More from "The Other Voice" in early modern Europe

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Constance Jordan

Riccoboni's chronicle is a case in point, one that displays a happy inventiveness when it deals with causality. Reviewing the origin of her order in the vision of its founder Sister Lucia Tiepolo, Riccoboni asserts the prophetic and explanatory power of certain events whose meanings were understood only belatedly. They were assigned, as causative, to other and earlier events. Thus they became part of a seamless narrative. Speaking of the foundation of the altar of Corpus Domini, the convent's church, Riccoboni declares that its location was miraculous, signaled by an August snowfall. The snowfall acquires its significance when the location of the altar needs an explanation; otherwise, it would have remained an empty sign. In fact, there are many such empty signs in Riccoboni's chronicle. Here's an example: "before she came to live here [the place of Corpus Dominil this Sister Lucia saw a gold brood hen with all her chicks, and when she tried to embrace or grasp it, it plunged underground and she saw it no mo re" (29). The reader is never told what the strange history of this hen means nor why Riccoboni saw fit to include it in the history of her convent. In its curious synchronism, Riccoboni's narrative resembles paintings of this period in which the life of a saint is depicted at several distinct moments in time but displayed in one unified space, on a single canvas.

Riccoboni shows no discrepancy between her pious understanding of events and what the men who teach her and her sisters state as true and sufficient. When, for example, she reports to Giovanni Domenici that the wind knocked down the sacrament from its place of storage, he explains that this happened because the Lord desired that (like him) the convent should suffer tribulation. Giovanni's allusion to an imitatio Christi is followed by his prophecy of further but unspecified afflictions, which Riccoboni confesses "indeed came true soon thereafter" (41). Because what she reports as an explanation is really an effect (an afterthought, a reflection) of what it is supposed to explain, events in Riccoboni's chronicle seem always already to be happening. Why such a notion of history would make sense to her is suggested in the necrology she appends to her history. What counts there is how the sisters passed from this life to the next; their translation out of time and into eternity is the reason their lives are wort h telling. Sister Marina Pisani's death is quickly summarized: sick after a life of "fasting and good works," she "received all the holy sacraments very devoutly." These slender facts are important because they demonstrate that Sister Marina indeed "went to the Lord" (95).

In quite a different way, Cassandra Fedele's Letters and Orations also show a kind of a-historicity. Shaped by a humanistic training unavailable to most Women in her day, they draw on a rhetoric of argument that collapses distinctions of gender into a uniform set of references to a masculine experience. Inevitably, this argument places the notion of exceptionalism in the forefront of Fedele's thinking about her place in the intellectual life of her city, Venice, and in a larger sense Italy. Her elegant and tempered writing shows the equivocal effects of humanism on habits of thought associated with the woman question. Fedele's standards are masculine and chiefly assigned to males; she responds to them as if acknowledging a demi personhood - a status she attains not as a woman but rather as a quasi-man. Diana Robin, her editor, introduces Fedele's ambiguous condition by prefacing her introduction with an epigraph by Scaliger: "If no woman is able to explore the truth hidden in God's mind and bosom or bring di vine inspiration to nature, then you [Cassandra Fedele] never were a woman, but you were a man" (3). This hypothetical statement points to Fedele's exotic womanhood. The sense of wonder that it conveys is consistent with conventional compliments Fedele received in letters from her correspondents, all men, as well as those she gave to women. In each case, the figure of the woman who competes and excels in the masculine domain of learning is made to be exceptional.