the most widely read books of the era, published by the Italian Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 and immediately translated into other European vernaculars. The Courtier depicts a series of evenings at the court of the duke of Urbino in which many men and some women of the highest social stratum amuse themselves by discussing a range of literary and social issues. The “woman question” is a pervasive theme throughout, and the third of its four books is devoted entirely to that issue. In a verbal duel, Gasparo Pallavicino and Giuliano de’ Medici present the main claims of the two traditions. Gasparo argues the innate inferiority of women and their inclination to vice. Only in bearing children do they profit the world. Giuliano counters that women share the same spiritual and mental capacities as men and may excel in wisdom and action. Men and women are of the same essence: just as no stone can be more perfectly a T H E D E B AT E .

Series Editors’ Introduction stone than another, so no human being can be more perfectly human than others, whether male or female. It was an astonishing assertion, boldly made to an audience as large as all Europe. T H E T R E AT I S E S . Humanism provided the materials for a positive counterconcept to the misogyny embedded in Scholastic philosophy and law and inherited from the Greek, Roman, and Christian pasts. A series of humanist treatises on marriage and family, on education and deportment, and on the nature of women helped construct these new perspectives. The works by Francesco Barbaro and Leon Battista Alberti—On Marriage (1415) and On the Family (1434–37)—far from defending female equality, reasserted women’s responsibility for rearing children and managing the housekeeping while being obedient, chaste, and silent. Nevertheless, they served the cause of reexamining the issue of women’s nature by placing domestic issues at the center of scholarly concern and reopening the pertinent classical texts. In addition, Barbaro emphasized the companionate nature of marriage and the importance of a wife’s spiritual and mental qualities for the well-being of the family. These themes reappear in later humanist works on marriage and the education of women by Juan Luis Vives and Erasmus. Both were moderately sympathetic to the condition of women without reaching beyond the usual masculine prescriptions for female behavior. An outlook more favorable to women characterizes the nearly unknown work In Praise of Women (ca. 1487) by the Italian humanist Bartolommeo Goggio. In addition to providing a catalog of illustrious women, Goggio argued that male and female are the same in essence, but that women (reworking the Adam and Eve narrative from quite a new angle) are actually superior. In the same vein, the Italian humanist Maria Equicola asserted the spiritual equality of men and women in On Women (1501). In 1525, Galeazzo Flavio Capra (or Capella) published his work On the Excellence and Dignity of Women. This humanist tradition of treatises defending the worthiness of women culminates in the work of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa On the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. No work by a male humanist more succinctly or explicitly presents the case for female dignity. T H E W I T C H B O O K S . While humanists grappled with the issues pertain-

ing to women and family, other learned men turned their attention to what they perceived as a very great problem: witches. Witch-hunting manuals, explorations of the witch phenomenon, and even defenses of witches are not at first glance pertinent to the tradition of the other voice. But they do

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Series Editors’ Introduction relate in this way: most accused witches were women. The hostility aroused by supposed witch activity is comparable to the hostility aroused by women. The evil deeds the victims of the hunt were charged with were exaggerations of the vices to which, many believed, all women were prone. The connection between the witch accusation and the hatred of women is explicit in the notorious witch-hunting manual The Hammer of Witches (1486) by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Krämer and Jacob Sprenger. Here the inconstancy, deceitfulness, and lustfulness traditionally associated with women are depicted in exaggerated form as the core features of witch behavior. These traits inclined women to make a bargain with the devil—sealed by sexual intercourse—by which they acquired unholy powers. Such bizarre claims, far from being rejected by rational men, were broadcast by intellectuals. The German Ulrich Molitur, the Frenchman Nicolas Rémy, and the Italian Stefano Guazzo all coolly informed the public of sinister orgies and midnight pacts with the devil. The celebrated French jurist, historian, and political philosopher Jean Bodin argued that because women were especially prone to diabolism, regular legal procedures could properly be suspended in order to try those accused of this “exceptional crime.” A few experts such as the physician Johann Weyer, a student of Agrippa’s, raised their voices in protest. In 1563, he explained the witch phenomenon thus, without discarding belief in diabolism: the devil deluded foolish old women afflicted by melancholia, causing them to believe they had magical powers. Weyer’s rational skepticism, which had good credibility in the community of the learned, worked to revise the conventional views of women and witchcraft. W O M E N ’ S W O R K S . To the many categories of works produced on the question of women’s worth must be added nearly all works written by women. A woman writing was in herself a statement of women’s claim to dignity. Only a few women wrote anything before the dawn of the modern era, for three reasons. First, they rarely received the education that would enable them to write. Second, they were not admitted to the public roles— as administrator, bureaucrat, lawyer or notary, or university professor—in which they might gain knowledge of the kinds of things the literate public thought worth writing about. Third, the culture imposed silence on women, considering speaking out a form of unchastity. Given these conditions, it is remarkable that any women wrote. Those who did before the fourteenth century were almost always nuns or religious women whose isolation made their pronouncements more acceptable.

Series Editors’ Introduction From the fourteenth century on, the volume of women’s writings rose. Women continued to write devotional literature, although not always as cloistered nuns. They also wrote diaries, often intended as keepsakes for their children; books of advice to their sons and daughters; letters to family members and friends; and family memoirs, in a few cases elaborate enough to be considered histories. A few women wrote works directly concerning the “woman question,” and some of these, such as the humanists Isotta Nogarola, Cassandra Fedele, Laura Cereta, and Olympia Morata, were highly trained. A few were professional writers, living by the income of their pens; the very first among them was Christine de Pizan, noteworthy in this context as in so many others. In addition to The Book of the City of Ladies and her critiques of The Romance of the Rose, she wrote The Treasure of the City of Ladies (a guide to social decorum for women), an advice book for her son, much courtly verse, and a full-scale history of the reign of King Charles V of France. W O M E N P AT R O N S . Women who did not themselves write but encouraged others to do so boosted the development of an alternative tradition. Highly placed women patrons supported authors, artists, musicians, poets, and learned men. Such patrons, drawn mostly from the Italian elites and the courts of northern Europe, figure disproportionately as the dedicatees of the important works of early feminism. For a start, it might be noted that the catalogs of Boccaccio and Alvaro de Luna were dedicated to the Florentine noblewoman Andrea Acciaiuoli and to Doña María, first wife of King Juan II of Castile, while the French translation of Boccaccio’s work was commissioned by Anne of Brittany, wife of King Charles VIII of France. The humanist treatises of Goggio, Equicola, Vives, and Agrippa were dedicated, respectively, to Eleanora of Aragon, wife of Ercole I d’Este, duke of Ferrara; to Margherita Cantelma of Mantua; to Catherine of Aragon, wife of King Henry VIII of England; and to Margaret, duchess of Austria and regent of the Netherlands. As late as 1696, Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest was dedicated to Princess Anne of Denmark. These authors presumed that their efforts would be welcome to female patrons, or they may have written at the bidding of those patrons. Silent themselves, perhaps even unresponsive, these loftily placed women helped shape the tradition of the other voice. T H E I S S U E S . The literary forms and patterns in which the tradition of the other voice presented itself have now been sketched. It remains to high-

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Series Editors’ Introduction light the major issues around which this tradition crystallizes. In brief, there are four problems to which our authors return again and again, in plays and catalogs, in verse and letters, in treatises and dialogues, in every language: the problem of chastity, the problem of power, the problem of speech, and the problem of knowledge. Of these the greatest, preconditioning the others, is the problem of chastity. T H E P R O B L E M O F C H A S T I T Y . In traditional European culture, as in those of antiquity and others around the globe, chastity was perceived as woman’s quintessential virtue—in contrast to courage, or generosity, or leadership, or rationality, seen as virtues characteristic of men. Opponents of women charged them with insatiable lust. Women themselves and their defenders— without disputing the validity of the standard—responded that women were capable of chastity. The requirement of chastity kept women at home, silenced them, isolated them, left them in ignorance. It was the source of all other impediments. Why was it so important to the society of men, of whom chastity was not required, and who more often than not considered it their right to violate the chastity of any woman they encountered? Female chastity ensured the continuity of the male-headed household. If a man’s wife was not chaste, he could not be sure of the legitimacy of his offspring. If they were not his and they acquired his property, it was not his household, but some other man’s, that had endured. If his daughter was not chaste, she could not be transferred to another man’s household as his wife, and he was dishonored. The whole system of the integrity of the household and the transmission of property was bound up in female chastity. Such a requirement pertained only to property-owning classes, of course. Poor women could not expect to maintain their chastity, least of all if they were in contact with high-status men to whom all women but those of their own household were prey. In Catholic Europe, the requirement of chastity was further buttressed by moral and religious imperatives. Original sin was inextricably linked with the sexual act. Virginity was seen as heroic virtue, far more impressive than, say, the avoidance of idleness or greed. Monasticism, the cultural institution that dominated medieval Europe for centuries, was grounded in the renunciation of the flesh. The Catholic reform of the eleventh century imposed a similar standard on all the clergy and a heightened awareness of sexual requirements on all the laity. Although men were asked to be chaste, female unchastity was much worse: it led to the devil, as Eve had led mankind to sin. To such requirements, women and their defenders protested their innocence. Furthermore, following the example of holy women who had escaped

Series Editors’ Introduction the requirements of family and sought the religious life, some women began to conceive of female communities as alternatives both to family and to the cloister. Christine de Pizan’s city of ladies was such a community. Moderata Fonte and Mary Astell envisioned others. The luxurious salons of the French précieuses of the seventeenth century, or the comfortable English drawing rooms of the next, may have been born of the same impulse. Here women not only might escape, if briefly, the subordinate position that life in the family entailed but might also make claims to power, exercise their capacity for speech, and display their knowledge. T H E P R O B L E M O F P O W E R . Women were excluded from power: the whole cultural tradition insisted on it. Only men were citizens, only men bore arms, only men could be chiefs or lords or kings. There were exceptions that did not disprove the rule, when wives or widows or mothers took the place of men, awaiting their return or the maturation of a male heir. A woman who attempted to rule in her own right was perceived as an anomaly, a monster, at once a deformed woman and an insufficient male, sexually confused and consequently unsafe. The association of such images with women who held or sought power explains some otherwise odd features of early modern culture. Queen Elizabeth I of England, one of the few women to hold full regal authority in European history, played with such male/female images—positive ones, of course—in representing herself to her subjects. She was a prince, and manly, even though she was female. She was also (she claimed) virginal, a condition absolutely essential if she was to avoid the attacks of her opponents. Catherine de’ Medici, who ruled France as widow and regent for her sons, also adopted such imagery in defining her position. She chose as one symbol the figure of Artemisia, an androgynous ancient warrior-heroine who combined a female persona with masculine powers. Power in a woman, without such sexual imagery, seems to have been indigestible by the culture. A rare note was struck by the Englishman Sir Thomas Elyot in his Defence of Good Women (1540), justifying both women’s participation in civic life and their prowess in arms. The old tune was sung by the Scots reformer John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558); for him rule by women, defects in nature, was a hideous contradiction in terms. The confused sexuality of the imagery of female potency was not reserved for rulers. Any woman who excelled was likely to be called an Amazon, recalling the self-mutilated warrior women of antiquity who repudiated all men, gave up their sons, and raised only their daughters. She was often said to have “exceeded her sex” or to have possessed “masculine virtue”—as

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Series Editors’ Introduction the very fact of conspicuous excellence conferred masculinity even on the female subject. The catalogs of notable women often showed those female heroes dressed in armor, armed to the teeth, like men. Amazonian heroines romp through the epics of the age—Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–1609). Excellence in a woman was perceived as a claim for power, and power was reserved for the masculine realm. A woman who possessed either one was masculinized and lost title to her own female identity. T H E P R O B L E M O F S P E E C H . Just as power had a sexual dimension when it was claimed by women, so did speech. A good woman spoke little. Excessive speech was an indication of unchastity. By speech, women seduced men. Eve had lured Adam into sin by her speech. Accused witches were commonly accused of having spoken abusively, or irrationally, or simply too much. As enlightened a figure as Francesco Barbaro insisted on silence in a woman, which he linked to her perfect unanimity with her husband’s will and her unblemished virtue (her chastity). Another Italian humanist, Leonardo Bruni, in advising a noblewoman on her studies, barred her not from speech but from public speaking. That was reserved for men. Related to the problem of speech was that of costume—another, if silent, form of self-expression. Assigned the task of pleasing men as their primary occupation, elite women often tended toward elaborate costume, hairdressing, and the use of cosmetics. Clergy and secular moralists alike condemned these practices. The appropriate function of costume and adornment was to announce the status of a woman’s husband or father. Any further indulgence in adornment was akin to unchastity. T H E P R O B L E M O F K N O W L E D G E . When the Italian noblewoman Isotta Nogarola had begun to attain a reputation as a humanist, she was accused of incest—a telling instance of the association of learning in women with unchastity. That chilling association inclined any woman who was educated to deny that she was or to make exaggerated claims of heroic chastity. If educated women were pursued with suspicions of sexual misconduct, women seeking an education faced an even more daunting obstacle: the assumption that women were by nature incapable of learning, that reasoning was a particularly masculine ability. Just as they proclaimed their chastity, women and their defenders insisted on their capacity for learning. The major work by a male writer on female education—that by Juan Luis Vives, On the Education of a Christian Woman (1523)—granted female capacity for intellection but still argued that a woman’s whole education was to be shaped around the requirement of chastity and a future within the household. Female writers

Series Editors’ Introduction of the following generations—Marie de Gournay in France, Anna Maria van Schurman in Holland, and Mary Astell in England—began to envision other possibilities. The pioneers of female education were the Italian women humanists who managed to attain a literacy in Latin and a knowledge of classical and Christian literature equivalent to that of prominent men. Their works implicitly and explicitly raise questions about women’s social roles, defining problems that beset women attempting to break out of the cultural limits that had bound them. Like Christine de Pizan, who achieved an advanced education through her father’s tutoring and her own devices, their bold questioning makes clear the importance of training. Only when women were educated to the same standard as male leaders would they be able to raise that other voice and insist on their dignity as human beings morally, intellectually, and legally equal to men. T H E O T H E R V O I C E . The other voice, a voice of protest, was mostly female, but it was also male. It spoke in the vernaculars and in Latin, in treatises and dialogues, in plays and poetry, in letters and diaries, and in pamphlets. It battered at the wall of prejudice that encircled women and raised a banner announcing its claims. The female was equal (or even superior) to the male in essential nature—moral, spiritual, and intellectual. Women were capable of higher education, of holding positions of power and influence in the public realm, and of speaking and writing persuasively. The last bastion of masculine supremacy, centered on the notions of a woman’s primary domestic responsibility and the requirement of female chastity, was not as yet assaulted—although visions of productive female communities as alternatives to the family indicated an awareness of the problem. During the period 1300–1700, the other voice remained only a voice, and one only dimly heard. It did not result—yet—in an alteration of social patterns. Indeed, to this day they have not entirely been altered. Yet the call for justice issued as long as six centuries ago by those writing in the tradition of the other voice must be recognized as the source and origin of the mature feminist tradition and of the realignment of social institutions accomplished in the modern age.

We thank the volume editors in this series, who responded with many suggestions to an earlier draft of this introduction, making it a collaborative enterprise. Many of their suggestions and criticisms have resulted in revisions of this introduction, although we remain responsible for the final product.

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Isabella Andreini, Mirtilla, edited and translated by Laura Stortoni Tullia d’Aragona, Complete Poems and Letters, edited and translated by Julia Hairston , The Wretch, Otherwise Known as Guerrino, edited and translated by Julia Hairston and John McLucas Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola and Diamante Medaglia Faini, The Education of Women, edited and translated by Rebecca Messbarger Francesco Barbaro et al., On Marriage and the Family, edited and translated by Margaret L. King Laura Battiferra, Selected Poetry, Prose, and Letters, edited and translated by Victoria Kirkham Giulia Bigolina, “Urania” and “Giulia,” edited and translated by Valeria Finucci Francesco Buoninsegni and Arcangela Tarabotti, Menippean Satire: “Against Feminine Extravagance” and “Antisatire,” edited and translated by Elissa Weaver Maddalena Campiglia, Flori, a Pastorial Drama: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson Rosalba Carriera, Letters, Diaries, and Art, edited and translated by Shearer West Madame du Chatelet, Selected Works, edited by Judith Zinsser Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, edited and translated by Abigail Brundin Vittoria Colonna, Chiara Matraini, and Lucrezia Marinella, Marian Writings, edited and translated by Susan Haskins Marie Dentière, Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin, edited and translated by Mary B. McKinley Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Correspondence with Descartes, edited and translated by Lisa Shapiro Isabella d’Este, Selected Letters, edited and translated by Deanna Shemek Fairy-Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers, edited and translated by Lewis Seifert and Domna C. Stanton Moderata Fonte, Floridoro, edited and translated by Valeria Finucci Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, Religious Narratives, edited and translated by Virginia Cox Francisca de los Apostoles, Visions on Trial: The Inquisitional Trial of Francisca de los Apostoles, edited and translated by Gillian T. W. Ahlgren Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, Meditations on the Life of Christ, edited and translated by Lynne Tatlock In Praise of Women: Italian Fifteenth-Century Defenses of Women, edited and translated by Daniel Bornstein Louise Labé, Complete Works, edited and translated by Annie Finch and Deborah Baker Madame de Maintenon, Dialogues and Addresses, edited and translated by John Conley, S.J. Lucrezia Marinella, L’Enrico, or Byzantium Conquered, edited and translated by Virginia Cox Lucrezia Marinella, Happy Arcadia, edited and translated by Susan Haskins and Letizia Panizza Chiara Matraini, Selected Poetry and Prose, edited and translated by Elaine MacLachlan

Series Editors’ Introduction Eleonora Petersen von Merlau, Autobiography (1718), edited and translated by Barbara Becker-Cantarino Alessandro Piccolomini, Rethinking Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Italy, edited and translated by Letizia Panizza Christine de Pizan et al., Debate over the “Romance of the Rose,” edited and translated by Tom Conley with Elisabeth Hodges Christine de Pizan, Life of Charles V, edited and translated by Charity Cannon Willard Christine de Pizan, The Long Road of Learning, edited and translated by Andrea Tarnowski Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Selected Letters, Dialogues, and Poems, edited and translated by Anne Larsen Oliva Sabuco, The New Philosophy: True Medicine, edited and translated by Gianna Pomata Margherita Sarrocchi, La Scanderbeide, edited and translated by Rinaldina Russell Madeleine de Scudéry, Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues, edited and translated by Jane Donawerth with Julie Strongson Justine Siegemund, The Court Midwife of the Electorate of Brandenburg (1690), edited and translated by Lynne Tatlock Gabrielle Suchon, “On Philosophy” and “On Morality,” edited and translated by Domna Stanton with Rebecca Wilkin Sara Copio Sullam, Sara Copio Sullam: Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Early Seventeenth-Century Venice, edited and translated by Don Harrán Arcangela Tarabotti, Convent Life as Inferno: A Report, introduction and notes by Francesca Medioli, translated by Letizia Panizza Laura Terracina, Works, edited and translated by Michael Sherberg Madame de Villedieu (Marie-Catherine Desjardin), Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière: A Novel, edited and translated by Donna Kuizenga Katharina Schütz Zell, Selected Writings, edited and translated by Elsie McKee

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THE OTHER VOICE

T

he title of this series, “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe,” could not be more appropriately applied than to Arcangela Tarabotti (1604– 1652), all of whose writings articulate her anger at life’s injustices to women in general, and at the injustices of seventeenth-century Venetian family, marriage, and religious life in particular. Tarabotti not only overcame the reticence, so strong in early modern women writers, about revealing deep personal emotions, longings, and opinions, especially when these meant condemning men; she resisted to a remarkable extent, and in one case overcame, attempts by them to silence her. Tarabotti cannot be placed in any conventional literary slot; her writings, including this one, both elude the usual categories and mix features of many of them. Paternal Tyranny is predominantly an invective against the oppressions of patriarchy; but it is also a treatise on the evils of forcing young girls into a life they are not suited for, a psychological autobiography on the torments of childhood and adolescence in the Venetian family of her day, a confession to God of a soul’s suffering, a literary critique of major texts of contemporary misogyny, a feminist commentary on the Bible, and finally, the first manifesto about women’s inalienable rights to liberty, equality, and universal education. Passages in Paternal Tyranny could have come from the circle of Mary Wollstonecraft or John Stuart Mill two centuries later. This book is Tarabotti’s j’accuse, in which the tone of an avenging angel remains a constant.1

1. Modern studies on Tarabotti were launched in 1960 with E. Zanette, Suor Arcangela Tarabotti monaca del Seicento veneziana (Venice and Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1960), which incorporates earlier articles and bibliography. While in some aspects an unparalleled source of information about Tarabotti’s life and milieu, Zanette does not take her protesta-

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n TA R A B O T T I ’ S L I F E A N D W O R K S

Tarabotti was self-conscious and bitter about her physical appearance. She was lame, a condition that she alone, among all her siblings, inherited from her father and that gave him cause to judge her unmarriageable, fit therefore only for the convent. (The same condition had not prevented her father himself from marrying.)2 She put on a brave face. When someone insulted her in a letter, she registered the hurt—“you derided me to my face, and taunted me about that disability by which my father perhaps wished to brand me as his daughter”—but also engaged in counterattack: though her taunter was “sound of body,” he was “crippled in soul” and would be excluded from tions—or those of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella—seriously. Tarabotti was nursing personal grievances, perhaps caused by an unhappy love affair, that colored her judgments. More objective reevaluations began with G. Conti-Odorisio, Donna e società nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Arcangela Tarabotti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979); see also P. Labalme, “Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists, Archivio Veneto 117 (1981): 81–109; D. De Bellis, “Arcangela Tarabotti nella cultura veneziana del XVII secolo,” Annali del Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Firenze 6 (1990): 59–110; M. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and V. Cox, “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 513–81. See entries on Tarabotti by N. Costa Zalessow, in Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Testi e critica (Ravenna: Longo, 1982); A. Niero in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1990); M. Gambier, in Le stanze ritrovate. Antologia di scrittrici venete dal Quattrocento al Novecento, ed. A. Arslan et al., 117–25 (Mirano and Venice: Eidos, 1991); E. Weaver in Italian Women Writers. A Bio-Biographical Sourcebook, ed. R. Russell 415–22 (Westport, Conn., 1994); and L. Panizza in volume 6 of the Encyclopaedia of the Renaissance, ed. P. Grendler, 109–11 (New York: Scribner’s, 1999). A collection of essays exclusively on Tarabotti and her social and cultural context is forthcoming in the series Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies and edited by E. Weaver, Arcangela Tarabotti (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press). Tarabotti’s six works, in order of publication (not composition) are as follows: (1) Il Paradiso monacale, con un soliloquio a Dio (Venice: G. Oddoni, 1643). (2) F. Buoninsegni and Suor A. Tarabotti, Satira e Antisatira (1651), ed. E. Weaver (Rome: Salerno, 1998); translation forthcoming in this series, also edited by E. Weaver. (3) Lettere familiari e di complimento (Venice: Guerigli, 1650), critical edition by M. Ray and L. Westwater (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, forthcoming). (4) Galerana Barcitotti, Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini. Difesa della donne (1651), ed. L. Panizza (London: Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, 1994); translation by T.M. Kenney, “Women Are Not Human”: An Anonymous Treatise and Responses (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998). (5) Galerana Baratotti, La semplicità ingannata (Innocence Betrayed) (Leyden: G. Sambix [=Elzevier], 1654); translated with original title Tirannia paterna (Paternal Tyranny) in this book. (6) L’ Inferno monacale di Arcangela Tarabotti, ed. F. Medioli (Turin, 1990); translation forthcoming by F. Medioli and L. Panizza in this series. “Galerana Barcitotti” and “Galerana Baratotti” are pseudonyms. Note that only the first four of her writings were published in her lifetime. Printed with Lettere familiari is a poetic funeral lament in honor of her lifelong friend in the convent, Regina Donà (or Donato), Le Lagrime (Tears) (Venice: Guerigli, 1650), which belongs to the genre of penitential or mournful lyric poetry of the same name initiated by Luigi Tansillo in the sixteenth century and followed, among others, by Lucrezia Marinella in her 1606 Le Lagrime di San Pietro. Tarabotti is thought to have completed her version of Dante’s Divine

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Christ’s great feast in the next life. On one occasion, she could even assert that her lack of physical attractiveness was compensated for by superior moral and spiritual qualities: 3

I have always had this maxim engraved in my memory: that without chastity no woman is beautiful, and that physical beauty cannot and should not claim a greater adornment than purity of heart. Indeed, recognizing that I am ugly and maimed in body, I have devoted myself to cultivating beauty of soul as the only kind that deserves to be desired and admired.4 As a child of eleven, she was sent as a boarder to the Benedictine Convent of Sant’Anna in Castello, the area of Venice near the famous Arsenale shipyards. When she was sixteen, in 1620, she took her first vows, and in 1623, her final vows. She was already a rebel, refusing to wear the religious habit or cut her hair.5 If Tarabotti is sometimes harsh about her companions, she is merciless about their parents, blaming them for abusing the convent and treating it as a dumping ground for their unwanted maimed, mentally retarded, and illegitimate daughters. Like Cain, who offered “the most contemptible things he possessed, a sign and proof of his heart’s meanness and wickedness, intent solely on material gain,” contemporary fathers do not offer as brides of Jesus their most beautiful and virtuous daughters, but the most repulsive and deformed: lame, hunchbacked, crippled, or simple-minded. They are blamed for whatever natural defect they are born with and condemned to lifelong prison. (book 1, 66) She was also appalled at the inadequacy of the instruction imparted to the young boarders, most of whom would go on to become nuns, and linked Comedy by writing a Purgatorio on the sufferings of mismatched wives to complement her Inferno monacale and Paradiso monacale; so far, no manuscript has surfaced. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) composed A Vindication of the Rights of Women; John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) composed On the Subjection of Women. 2. Tarabotti was born 24 February 1604 and died 28 February 1652. She had two brothers and four other sisters, only two of whom married. The other two were allowed to remain single. She kept in touch with her sister Lorenzina, who married Giacomo Pighetti, who is mentioned several times in her correspondence. There is no mention of her father Stefano, who died an old man in 1642. Her mother, Maria Cadena, died in 1649, only a few years before Tarabotti herself. Her death is recorded in a letter of Tarabotti to a close friend, Betta Polani (Lettere, 55), to whom she turns for comfort. 3. Lettere, 80. 4. Paradiso, translation from “Letter to the Reader,” appendix 1. 5. “Soliloquio a Dio,” Paradiso 8–9.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n women’s poor education inside and outside the convent to their general subjection. Fathers made sure that from an early age their daughters’ minds were stunted: You give them as a governess another woman, also unlettered, who can barely instruct them in the rudiments of reading, to say nothing of anything to do with philosophy, law, and theology. In short, they learn nothing but the ABC, and even then this is poorly taught. (I know from experience, so I can bear witness at length). (book 2, 99) At sixteen, she took her four vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability—the latter was a characteristic of Benedictines, who were thereby bound to remain physically in the same convent for life and to be buried there. No wonder the thought of her convent both as a tomb in which she was buried alive as well as a prison recurs with such frequency.6 From vivid descriptions in Paternal Tyranny of the psychological blackmail employed by fathers, priests, and the religious themselves against recalcitrant young girls we can perhaps infer something of Tarabotti’s own experience: Too much, yes, too much does the behavior of the head of a family disgust me when he advises young girls to lock themselves in a cage! . . . [Fathers] prate on and on how their daughters must on no account ever think of renouncing the religious life to embrace holy wedlock and how the married state is full of trials and tribulations for a woman (book 1, 62) Even worse, daughters could be made to feel responsible for the financial survival of the family. Tarabotti compares fathers to Caiphas the high priest and his followers at Christ’s trial, who decreed that “[i]t was expedient that one man should die for the people” (Jn 18:14). “Just like them you say that 6. The practice of forcing young girls to enter the convent was denounced by the patriarchs of Venice. Giovanni Tiepolo, patriarch from 1619 to 1631, acknowledged in a letter to the Venetian Doge and Senate that many nuns were in convents “not because of a religious motivation, but pushed by their own families; they make a gift of their own liberty (so precious even to those lacking reason) not just to God, but to their native land, to the world, and to their closest relatives” (“non per spirito di devozione, ma per impulso dei loro, facendo della propria libertà (tanto cara a quelli che mancano dell’uso della ragione) un dono non solo a Dio, ma anco alla Patria, al Mondo et alli loro più stretti parenti”); in Silvio Tramontin, “Ordini e congregazioni religiose,” Storia della cultura veneta. Il Seicento, ed. G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi, 23–60, 49 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1983). Tiepolo’s solution, however, was merely to relax the rules to make life more bearable; social chaos would result if so many single women were to remain in the world.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n convents are built on purpose for all kinds of women: ‘The religious life is their destiny—much better for one woman to be shut up to serve God than for a whole family to be ruined’ ” (book 3, 131). The use of “God’s will” to mask lying fathers’ selfish desires infuriates Tarabotti, and she mimics their twisted casuistry: There isn’t a leaf on a tree that moves without the divine will permitting (they say); God has willed these daughters of ours and their relatives to be born for the purpose of being enclosed in a convent; destiny—which derives from God’s inscrutable decisions—obliges them to submit to lifelong imprisonment, and if it were not meant to be so, His Divine Majesty would not allow it to happen! She punctures this hypocritical bubble with a defiant, “You liars! Not even the devil himself would have the impudence to speak thus” (book 3, 127).7 She notes that greed spreads throughout the family like a poison, as brothers brag to their sisters that they alone will inherit the family’s wealth. Addressing the incredulous reader, Tarabotti urges, See for yourself if you doubt the absolute truth of my words! Go and ask one of these children, who as yet cannot put two syllables together, let alone a whole word: ‘What will become of your sisters?’ Immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, prompted by that cunning disposition shaped by his father’s upbringing, he will say, ‘They’ll become nuns because I want to be rich!’ (book 1, 74)

7. E. Zanette was so struck by Tarabotti’s description of fathers’ devious arguments in Paternal Tyranny that he thought there must have been manuals written just for the purpose. Unfortunately, none has come to light. But plenty of grist for their mills could have been found, I believe, in the many treatises circulating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about the glories of the religious life and its superiority to marriage. See E. Zanette, Suor Arcangela, monaca del Seicento veneziano (note 1), 94–95. The superiority of virginity over marriage was accepted doctrine since the early Church, and affirmed most emphatically by Saint Jerome in his letters and polemical tracts against Jovinianus and Helvidius. See J.N.D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings and Controversies (London, 1975); and E.F. Rice, Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). In its regulations about marriage issued in 1563, the Council of Trent reiterated this hierarchy. See A. Turchini, “Dalla disciplina alla ‘creanza’ del matrimonio all’indomani del Concilio di Trento,” in Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo, ed. G. Zarri, 205–14 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1996). Before the Council of Trent, there had been a vigorous campaign of tracts, essays, and dialogues to promote the dignity of marriage. See M. F. Fubini Leuzzi, “Vita coniugale e vita familiare nei trattati italiani fra XVI e XVII secolo,” in the same collection, 253–67. For further documentation corroborating Tarabotti, see F. Medioli, “Monacazioni forzate: donne ribelli al proprio destino,” in Clio. Rivista trimestrale di studi storici 30 (1994): 431–54.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Mothers stay silent. Tarabotti gives no indication that her own mother ever spoke up for her, or any other mother for their daughters—a witness of their powerlessness and their obligation as wives to obey their husbands.8 Once daughters were safely behind the grille never to come out again, fathers felt relieved at having got rid of a financial “burden.”9 The money saved from not paying out a dowry could be channeled into dowries for one or two favored daughters or preserved for a son’s inheritance or, Tarabotti also suggests, squandered by fathers for their own interests. This parental unfairness toward their own offspring never ceased to exasperate Tarabotti. Most girls forced to enter the convent accepted their lot to a greater or lesser degree; they knew they could do little or nothing to change it.10 All of Tarabotti’s compositions testify that she did not accept hers. If she was forced to live a lie, as she frequently confesses, it was all the more important for her to be true to herself in what she wrote. Tarabotti’s first published work, Il Paradiso monacale (Convent Life as Paradise), came out in 1643, when she was almost forty and had been in the convent for over twenty-five years. The one recorded event that affected her from the date of her final vows, 1623, to the book’s publication was the formal visitation to the convent of Federico Cardinal Cornaro (or Corner) in 1633. Of an old patrician Venetian family, he was known for his learning and piety and for putting into practice the reforming ideals of the Council of Trent.11 According to Tarabotti, he succeeded in changing her outward observance of the rule for the better but not her heart: “He made me amend my vanities. I cut off my hair, but I did not uproot my emotions. I reformed my life, but my thoughts flourish rampantly, and just like my shorn hair, grow all the more.”12 Though she laments her lack of a proper education and the deficiencies of the convent library, the Paradiso presupposes many 8. In L’Inferno monacale (44), Tarabotti mentions mothers who collude with fathers and religious superiors in forcing girls to enter the convent. 9. Tarabotti accuses fathers of yielding to “diabolical suggestions about ridding themselves of impediments to the line of inheritance: the house is relieved of the burden of females before they themselves are capable of making a free choice about their state in life.” See book 2, 90. 10. See F. Medioli, “To Take or Not to Take the Veil: Selected Italian Case Histories, the Renaissance and After,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. L. Panizza, 122–37 (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), for examples of some women who were released from their vows or who escaped, and for the conditions needed. 11. Paradiso (note 1), “Soliloquio a Dio,” 12, 24–26. See also the entry by G. Gullino in volume 29 of the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Treccani, 1960): 185–88, who attributes Tarabotti’s “conversion” to the cardinal. 12. “Fecemi corregger le vanità. Recisi i capelli, ma non sradicai gli affetti. Riformai la vita, ma i pensieri, ch’apunto a guisa di capelli tagliati, più crescono, vanno pullulando.” Paradiso 26.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n years of reading and writing, of exchanging and discussing literature, of visits by outsiders to the convent parlor (for nuns, the closest meeting place in Venice to a salon), of the circulation of partial or even whole manuscripts, and of editorial help in preparing her text for publication. To some extent, Tarabotti’s persona of the unlettered nun cut off from the world of learning is a ruse serving to deflect criticism but also to draw approval for what she has accomplished under such adverse circumstances. In her own address “To the Reader” of Paradiso monacale, she pleads, Do not expect from me a fine vocabulary, elegant tropes, pleasing descriptions, lofty opinions, and wide learning. These are qualities belonging to great intellects, not to me; my mind is poorly endowed. Just ponder a moment: what charm can there be in the manner of writing of a women who has not had any imaginable enlightenment in Latin language or literature or any other discipline to assist her in the art of composition; and who, for the rules of spelling and grammar, makes use of nothing beyond a dictionary? What style, what explanations, what sharpness of understanding can be discerned there? A person who has never been taught how to read and write, and who does not even recall learning how to read—although she has enjoyed it extremely—simply cannot possess sufficient preparation to compose without making all kinds of mistakes. (appendix 1, 156) From the Paradiso, it transpires that she had written two other books, the contents of which had circulated at least partially in manuscript. The printer, Guglielmo Oddoni, cheerfully tells the reader to “[e]xpect in a short while other compositions from the same very famous hand, more spicy, perhaps, as they are far better suited to worldly tastes: I hope that Paternal Tyranny will be the first.”13 The second was L’Inferno monacale, mentioned explicitly at the very end of Paternal Tyranny: “There is another book of mine, soon forthcoming, where [my thoughts] will appear with their same native simplicity to prove to you that in those places constructed by your fraudulent self-interest reign all the pains of Hell” (book 3, 152–53).14

13. “Attendi in breve altre compositioni dalla stesssa celebratissima penna forse più piccanti per esser assai più aggiustate al gusto del secolo. La Tirannia Paterna spero che sarà la prima.” Paradiso, “A chi legge,” no pagination. 14. In her own “Letter to the Reader” (appendix 1), Tarabotti states explicitly that she has composed two other books, each divided into three parts, but that they “were abruptly snatched from my hands.” She does not say who did this or for what reason. It is also unclear if Oddoni already had two other manuscript copies of these books when he announced their imminent

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n In all three books, Tarabotti shows herself to be relatively well-read in contemporary literature, prose, and poetry, as well as in the Bible and spiritual writings, a fact that leads us to wonder who encouraged her in her worldly reading and in her writing for a public outside the convent. What emerges is that Tarabotti was the only woman writer in Venice to enjoy the company, support, and financial patronage of one of the most distinguished, talented, and powerful aristocrats of the age, Giovanni Francesco Loredan, founder of the prestigious Venetian literary academy, the Incogniti, in 1627, and its leading light until his death in 1661. The Academy, furthermore, had the reputation for promoting anticlerical if not anti-Catholic sentiments and had become known as libertine—all of which makes it more incongruous for a Benedictine nun, however rebellious, to be attached to it. It may be that her brother-in-law, Giacomo Pighetti, a lawyer from Brescia and an art collector, and member himself of the Incogniti, first befriended her, lent her books, and introduced her to more illustrious members of the Academy, including Loredan. All the same, it was a remarkable achievement for Tarabotti to have Loredan’s letter to another Venetian patrician Giovanni Polani singing her praises in the front of Paradiso, with a play on her composition as a “Terrestrial Paradise” for its “trees of learning, boughs of phrasing, flowers of conceits and fruits of knowledge.”15 Equally prestigious was the dedication of her own correspondence, Lettere familiari e di complimento of 1650, to Loredan, who acted as an editor and benefactor. Loredan in turn included some letters to her, varying in tone, in his own Lettere.16 Tarabotti’s Antisatira, furthermore, was in answer to a Satira delivered in Loredan’s Academy and led to an acrimonious

publication. In an autograph letter to Angelico Aprosio dated a year earlier, 1642, Tarabotti states she has finished both Paternal Tyranny and Paradiso monacale. See F. Medioli, “Alcune lettere autografe di Arcangela Tarabotti: autocensura e immagine di sé,” Rivista di letteratura e storia religiosa 32 (1996): 135–55. 15. “Lo credei un Paradiso Terrestre, mentre gli alberi dell’eruditione, le frondi della frase, li fiori de’concetti, i frutti delle scienze . . . mi necessitavano a crederlo tale.” Letter to Signor Giovanni Polani, no pagination; also in Loredan’s Lettere del Signor Gio: Francesco Loredano Nobile Veneto (Venice: Guerigli, 1658), 49–50. Polani’s sister, Betta, was a nun and close friend of Tarabotti in the same convent of Sant’Anna. Her family supported her in her desire to leave. On the Incogniti, see G. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini, 2d ed. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983); and on Loredan, see M. Miato, L’Accademia degli Incogniti di Giovan Francesco Loredan, Venezia (1630–1661) (Florence: Olschki, 1998). 16. Loredan was furious at Tarabotti’s satirical attack on Buoninsegi (Loredan, Lettere, 243–44) and hurled back the usual misogynist commonplaces. But he is also full of praise for other works and appreciated the dedication of her letters to him. The third part of one of his novels, Hibraino (Abraham), was dedicated to her with the comment, “I know with how much keenness you read modern novels and with how much application, to the glory of your sex, you study the most famous authors” (“So con quanta curiosità non solo legge i Romanzi moderni, ma con quanta applicatione a gloria del suo sesso studia gli Autori più rinomati”) (Lettere, 435).

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n dispute with him. Her Paternal Tyranny, finally, takes issue with at least two works of the Incogniti: first and foremost, Loredan’s own L’Adamo, and then Ferrante Pallavicino’s Corriero svaligiato (121–22 and appendix 2).17 These first three works also share common themes, although with different emphases, regarding the religious life and the social, ethical, and theological problems of forcing women to lead a way of life they find repugnant. Although there has been controversy about whether Tarabotti underwent a conversion, there is agreement that the Paradiso monacale did allow her to present herself as a good Christian. All the same, she sharply contrasts the “true” nun, who gladly embraces the religious life, and for whom Tarabotti is full of praise, with the “false” one, a nun only in appearance: The voluntary sacrifice of one’s heart is more pleasing to God than anything else offered up to Him, whether forcibly or by persuasion . . . [and I believe that] numberless women, true living flames of the church . . . who have chosen for themselves through their own free will and have taught others the true path to eternal salvation, have succeeded in conforming themselves to God’s heart and are passionately loved by Him in return; but women forced [on this path] are little if at all pleasing to Him, and deserve to be banished from his mercy.18 Where does Tarabotti place herself? Certainly not among the former. She had not chosen the religious life, so she did not deserve the love God gives to the “voluntary sacrifice of one’s heart.” On the other hand, whatever she felt, in the eyes of the church and society she had consented to vows and could be punished for not keeping them. The publication of Paradiso served 17. The only other woman writer in Venice contemporaneous with Tarabotti was Lucrezia Marinella, prolific poet and novelist and author of a polemical work defending women, L’eccellenza et nobiltà delle donne, con i difetti e mancamenti degli huomini (1601), now in this series: The Nobility and Excellence of Women. With the Defects and Vices of Men, trans. A. Dunhill and intro. L. Panizza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). There is no evidence of letters between Marinella and members of the Incogniti or between her and Tarabotti. It may be that Marinella was too religiously conservative to approve of Tarabotti. In her very last work, she shows no sympathy with religious who rebel against the rules and regulations of their orders. See my introductory essay to Marinella, 15. 18. “L’oblatione volontaria del cuore sia più grata a Dio di qual si voglia cosa che gli venga offerta, o forzatamente, o per altrui persuasione, [e credo che] le numerosissime donne faci vive della Chiesa . . . c’hanno per propria volontà eletto per se stesse, & insegnato ad altre la strada vera della salute eterna, siano riuscite conforme al cuore di Dio, e siano svisceratamente da lui riamate, ma poco, anzi nulla grate gli siano le sforzate, come degne d’esser in esoso alla di lui misericordia” (Il Paradiso monacale, 50). The couplet serving as epigraph to Paternal Tyranny expresses similar sentiments.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n as an open act of reparation for the scandal of the two previous works that had circulated in manuscript. It was a palinode that made a strong case for the opposite point of view, but it did not necessarily mean that the author embraced this view for herself.19 It is Tarabotti’s most labored work, with quotations in Latin and Italian from the Old and New Testaments, early Christian writers like Saints Augustine and Ambrose, spiritual writers like Saint Bernard, and vernacular poets like Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini. She was deeply insulted to learn that Angelico Aprosio considered her works “full of faults” (imperfettissime) and at the same time declared that they were too learned to have been written by her. She retorted, “My offspring never had any other father than my unlettered mind, and no mother other than my own ignorance.”20 In another letter to the Duke of Parma, Ferdinando Farnese, she refers to Aprosio’s Maschera scoperta as written by the same person who doubted that the Paradiso “can be the fruit of my own labors.”21 Tarabotti soon laid herself open once again to the charge of worldliness. A year later, in 1644, she brought out a short tract in direct answer to an earlier one published in Venice in 1638, Contro ‘l lusso donnesco, satira menippea (Against Women’s Luxury. Menippean Satire), by Francesco Buoninsegni of Siena, friend of Loredan. In her Antisatira, she dons the persona of the confidante of married women who turn to her as their advocate, begging her to answer

19. Medioli rejects the “conversion” hypothesis most strongly on the grounds that Tarabotti went on trying all her life to publish Paternal Tyranny and was successful, although it came out two years after her death. Her later works also continued to arouse scandal. I would agree with Medioli in that there was no conversion in the sense of a complete change of heart and way of life. But judging from her own “Letter to the Reader” in Paradiso (translated into English in appendix 1), I am inclined to see the conversion as more of a crisis in which she tries to change and reaches a compromise: she cannot be a true nun, but she can and is moral and devout. Although disclaiming a literary education, she knows enough about rhetoric to adopt different personas for her writings. In the autobiographical “Soliliquio a Dio” (Paradiso,1–33), she is a new Augustine. She shows herself to be repenting of former worldliness and attachment to “vanities,” but not serious sin. In her “Letter to the Reader,”(appendix 1)in fact, she admits she is assuming a penitential role, but in case readers jump to any conclusions, she denies utterly any accusation of unchastity: “I am speaking before God, in whose sight I believe it is best to exaggerate one’s faults humbly in order to appease his most just anger more easily and regain his favor . . . . On the other hand, I have never deviated from what is owing to the honor that the conditions of my birth, my upbringing, and my own gifts demand of me. If I have been carried away in vain and youthful frivolities, my sense of honor always kept me within the limits of a chastity so unsullied that it could boast the name of purest innocence.” 20. Tarabotti explicitly admits in one of her letters that she had more difficulty writing Paradiso than writing Paternal Tyranny or Convent life as Inferno (Lettere, 69); “I miei parti non hebbero giamai altro Padre che il mio rozzo ingegno, né altra Madre che la mia stessa ignoranza,” Lettere, to Padre [Aprosio], no date, 24–25. 21. “possa essere frutto de’miei sudori” (Lettere, 34).

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n the ridicule poured on women by Buoninsegni for their seemingly excessive love of clothes, hairstyles, and adornments. Tarabotti resorted to her favorite principle of equal standards: if men ridiculed women, women could exercise the corresponding right to criticize men for their love of luxury displayed in items like fancy lace collars and cuffs, padded stockings, and expensive wigs. Indeed, if men first divested women of ignorance by educating them, women would soon give up worldly vanities. The trouble was that men kept women at arm’s length from learning so that when the need arose, “they do not know how to defend themselves nor do they want to.”22 Her final work, published under the pseudonym Galerana Barcitotti in 1651, a year before her death, was also directed specifically at refuting a particular tract: Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini (Women Do Belong to the Species Mankind), subtitled Difesa delle donne (A Defense of Women). It was an answer to an Italian translation attributed to “Orazio Plata Romano,” Che le donne non siano della spezie degli uomini. Discorso piacevole (Women Do Not Belong to the Species Mankind. An Amusing Speech), published in 1647.23 The Italian was based on an anonymous Latin tract circulating since 1595, Disputatio nova contra mulieres. Qua probatur eas homines non esse (An Amazing Debate against Women, by Which It Is Proved That They Are Not Men). The tract quoted Scripture to “prove” that women do not have a rational soul, cannot make ethical choices, and cannot therefore be saved. Even as a joke against those who would abuse Scripture to prove any doctrine, the author’s thesis once again was at the expense of women’s ignorance: “With your fallacious arguments you have aimed to attack women who cannot answer your wicked lies because they lack an education and with your poisoned minds you strive to kill their innocent

22. For Buoninsegni’s tract and Tarabotti’s answer, see the critical edition with introductory essay by Elissa Weaver (note 1 above); Weaver discusses the furor following the publication of Tarabotti’s work, revealing that Buoninsegni himself remained good-humored with respect to Tarabotti (Weaver, 25–27). For further details on Aprosio’s attempts to prevent publication see Emilia Biga, Una polemica antifemminista del ‘600. La Maschera scoperta di Angelico Aprosio (Città di Ventimiglia: Quaderno dell’Aprosiano 4, Civica Biblioteca Aprosiana, 1989), 49–112; and Quinto Marini, “Angelico Aprosio da Ventimiglia,” in Frati barocchi, 153–79; for Tarabotti, 170– 73 (Modena: Mucchi, 2000). Marini concludes that Aprosio made himself so objectionable to the Incogniti that he had to leave Venice. See also D. De Bellis, “Attacking sumptuary laws in Seicento Venice: Arcangela Tarabotti,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. L. Panizza, 227–42 (note 10). 23. See the critical edition with introductory essay by L. Panizza (note 1). Tarabotti dismantles “Plata” paragraph by paragraph, calling each section of his an “inganno” (“illusion”) and refuting it with her “disinganno” (“disillusion”). For the identity of “Plata”—the finger points to Loredan or a close associate—an analysis of her arguments, and the context and reception of the tract, see my introductory essay to Che le donne, vii—xxx. Tarabotti was right in calling the work heretical; it was placed on the Index in 1651.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n souls.”24 An incandescent Tarabotti dismantles the sophistries of the original tract like an expert logician or lawyer, and she spots the misreading of passages from Scripture like a trained theologian. In addition, she attacks the author by a series of animal metaphors—he is in turn a goat, a chameleon, an ass, a wolf, a mole, a serpent, a crow, a cuckoo, a spider, a wasp—that invert the misogynistic opposition of (rational) male versus (irrational) female. It is the anonymous (male) author, not his female adversary, who ends up stripped of a human soul. Quotations she had used earlier in Paternal Tyranny from Genesis and the New Testament to assert women’s moral and intellectual equality are now put to a similar purpose with equal effectiveness. With the publication in 1650 of her Lettere familiari e di complimento, Tarabotti’s persona entered a public, secular domain. (I have left them to the last, as they shed light on the analysis of Paternal Tyranny to follow next.)25 Dedicated to Loredan, they bore his coat-of-arms on the title page. Inside was a Dedicatory Letter from Tarabotti acknowledging his patronage. She had achieved her goal as a literary figure who corresponded as a social and intellectual equal with members of the Venetian elite: aristocracy, clergy, and the top men of letters of her age, many of whom were Incogniti; and she makes these impressive relationships known to all her readers. The letters testify to a cultural exchange between peers: Tarabotti sends out her own works and asks for advice and comment, but she also receives works of other writers and is sometimes asked for advice. (In conducting herself thus, she was defying instructions of the Venetian Patriarch himself, who specifically warned nuns against writing and receiving letters of any kind.26 ) To her physician Francesco Pona, author of erotic and anticlerical novels,27 she confesses to feeling mortified when other Incogniti have shown him 24. “Voi, con sofistici argomenti, vi sète messo ad assalir a quel sesso che per mancanza di studi non può risponder alle vostre inventate malvagità, e col veleno de’vostri caratteri procurate d’uccidere l’anime de’semplici” (Che le donne, 6). 25. Until the critical edition promised by Ray and Westwater (note 1), the 1650 edition of the letters, although not entirely reliable, will have to be used. They are not in chronological order, lack a date, and often withhold the names of the addressees. For revealing discrepancies between published and manuscript letters, see F. Medioli, “Alcune lettere autografe di Arcangela Tarabotti: Autocensura e immagine di sé” (note 14). 26. Says Patriarch Giovan Francesco Morosini. “They [nuns] should refrain . . . from writing and receiving letters to avoid sin, for when it is done with a bad intention, it becomes a mortal sin” (“S’astenghino . . . di scriver lettere e dal riceverne, per schivare il peccato, che quando sia a mal fine, si fa mortale”). Quoted by E. Zanette, Arcangela Tarabotti, 366. 27. Pona’s satirical novel, La lucerna, first published in 1625, incurred the condemnation of the Index. Modern edition by Giorgio Fulco (Rome: Salerno, 1973). One episode is about a young nun—one of the many transformations of the male narrator—escaping to meet her lover; see 123–27.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n her writings (Lettere, 76–77) and reports that she has received a motet of the famed musical composer Vittoria that Pona wants for his own daughter in a monastery (Lettere, 241). She corresponds also with Angelico Aprosio, Augustinian bibliophile, who turned into her bitterest enemy at the time of her Antisatira;28 Girolamo Brusoni, a fugitive Carthusian priest who wrote sympathetically about the plight of nuns like Tarabotti in his novels, but then attacked her after her death and sided with Aprosio;29 Giovan Francesco Busenello, the most acclaimed opera librettist of the age, who came to visit her masked;30 and Count Pier Paolo Bissari of Vicenza, writer of short stories, various poetic compositions, and a successful libretto, La Bradamante, based on Ariosto’s warrior heroine, put to music by Francesco Cavalli in 1650 and highly praised by Tarabotti (Lettere, 280).31 The letters reveal to what extent Tarabotti did value her own writings, how driven she was to circulate them and have them published, and how sensitive she was to criticism. When she thought she was near death, she entrusted her writings to her best friend who had left the convent, Betta Polani; they are “the most precious things I have, and that pain me the most to leave behind.”32 Many letters testify to her determination in overcoming the obstacles she encountered in publishing Paternal Tyranny. She is indefatigable. She accuses one (anonymous) author of plagiarizing her Paternal Tyranny for his own story about “nuns forced to take the veil” (Lettere, 291–92). She turns to Vittoria Maria della Rovere, Duchess of Tuscany, to obtain permission to

28. For his extreme misogyny displayed in his quarrels with Tarabotti, see Emilia Biga, Una polemica antifemminista del ‘600 (note 22 above); see also A. Asor-Rosa’s entry in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol 3, 650–53; and Quinto Marini, “Angelico Aprosio da Ventimiglia” (note 22 above). 29. See entry by G. De Caro in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 14: 712–20; the analysis of his novels in G. Spini, 247–53; and Girolamo Brusoni, ed. G. Benzoni (Rovigo: Minelliana, 2001). Between 1640 and 1642, he wrote four novels, one of which, Le turbolenze delle Vestali (The Turmoils of Vestal Virgins), set in ancient Rome, dealt with the unhappy lives and loves of Vestal virgins, all too similar to contemporary Venetian nuns. When published in 1658 with a changed title, Gli amori tragici, it was put on the Index. For his attack on Tarabotti in Sogni di Parnaso, see this introduction, 26–27. 30. Lettere, 206. Tarabotti also asked Enrico Cornaro to intercede on her behalf with the poet; she wanted him to write a piece for her close friend who died in the convent, Regina Donà (Lettere, 155–56). Busenello wrote libretti for several operas including “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” 1642) (“The Coronation of Poppea”), which was put to music by Claudio Monteverdi. See entry by M. Capucci, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani vol. 15, 512–15. 31. See entry by G. Ballistreri, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 10, 688–89; and E. Zanette (note 1), 327–31. Bissari remained on good terms with Tarabotti, praising her in public in his own Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza. 32. Tarabotti requests Polani burn her manuscripts after her death (Lettere, 47).

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n print from Rome or Florence (Lettere, 136–37). Unsuccessful, she seeks support from French visitors. She writes directly to the great French bibliophile, friend of the Incogniti and librarian of Cardinal Mazarin, Gabriel Naudé, when he comes to Venice (Lettere, 184–86). Perhaps during a visit of Naudé, she is told of greater “freedom of conscience” in France and how Paris, compared with Venice, is a “women’s Paradise.” The latter comment is repeated to Mazarin himself (Lettere, 186–88). She receives some cooperation from the French ambassador in Venice, Nicolas Bretel de Gremonville, and his wife; when he dies, she writes to his wife and daughters, whom she taught in the convent, but also to another Frenchman, Louis de Matharel, to retrieve her book. When she had not heard from Matharel for over a year, she writes frantically to Renata di Claramonte, Marchesa di Galeranda, and begs her to do something (Lettere, 219). On receiving proofs (perhaps partial), she is furious at the number of misprints, and tells the Marchesa that she does not want the printing to go ahead (Lettere, 230). In this letter, Tarabotti shows herself ready to sacrifice the money she made making lace to cover her publication costs. Another letter tells us that she has “rebaptized” her book, by which she must mean giving it the new name of La semplicità ingannata (Innocence Betrayed) and probably adding the introductory addresses “To God” and “To the Reader.” The original title placed blame for women’s condition firmly on patriarchy, on political and cultural structures designed to prevent women from entering public life as equals. The revised title shifts attention to women as innocent victims whose destiny it is to suffer. Difficulties in publishing this book and its companion, Convent Life as Inferno, were compounded because they offended not only ecclesiastical authorities with their “bad publicity” for the religious life, but also the majesty of the state with their condemnation of Venetian policy about dowries and restricting marriages. Tarabotti herself acknowledged as much: “I realize the subject matter is scandalous because it goes against our political as well as against our Catholic way of life” (Lettere, 317). Loredan himself had two sisters in convents; he held high political offices and kept strictly to the aristocratic policy of restricting marriages, though supportive of Tarabotti on many counts. He could allow her fame, but not liberty. In a letter to a young aristocratic relative, Laura Pasqualigo, who had appealed to Loredan against the desires of her family to place her in the convent against her will, Loredan is heartless. Her family’s honor and status must come first: “Marriage is desirable for young people, preserving the decorum of society. But if one looks closely, one will find more thorns than roses, more reason for despair than happiness.” Laura must put out of

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n her mind any idea of getting married both to safeguard her family’s reputation and to preserve her own peace of mind: You have been born noble, of a distinguished family, but since you do not have a dowry to match your birth, you must either marry beneath you, or hazard the inconvenience of poverty. You will encounter universal contempt if you stain nobility with inferior alliances . . . . Those marriages are always unhappy where the partners are unequal by birth but equal in poverty.33 It is not unlikely that Loredan was instrumental in suppressing Paternal Tyranny and Convent Life as Inferno and in compensation, perhaps, promoting the Paradiso and her letters. It may also be no coincidence that the changed title, La semplicità ingannata, comes straight out of Eve’s speech to God in Loredan’s L’Adamo. When asked to explain herself for tempting Adam and bringing about the downfall of the human race, Eve responds: “My simplicity . . . was deceived by the cunning of the serpent” (“La mia semplicità . . . è stata ingannata dalla sagacità del serpente,” 52), a sentiment that removes guilt from Eve. For Loredan, that would have been unintentional. Tarabotti, on the other hand, may have felt that for once Loredan was speaking the truth and enjoyed catching him in contradiction. Tarabotti’s death in February 1652 at the age of forty-eight was probably hastened by tuberculosis. She often describes her exhaustion and fevers in letters, and the prescribed cure of the time, the application of leeches. At one point, she says she is so weak and emaciated she cannot even recopy her own writings and would like someone to perform this task for her (Lettere, 287). She was presumably buried in the convent cemetery.

C O N T E N T A N D A N A LY S I S

At a first glance, Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny appears a loosely put together invective against the patriarchy of her day, beginning with the family, then moving outwards as in concentric circles to convent life in Venice, and finally to the organization of Venetian political life itself. The sense of looseness is added to by the lack of divisions within the books, frequent jumps from one line of thought to another, and Tarabotti’s own admission of returning to a main point after digressing. On closer inspection, her short address to 33. This letter is partially quoted with discussion in L. Menetto and G. Zennaro, La storia del malcostume a Venezia nei secoli XVI e XVII (Abano Terme: Piovan, 1987), 104–5.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n the Venetian Republic at the beginning of Paternal Tyranny establishes the unifying fundamental opposition coloring all three books: the one republic in the Italian peninsula boasting political liberty exercises the most execrable tyranny against its own women, depriving them of liberty granted even to foreigners. Tarabotti’s task will therefore be to expose the tyranny that patriarchy struggles to conceal, overturn the arguments that buttress it, and restore and enhance the liberty that has been wrongfully suppressed. Much of the emotional pull of her book lies, I believe, in her ambivalence about herself. She is at once hopeful and despairing: hopeful in that she writes to reach others who will listen to her message; despairing in that her own fate has been sealed. As she concludes in her address to Venice, “Once you have lost liberty, there remains nothing else to lose.” Tarabotti has lost; her readers must take up her cause. The dismantling of the structures supporting tyranny takes place on many overlapping planes: theological, political, social, and psychological. In all three books, Tarabotti is engaged in debates against adversaries she does not immediately identify. Three authors stand out, all published in Venice, whose works surface not just once or twice, but several times: First in time is Giuseppe Passi’s Dei difetti donneschi of 1599, already refuted brilliantly by Lucrezia Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women (1600, 1602, 1620); second is Gian Francesco Loredan’s parody of Genesis, defending Adam against Eve, L’Adamo (The Life of Adam) of 1640;34 and third is Ferrante Pallavicino’s vitriolic epistolary satire, also misogynistic, Il corriero svaligiato (The PostBoy Robbed of His Bag). On her own side she lines up the Bible, in particular, the book of Genesis and the New Testament; Dante’s Divine Comedy, and an anonymous Italian translation of Agrippa’s The Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex,35 the writings of contemporary Venetian women such as Lucrezia

34. L’Adamo di Gio. Francesco Loredano nobile Veneto (Venice: Valvasense, 1640). The edition I follow bears the date 1666. It was translated twice into English. See The Life of Adam (1640) of Giovan Francesco Loredano, facsimile reproduction of 1659(Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967); also printed in 1779. There is a French translation of 1695. 35. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), was first published in Latin in 1529. Probably because of Agrippa’s Protestant and occultist leanings, this tract appeared anonymously in Italian about the middle of the century and was soon adapted by other Italian writers. Agrippa’s own arguments encouraged a rehabilitation of Eve and the role of women in the Bible. It is not possible to say which version Tarabotti used. See Rabil’s introduction to this work, 27–29. Earlier, Isotta Nogarola had cautiously attempted to diminish Eve’s “guilt” in a treatise letter of about 1450. See M. King and A. Rabil, Jr., Her Immaculate Hand (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), 57–69. On the paradoxical nature of such attempts, see F. Daenens, “Superiore perché inferiore: il paradosso della

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Marinella and the slightly earlier Moderata Fonte, and vernacular poets like Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini. Most remarkable throughout Paternal Tyranny is Tarabotti’s narrative voice. She is not a nun lamenting her own condition, engaged in special pleading, or acting in her own interests, but more like a modern investigative journalist, committed to making unwanted truths known to a cynical world about an unjustly treated group. When speaking of nuns who freely choose the religious life, she comments, Our age is not worthy of such exemplars; nor can I speak about them. I can only relate what I have heard or read, since even when it comes to the modern condition of religious forced to take vows, I am only able to have an imperfect and shadowy knowledge, as I am a layperson. (book 1, 64–65) In her final peroration against male tyranny, she also distances herself, this time to convey her own inexperience compared with the difficulty of her task: Just outrage and imprecations against your enormities should come from a voice other than mine or be written down in another hand. I am a simple woman . . . with no experience of your diabolical way of life . . . . It is impossible for a person like myself to describe your waywardness and evils when I have always led a life far from such practices. (book 3, 152) There is further ambivalence about her identity in the above quotations; whether placing herself within or without the convent, she is an outsider. It may not be right to call her a nun at all, since she herself makes the distinction between a true nun who takes her vows freely and a monaca forzata, a nun by force and therefore a nun only in appearance. Tarabotti has no word for a layperson held against her will in a convent for life. “Prisoner” comes nearest. Book 1 is strongly theological. Tarabotti lays before the reader proof from the Old Testament, assisted by Dante, that from the beginning of the human race, God never “wished there to be women enclosed in monasteries against their wills” and certainly did not entrust men with the task of determining the fate of their daughters, knowing that “men . . . submit women to their own mainly wicked and depraved wills” (48). Genesis is united with Dante’s proclamation about free will being the greatest gift that superiorità della donna in alcuni trattati italiani del Cinquecento,” in Trasgressione tragica e norma domestica, ed. Vanna Gentili, 11–41 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1983).

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n God gave human beings at creation. Those who would diminish, if not eliminate, women’s free will by postulating an innate moral “infirmity” designed by God are contradicted: “Divine Providence created both Adam and Eve in a state of innocence with choice and free will—and the woman did not lack such a matchless gift” (44). Fathers who force daughters either to take religious vows or marry have no authority to do so; in fact, they disobey God’s will and commit a grave sin. When God spoke to Adam of Eve as an adiutorium simile sibi (“a helper like unto himself”) (Gn 2:18), He was not giving Adam a servant subject to him, but a companion and equal: What arrogant presumption is yours, then, you liars, when you repeat time and again that woman serves man as a help only with respect to reproduction; and that for the rest she is an imperfect animal, meant, fittingly, to live in subjection to him as the unstable, weak, and frail sex. . . . If she is similar to you, O proud one, she is not inferior. If she has been given to you as your help, she ought not to serve you like a slave, as you repeat endlessly when you employ false reasoning on your side contrary to Holy Scripture and to the words of God, Who cannot lie. (50) Tarabotti’s insistence that the command, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28) was given to both Adam and Eve, and not just to Adam, follows correctly the Latin Vulgate commands given in the plural: Crescite et multiplicamini et replete terram et subjicite eam.36 Her point is that increasing the human race and ruling and controlling the earth are exercises of authority belonging to both sexes, not just to the male. Her shifting of blame for the Fall from Eve to Adam serves the same purpose. The usual line was that Eve was far more culpable: she listened to the serpent, ate first of the

36. The reader may need to be reminded of the sequence of the Genesis narrative, especially regarding Adam and Eve. In chapter 1, God creates the heavens and the earth and then “man” in His own image, but the Vulgate then specifies “male and female”: masculum et feminam creavit eos (1:27). The command to increase and multiply is in the plural. In chapter 2, God makes man (singular) from the dust or clay, places him in Paradise, and forbids him alone to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:17). God has Adam (by himself) name all the living animals on earth; only then does God make Adam an adiutorium simile sibi (“a helper like himself”), that is, Eve (2:21). The Vulgate does not specify which side of Adam the rib was taken from. In chapter 3, the serpent (not gendered) tempts Eve first, who eats the forbidden fruit and gives it right away to Adam, who also eats (3:6). God reproaches Adam first, who blames Eve, who blames the serpent; and God punishes all three, in reverse order: serpent, Eve, Adam. God expels Adam from Paradise by name, Ejecitque Adam (3:24), although it is clear from the next chapter that they were together.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n forbidden fruit, and gave it to Adam, who also ate. Tarabotti, on the other hand, highlights Adam’s failure to take responsibility for his deed when God called him to account. Like a coward, he “excused himself by accusing his wife” (51). Since he was rational and morally superior to Eve, he “should not have fallen . . . nor should he have given faith to words promising him that he would be like God—words making him similar to haughty Lucifer” (53). Eve’s “sin” was much lighter by comparison; an innocent, trusting wife, she allowed her ungrateful husband to strip her of all authority. Tarabotti composes a set speech for God, who is shocked by Adam’s lies and calls Eve to His side to enlighten her about male cunning. “Truly, the devil stands for the male,” He tells an ingenuous but far from depraved Eve, who from now on will cast on to you the blame for his failings and will have no other purpose than deceiving you, betraying you, and removing all your rights of dominion granted by my omnipotence. (52) While the debate about Eve’s versus Adam’s guilt for the Fall had been simmering away for centuries within the framework of the querelle des femmes, Tarabotti’s radical reassessment of Genesis redresses distortions she had most definitely read in Loredan’s biblical novel, L’Adamo, subtitled “The Life of the First Man” and first published in 1640. Loredan’s fiction is all about Adam, God’s preferred creature, to whom alone is given a share in God’s divinity. All creation, says God to Adam in one of many set speeches, “is at the sole disposal of your dominion;” to Adam alone is also given the task of naming all living creatures, “according to your pleasure, so that they may obey you more willingly, and with greater reason be obliged to obey your orders.” In these commands, Loredan has God use the singular “tu” and carefully avoids God’s commands in Genesis, chapter 1, to both Adam and Eve.37 Eve, on the other hand, appears on the Paradise scene as a reluctant afterthought on God’s part. Rhetorical questions about Eve posed by Loredan invite guesses that bear no relation to Genesis whatsoever. For example, Why did God put Adam to sleep when drawing out his rib to form Eve? God was afraid that Adam might contradict Him as, endowed with the gift of prophecy, Adam could foretell all the damage brought upon the human race by her creation. Why was woman made from man? To warn woman that she must recognize with submission the cause of her existence. Why was the rib taken from 37. All creation is “alla sola dispositione del tuo dominio . . . . Imponi loro [the animals] il nome a tuo piacimento accioché più volentieri t’ubbidiscano e con magggior ragione siano obligati a i tuoi comandi” (L’Adamo, 16).

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Adam’s left (sinistro) side? To show that woman must be the heart of man, not the head. In addition (and here, Loredan makes a pun on the double meaning of sinistro in Italian), since woman was destined to bring upon man a sinister future, God wanted her to take her origin in his left (sinistro) side.38 Points from Loredan’s L’Adamo spill over into books 2 and 3. Not only does Loredan declare Eve to be naturally weak and cunning, and lying to be “innate in the female sex,” but he even gives the serpent the face of an attractive young girl. Tarabotti is enraged. “There are those who say that the devil’s perverse spirit took the form of a young virgin . . . and only in this way persuaded her . . . to taste the forbidden fruit.” Such writers she dubs “humbug zealots” (book 2, 121). Full blame rests with Adam alone, asserts Tarabotti, adroitly adapting Saint Paul: “Through one man sin entered the world, and through a woman grace” (book 2, note 79). When Loredan argues that Adam would not have sinned without Eve’s bad influence (“I’ve sinned without truly sinning . . . that companion of mine,” Adam says, “has corrupted my obedient actions and contaminated my duty of loyalty”39), Tarabotti consistently maintains the opposite. When God reproaches Eve after the Fall for her alleged “gullibility” (credulità), Loredan has Him exaggerate: “You will always be subject to man, and he will exercise over you a never-ending rule.” Eve will no longer console her husband, but add to his torments.40 As a final exaltation of Adam, Loredan delivers a long eulogy of this first man, first father, and first saint. Eve is consigned to oblivion: The Bible does not mention how long Eve lived, perhaps because we ought not to know about the death of one who deserved to die before she was born, since from her originated all the miseries of the human race.41 38. See L’Adamo, 20–21, and 22. 39. “Io ho peccato senza peccare . . . quella compagna ha corotti gli atti della mia ubbidienza, e contaminato i doveri della mia fedeltà” (L’Adamo, 50). 40. “Sarai sempre soggetta all’huomo, ed egli esercitarà sovra di te un perpetuo comando” (L’Adamo, 55). Tarabotti is most insistent on the equal authority of husband and wife in marriage, but in Counter-Reformation terms, also most deviant. The catechism based on the decrees of the Council of Trent and prepared for the instruction of the laity by their parish priests makes it clear that in marriage and the family there is only one head, the husband. The wife is subject to him. After God, she should love him and seek to please and respect him above all others, even happily carry out his orders as long as they are not contrary to the laws of God. See the chapter “Del Sacramento del Matrimonio,” in Catechismo, cioè Istruttione secondo il Decreto del Concilio di Trento, a’ Parochi, 315–32. (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1582). 41. “De gl’anni d’Eva non fa mentione la Scrittura, forse perché non si deve sapere la morte di colei che meritava di morire prima che nascere, essendo da lei originate tutte l’ infelicità al genere umano” (L’Adamo, 90).

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Tarabotti explicitly quotes this damning judgment in book 3, naming Loredan for the first time. She rebuts: “[Loredan] could have said something far more reasonable, truthful, balanced, and less far-fetched, as he ought, namely, that there is no mention of Eve ever having died because, on the contrary, she deserved to be considered immortal” (book 3, 134). She also dismisses the charge of gullibility (book 3, 136–38). In book 2, Tarabotti turns her attention to the social and political aspects of patriarchy that harm women, intensifying her attack on themes merely touched on in book 1 and addressing fathers directly as if she were a prosecuting lawyer in court. Men’s betrayal of their daughters’ trust, the evils of the contemporary marriage market and women’s enforced ignorance, and the injustices of the double sexual standard in adultery laws all come under her scrutiny. For abusive fathers, Tarabotti invokes a vindictive God who will not fail to smite sinners. Comparing Jephte (Jgs 11:30–40), who sacrificed his only daughter because of a rash vow, to modern fathers, she finds Venetian counterparts far more culpable: “They are not offering sacrifices in thanks for military victories, but yielding to diabolical suggestions about ridding themselves of impediments to the line of inheritance” (90). Neither are religious superiors, eager to boost the number of nuns in their convents, spared: “Political expediency . . . the father of all error, contaminates even these supreme ministers, who end up giving their permission for women to become nuns” (92) and thereby collude in the deception. What threat would all those women, sentenced to convents, be to the state if they were allowed to remain single or marry, even if their number made up an army? Tarabotti confronts the Venetian patriarchy, knowing that ignoble financial considerations influence their conduct: If you believe that numerous daughters are prejudicial to reasons of state—since, if they all married, the nobility would increase and families be impoverished by paying out so many dowries—then, without greed for gain, accept the companions God has destined for you. In any case, it would be more decent for you to pay out money when taking a wife, just as you do in purchasing slaves, than for them to consume fortunes in purchasing a master. (95) Evidently, Tarabotti had no sympathy for Loredan’s defense of the marriage market set out in his letter to Laura Pasqualigo (above, note 33). Women’s ignorance also serves expediency. Men’s false superiority over women can be maintained only by keeping them so. “I would make a great mistake were I to attribute learning to women when they are so wondrously stripped of it,” Tarabotti opines sarcastically, “not through lack of native intelligence, but lack of schooling. When you bestow on them the quality

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n of ‘imperfect,’ you do so not in virtue of their merit, but of your ambition” (97). Just as becoming learned is impossible for men without social structures like schools, universities, and a teaching profession, so also for women. But Tarabotti reveals a further excuse for keeping women ignorant: “Women cannot be permitted to study grammar, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, theology, and the other sciences because by attending school they would easily lose their chastity” (109). Tarabotti is full of anger at the underlying duplicity driving these prohibitions: Do not scorn the quality of women’s intelligence, you malignant and evil-tongued men! Shut up in their rooms, denied access to books and teachers of any learning whatsoever, or any other grounding in letters, they cannot help being inept in making speeches and foolish in giving advice. Yours is the blame, for in your envy you deprive them of the means to acquire knowledge . . . . So shameless are you that while reproaching women for stupidity you strive with all your power to bring them up and educate them as if they were witless and insensitive . . . . As soon as you men catch sight of a woman with pen in hand, you start ranting and raving. . . . (99) Tarabotti is particularly scathing about Venetian laws denying women the chance to hold any kind of public office whatsoever. As for the freedom men have to go to famous universities like Padua, Bologna, Rome, Paris, and Salamanca, “We have never even been granted permission to attend lectures in Venice’s state schools” (book 2, note 102). Tarabotti is especially outspoken in book 2 about the double sexual standard concerning adultery. According to widespread custom and, more specifically, her target Giuseppe Passi’s Dei donneschi difetti, an adulterous married woman was more “justly” condemned and punished than the lover, married or not. Passi drew on lawyers and philosophers of all ages to support his view that a wife’s “adultery must be punished by the sword, by fire, by stones, whips, blows, banishment, and the most harsh and cruel punishment of every kind.”42 Tarabotti answers the case for a wife’s greater guilt advanced by Passi: a husband’s honor is lost through his wife’s sin (consequently, he has a right to kill her to restore it); a husband’s line and property may be threatened by illegitimate sons he then (unknowingly) rears; and, finally, a 42. Passi, Dei donneschi difetti, (Venice: I.A. Somasco, 1599), 75–76. The whole chapter on adultery, 74–100, quotes with approval tales of husbands punishing wives by cutting off their noses, drowning them, and the like. The only remedy is to keep wives locked up with no liberty whatsoever. For Passi’s views on men’s greater dishonor, see 89–91; on husbands never sure of children, 88–89; on wives killing husbands, 94–96. For Passi, see also my introductory essay to Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, 15–19.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n husband is more likely to be murdered than a wife, either by her or her lover. Tarabotti refutes the first count confidently with Saint Paul’s assertion of the equal sexual rights of husband and wife (1 Cor 7:4) over one another and the consequence that both lose or maintain honor by their own conduct. Men have contradicted divine commands to suit their own interests: “God did not grant you full liberty to sin . . . . He allows you to put aside your wife if you catch her in flagrante, but you have made it legal to kill her on the slightest suspicion” (111). Tarabotti also reminds husbands that it takes two to commit adultery and produce an illegitimate child; it is common knowledge, she adds, that more men importune women to commit adultery than the other way around. And, finally, she recalls examples of men who have killed to commit adultery, the most important being King David who sent away Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, to die in battle so he could lie with her. Only in book 3, however, will Tarabotti openly identify Passi and his book: “What indecent accusations, what obscene, sarcastic, disgusting applications of his material to the dignity of women’s worth one reads there!” (146). Book 3 takes up strands from book 1 about woman’s liberty and the Bible by presenting a feminist reading of the New Testament, another striking feature of Tarabotti’s theology, drawing, perhaps, initial inspiration from Agrippa, but going far beyond to establish gender equality as a fundamental Christian doctrine.43 Paternal tyrants are reminded that Christ Himself, the model of all Christians, respected women’s free will. Tarabotti dwells on the story of the Samaritan woman and on the women who consoled Christ during His Passion and death and to whom He appeared first after His resurrection. They provide her with evidence that women are not just more devout than men, but show greater loyalty and fortitude, virtues contrary to their innate “infirmity.” As if conscious of treading on forbidden ground by discussing Scripture and needing to establish her orthodoxy, she opens book 3 with a fulsome praise of the Virgin Mary, the sum of all virtues and role model for all women, virgins and mothers. When misogynists insult women, Tarabotti asks pointedly, do they realize they insult their own mothers who bore them and the mother of God as well? There are passages in book 3 that Tarabotti may have added at the time she changed the title and decided upon the introductory addresses. They point to the layered texture of her book, a continual “work in progress.” First of all, Tarabotti identifies all three of her adversaries, including her patron, 43. Declamation, 77 and 64–65, respectively. See T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) for essays that shed light on Tarabotti’s criticisms of marriage, the dowry, the double standard, adultery, and parental rights.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Loredan, who was still alive. She names Giuseppe Passi (already referred to) and she gives precise, unmistakable indications of one of Ferrante Pallavicino’s notoriously misogynistic fictional letters in his Corriero svaligiato, first printed in 1641 (see appendix 2), taking it apart section by section. It may be she felt freer to attack famous people by name—a dangerous practice as it could bring retaliation—once she thought her book was going to be published outside Italy. Furthermore, when discussing Pallavicino’s Corriero, she exclaims, “Just as well he was put to death before the book’s publication!” (147). Since Pallavicino was put to death in 1644, this comment would make sense only if she added it after she had finished the main part of Paternal Tyranny before 1643. Even if she is confusing Corriero svaligiato with Il Divortio Celeste, another blasphemous book full of imaginary letters published in 1643, but not in circulation until after his death, the comment would have to have been added after 1644. In book 3, there is also the refutation of a charge that Christ appeared after His resurrection first of all to women, gossips by nature, to ensure that the news would spread quickly (book 3, note 144). This accusation, found in Orazio Plata’s work of 1647 about women not being human beings, was refuted by Tarabotti in her last work of 1651 and must therefore have been added at some time after 1647. In book 3, finally, Tarabotti suggests she has been accused of “libertine” tendencies and begs the reader not to believe that what she has said springs from an unwise desire for liberty of conscience and an inclination to live subject to no authority: I disagree with those who say that it is all right for each and every person to damn himself as he wishes . . . . For the same reason, I shall exalt in eternity those convents inhabited by young girls called to God . . . who . . . have willingly withdrawn from the world’s stormy seas. (128) A similar plea had been entered in her letter “To the Reader,” added when Tarabotti changed the title to Innocence Betrayed. There, she reports hostile responses to her work, in particular, first, that I nurture within myself a particular contempt for men; and second, that I loathe the religious life and consequently seek that original liberty experienced in the Golden Age, agreeing with the author who wrote, “Whatever brings pleasure, that you may do.” (40 and note 8)

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Both reports from accusers must have been added after she had received responses to at least whatever part of Paternal Tyranny had been circulating in manuscript. They are remarkably similar: she refuses to be subject to men; she is bringing bad publicity to the religious life, and she expresses a deviant notion of liberty, more typical of Protestants than Catholics, and smacking of anarchy and abandonment to the senses. The Holy Office’s condemnation, censura, of 1660, discussed below, would confirm Tarabotti’s fears, but ignore her defense. Her search for liberty, just as much as her exposure of paternal tyranny, would be silenced with a heavy hand.

RECEPTION E A R LY R E C E P T I O N . In her lifetime and also in the decades following her death, Tarabotti and her works were the objects of controversy. Her pleas for radically changing women’s status were not just misunderstood, but were seen as socially and politically threatening. Attacks of Angelico Aprosio about the Paradiso, but especially about her Antisatira, have been mentioned.44 Some criticisms seem aimed at the tone of Tarabotti’s writings. She appears twice in a collection of fictional dispatches from Apollo about the state of letters in the world, La Segretaria di Apollo, by the Incognito, Antonio Santacroce, published anonymously around the time of Tarabotti’s death. In one dispatch “To the Female Sex,” a group of educated and virtuous women including Vittoria Colonna and Michela [sic] Tarabotti, deliver a request to Apollo, the all-wise ruler and judge of Parnassus, for women to be freed from subjection to men. There may be a few women “in intellect and character not inferior to men,” Apollo allows; nevertheless, he does not want to change the status quo. That would disturb the natural order—for judged as a whole, “women are without brains” and known to be proud, irascible, moody, and spiteful. But change would also disturb the social order requiring male domination. Indeed, “Woe to men if women did possess brains!”45 In a specific dispatch to Tarabotti, Apollo refuses to admit the one book meant to assure Tarabotti’s respectability, the Convent as Paradise (which he calls the Paradiso claustrale) precisely because it is not scandalous enough!

44. See notes 22 and 28 above. 45. “Sono tutte [le donne] senza cervello. . . . Guai a gli huomini se le donne avessero cervello!” La Secretaria di Apollo (Amsterdam: Blum & Conbalense, 1653), 193–94. See G. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini (note 15), 254–57, for this work, seen mainly as a tribute to Ferrante Pallavicino and his antityrannical views.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n We have not wished to accept your book called Paradise of the Cloisters in our kingdom, so as not to introduce matters arousing ridicule—which would cause your good reputation to be damaged . . . . Indeed, we cannot understand how these two words, “Paradise” and “cloisters” go together, as we know very well that the cloister is the dwelling place of envy, discord, and persecution and other conditions more suitable to Hell. You would have done better to call your book, The Cloisters as Inferno.46 Had he heard of Tarabotti’s L’Inferno monacale, or Paternal Tyranny? Girolamo Brusoni, who had corresponded with Tarabotti, is sympathetic to young girls who rebel against convent discipline in his novels, but in Sogni di Parnaso, a series of four fictional dialogues, he turns on Tarabotti for her contentiousness. The invective is long, personal, and made more venomous by being delivered by the only woman speaker.47 “The world is less blind than this philosophess of Erebus is crippled in body and soul . . . . As for her tongue, she can’t forgive God Himself; she speaks ill of her father, and instead of expressions of praise and thanks to those who look after her and do her good, she’s given to curses and calumny.”48 Another interlocutor derides her appearance: “She’s an old woman by now, and uglier than sin,” but reveals an influential Tarabotti who runs in effect a marriage counseling service from the convent parlor: What that poor little woman can’t do for herself, she gets her friends and followers to do for her. She never fails to have a band of them, as long as she’s exercising her role of counselor and instructor of mis-

46. “Non abbiamo voluto accettare il libro vostro, intitolato Paradiso Claustrale; affine di non introdurre nel nostro Regno materia di riso, con detrimento . . . della vostra buona fama. . . . E per verità noi non sappiamo come possano accordarsi queste due parole, Paradiso Claustrale; sapendo molto bene che ne’ Chiostri sono solite di abitare la invidia, la discordia, la persecuzione, ed altre cose più proprie dell’Inferno: onde meglio avereste voi fatto a intitolare il vostro libro, Inferno Claustrale” (La Segreteria di Apollo, Dispatch to Arcangela Tarabotti, 199). 47. This rare dialogue appeared without date or name of publisher. I am grateful to the librarian of the Accademia dei Concordi at Rovigo and to Marta Fattori for obtaining a photocopy for me. Spini thinks it was published about 1650 (Ricerca dei libertini, 248–51). For Brusoni (1614(?)— 1686), see note 29 above. 48. “Il mondo non è così cieca come ella è zoppa di corpo e d’ingegno, questa filosofessa dell’Erebo . . . . Da una lingua, che non la perdona allo stesso Dio, e che non sa che dir male di chi l’ha generata; e di chi la sostenta e benefica escono a lode e a gloria le maldicenze e le calunnie” (Sogni di Parnaso, 47–48). Erebus is a mythological name of a region of the underworld full of darkness.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n matched wives and witless women. She advises and teaches them— just look at her writings!—to abandon themselves to luxury, debauchery, sacrilege, and irreligion under the title of convenience, justice, holiness, and religion.49 The above judgments and the ones arising from the continued discussions about her Antisatira came from a circle, mainly of Venetian acquaintances, who at least knew her personally. The condemnation of the Holy Office in 1660, drawn up by the consultor (or referee) Brother Francesco Antonio Ricci, came from another world entirely that knew next to nothing about Tarabotti, her writings (except for Paternal Tyranny), or the Venetian social and cultural context. By failing to acknowledge her adversaries, Giuseppe Passi, Loredan, and Ferrante Pallavicino, he implies that there was nothing wrong with their arguments, only with Tarabotti’s refutations.50 Canon law, decrees of church councils, including the Council of Trent, and papal bulls are repeatedly cited. The censura shows that Tarabotti had reason to be alarmed by her critics. The Holy Office is mainly concerned with preserving the sanctity and good name of the religious life. Paternal Tyranny is therefore condemned for the effect it would have either in deterring young girls from entering at all or discouraging those who entered from taking permanent vows. Tarabotti’s mere announcement of L’Inferno monacale at the very end of Paternal Tyranny is enough for it to be damned in advance: “In order to curtail its insolence, I declare that work, in which the Author attempts to show that all the kinds of punishment which are in Hell can be plainly found in holy convents, to be prohibited in its entirety.”51 49. “essendo ormai vecchia e più brutta del peccato” (Sogni di Parnaso, 50); “Ma quello che non può quella femminetta per se medesima, il fa per mezzo delle sue amiche e partigiane; né possono mancarlene molte mentre fa professione di consigliera e di maestra delle mal maritate e delle mal provedute; e le consiglia ed ammaestra (parlano i suoi scritti) a darsi con merito di convenienza, di giustizia, di santità, e di religione al lusso, alle dissolutezze, ai sacrilegi, e all’empietà” (Sogni di Parnaso, 50–51). 50. Thanks to the opening of the archives of the Holy Office, the censura of Tarabotti’s book is now available. See Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, Indice, Protocolli, IIa, 33, KK (1650–59), fols. 364r–367v. For the full text of the censura in Latin and a commentary in Italian, see Natalia Costa-Zalessow, “La condanna all’Indice della Semplicità ingannata di Arcangela Tarabotti alla luce di manoscritti inediti,” in Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (2001.1), 97–113, and for some of the same material in English, see also Costa-Zalessow, “Tarabotti’s La semplicità ingannata and Its Twentieth-Century Interpreters, with Unpublished Documents Regarding its Condemnation to the Index,” Italica 78, no. 3 (2001): 314–25. 51. “In quo ostendere nititur in sacris monasteriis omnia poenarum genera quae in Inferno sunt manifeste reperiri, ad eius audaciam retundendam opus istud omnino prohibendum censeo” (fol. 367v).

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n Tarabotti’s stirring case for Eve’s greater innocence and Adam’s greater guilt is swept away brusquely (and by implication all similar Renaissance defenses from Isotta Nogarola and Agrippa down to Tarabotti’s own time): “It is contrary to the plain evidence of Scripture, which teaches that Eve was deceived by the serpent, ate [of the fruit], transgressed God’s command, and was justly punished by Him.”52 And Tarabotti’s equally stirring pleas for liberty, the moral and intellectual equality of the sexes, and the right of women to choose freely their state in life are reduced, as Tarabotti also feared, to license. Tarabotti had denied she was invoking the liberty of the Golden Age or “freedom of conscience” in the sense of doing whatever one wanted. Wrenching her words from their context, Ricci condemns her all the same and tars with the same reductionist brush other passages about liberty: The author shamelessly upholds that liberty which should rather be called license, and which is defined by Cicero, Paradoxa, 1, as “the power of living as you wish,” which our Holy Fathers have condemned as contrary to the spirit. It is also an obvious error to say that a nun loses her freedom of choice in the cloister, since freedom of choice cannot be separated from the will itself, as all theologians commonly teach. And what she states about woman being given exclusively to her husband as a helper, smacks of Lutheranism.53 Tarabotti’s quotes from Scripture are deemed faulty, even misleading, and her understanding of doctrine confused. Brother Ricci concludes that Paternal Tyranny contains “statements that are plainly erroneous in matters of 52. “Quod apertis Scripturae testimoniis adversatur, quae docet Evam a serpente deceptam comedisse, Dei mandatum transgressam, ab eoque iuste punitam fuisse” (fol. 367r). Similarly, Tarabotti’s praise of women (“woman is the sum of all perfection,” etc.) is put down with no understanding of rhetorical conventions governing the genre: “Dum mulieris laudes nimium extollere cupit, multipliciter errat” (“When she wants to extol the praises of women excessively, she errs in several ways”) (fol. 367r). The same kind of accusation could be leveled at rhetorical debates written by men. 53. “Auctor impudenter libertatem illam commendat, quae licentia potius dicenda est, et a Cicer[one], 1, Parad[oxa Stoicorum] definita potestas vivendi ut velis, quam perpetuo SS. Patres tanquam spiritui contrarium damnarunt. Dicere autem quod monialis per clausuram libertatis arbitrium amittit, manifestus error est, cum liberum arbitrium sit a voluntate ipsa inseparabile, ut Theologi omnes communiter docent. Et quod asserit foeminam ad mariti dumtaxat adiutorium datam Lutheranismum sapit” (fol. 366v). Ricci is looking for bones to pick. Cicero’s definition, from one of the most popular works of practical ethics for the Renaissance, is taken out of context: the liberty Cicero describes belongs only to the wise and virtuous man who follows duty unswervingly; it is certainly not license (see Paradoxes 5.33–35). Tarabotti, as seen, always makes a distinction between women who choose to take vows and women who are forced to; only the latter have their liberty taken away. Likewise, Tarabotti never says that women are made only for marriage and not the cloister or the single life.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n faith, outrageous, misleading, and offensive to the ears of the pious, and scandalous.”54 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tarabotti sometimes appears in biographical collections, with distortions about her name and writings. Ginevra Canonici Fachini’s is typical: Tarabotti is “Trabotti,” with no dates of birth or death supplied. She wrote four works: Antisatira; La semplicità ingannata, described as a romanzo or novel; Lettere famigliari; and Le lagrime.55 M O D E R N R E C E P T I O N . In the twentieth century, on the other hand, Tarabotti’s reception has grown by leaps and bounds. Her overturning of the assumptions of patriarchy, her call for greater personal freedoms for women, and her emotional intensity and anger are seen as constituting a unique voice in early modern Europe. Where Brusoni judged her a spirit of darkness, we now acclaim her as a bearer of light. As seen above (note 1), nearly all her works have now been published or will soon be published in modern editions and translations, the exception being the one work meant to make her respectable in her lifetime, the Paradiso monacale. Tarabotti has been studied from different perspectives, some overlapping: Venetian history, social and cultural history, and history of spirituality and the religious life and, since the 1980s, as a main figure of women’s history and the history of women’s writing. Further exploration is needed—I speak of Paternal Tyranny—on Tarabotti’s theology and interpretation of the Bible, on her notions of liberty and of inner consent as the only criterion of a binding law, on her style (her use of vivid metaphors and her translation-defying syntax, for example), and on her methods of reading and writing and using her sources.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

This translation follows the 1654 Elzevier edition: La Semplicità ingannata di Galerana Baratotti. In Leida. Appresso Gio. Sambix. It numbers 304 pages, beginning with book 1. “Sambix” was one of the associated printers used by Elzevier for clandestine publications. I have examined copies in the Leiden University Library, the Biblioteca Civica, Padua (which kindly provided me with a photocopy); the British Library, London; the Vatican Library, Rome; and

54. “Propositiones manifeste erroneas in fide, temerarias, male sonantes, piarumque aurium offensivas, et scandalosas” (fol. 367v). 55. Prospetto biografico delle donne italiane rinomate in letteratura dal secolo decimoquarto fino a’ giorni nostri (Venice: Alviso, 1824), 162. For other mentions, see Costa-Zalessow, “Tarabotti’s La semplicita` ingannata” (note 50 above).

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n the Exeter Cathedral Library (the existence of this last copy was brought to my attention by Roberto Bruni).56 The title page bears the emblem of a sphere with a zodiac band, and on the page facing the start of book 1 is printed the couplet: “La divozion forzata / Al signore non è grata,” preserved and translated below (42). Nothing is as yet certain about the final stages of the journey of Tarabotti’s manuscript from France to the Elzevier press in the Protestant Netherlands. This edition is not the same as the one used by E. Zanette, in the Marciana Library, Venice, which he assumed was the only one.57 It has stars instead of a sphere, numbers 191 pages, and is bereft of the couplet. It may be a pirate edition. I first reported the difference I found between the two in my edition of Che le donne (x, note 8).58 There is, finally, a manuscript of La semplicità, also in the Biblioteca Civica, Padua. It may be a copy of one of the printed editions.59 Manuscript copies were sometimes made of clandestine printed works, especially if they were difficult to obtain. But until a detailed comparison of all three is done as part of the preparation for a critical edition, it is not yet possible to determine the precise relation of the manuscript to the two printed editions and of the printed editions to one another. I have used Tarabotti’s original title Tirannia Paterna and restored the “Address to the Most Serene Venetian Republic,” first published by Medioli in L’Inferno monacale (see book 1, note 1). I have also translated the introductory material of La semplicità and the entire contents of all three books, with the exception of a short section in book 3 continuing a praise of the Virgin Mary that contains much repetition. I have also added as appendices Tarabotti’s letter “To the Reader” from her Paradiso Monacale, a defense of her character 56. See Alphonse Willems, “L’Officine de Leyde. Jean et Daniel Elzevier,” in Les Elzevier. Histoire et Annales Typographiques, 183, n. 740 (Brussels: G. A. Van Trigt, 1880), for a detailed description of La Semplicità. Willems pronounces it a true Elzevier, listed in catalogues of the press going back to 1656 and 1675, and calls it “a satire against parents who force their daughters to enter the religious life, and at the same time a defense of the female sex.” I am grateful to Dr. R. Breugelmans of the Leiden University Library for his help in finding this information and pointing out that Sambix was a genuine name, used as a “cover” for Elzevier. 57. E. Zanette, Suor Arcangela (432–40), also speculates that the work was printed in Venice with Loredan’s assistance in 1651, just before Tarabotti died. He misreads the date on the title page. 58. The Elzevier edition had been described long before Zanette by Count Pietro Leopoldo Ferri, in Biblioteca Femminile Italiana raccolta, posseduta e descritta (Padua: Crescini, 1842), 560. It was in his own library and is now part of the Biblioteca Civica in Padua. 59. Zanette thinks it may have been used by the printer (Suor Arcangela, 435); militating against that view is the copying of details from the printed title page: “La semplicità ingannata di Galerana Baratto In Leda appresso Gio. Sambix.” There is no date. For a description, see G. Abate and G. Luisetti, Codici e Manoscritti della Biblioteca Antoniana di Padova (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1975), 614. MS 614, Scaff. XXII. The editors hold that “it is obviously a copy of the published edition.”

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n and unpolished style useful for Paternal Tyranny; and Ferrante Pallavicino’s Letter 5 from Il Corriero svaligiato, an insulting invective against women that Tarabotti deconstructs in book 3. Finally, all headings within the three books have been inserted by me as an aid to the reader. Translations of biblical quotations and corresponding English names follow the Roman Catholic Douay version, translated from the Vulgate and published early in the seventeenth century. Just as Tarabotti writes in Italian but always quotes the Bible in Latin, I tried in the translation to maintain a distance by using a modern English for Tarabotti and a more archaic English for the Bible. I have standardized Tarabotti’s indiscriminate use of “convento” and “monastero” to refer to religious houses for women, acceptable in Italian, to “convent.” In the notes, I have attempted, where possible, to give sources that would have been accessible to Tarabotti: Italian vernacular translations of classical authors (her Latin, as she confesses herself, was limited); and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed editions of Italian works to which she refers. Almost always, Tarabotti writes as if speaking directly to someone, from God and the Virgin Mary to the tyrannical fathers in general or an individual father. She frequently uses parenthetical expressions and colloquial idioms and metaphors. She creates neologisms and maintains a sarcastic and parodic tone of voice except when addressing sacred figures. I have tried to render these swings of tone and subject matter and resorted to contractions and dashes, question marks and exclamation points, and quotations within longer set speeches—practices that might not seem appropriate to a flat, impersonal essay style, but which help to convey the emotional intensity of her denunciations.

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VOLUME EDITOR’S BIBLIOGRAPHY

P R I M A RY S O U R C E S

Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. Translated and edited by Albert Rabil Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Libro delle donne illustri. Translated from Latin and with additions by Giuseppe Betussi, and more additions by M. Francesco Serdonati. Florence: F. Giunti, 1596. . Concerning Famous Women. Latin with facing English translation by Virginia Brown. Cambridge, Mass.: I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2001. Brusoni, Girolamo. Sogni di Parnaso. N.p.: n.p., ca. 1650–51. Canonici Fachini, Ginevra. Prospetto biografico delle donne italiane rinomate in letteratura dal secolo decimoquarto fino a’ giorni nostri. Venice: Alviso, 1824. Council of Trent. Catechismo, cioè Istruttione secondo il Decreto del Concilio di Trento a’ Parochi. Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1582. Dolce, Lodovico. De gli ammaestramenti pregiatissimi, che appartengono alla educatione et honorevole, e virtuosa vita virginale, maritale, e vedovile libri tre. Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1622. Fonte, Moderata. Il merito delle donne. Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1600. Translated as The Worth of Women by Virginia Cox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. . Tredici canti del Floridoro. Venice: Rampazetti, 1581. Loredano, Gian Francesco. L’Adamo. Venice: Valvasense, 1640. . The Life of Adam. Facsimile reproduction of 1659. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967. . Lettere. Venice: Guerigli, 1658. Marinella, Lucrezia. La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne. Venice: Battista Ciotti, 1601. Translated as The Nobility and Excellence of Women by Anne Dunhill. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. . De’ gesti heroici e della vita maravigliosa della Serafica S. Caterina da Siena. Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1624. Pallavicino, Ferrante. Il corriero svaligiato. Norimbergh: Hans Jacob Stoer, 1641. Critical edition by Armando Marchi. Parma: University of Parma, 1984.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s B i b l i o g r a p h y Passi, Giuseppe, I donneschi difetti. Venice: I. A. Somasco, 1599. Pentolini, Don Francesco Clodoveo Maria, Le Donne illustri, Canti dieci. 2 vols. Livorno: Vincenzo Falormi, 1776, 77. Santacroce, Antonio. La Segretaria di Apollo. Amsterdam: Blum & Conbalense, 1653. Settala, Lodovico. De ratione instituenda et gubernanda familia. Milan: 1626. Tarabotti, Arcangela. Il Paradiso monacale, con un soliloquio a Dio. Venice: G. Oddoni, 1643. . F. Buoninsegni and Suor A. Tarabotti. Satira e Antisatira (1644). Edited by Elissa Weaver. Rome: Salerno, 1998. Translated and with an introduction by Elissa Weaver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming. . Lettere familiari e di complimento. Venice: Guerigli, 1650. Critical edition by Meredith Ray and Lynn Westwater, Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier. Forthcoming. . Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini. Difesa della donne (1651). Edited by Letizia Panizza. London: Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, 1994. Translated by Teresa M. Kenney, “Women Are Not Human”: An Anonymous Treatise and Responses. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998. . La semplicità ingannata. Leyden: G. Sambix [=Elzevir], 1654. Translated with original title Tirannia paterna (Paternal Tyranny) in this volume. . L’ Inferno monacale di Arcangela Tarabotti. Edited by Francesca Medioli. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990. Translated by Francesca Medioli and Letizia Panizza, Convent Life as Hell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming. . Le Lagrime . . . per la morte dell’Illustrissima signora Regina Donati. Printed at end of Lettere familiari. Venice: Guerigli: 1650.

S E C O N D A RY S O U R C E S

Studies Benzoni, Gino, ed. Girolamo Brusoni. Avventure di penna e di vita nil Seicento veneto. Rovigo: Minelliana, 2001. Biga, Emilia. Una polemica antifemminista del Seicento: La maschera scoperta di Angelico Aprosio. Città di Ventimiglia: Quaderno dell’ Aprosiano 4, Civica Biblioteca Aprosiana, 1989. Conti-Odorisio, Ginevra. Donna e società nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Arcangela Tarabotti. Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. “Tarabotti’s La semplicità ingannata and Its Twentieth-Century Interpreters, with Unpublished Documents Regarding Its Condemnation to the Index. Italica 78, no. 3 (2001): 314–25. . “La condanna all’Indice della Semplicità ingannata di Arcangela Tarabotti alla luce di manoscritti inediti.” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1 (2000): 97–113. Cox, Virginia. “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 513–81. De Bellis, Daniela. “Arcangela Tarabotti nella cultura veneziana del XVII secolo.” Annali del Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Firenze 6 (1990): 59–110. Dean, Trevor, and K. J. P. Lowe, eds. Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1998. King, Margaret. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s B i b l i o g r a p h y Kuehn, Thomas. Law, Family and Women: Towards a Legal Anthropology of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Labalme, Patricia. “Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists.” Archivio Veneto 117 (1981): 81–109. . “Women’s Roles in Early Modern Venice: An Exceptional Case.” In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Edited by P. Labalme, 129–52. New York: New York University Press, 1980. Laven, Mary. Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows. Harmondsworth and Middlesex: Viking Penguin, 2002. Levi Pisetsky, Rosita. “Il gusto barocco nel costume italiano del Seicento.” Studi Secenteschi 2 (1961): 89–94. Medioli, Francesca, “Alcune lettere autografe di Arcangela Tarabotti: autocensura e immagine di sé.” Rivista di letteratura e storia religiosa 32 (1996): 135–41, 146–55. . “Monache e monacazioni nel Seicento.” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 33 (1997): 670–93. Menetto, L., and G. Zennaro. Storia del malcostume a Venezia nei secoli XVI e XVII. Abano Terme: Piovan Editore, 1987. Miato, Monica. L’Accademia degli Incogniti di Giovan Francesco Loredan (1630–1661). Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998. Panizza, Letizia. “Polemical Prose Writing, 1500–1650.” In A History of Women’s Writing in Italy. Edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, 65–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. . Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000. Schutte, Anne Jacobson, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, eds. Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe. Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies, 57. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2001. Spini, Giorgio. Ricerca dei libertini: la teoria dell’ impostura delle religioni nel Seicento italiano. 2d ed., revised and amplified. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983. Tramontin, Silvio. “Ordini e congregazioni religiose.” In Il Seicento, 4/I of Storia della cultura veneta. Edited by G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1983. Weaver, Elissa, ed. Arcangela Tarabotti. Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press. Forthcoming. Zanette, Emilio. Suor Arcangela Tarabotti monaca del Seicento veneziano. Venice-Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1960. Zarri, Gabriella, ed. Donna disciplina creanza cristiana. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1996. . Il monachesimo femminile in Italia dall’ alto medioevo al secolo XVII. Verona: Il Segno dei Gabrielli, 1997.

Entries on Tarabotti in Encyclopedias and Anthologies Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Testi e critica, 153–62. Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Gambier, Madile. In Antonia Arslan, Adriana Chemello, and Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Le stanze ritrovate. Antologia di scrittrici venete dal Quattrocento al Novecento, 117–25. Mirano and Venice: Eidos, 1991.

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Vo l u m e E d i t o r ’s B i b l i o g r a p h y Niero, A. In Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, 17–25. Paris: Beauchesne, 1990. Panizza, Letizia. In Encyclopaedia of the Renaissance. New York: Scribner’s, 1999, 6: 109– 11. Weaver, Elissa. In Italian Women Writers. A Bio-Biographical Sourcebook. Edited by Rinaldina Russell, 415–22. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

PAT E R N A L TYRANNY

T O T H E M O S T S E R E N E V E N E T I A N R E P U B L I C1

A

s far as the remotest corners of the known world, the wings of Fame bear aloft the news of how you, Most Serene Queen, grant unconditional liberty to people dwelling in your beautiful city, whatever their nationality; even those who crucified the Son of your Most Holy Protector, the Virgin Mary, are its beneficiaries.2 From the first foundations of your city on these lagoons, Fame penetrated its depths and drew forth Paternal Tyranny. Hidden under the majesty of your senators’ garments, Fame has at last set its seat in the Ducal Palace and dominates the entire city. It has its vassals following as a rule in the train of the city’s princes, just as a shadow follows the body casting it. Your most noble lords have found this infernal monster of Paternal Tyranny so welcome that they have gladly embraced it and given it their ears. I can only fear that my own Paternal Tyranny, by one of the most unlettered writers who ever put pen to paper, may not prove pleasing in your sight. This Paternal Tyranny is a gift that well suits a Republic that practices the abuse of forcing more young girls to take the veil than anywhere else in the world. My book does not deserve to be dedicated to other rulers, as it might cause them too much outrage. It is fair, however, to dedicate my book to your great senate and its senators, who, by imprisoning their young 1. This sarcastic address to the Venetian Republic personified is the original introduction to Paternal Tyranny preserved in the manuscript of L’Inferno monacale, which was published by Francesca Medioli (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990), 27–28. It was replaced, along with the title La semplicità ingannata (Innocence Betrayed)—we do not know exactly when—by the two more conciliatory prefatory pieces that follow, the “Address to God” and the “Letter to the Reader.” 2. A reference in general to Venice’s relatively tolerant policies toward foreign residents, including Jews, who were nevertheless obliged to live in a designated area, the Ghetto.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y maidens so they chant the Psalter, pray, and do penance in their stead, hope to make you eternal, most beautiful virgin Republic, Queen of the Adriatic.3 If it pleases you to hear it said that in your fortunate origins, the liberty that was believed to have died with Cato of Utica4 is instead reborn, do add to your merits by allowing me the benefits of your favors that you scatter to all and sundry with such liberality. To you, then, I dedicate and consecrate this first offspring of mine, a fancy of a woman’s mind. I shall not beseech you to deflect the tongues of detractors, because without fail I shall encounter spiteful censure from no others than your own nobles, who are part of you, and your own subjects, who are subordinate to you. I declare explicitly that there is no intention in my writings to criticize religion itself or to enter into debates—except against those fathers and relatives who act violently in making their daughters don the religious habit. What else is it but deep ingratitude when that country under the special protection of the Virgin Mary, that country which once triumphed against the uprising of Baiamonte Tiepolo by means of a woman,5 finds itself engaged in degrading, deceiving, and denying liberty to its own young girls and women more than any other kingdom in the world? I shall not wheedle you into finding excuses for me, nor inveigle you into believing my sincerity. In any case, once you have lost liberty, there remains nothing else to lose. A D D R E S S T O G O D6

O most merciful Lord of Lords, You are well aware that my Innocence Betrayed, dictated by a simple heart, will not be well received in this treacherous world. 3. Tarabotti’s sarcasm about fathers’ hypocritical rationalizations related to forcing daughters to pray on their behalf finds variations and elaborations throughout her book. 4. Marcus Porcius Cato, usually referred to as Cato of Utica, was a stern Stoic and Roman statesman of republican loyalties. He took his own life in 46 B.C.E. rather than submit to Julius Caesar, whom he saw as a tyrant. Tarabotti always refers to him in connection with liberty, prompted by Dante. See note 67 below. 5. In 1310, Baiamonte Tiepolo plotted a coup d’état with his rebel forces against Doge Gradenigo, but when a woman killed the standard-bearer, the rebel forces scattered. The incident helped the Venetian army to regain control and defeat the insurgents. See G. Tarcagnota, Delle Historie del mondo, vol. 3 (Venice, 1598), 601. 6. This “Address to God” and the following “To the Reader” are modeled on the similar conciliatory addresses, also to God and the Reader, of her first published work, Il Paradiso monacale of 1643. That the addresses were added at a later date is revealed by Tarabotti’s admission of criticisms (4), which could only be the case if her manuscript had already circulated and provoked replies. The criticisms are discussed in my introduction above.

Dedication That is why I dedicate it to You, whose gaze is not arrested by outer appearances, but pierces right through to the marrow of my good intentions. These lines owe their existence to You, who are Truth itself, not to others, as their final aim is to display the truth. To You, then, I offer them, together with my soul’s most fervent sentiments; and prostrate on the ground I beseech you to forgive my foolhardy flight and blame instead my pen’s zeal. You know well, dear and most beloved Lord, that if I were to dedicate this labor of mine to earthly princes, it would be rejected—perhaps prohibited—because of their “reasons of state”; and, deemed prejudicial to men’s self-seeking political interests, it would be shunned by everybody else in general. Some individuals would think ill of it and show their disdain. Since we are in such a perfidious world that innocent young girls, deceived by their very own family, have no other refuge than forced enclosure in a convent against their wills, this true offspring of mine, just like some abandoned virgin, could not find, nor wish, other support than Your mercy. To this I recommend my work and my very self in the hope that both may remain unharmed by the deep watery pits the mouths of my detractors are already preparing for me. I know too well that only Your omnipotence is a shield strong enough to defend truth and innocence from the poisoned shafts of angered tongues. With the aid of the most Holy Spirit’s rays, pour into men’s hearts a belief in the sincerity of my words; they are not pronounced lightly, are not spoken out of self-interest, and do not lie. Rather, they spring from zeal for Your most holy religion and the spiritual enrichment of Your truly devout nuns. While declaring to the entire world with You as my witness that I have not exaggerated against the deceivers out of contempt, but under the compulsion of conscience (for I have heard about their harshness from others’ accounts), and adoring You in spirit and in truth, it remains for me to implore You to grant me, however unworthy, Your grace and salvation.

TO THE READER

Here is my Innocence Betrayed, which at last sees the light of day to reveal to the world the most savage deceit that malicious cunning has known how to perpetrate in the guise of kindness. I would like to persuade you that my words are founded on the unshakeable truth; from others, I imagine you will probably hear a thousand lies, stories, rumors, and calumnies regarding me. Not that I pay any attention; for just as the first law of the madhouse is believing that one can be all things to all men—which no writer, however famous, has ever succeeded in doing—so there have never lacked types like

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y carping Aristarchus7 and never will till the end of time. Anyone who does not wish to know the truth must of necessity conceal it with lies; and so you will hear discordant opinions united in the sole aim of arousing hatred for my book just because it is so resolutely opposed to wrongdoing. Two of the main impertinent remarks you will hear expressed are, first, that I nurture within myself a particular contempt for men; and, second, that I loathe the religious life and consequently seek that original liberty experienced in the Golden Age, agreeing with the author who wrote Whatever brings pleasure, that you may do.8 Dear Reader, please answer on my behalf. My mind detests the wickedness of such thoughts; and my writings are not the first that may appear to run contrary to their authors’ way of life—many saints, after all, discussed abuses that they themselves never perpetrated. You may also add that my heart has never had any personal reason for growing angry against the male sex, although it cannot bear to recall without irritation those devious words proffered by the first man when he blamed the woman given to him by God as a partner (Gn 3:12). I condemn men’s vices, not man himself; and I condemn enforced religious life, not those women called by the Holy Spirit who voluntarily seclude themselves in convents to serve God. Stricken by a guilty conscience, some men will say that I speak with excessive temerity about all men in general. They are greatly mistaken. If they behave justly, they will be protected from my attacks and those of others. I separate the just from the wicked (who are the subject of my discourse), since not all men are bad and not all women are good. You must decide, dear Reader, if the complaints of the present author ring true or deserve blame. If you do not count yourself among the number I berate, consider my writings as worthy of your attention and not mere pinpricks against the male sex. On the contrary, written without guile, they are intended to abound to God’s honor, even though entirely opposed to man’s self-interested politicking.

7. Aristarchus of Samothrace (ca. 217–145 B.C.E.), librarian at Alexandria, was famed as the most fastidious literary critic and scholar of antiquity. Here he stands as the figure of the pedantic faultfinder. 8. “Quel che a te piace, lice.” Tarabotti slightly adapts the famous verse from the chorus (end of act 1) of Torquato Tasso’s pastoral drama, Aminta, in praise of the Golden Age, when people followed the law of pleasure engraved by Nature in their hearts: “S’ei piace, lice” (If it brings pleasure, it is permissible). After the Fall, however, pleasure was not guided by a clear mind and the laws of church and state were deemed necessary to guide men and women along the path of morality.

Dedication But let everyone think and say what they wish! Little do I care. My one and only purpose is to show that at no time in the world’s history, in no legislation whatsoever promulgated by His Divine Majesty, ancient or modern, does one find a precept that commands, or a document that teaches or exhorts, the sacrifice of virgins to the Lord by enclosing them against their wills.9 He is indeed well pleased by the voluntary vow of virginity more than all other sacrifices offered up to Him, but at the same time He abhors what is done by force and what is holy only in name—the condition of nuns involuntarily shut up (although altogether innocent) as if they were criminals sentenced to life imprisonment. You must know that I blush a little at my own audacity in putting pen to paper, lacking as I do all book learning. On the other hand, as a Catholic I am full of good will and long to make plain for the sake of Christianity and the welfare of souls the immense cruelty and treachery of men. I refer to those who out of pure greed and social ambition dedicate innocent babes in the womb to a living Hell—for that is what the cloister means to nuns forced to live there.10 I wish I possessed the eloquence of a Cicero or a Demosthenes,11 not because I seek applause, but so my words strengthened by rhetorical gifts might penetrate men’s hearts more sharply and draw forth the fruits I long for with all my being. In this corrupt age, alas, few men are not tainted by the great fault I speak of, at least in giving their tacit approval. And so my words will bear little or no fruit and will remain unheeded, condemned as the offspring of a deranged mind stripped of religion and accused of imprudence, since in this false world, as the proverb goes, “Speaking the truth incurs hatred.”12 But I do not value the opinion of men concerned only with their own interests. My one satisfaction lies in an upright conscience; enough for me the divine gaze, never deceived, piercing into the heart’s innermost recesses. So please put aside, kind Reader, any suspicion about me; and if you do not want to be counted among the betrayers, make sure that your daughters or

9. Tarabotti is implying that the Bible provides neither church nor state with grounds for binding young girls by vows to the religious life, a position associated with Protestantism: Luther and Calvin had abolished monasteries and convents because they could not find Biblical evidence for taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. 10. To speak of the cloister as Hell was not just a metaphor. Women forced to take vows for life against their wills were often not able to keep them. By breaking their vows, however, they would be committing mortal sin, which merited eternal punishment in Hell. 11. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) and Demosthenes (384–322 B.C.E.) were the two most famous orators of classical Latin and Greek antiquity. 12. “Veritas odium parit.” (Terence Andria 1.1.41).

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y any other female relatives of yours who have no wish to become nuns enjoy a true Christian education at home accompanied by modest retirement from the world. Do not enclose their bodies in a repulsive prison in order for their wretched souls to be cast subsequently into the infernal tomb. I kindly beg you to have pity on my failings; and if you become bored by my prattle, be patient. Do not think that I lay claim to any ability, only to the truth, whose tongue I make my own. If I accomplish nothing else of good, at least may I awaken remorse in the consciences of wicked men. I wish you prosperity.







La divotion forzata, Al signore non è grata. [Piety by the sword / pleaseth not the Lord.]13

13. This little couplet is found only in the Elzevier edition and was removed for the pirated Venice edition of the same date, 1654. By implying that true piety requires only a good heart, the couplet would be interpreted by Catholics as downplaying the role of the church and its institutions and would therefore be suspect.

BOOK ONE

THE CRIME OF ENFORCED ENCLOSURE

M

en’s depravity could not have devised a more heinous crime than the wanton defiance of God’s inviolable decrees. Yet day in and day out, men never cease defying them by deeds dictated by self-interest. Among their blameworthy excesses, pride of place must go to enclosing innocent women within convent walls under apparently holy (but really wicked) pretexts. Men dare to endanger free will, bestowed on men and women alike by the Divine Majesty; they force women to dwell in life-long prisons, although guilty of no fault other than being born the weaker sex— and consequently more deserving of compassion, assistance, and support, rather than being locked up forever in dungeons. The pagan philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, flourishing at the time of the sixty-ninth Olympiad, lived continually in deep gloom. People observed him most of the time with his eyes brimming with tears and his head bowed down with sad thoughts; he was a bundle of suffering and melancholy bemoaning the degree and extent of human wretchedness.14 Following Heraclitus’s example, every Christian’s eyes should gush with streams or turn into founts of perpetual tears as they meditate on the doubtful salvation of so many women put behind convent walls under the pseudonym of “nuns.” But these men do not weep; on the contrary, the most Catholic and spiritual of them—or rather the most hypocritical—consider it their right to offer up young creatures to God in unlawful sacrifice for the sake of 14. Heraclitus (fl. ca. 500 B.C.E.) was one of the first Greek natural philosophers and was usually portrayed weeping at the human condition. It was customary to contrast him with Democritus (b. 460–457 B.C.E., d. ca. 357 B.C.E.), who was portrayed laughing at the same human condition. An Olympiad was a period of four years reckoned from the celebration of one Olympic game to another, beginning 776 B.C.E. The sixty-ninth Olympiad would mean 276 years from 776 B.C.E., or 500 B.C.E.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y preserving their own advantages. (Unlike the Blessed Virgin Mary, these young girls have been conceived in original sin; and unlike John the Baptist, they have not been sanctified in their mothers’ wombs. They come into the world tainted by sinful dispositions.15) What a gross abuse, what an unforgivable error, what a wicked decision, and what sheer audacity is this deed when Divine Providence, after all, has granted free will to His creatures, whether male or female, and bestowed on both sexes intellect, memory, and will! By means of these three faculties they are able to shun avoidable evil and pursue the good of their choice by their own voluntary inclination, not servile fear. In the Garden of Eden, Divine Providence created both Adam and Eve in a state of innocence with choice and free will—and the woman did not lack such a matchless gift. Both sexes were endowed with this precious treasure of free will without distinction. Dante himself esteemed it so highly that he says in Paradiso: The greatest gift the magnanimity of God, as He created, gave, the gift most suited to His goodness, gift that He [M]ost prizes, was the freedom of the will.16 We read that the first man and woman enjoyed the Garden’s delights for only seven hours before they contended with one another in disobeying the divine command.17 The Divine Maker could have created them free from guilt and established them from the start in the state of grace, but He did not do so. Rather, He wished to show how much a voluntary act pleased Him; thus His beloved prophet declares, “I will freely sacrifice to thee” (Ps 53:8). But lest it seem that I wish to enter into debates unsuitable to my state in life, I put aside the subject of free will, which has been disputed by the 15. A point similar to that made in note 8 above. If women are already inclined to wrongdoing by original sin, it will be all the more difficult, if not impossible, for them to keep their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, especially when forced into the religious life. John the Baptist was sanctified when Mary visited his mother Elizabeth (Lk 1:41). 16. Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza fesse creando, ed alla sua bontate più conformato, e quel ch’ e’ più apprezza, Fu della volontà la libertate. (Par. 5.19–22) Dante quotations from La Divina Commedia, ed. Giuseppe Scartazzini and Giuseppe Vandelli (Milan, 1929). All English translations are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (London: Everyman’s Library, 1995); here, 398. Tarabotti quotes from Dante more times in this work than in any other, treating him as a philosopher and theologian. 17. Tarabotti follows the view expressed by Adam in Dante’s Paradiso 26.139–42.

Book One most serious and respected authorities, to say only this: When that ineffable Goodness and incalculable Splendor fell in love with the sacred Idea of Godmade-man in His own divine mind, He wished, before actually shaping this person, to prepare a stage, or theater, where all the worldly delights enjoyed daily could be displayed.18 So God began with consummate divine skill to design the world: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” (Gn 1:1). In six days, He adorned it with all perfection: He separated the waters, created fish, birds, and plants; and He did this for the sole purpose of His creature admiring and enjoying the work of His divine hands and finding it both useful and pleasant. Woman, the compendium of all perfections, was the last to be created. I speak of material creation; otherwise, she existed from all eternity, the firstborn of all creatures generated by the breath of God Himself. This is conveyed by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of Solomon, where the author introduces the Most Holy Virgin to sing of herself, “I came out of the mouth of the Most High, the firstborn before all creatures” (Sir 24:5). Mary, a woman like all others, was not obliged to beg for her existence from a man’s rib! She was born before time itself as well as before other men who, blinded by ambition to rule the world on their own, pass over this infallible truth in silence: that in the divine mind, woman was created ab eterno. “I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived” (Prv 8:23–24).19 Men’s perversity will not allow them to confess the following truth with their own words, so we will force them to admit it with the words of Holy Scripture: woman gave perfection to man, and not vice versa as certain rather dim-witted preachers would have it.20 After the Lord had created the universe and all the animals—as I have just said—it is written, “And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good” (Gn 1:31). He 18. The interpretation of Christ as the Word, or Logos, existing as the archetypal Idea in the divine mind before becoming man was widely diffused, but Tarabotti could have found an elaboration of this view, together with the metaphor of creation as a spectacular theater, in Torquato Tasso’s Italian cosmological poem, Il mondo creato (1595), 3.1–57, and especially 6.1– 53. Tasso, in turn, took the theater image from the Greek Father of the Church, Basil, in his commentary on Genesis, Homiliae IX in Hexaemeron, Patrologia Graeca 29.73–74. 19. Tarabotti would have come across these passages from Sirach (or Wisdom) and Proverbs applied to the Virgin Mary in the liturgy for feast days dedicated to her. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December, for example, uses Proverbs 8:22–35 for the Lesson. See also book 3, note 1. 20. The “dim-witted preachers,” however, are expressing traditional Catholic teaching about women’s subjection to male authority in the family, in marriage, in the state, and in the church. See my introduction, note 40.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y then set about shaping the proudest animal of all; but when He had finished, He did not deem His work perfect and so did not recognize it as good. For this reason, Genesis does not add the same words as before; but foreseeing that without woman man would be the compendium of all imperfections, God said after some thought, “It is not good for man to be alone, let us make him a help like unto himself” (Gn 2:18). Thus He willed to bring forth a companion for man, who would enrich him with merits and be the universal glory of the human race. If the Maker of the Universe, as He was creating such a beautiful machine, had first of all created man, and then all the other delights—that is, the animals and the plants—and woman last, truth’s enemies would say that she had been created from a coarser matter, so to speak. With great disdain, they would then bring the above Scripture verse to bear against women. But since they cannot prove by this argument that women are less because of when or where they were made, they turn to blaming her time and again as the guilty party for the sin of our first parents. They continue to lie, of course, since the fault was man’s, and he sinned to the detriment of the innocent woman, just as one reads in the book To Peter on Faith: “If the man had not sinned, the woman would give birth without pain and still remain a virgin.”21 I shall discuss below which sex caused the fall from grace and which one has the greater reason for remorse.22

S U P E R I O R I T Y O F W O M A N I N G O D ’ S C R E AT I O N ; H E R F O RT I T U D E A N D M A N ’ S W E A K N E S S

Since the omnipotent Lord had kept the creation of such a beautiful work as woman to the end, He willed to single her out, bear witness to her blessings, and make the whole world rejoice in her splendor. The Supreme Craftsman’s power, wisdom, and love for us shine forth in all His other works; but with her, the finishing touch to such a wonderful fabric, He willed that all those catching sight of her should marvel. He thus ordained that she would have the power to dominate and subdue the fiercest, wildest hearts to willing service by virtue of her glance and restrained modesty. God made proud man in the Damascene field; but from one of his ribs He made woman in the Garden of Eden. Even if I were not a woman, I would 21. The work De fide ad Petrum diaconem was attributed to Augustine of Hippo, although it is now grouped with his apocryphal writings. It is a short summary of beliefs that must be firmly held, such as one finds in the Apostles’ Creed. I was not able to find the quotation Tarabotti uses in the two editions consulted: Cologne, 1473; and Augsburg, 1475. 22. See below, this same book 1, 51–53. This issue is also at the heart of Tarabotti’s later Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini (1651), ed. L. Panizza (London, 1994).

Book One infer that on account of the quality of the matter from which she was made, and also of the place where she was made, woman is nobler, more refined, stronger, and worthier than man.23 I do not wish to set sail on the open sea with such contrary winds blowing; on the other hand, nor must I pass over in silence men’s folly when they extol their own strength to Heaven and cast our own “weakness” into the deepest abyss. What liars you men are! True strength lies in conquering one’s own passions. Which sex is stronger than the female one in this respect—forever virtuous, resistant to every push and pull of ill-conceived thoughts and desires? You are formed from the earth’s dust—is there anything less solid? On the other hand, consider the strength of a rib—hard bone—from which we women were made, and you will come to remain dissatisfied with yourselves. Besides, everybody knows how much stronger women are in conceiving and bearing children, whom they carry for nine months without tiring. You cruel, inhuman men, forever preaching that evil is good and good is evil, glory in your strength just because you wage war among yourselves, killing one another like wild beasts. This is where your strength lies! On the other hand, you do not have the power to resist a caress or a tear or a flutter of a pair of eyes glancing at you by chance, not choice. You always fall, overcome by the weakness of your own senses. If fortitude lies in bearing misfortunes and insults, in what ways are you strong when you spill others’ blood without reason, when you take innocent lives inflamed by a word or some groundless suspicion? As Horace said, For this very reason, live bravely And, when adversity comes, may you front it with hearts full of courage.24

23. The view that Adam was created outside Paradise in the Damascene field from red clay was generally accepted by many commentators on Genesis. Tarabotti could have come across it in Boccaccio’s “Life of Eve” in Famous Women, trans. Virginia Brown, 14–17 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). It was used by Henricus Cornelius Agrippa to advance woman’s superiority in his 1529 Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, ed. and trans. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 48 and 48 n. 33, which Tarabotti would have read in an anonymous Italian translation, or in the many works following the same arguments (see Rabil’s introduction, 27–29). Agrippa’s point is that Adam was made from the dust in a field reserved for animals and then taken into Paradise, while Eve was made from superior living matter in Paradise, where angels, too, were also created. Tarabotti may even have read it in Lucrezia Marinella’s first version, 1600, of her Della nobiltà e l’eccellenza della donna (fol. 5vo), which was removed from her later 1602 and 1620 versions, translated as The Nobility and Excellence of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 24.

Quocirca vivite fortes, Fortiaque adversis opponite pectora rebus. (Sat. 2.2.135–36) Translation by C. E. Passage in The Complete Works of Horace (New York, 1983), 63.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y And Cato gave the following precept: Do not surrender your spirit in adversity.25 Swaggering is not the same as strength; one needs to resist, to persevere, and to remain constant in Christian fortitude. How can it be that you can boast of such a virtue when you are nothing but inconstant? You have mistakenly attributed fortitude to yourselves, you liars. For those who destroy humankind with arms cannot be called strong; but, those who fill the world with children and good works just as we do can be. Listen to Solomon speaking about women; he agrees with me: “Strength and beauty are her clothing” (Prv 31:25). With unspeakable courage women conceive you, bear you in their wombs, bring you into the world, nourish you with their milk, and teach you—even if once grown up you turn to vice under the influence of your own evil genius.

NO EVIDENCE IN GENESIS FOR RELIGIOUS VOWS

So go on complaining against women; I’ll leave you to croak and return to weaving the thread of my argument: “On the seventh day God ended his work which he had made: and he rested . . . from all his work which he had done” (Gn 2:2). God rested, not because He was tired—since at a nod He could bring forth everything from nothing, but as a sign that the works made with His hands were complete, although His favors remain without measure as we see daily how He grants ever new ones. Gazing at the perfections of this great edifice, or into these deep mysteries, I do not find literally or symbolically a hint of a shadow that God wished there to be women enclosed in convents against their wills. These edifices exist because of human—or rather, inhuman—contrivance and nothing else. The blessed Creator, in whose mind the numerous future procreation of the human race was as present, could have entrusted to our first father Adam the task of founding religious orders of women dedicated to His service. But He did not do so, as He could foresee the resulting mistakes and injuries brought about in His church by men’s attempts to erase His gift of free will; men would rather submit women to their own mainly wicked and depraved wills. What we see daily taking place, practiced more than anything else in this corrupt age, I count as an abuse, for nowhere in Genesis and nowhere at 25. “Rebus in adversis animum submittere noli” (Distichs 2.25). Dionysii Catonia de Moribus ad Filium (Amsterdam, 1759). Cato’s Distichs were widespread as a school text throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Book One all in the length and breadth of Holy Scripture is it recorded even fleetingly by His Divine Majesty that He is served by the closeting of women involuntarily. It is, in short, an impious, malicious invention of men who bestowed the name of monache (“nuns”) on those unhappy souls perhaps to play the fool—thereby mocking God who wanted Adam to name all things. For the name is derived from that foul beast said in fabulous stories to be the devil’s making. He tried to mimic the heavenly Creator in attempting to create a being like man.26 Nuns who are forced to be so are truly like apes; but even more lacking in reason than apes are those men who, full of guile and without any spirit of truth, want to bend women’s opinions to their own. Mimicking what they have seen other men do, they use violence to force women into the cloister or, as the saying goes, “to drown themselves in a glass of water!” On the other hand, women who voluntarily withdraw to a solitary cell after experiencing the world’s vanities and men’s deceptions are truly praiseworthy and full of prudence. They contemplate the Godhead and the loftiness of their own souls created in the likeness of God and then rise with the mind’s eye to contemplate His grandeur and gaze upon His immensity. Here more is gained by silence than can be expressed by the spoken word. Stunned and blinded by this holy and awesome ecstasy, the soul finally leaves the senseless body and, one can say, is transformed into its beloved. These are the nuns worthy of our praise and admiration, but in our age such privileges are granted to few and only to those brought up by their families to exercise their free will and who have therefore chosen such a life prompted by the breath of the Holy Spirit alone.

F R E E W I L L B E L O N G S E Q U A L LY T O M E N A N D W O M E N ; T H E R E I S N O S U B O R D I N AT I O N

Let me now return to my main point: any attempt to remove free will from a woman is a direct contravention of the Almighty’s decision when He ordained that all living things should reproduce themselves, but to man and woman He commanded “Increase and multiply” (Gn 1:22) as if to make clear that He did not wish anything from them without their common consent. Man’s foolishness is nonetheless so great that he would attribute to himself alone all the graces, favors, and privileges dispensed by divine goodness equally and impartially to one sex as much as to the other. 26. Monaco in Italian is a homonym and can mean both “monk” and “ape”; monaca can mean “nun” or “female ape.” Tarabotti also calls nuns simie or “apes” when they “ape” a religious life they have no desire to follow.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y Let me add that if woman had been deprived of freedom’s bounty, God would not have given her to man, since she is “A help like unto himself” (adiutorium simile sibi) (Gn 2:18). God furthermore did not give woman to man as a help inferior to himself; woman’s creation was one of parity—indeed, its circumstances were marked by greater excellence—in which both were made similar in knowledge and with equal claims to eternal glory. As soon as His Majesty said the word “help,” He immediately added, “like unto himself,” implying that woman is of just as much value as man. So do not boast about your superiority; remember that just as from one good work is drawn an even better one, so woman drawn from the first beautiful work of the divine hand turns into a creature of higher excellence, grace, and beauty than you are! Remember that she must be alike in ruling: the mistress of your possessions and the family. “They shall be two in one flesh” (Gn 2:24), said the Lord. You exchange souls reciprocally, crossing the boundaries, as it were, of mere human nature:27 your soul is hers, and hers is yours. You cannot then oppress her without sinning. Do you not recall that the apostle Paul obliges you to honor your wife: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church” (Eph 5:25). What arrogant presumption is yours, then, you liars, when you repeat time and again that woman serves man as a help only with respect to reproduction; and that for the rest, she is an imperfect animal meant, fittingly, to live in subjection to him as the unstable, weak, and frail sex. With all your lies in this matter and in others, you contradict the commands of your very Maker and reveal yourself as the devil’s offspring: “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you will do” (Jn 8:44). You cannot deny your sonship, you evil sorcerers, whose words have seduced the whole world into believing that women must be excluded from ruling. In this way you have made them subject to your ruses: a simple woman of dim intellect is taken in by your insinuations and imagines she is weaker than you and an inferior being, although God Himself, by saying that woman is a “help like unto himself” has resolved all doubts about the equality of the sexes. If she is similar to you, O proud one, she is not inferior. If she has been given to you as your help, she ought not serve you like a slave, as you repeat endlessly when you employ false reasoning on your side contrary to Holy Scripture and to the words of God who cannot lie. The Creator of all things

27. Tarabotti uses a neologism coined by Dante, transumanar. See Paradiso 1.70–71: “Transumanar significar per verba / non si poria . . .’ ” (“Passing beyond the human cannot be / worded”). Dante’s sense is that of passing beyond the limits of the human, whereas Tarabotti stresses a crossing over. See also book 2, 120 and note 74.

Book One said to both man and woman, “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth” (Gn 1:28). He established both sexes as rulers of the world, without discrimination. He did not tell Adam, “You will rule over woman.” Both male and female were born free, bearing with them, like a precious gift from God, the priceless bounty of free choice. If in God’s eyes woman is not less privileged than you with respect to her physical or spiritual qualities, why do you wish her to seem created with such great inequality, you enemies of the truth, proclaiming her to be subject to your impulsive, mad whims? In short, woman is deserving of less respect than you only when you have reduced her to this state by your scheming.

A D A M M A I N LY T O B L A M E F O R T H E F A L L , N O T E V E

God’s greatest gift to the nobler sex cannot be taken away, that is, woman cannot be subject to man because even before Adam ate of the apple, she showed that her will was not tied to his. If he alone had the grace of free will and was superior to Eve, she would not have sinned at all, despite the serpent’s promptings and insinuations, for the simple reason that she could not have made choices without her husband’s consent. And even though the sin committed by Eve is reported by all men (as interested parties, to free Adam from blame) as the source of our mortality, it was nothing more after all than a simple mistake she made, deep in thought, upon hearing, “And you shall be as gods” (Gn 3:5).28 The same Holy Scripture that cannot lie proves the contrary, to the confusion of those men who assert that our loss of immortality was the fault of our first mother. The Prime Mover, just and perfect in His every operation, cannot be in error. After Eve’s disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit, He did not first call the woman to reproach and blame her as the main guilty party, the prime source of sin. He said instead, “Adam, where art thou?” (Gn 3:9) for no other reason than to advertise Adam as the principal source of our woe. The Highest Wisdom, to whom are revealed our thoughts, words, and deeds, could not have been mistaken in naming the first sinner. So what did the first man do so as not to deviate minimally from his true image, the devil, father of lies? He excused himself by accusing his wife!

28. Throughout these pages about Eve, Tarabotti is engaging in covert polemics with her patron, Gian Francesco Loredan, author of a Biblical novel, L’Adamo (Venice, 1640), which exalted Adam as an all-perfect creature who did not need nor wish the company or “help” of Eve. See introduction, 19–21. Tarabotti returns to condemning the novel at the end of book 2; see note 75.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y Forever slanderers, forever false, forever seducing women: you were barely in the world and you blame your help whom—you say—you love so tenderly, and at whose tears, pleadings, attractions, and wiles you cast yourself into disobeying the Most High. What kind of constancy can one hope for from such monsters? He falls for a woman’s simple and natural charm and then immediately condemns her as guilty before the divine tribunal; the woman, on the other hand, who loves her husband sincerely and wants truly to help him become a god, suggests all lovingly, the ingénue, that he eat of the tasty fruit. Oh, the depravity of these blasphemers! Eve is deceived by the serpent’s cunning, and you place all the blame on her. Adam falls for a charming request, and you excuse him. He knew he was offending his God; he was not deceived by cunning, but beseeched by an innocent and sincere creature. Have you ever heard of greater wickedness than shielding yourself against your own faults with another’s innocence? But listen to our blessed God who alone judges righteously. Once He heard Adam’s lies (remember, he tried slipping out of the wrong he did by blaming his wife!), He was amazed, so to speak, at such abominable fraud; so calling Eve to His side, He said, Why were you so gullible, so ingenuous, as to lend your ears to the serpent’s perfidious, cunning fictions when he told you, “No, you shall not die the death” (Gn 3:4)? Why, in your garb of innocence, did you fall at the devil’s urging? Truly, the devil stands for the male, who from now on will cast on to you the blame for his failings and will have no other purpose than deceiving you, betraying you, and removing all your rights of dominion granted by my omnipotence. Because of your credulity, “I will multiply thy sorrows . . . in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children” (Gn 3:16), since it stands to reason that such an ungrateful animal as man should prove himself even more so to his own mother, who undergoes mortal pains at his birth—after nourishing him with her own substance and bestowing unimaginable tenderness on him for nine months. I foresee, on the contrary, that the sincerity of your expression will be a true and living reflection of your feelings toward your husband; but, carried away by wifely sentiment, you will make your false partner the master of your wishes and allow him to strip you of all authority. Thus, because you are so trusting, so yielding to his demands, it can be said of you, “Thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee” (Gn 3:16). These words are not a sentence for the punishment that you deserve; rather, you will fall into the traps prepared for you by such an

Book One ungrateful monster, overcome now by promises, now by threats, and sometimes even by entreaties. Do not, as a result, let your constancy be dismayed, for you will be rescued from the injustices suffered at the hands of their arrogant claims to dominion: there will come a woman who will crush the head of the serpent in revenge and for the universal glory of her whole sex. Meanwhile, I say to you, Adam, who listened to your wife’s words in order then to subjugate her, “Cursed is the earth in thy work . . . Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (Gn 3:17–18).29 God did not therefore curse the deeds of the first woman, as He did the first man; His wrathful pronouncement meant that the fall and overcoming of the more innocent sex should come as no surprise to us. Man, who boasts of being strong, should have resisted; there is no excuse for his sin.

A D A M , T H E F AT H E R O F P R I D E A N D M E N D A C I T Y

But let us return to Eve, the innocent one who fell for the devil’s deceptions. No judicious person will be astonished by her behavior. Rather, let such a person be amazed at Adam, to whom God revealed many profound matters about future happenings like the Flood and the Last Judgment, so that he might be more vigilant in keeping the divine law—all this in addition to taking a rib during that deep sleep to shape a sweet companion for him. The male who boasts of his strength should not have fallen but should have withstood that little breeze of ambition; nor should he have given faith to words promising him that he would be like God—words making him similar to haughty Lucifer, who had also claimed for himself the power to become like his Creator. What brazen audacity of that shameless creature who finds no equal in the history of vainglory because he is the father of pride itself! So puffed up was he that right after his own creation he dared to rebel against his Maker by relying on his own strength, or rather his nothingness. That is why he lost with all his descendants the life of the true light—that is, grace—and remained defiled with the stain of the first sin that, to his greater shame, he committed in Paradise. The prophet Isaiah regards him as fallen from his first glory, stripped of all splendor, darkened and stained by the fumes of the infernal fire and breaks out into this mocking, but somber taunt: 29. This speech Tarabotti has God make to Eve parallels the several speeches that Loredan has God make to Adam and that Adam makes to Eve in L’Adamo. God speaks directly to Eve in Loredan’s novel only after the Fall, in reproach and recrimination.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning?. . . . / And thou saidst in thy heart: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north. / I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the most High.” / But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit. (Is 14:12–14) If Lucifer fell from the greatest heights to the greatest depths because of pride, the same follows for you men, swollen with conceit and bent on carrying out your perverse determinations. If with Satan you crave greater glory than God’s by taking away free will from women, so with Satan may you fall into that horrendous kingdom whose foundations have been laid by pride! If you would not accompany your daughters to wealthy and noble wedding rites with high-ranking and wealthy spouses, as your vainglory requires, then join them at least in more modest marriages. Divide up your estates and wealth among them without preference, for that is the will of God. Do not aim at raising one of them to the summit of worldly pomp by casting the others down into a chaos of wretchedness and damnation’s abyss. Temper the wealth of your sons, and remember that your daughters are also your flesh and blood; do not wish to constrain the feelings that God has left free to all His creatures.

FA L S E V I E W S A B O U T T H E N E E D F O R W O M E N ’ S C H A S T I T Y

But maybe one of these men would argue the other side, namely, that the human race would multiply to such an extent that one may no longer make use of that first command of Genesis, “Increase and multiply and fill . . . the earth” (Gn 1:22). I reply that this does not justify the arbitrary authority of cruel men to dispose of thousands of innocent lives at whim by thrusting them in prisons and barbarically sacrificing them to Pluto, for they are souls in despair, rather than to God. Let us be clear: Christ did not desire the virginity of an imprisoned body with the contradiction of freely roaming desires. Only once in all the Gospels did Christ exhort our sex to a life of chastity, not an enclosed life, and even then in the form of a parable and as a counsel of perfection.30 Saint Paul said, likewise, “Concerning virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord; but I give counsel” (1 Cor 7:25). On 30. Tarabotti may be thinking of Christ’s recommendation about men “who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven;” that is, who choose to be celibate. See Matthew 19:12. As for a parable addressed specifically to women, Tarabotti may be alluding to the parable of the five wise virgins and the five foolish ones (the former filled their lamps with oil in

Book One the other hand, he preached magisterially to men on how pleasing it was to God whenever they led celibate and pure lives. Some men with little understanding of Christian precepts make it appear that laws about virginity and temperance are necessary only for women, almost as if they are obliged to keep these laws even by force. Nor do these false investigators of the Gospels realize that when blessed Jesus explained to His disciples His desire for their perfection and gave them the counsel of virginity, He was speaking to men and did not include women of any sort. The opinions of the male sex have gone so far that they make all kinds of obscenity and depravity lawful, yet hold as just the subjection of women in every walk of life. They also practice continually vilifying them, accusing them of “frailty” and calling them infirm, weak, and fickle in all they do. Whence it is that a Latin poet once sang with all the usual malice of his sex, Woman: forever a variable and fickle thing!31 Many others, contradicting such falsity, have truly confessed the instability of their own sex. Most suitably, Lodovico Ariosto’s wisdom dictated, Oh the weak, inconstant minds of men! How ready we are to vacillate, how ready we are to change our ideas! 32

readiness for the arrival of the bridegroom and admission to the wedding feast; the latter did not bother and were shut out). See Matthew 25:1–13. The wise virgins preserve their virginity for Christ, the Bridegroom, and gain Heaven; the foolish virgins “squander” their virginity. 31. “Varium et mutabile semper foemina” (Virgil Aeneid 4.569). This refutation of woman’s frailty is answering specific quotations from Giuseppe Passi, I donneschi difetti (Venice, 1599) on woman’s inconstancy, 225–28. He begins with the Latin quotation, not identifying Virgil; continues with an Ariosto passage, in which a Saracen warrior and arch-misogynist Rodomont laments the fickleness of women, “Oh feminile ingegno (egli dicea) / come ti volgi e muti facilmente, / contrario oggetto proprio de la fede” (“O feminine mind (he said) / how easily you turn and change; / you are the very opposite of constancy!”) (Orl. fur. 27.117); and also adds three verses from a Petrarch sonnet with the words about woman being “cosa mobil per natura” (“a fickle thing by nature”). Canzoniere 183:12. 32. O degli uomini inferma e instabil mente! come sian presti a variar disegno! Tutti i pensier mutamo facilmente. (Orl. fur.29.1) Quotations from Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. MarcelloTurchi (Milan, 1982). Translations from G. Waldman, Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (Oxford, 1983). Note that the offensive adjectives that are usually applied to a woman’s mind—inferma and instabile—are here thrown at men in a parody and rebuttal of Rodomont. Note the similarity of “muti facilmente” (applied by Rodomont to women) and “mutamo facilmente” (applied by Ariosto to men). Tarabotti, however, fails to recognize the Petrarch verse even though Passi had identified it (I donneschi difetti, 225), and goes on to attribute it to Ariosto!

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y Despite men’s malign propensities, that blessed tongue exposes without prejudice the defects of men as well as women in various parts of his truthful poem and gives us to understand that we are all subject indiscriminately to frailty—although his being a man may have led him to keep silent about women’s greater merit. The same men who accuse women of instability and levity should not therefore oblige them to perpetual vows, for I do not think that one can find a greater madness than wishing a spirit born free to bind herself by an irrevocable decision, yet that is precisely what men contrive. Why did the same Ariosto say, “femina, cosa mobil per natura” (“woman, a fickle thing [mobile] by nature”)? He was mistaken, of course, and meant to say: “a noble [nobile] thing by nature.”33

IF WOMEN ARE FICKLE, WHY FORCE THEM T O B E C O N S TA N T ?

God does not wish to interfere with or oppose the will of His creatures; indeed, He permits us all to dispose of our wills as we please. It is male foolhardiness that grants itself the right to violate women’s free wills and then regale them with unjust invectives against their “fickleness” and “inconstancy.” If wise King Solomon affirms that we are all as fickle as leaves and more unstable than the wind34—although he himself displays a fragility greater than glass!—why do you cruel men wish to sentence women irrevocably and unjustly to perpetual imprisonment, tied down by indelible sacraments with the knots of oaths made on sacred altar stones under pain of ecclesiastical censure and excommunication? At this point one needs the voices of all Catholic and secular writers, of moderns and ancients, and of believers and heretics to join with mine in describing fully men’s profound madness. They are the ones in need of a new Astolfo who would ascend beyond the clouds to the moon in search of their wits!35 33. Passi also notes that the same phrase is found in Tasso Aminta 1.2.279 (but not Ariosto); I donneschi difetti, 227. 34. Many passages from the books of the Old Testament attributed to Solomon underline the ephemeral quality of human life: the main theme of Ecclesiastes is “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.” For the image of life as grass, see Psalm 89:6: “In the morning, man shall grow up like grass; in the morning he shall flourish and pass away; in the evening he shall fall, grow dry, and wither”; and Psalm 102:15: “[God] remembereth that we are dust; man’s days are as grass, as the flower of the field so shall he perish.” But here, I think, Tarabotti is trying to contradict Passi, who compares woman’s instability to leaves and wind, quoting Ovid Elegies 2, by finding passages from a higher authority (the Bible) that is critical of men as well as of women. 35. Astolfo is a character in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso who is given the task to seek mad Orlando’s lost wits on the moon. See especially Orl. fur. 34.69–92.

Book One And just how, if you please, can these extreme opposites be matched together: natural fickleness and an immutable state of life, shifting sense of purpose and firm commitment, inconstancy of mind and a fixed dwelling place in a convent? And that not through their own choice but through another’s determination, imposed on those bodies and souls that you say have inconstancy as their proper attribute. How is it, you cruel men—I am tempted to say butchers—can assign dwellings to women, and confined ones at that, which they may never change? It is further presumption to imagine that you can rein in the varied sentiments of a sex that—if one is to believe what you say—draws its unstable temperament from the maternal womb and that is therefore deemed, as if by natural inheritance, to have inconstancy at the heart of all things amorous as well as furious. But fathers, too, should recall that when they gave life to their offspring, they also passed on their own defects, as men are much more fickle in their sentiments than women.

S O L O M O N A F I N E E X A M P L E O F M A L E I N C O N S TA N C Y

Let that embodiment of wisdom, King Solomon, be my clear proof, for although he reproached women for their fickleness and levity with endless zeal, he allowed himself to be led astray a thousand times. He changed his mind from one moment to the next, harboring as many desires as there were objects of his gaze. I am amazed that a king endowed with divinely infused wisdom could err in accusing women of instability and blame them for his own faults; that he could be so little wise in knowing himself—the quality that defines the truly wise man, and is valued not only by the greatest sages of this world, but by God Himself, as the perfection needed for understanding this microcosm of ours: “Know thyself,” as the saying goes. I shall gladly inform you that this sage of sages failed to know himself, and if I thought I was becoming too bold by using my pen against the most knowledgeable of all men, one who was granted illustrious favors by His Divine Majesty so that from the farthermost provinces of the earth queens abandoned their kingdoms to come and see him and hear him, I would disregard the matter. But let us recall: “The queen of the south . . . came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon” (Lk 11:31). This great queen arrived (from Sheba) and was so amazed at his superhuman wisdom that she exclaimed, “Blessed are your man servants” (3 Kgs 10:8). I touch on a sensitive issue, and if my present theme is an important one among men, I shall seize on that everyday saying, “Fortune favors the bold.” Taking courage then into my hands, I say that I do not know what spurs could have goaded such a wise king, who should have been more resolute in the face of contrary

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y emotions than a mountainside to the winds or a cliff to the waves, given his royal role and the torrents of divine favors poured over him as well. He starts by exaggerating our inconstancy to our detriment, while he—according to your own false opinions—is one of the most perfect men born of a father, gifted with intelligence and grace. He then takes leave of his senses because of women, whom he also despises. He neglects to worship the true God and adores as many false idols as the women he loves, or rather does not love. (I say this, as love cannot take root where it finds so many contrary sentiments and so many objects of desire.) Finally, he loses the fruits of the many favors, graces, and privileges he acquired—all the fault of his own fickleness. Might he try to claim in his defense that he was inconstant in spiritual matters in order to be constant in love? He goes about from city to city rounding up women, adoring various idols in public, giving scandal to his own people. He searches only for the sex he then despises by calling women names like “unstable” and “indecisive”; and in a matter of such importance as the salvation of his own soul, he makes himself known as the very idea of inconstancy. That Solomon, so glorious, so exemplary, about whom the Bible says, “Not even Solomon in all his glory” (Mt 6:29), commits such excesses in sins of inconstancy that he loses his reputation, and Scriptures say of him, “And thou didst bow thyself to women: and by thy body thou wast brought under subjection” (Sir 47:21). Could anyone fall into greater inconstancy? Not only does he adore the pleasures of the senses and the comeliness of idolaters, but he also degrades himself by worshiping vain idols in order to please them, hard of heart to the highest good. Finally, he hurls himself headlong into the very abyss of faults he so detested in the female sex: “Thou that preachest that men should not steal, stealest” (Rom 2:21). Physician, heal thyself!36

C O N D E M N AT I O N O F T Y R A N N I C A L F AT H E R S

Let us now return to the original depravity. How can you deceivers harbor in your breasts hearts so cruel as to inflict torment on the bodies of your own daughters, made of your flesh and blood? How can you suffer the loss, perhaps, of their souls? They are of such noble natures that Christ would descend once more from Heaven to earth and suffer death on the cross were it necessary to save any one of them. And how can you risk casting into Hell’s abyss your own souls along with theirs, for you are guilty of grievous mortal sin having done violence to the wills of young girls, which was granted 36. Tarabotti builds up a contradictory picture of Solomon to show that even the wisest of men, revered by the fabled queen of Sheba, can be guilty of extreme inconstancy and misogyny.

Book One freely to them by God with such abundant generosity? You deserve eternal torments, along with the greatest tyrants in history, more, I say, than all the Neros and the Diocletians.37 Persecuting and slaughtering the holy martyrs so ruthlessly, they harmed their bodies, not threatening in any way their souls. Indeed, as many drops of blood shed by the martyrs are transformed into as many sparkling rubies in their crowns of glory! These tyrants did not have the light of Christian faith; they therefore fell into savagery and presumed to increase their own religion with an impious piety. But you, you are tyrants from Hell, monsters of nature, Christians in name, and devils in deeds. You presume to take part in executing God’s will at the very moment you deeply offend it. You presume, I say, to examine hearts seen only by God’s eyes; your mad presumption disposes of the free choice of creatures still in their mothers’ womb, without waiting for them to tell you toward which state in life their talents incline them. Dante understood this well; in the following verses he denounced the folly of fathers who abused the natural inclinations of their sons: But if the world below would set its mind on the foundation Nature lays as base to follow, it would have its people worthy. But you twist to religion one whose birth made him more fit to gird a sword, and make a king of one more fit for sermoning, [S]o that the track you take is off the road.38 It would be better for these innocents whom you deceive and incarcerate if their days of birth were also their days of death! Whenever I see one of these hapless young girls, betrayed by their very own parents, I am reminded of what happens to a pretty little bird: from within the tree’s foliage or along riverbanks, it delights the ear with sweet chirping and charming song, soothing the hearts of its audience—when suddenly it’s trapped in a treacherous net, robbed of precious liberty. The same befalls these unhappy

37. Nero (54–68 C.E.) and Diocletian (240–312 C.E.) were Roman emperors who were notorious for their depravity and cruelty; they both persecuted Christians. 38. E se ‘l mondo là giù ponesse mente al fondamento che natura pone, seguendo lui, avria buona la gente. Ma voi torcete alla religione tal che fia nato a cignersi la spada, e fate re di tal ch’ è da sermone: Onde la traccia vostra è fuor di strada. (Par. 8.142–48) Mandelbaum translation, 417.

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y creatures: born under a star of ill omen, they spend their childhoods crying and cooing with their tongues still wet with milk, moving their delicate limbs in charming gestures. They bring delight to the ears and joy to the hearts of their savage parents, who think of nothing else but hiding their faces as soon as possible and burying them alive in the cloister for the rest of their lives, bound by indissoluble knots. If they still draw breath, their words may well be, “The sorrows of death surrounded me” (Ps 17:5). His Divine Majesty never conjured up, I say, nor ordained this excess; and even if He permits other sins and errors, He neither advises nor orders them. Only men’s rashness makes such foul sacrilege permissible.

I F M A R R I A G E V O W S C A N B E D I S S O LV E D , WHY NOT RELIGIOUS VOWS?

When there are just reasons, the sacrament of marriage itself may be dissolved by divorce, although it was established in Paradise in the age of innocence, practiced and thus confirmed by Old Testament patriarchs and prophets, recognized by Christ Himself, and given the final seal of approval by the very Blessed Virgin Mary (although her marriage was exceptional, for her virginity was left intact). So the knot of matrimony, despite its sanctity, may nevertheless be dissolved under certain conditions—or at least come to an end with the death of a partner. Why, then, must nuns be condemned to keep their vows forever by the sacrament of their religious profession, with no appeal whatsoever? Your ambition alone, added to your overweening insolence in taking no account of God’s will, allows you to damn your own flesh to a monastic hell, where these innocents remain in spite of beatings, insults, and torments. Christ Himself, on the other hand, gave His disciples the following precept: “And when they shall persecute you in one city, flee into another” (Mt 10:23). For private individuals to commit such enormity through self-interest— cursed be self-interest!—is an abominable abuse of power, but for religious superiors and rulers to allow it makes one reel in horror at their insensitivity. The prince’s eye, we know, guards not only the “interests of state,” but the salvation of souls as well; he ought not to allow so many to perish wretchedly by thus subordinating their salvation to these same interests.

APPEAL TO THE RULERS OF VENICE

Most Eminent, Serene, and Illustrious Lords, how greatly, how greatly should your souls be moved to compassion by the streams of tears from these

Book One desperate prisoners! Your minds, too, should show a little consideration in providing for their woeful condition. Are you not aware that, “All that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn 2:16)? These poor wretches are formed of the same flesh and blood as yourselves; so when it shall be said to you, “Give an account of thy stewardship” (Lk 16:2), you will have no sound excuse in your defense. You know only too well that the vast number of women in religious life cannot reach spiritual perfection because they are unfortunately compelled to that state by parents and family. It is not theirs to say, “This is my rest forever and ever: here will I dwell for I have chosen it” (Ps 131:14). The greater part is not moved, like Saint Anthony, the desert father, by Christ urging them, “Go sell what thou hast . . . and come, follow me” (Mt 19:21).39 Rather, their hearts are turned to the world; they long for their portion of the goods, theirs by right, which has been taken away unlawfully. And yet God has shown that He loathes actions springing from a reluctant disposition, since He requires only our hearts: “My son, give me thy heart” (Prv 23:26). Only women like Saint Clare and Saint Catherine of Siena who voluntarily renounce the world—indeed, against their parents’ wills—should be enclosed within the cloister.40 But men today imprison women to avoid expense and make life easier for themselves by enjoying every kind of luxury, indulgence, and superfluous vanity, to the point of satisfying their vile lusts with prostitutes, losing their wealth in gaming houses, and spending money like water in the satisfaction of every base whim. Men like this who abuse the law of Christ for political interests deserve to have their names effaced from the Book of Life! 39. What we know of the life of Anthony comes from a life written by Athanasius. Tarabotti would more likely have read of him in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, bk. 8, chap. 6; and especially chap. 12: just as Anthony was converted on reading the Matthew verse, so Augustine claims to have been moved to embrace Christianity on reading the same verse. Tarabotti could also have read about Saint Anthony in the Dominican, Domenico Cavalca’s Vite dei Santi Padri (Lives of the Holy Fathers), written in Italian in the fourteenth century and published many times in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; and in the most accessible collection of saints’ lives, the Legenda aurea, published in Latin and translated into Italian. See Legendario delle Vite de’Santi, Reverendo Padre Fra’ Giacobo di Voragine dell’ Ordine de’ Predicatori, tradotto già per Nicolò Manerbio Venetiano (Venice: Matteo Valentini, 1592). 40. Saint Clare (1347–86), a follower of Saint Francis of Assisi, founded a religious order for women called the Poor Clares, dedicated to imitating Christ’s absolute poverty. Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–80) founded a religious community of women and was the first great woman writer of letters in Italian. Lucrezia Marinella, Tarabotti’s contemporary, composed a lengthy praise of her life and miracles in six books: De’ gesti heroici e della vita maravigliosa della Serafica S. Caterina da Siena (Venice, 1624).

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P a t e r n a l Ty r a n n y There is nothing more powerful in the world than example, whether for good or evil; one good work is worth more than a thousand sermons. That is why it is said of Christ Our Lord that He first began to do good deeds and then began to teach. But you parents of nuns, on the other hand, are numbered among those Christ Himself condemns: “For they bind heavy and insupportable burdens, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but with a finger of their own they will not move them” (Mt 23:4). Too much, yes, too much does the behavior of the head of a family disgust me when he advises young girls to lock themselves in a cage! Their pretexts appear ludicrous to the same girls, only too aware of how they are being tricked with seemingly big, generous promises, but in fact with lies and cunning. They prate on and on how their daughters must on no account ever think of giving up the religious life to embrace instead the state of matrimony and how the married state is full of trials and tribulations for a woman. They even quote from Saint Jerome to this effect: Then come the prattling of infants, the noisy household, children watching for her word and waiting for her kiss, the reckoning up of expenses, the preparation to meet the outlay . . . . Where there is the beating of drums, the noise and clatter of pipe and lute, the clanging of cymbals, can any fear of God be found? . . . The unhappy wife must either take pleasure in them, and perish, or be displeased , and provoke her husband. The passage ends as follows: Suppose you find me a house where these things are unknown . . . yet even there, the very management of the household, the education of the children, the wants of the husband, the correction of the servants, cannot fail to call away the mind from the thought of God.41 And so fathers continue in their depictions of the woes and miseries of marriage, inveighing against their own state of life, veiling the truth as they

41. The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, against Helvidius, in St. Jerome: The Principal Works, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. W. H. Fremantle (New York and Oxford, 1893), 2d ser., vol. 6, 345. The tract was composed about 383 C.E. The above quotation comes from a long section ideally suited for fathers to use as propaganda for the religious life and against the married state. A little further on, Jerome pronounces