Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2005 by Constance Jordan

Isotta Nogarola. Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Eds. and trans. Margaret L. King and Diana Robin. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. xxxii 226 pp. index. append. bibl. $65 (cl), $25 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-59007-0 (cl), 0-226-59008-9 (pbk).

Madeline de Scudery. Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Eds. and trans. Jane L. Donawerth and Julie Strongson. Chicago and London; The University of Chicago Press, 2004. xxxii 174 pp. index. illus. bibl. $25. ISBN: 0-226-14404-6.

Two new publications from the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe illustrate transformations in both substance and style that characterize writing by women from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In the space of these 200 years, women writers discovered not only new literary models but also revolutionary ways of expressing themselves. Isotta Nogarola, a generation later than Christine de Pisan, achieved her reputation as scholar of humanist texts, an impressive Latinist, and a skilled rhetorician by corresponding with prominent male humanists in Venice and neighboring Verona. She regularly deferred to contemporary social norms by announcing herself as an ignorant woman. Yet inspired by the affection of Ludovico Foscarini, a Venetian nobleman, she achieved a distinguished place in the world of learned letters. Madeleine de Scudery, deferring neither to custom nor the presumed authority of men, saw her wit and erudition triumph in the conversations taking place in her Paris salon. Eschewing humanist models, she praised concision and clarity. Above all, she sought to persuade without giving offence.

From the outset, Nogarola confirmed her literary status by modes of indirection. Employing the trope of concessio, she regularly admitted her feminine weakness but also argued generally from cases of exceptional women, and, more courageously, identified herself as one of them. In a letter from 1436 to Guarino Veronese (who had praised her), she calls him a "wellspring of virtue and probity," and then terms both of them heroic, she a Cicero to his Cato, she a Socrates to his Plato (51). Her despair at his failure to respond to her compliments was answered when, in a letter dated 10 April 1537, he reaffirms his estimation of her, challenging her to "create a man within her womanhood" (in muliere virum faciat; [43, n. 11]). In a letter to Niccolo Venier the following year, she appears to have done so, at least in fantasy, discovering her model in the cross-dressed Euclides, a man, who traveled through hostile territory in woman's dress in order to gain wisdom (74). Her defense of women, the Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve, was an answer to Foscarini's orthodox claim that Eve, defying God, had exhibited pride and was the cause of sin in Adam. Nogarola's argument exploits Foscarini's assertion of female inferiority by an ironic logic: for if Eve in her created state was weaker than Adam by nature and an imperfect creature, she was also, by definition, incapable of full responsibility. And in fact it was Adam, the superior of the two, who was charged with obedience to God's command.

Given Nogarola's willingness to test gender distinctions, her Oration to Pope Pius II at the Congress of Mantua (1459) is surprising. Arguing for a proposed crusade against the Turks, she insists that the church must "crush proud peoples and savage nations, trample the land underfoot with a rumbling and stun nations with your rage" (184). There had been at least six crusades, not counting the pathetic Children's Crusade of 1212, before the fall of Acre and the withdrawal of Christian forces from Turkey in 1291, and I find it hard to imagine what impetus there could have been for a renewed effort of that kind almost two hundred years later. Europe had less than fifty years to wait before Erasmus would issue his calls for peace and his condemnation of war in various Adages (Querela pacis, dulce bellum inexpertis) and in The Praise of Folly (Encomium moriae). We can only imagine what moved Nogarola to argue otherwise.

Madeleine de Scudery's literary career is defined by her great novels, Artamene, ou Le grand Cyrus (1649)--represented in the Chicago series by an extract entitled Sapho, translated and edited by Karen Newman--and Clelie (1655). The works in this volume, drawn from Lettres amoureuses (1641), Les femmes illustres (1642), and Conversations sur divers sujets (1680, 1684), illustrate the culture of her Saturday salons; they are, in a sense, evocations of these occasions.

The Lettres derive from the classical ars dictaminis, instruction instilled in popular handbooks promoting the art of writing letters, both formal and personal. The Les femmes illustres feature Scudery's rendition of speeches by exceptional women of antiquity, as she imagines them. Miriam, the wife of Herod, defies his accusation that she has conspired against him by arguing from her (idealized) nature: "I am of a class unused to accounting for actions except to God alone" (60). Finally, it is "the image of Miriam," which, though invisible, will pervade the civil ethos and establish her innocence. The figure points to Scudery's belief in what might be termed the existence of a public conscience, the inner life of persons who serve as mentors of a political ethics. The oration attributed to Sophonisba, queen of Numidia and wife of Roman general Masinissa, who asks him to send her poison so that she can commit suicide rather than be led in a triumph in Rome, contrasts with that of Zenobia, who accepts this fate. Sophonisba distinguishes monarchs, who must convey a heroic example of liberty to the world, from philosophers, who can embrace the stoic virtue of constancy in adversity. Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, defeated by Aurelian in 272, argues for the philosopher's "sovereign wisdom," telling her daughters: "unable to live as queens, you might yet reign over yourselves" (77). The force of Sophonisba's politically charged exemplum is countered and balanced by Zenobia's reliance on an entirely private moral judgment that functions independently of circumstance. Sappho's oration celebrates womanly intelligence and the resources of poetry. It looks forward to Scudery's narrative of the romance between Sapho (a character modeled on the poet Sappho) and Phaon in Artamene ou Le grand Cyrus. As imagination is linked to judgment, which is the faculty responsible for invention, so Erinna, Sappho's beloved correspondent, will attain the heights of Parnassus and an eternal beauty of mind and spirit.