More from "The Other Voice" in early modern Europe

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Constance Jordan

Whether it was River's reply that actually forced van Schurman to begin her recantation of this program, or the later influence of Jean de Labadie, is unclear. In any case, Rivet's position denied all validity to van Schurman's argument, largely because it insisted on the propriety of the status quo: reality will not follow the lead of your words"; "men are destined to one set of things, women another"; women are not suited for "political and ecclesiastical duties, especially public reaching," and therefore they should not be educated to practice them (50). And finally, there is Rivet's trump card: even if women were so suited, it would nor be "in the public interest" to have them develop their talents to public ends. No reason is given. By abandoning the public/private criterion which allowed women the privileges of men in education and by insisting on the male/female difference, even though it was no more than customary, Rivet forced van Schurman into a position that was essentially impractical, antisocial , and a-historical. In Eukleria, she renounces her early work as erroneous, admits to the "grossest of faults" in endorsing it, and vows herself to thoughts and works of piety. "I am nothing but the dream of a shadow" (85), she declares. Her words recall the trope of life as a dream, familiar to readers of Montaigne and made popular on the English stage by Shakespeare's Prospero: "we are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep." That van Schurman believed that she had embraced a reclusive piety "only too late" (88), suggests how completely, after her turn to a mystical religion, she discounted the things of this world and the ordinary terms of human life in favor of the hope of eternity.

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Women writers were not, however, altogether bound by restrictions that required them to deny either their difference or their agency. If they did not challenge the norms of patriarchy overtly, they could at least reveal how to circumvent them. As her editor Jane Tylus notes, Lucrezia Tornabuoni is intrigued with the possibility that women can "meddle" in the business of men (22, 27), and while her stories of Susanna, Tobias, Judith, Esther, and John the Baptist display an acute sense of the differences of sex and gender they also show how conflict between and among men and women establish agency for women. This agency is not of course unqualified.

When made of a woman, the demand to exhibit virtu -- the kind of strength and skill normally assigned to men -- required some kind of accommodation, for typically a woman's virtu was recognized only as the virtue of chastity. In the stories of Susanna and Tobias, the female principals lack virtue but acquire virtue when men speak for them. Tornabuoni's Daniel has the wit and the status to interrogate the elders who have accused Susanna of fornication. He reasonably discovers contradiction and refutes the charges of the elders; she does not and cannot, not only because as a woman she is categorically incredible but also because she is given no power to reason or speak. Her virtu is only in the chastity of her mouth, her silence. Correspondingly, the virtu of Tobias, his abstemious sexuality, an act both generative and sober, conforms to the virtue of chastity expected of his bride Sarah. In that sense, he is himself feminized, a trait that may explain why he is so often pictured as an young adolescent. His vi rtue is expressed as the "familiarity" of the angel Raphael (114). Like Susanna, Sarah is validated through the action of a man. By contrast, Tornabuoni's stories of Judith and Esther show the virtu of women as actual and independently instrumental in preserving the integrity of their tribe.