Stephen Kolsky. The Ghost of Boccaccio. Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy

Italica, Winter, 2007 by Reinier Leushuis

The writers connected to the nexus of Ferrara and Mantua courts, where women such as Isabella d'Este, though never formally in charge, wielded great unofficial power, take center stage in chapter three. Again Kolsky's book superbly distinguishes the double-edged nature of both praise and blame in Boccaccio's imitators. While Foresti's De plurimis claris selectisque mulieribus (1497), a massive collection of biographies emulating and expanding Boccaccio's text both in structure and methodology (visually supported by woodcuts, of which Kolsky's book includes some pertinent examples) is ultimately "uncomfortable with [women's] achievements" (125) and falis back on debasing stereotypes and a dogmatic insistence on the superiority of Christian women over pagan ones, Equicola's De mulieribus and Strozzi's Defensio mulierum (both 1501) make an uncommon yet powerful case for women's equal participation in selected court circles. Yet again, although radically challenging female inferiority, Equicola's call for exploiting women's intellectual potential through education only addresses those female elites he sought to court in the hope of patronage.

However undercut it may be by "paradoxical logics," the "superiority argument" as further explored by the writers under scrutiny in the last chapter, "emerges as an innovative contribution to the debate on women" (171). The topos is already dealt with in Goggio's De laudibus mulierum (1487), a text addressed to the Ferrara court that defends female involvement in court and political life through a positive "repackaging" (190) of Boccaccio's sometimes heavily misogynous view of founding female figures in pagan and Christian lineage, such as Queen Semiramis. Capra's use of the vernacular for his Della eccellenza e dignita delle donne (1525) stands out for allowing the superiority argument to reach a wider readership. Yet Kolsky's subtle reading evinces that Capra's exempla are perhaps the best case in point of how a "slippery concept of superiority" (196) betrays a hidden sense of female inferiority, or at least reiterates women's enclosure in conventional social roles. Kolsky's inclusion of Agrippa's De nobilitate et prcecellentia foemini sexus (1529) remains puzzling for the absence of a convincing direct link to Boccaccio's founding text and for the different intellectual audience for which Agrippa was writing, namely fellow humanists. Nevertheless Kolsky's discussion convincingly enlightens the links between Italian court writers and northern European humanism regarding the laus mulierum topos.

The angle Smarr adopts in her study, i.e., the dialogue as a genre that allowed women to "insert their voices into the larger cultural conversation" (1) is both original and challenging. On the one hand, this perspective allows an innovative and exhaustive outlook on women's writing from the mid-fifteenth until the late sixteenth century in France and Italy. On the other hand, Smarr is juggling with an "eclectic approach" (26) that not only has to cope with the inherent fluidity of the dialogue as genre (diphonic and polyphonic, spiritual and secular, allegorical and realistic, theatrical and epistolary, etc.), but also has to handle a wide array of authors and audiences, including aristocrats such as Marguerite de Navarre, humanists such as Olympia Morata, women from the mercantile classes such as Louise Labe, and courtesans, such as Tullia d'Aragona. Consequently, the long list of questions on voice, authority, form, gender, authorship, audience, patronage, and socio-economic context that guide Smarr's approach (30) lacks analytical focus. But this is doubtlessly unavoidable in a study of this nature, forced to negotiate a delicate balance between overview and in-depth analysis.