Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 2002 by Elissa B. Weaver

Letizia Panizza, ed. Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society Oxford: University of Oxford European Humanities Research Centre, 2000. xxi 523 pp. $69.50. ISBN: 1-900755-09-2.

Se le carte sin qui state e gl'inchiostri / per voi non sono, or sono ai tempi nostri.

Orlando furioso 37 vii, 7-8

Ariosto's acknowledgment of his contemporary world's new found interest in women could as easily be applied to their rediscovery as a subject of history today. The study of the lives and contributions to society and to the arts of women in the early modern period continues to expand exponentially, as though in just a few decades we intend to compensate for centuries of disinterest or disparagement. The twenty-nine essays collected by Letizia Panizza in the volume Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society present this scholarly world in microcosm, touching on many aspects of the lives of Renaissance women, their creative works and their daily work, their representation in art and literature, their treatment under the law, and their place in culture. This varied collection (hailing from conference papers delivered at the University of London in 1994) has limited space to offer each voice; some of the essays suffer more than others from condensation. Many of the papers, however, meet this challenge brilli antly, presenting new information and interpretations succinctly and provocatively.

The papers are organized under six generous rubrics which acknowledge the broad sweep of the collection: women and the court; women and the church; legal constraints and ethical precepts; female models of comportment; women and the stage; and women and letters. This method of subdividing the material is in some cases fairly arbitrary -- to wit, discussions of women in court society and models of comportment for women are found throughout the collection.

Unfortunately, the space of this review does not permit discussion nor even a listing of the authors and titles of so many contributions; nor does the great variety of topics make it possible to characterize the collection accurately by referring to dominant themes. Some of the important topics treated, however, are: the social and legal control of women in Renaissance Italy, proper gender roles taught through literature and art, the relationship of the ideal to lived reality, and women's participation in literary culture. The approaches of the contributors are mainly historical -- social and literary but also religious and legal history (sumptuary laws, dowry and property rights), and the history of art (painting, prints, and furniture decoration). A vast gamut of comportment literature is examined, looking at the ecclesiastical origins of certain notions of discipline and civility (Zarri), or at the evolution over time of attitudes toward marriage (Richardson). Famous women writers like Vittoria Colonna, Lu crezia Marinella, the commedia actress Isabella Andreini, and obscure convent women historians are studied for their work and their legacy. Giovanna Rabitti carefully documents how Vittoria Colonna's poetry became a model, not unlike that of Petrarch's, for the women lyric poets who followed.

One of the topics that receives a rather thorough discussion, despite the brevity of the essays, is the importance of women as the audience of literature. Nadia Canata Salamone argues that women's participation in literary culture, primarily in court society where women were patrons, consumers, and the addressees of romance and lyric poetry, opened the way eventually for their more active participation in literature as subjects and eventually as authors. She contrasts the situation in northern Italian courts with that of Quattrocento Florence where vernacular culture, dominated by notaries and merchants, excluded women, and where women writers were the rare exception. Conor Fahy also takes up the subject of women as the audience of literature. He confutes the often asserted opinion that women belonged in considerable numbers to sixteenth-century literary academies. The evidence points to only a very few who did (among them, Laura Battiferri in Siena, Isabella Andreini in Padova), but Fahy explains that some w omen participated as the audience of academy performances and that their presence indeed influenced the activities and the writing, especially of certain members of the Sienese Intronati. In this Siena seems to have been exceptional.

Comportment literature figures prominently in the collection. One of its standard features is the catalogue of female exemplars, taken mostly from myth and antiquity, but also from contemporary times. Pamela Benson's essay on the exemplary figure of Gualdrada argues that the story of the young Florentine's refusal to kiss the Emperor was used by Boccaccio in his De claris mulieribus to represent the republican virtues of the Florentine Comune; it was later appropriated by Vasari for Eleanora di Toledo's bedroom ceiling, associating the Florence of Cosimo with republican government even though it had become a princely state. The painting program Vasari devised put Gualdrada in the company of Penelope, the Sabine women, and the Hebrew Ester and Florence then on a par with the ancients. In another important essay, Virginia Cox argues against making easy generalizations about the meaning of the relative silence of the female participants in Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano. Cox points to the importance of disti nguishing between dialogues that mean to be verisimilar and therefore seek to represent believable and decorous behavior and those that do not.