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

Italica, Winter, 2007 by Reinier Leushuis

Chapter Five, "Dialogue & Drama," constitutes a most original contribution, not only by exploring the significant link between theatricality and female dialogue writing, but also because it substantiates differences in emphasis between France and Italy: while Italian female dialogue writers generally preferred the historicity and communal aspects of the Ciceronian mode, not without a "proud identification" with classical Rome (188), the French women authors under scrutiny in this chapter fruitfully blended typically French medieval poetic and theatrical traditions (allegory, mythology, farce, debat, morality plays) with the satire of the Lucianic dialogue tradition. Labe's Debat de Folie et d'Amour and Catherine des Roches's dialogues, for instance, bridge Middle Ages and Renaissance by 'humanizing' their allegorical and mythological characters, which thus allows both authors to broach gender issues in unique dramatic fictionalizations of the guerre des sexes (e.g., between a male Love and a female Folly). However, since there is no evidence that these dialogues were actually performed, a theoretical deepening of the notion of theatricality would have made a stronger case than Smarr's insistence on their theatrical 'feel' or the vague reference to the reader's "mental theater" (189).

Finally, Smarr tunas to two examples of female-authored multi-voiced dialogues, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron and Moderata Fonte's Il merito delle donne, which both draw on the same two majors models for Renaissance polyphonic dialogue writing, Boccaccio's Decamerone and Castiglione's Cortegiano. While Smarr's categorization of these texts as "fully polyphonic" (191) in a chapter rather vaguely entitled "Many Voices," seems both forced and a little unclear (after all, quite a few of the other texts included more than two speakers, to think but of Labe's Debat), placing them at the end of her itinerary powerfully argues that the polyphonic dialogue was the exception rather than the rule for female dialogue writing, as Smarr had claimed in her opening pages (2). Even so, the indisputable fame of Marguerite's Heptameron somewhat belies Smarr's earlier claim on French women authors' avoidance of the Ciceronian model, which, although Smarr fails to mention it, was the founding paradigm for Castiglione and thus also for any imitation of his Cortegiano, be it male- or female-authored. Yet in spite of these formal issues, the chapter's sound intertextual readings clearly reveal how the multi-voiced dialogue allows female authors to both stage subversive feminist agendas and "fragment the authorial voice in a way that indicates the contradictions and ambivalences among and within women" (230). By avoiding the persuasive closure that diphonic dialogues tend to offer, the Heptameron and Il merito may thus well be the best examples of the enactment of "women's critical thought and its expression" (230).

In her conclusion Smarr pulls together the various "cross-threads" (231) from this impressive overview of female dialogue writing by pointing out with great accuracy the gender specificity of female dialogue production, and by allowing us to understand not only how women exploited dialogue to "join the conversation", but also, vice-versa, how early modern female authors contributed to and transformed the gente of the dialogue.