Listening to "the other voice" in early modern Europe

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 1998 by Constance Jordan

The inauguration of the Chicago series marks an important moment in women's studies: English-speaking readers will now be able to assess literary works in early modern Europe, especially Italy, that engaged the late medieval discourse on the nature and status of women. Commonly known as the querelle des femmes, this discourse was progressively transformed by the revisionary political philosophies promoted by Renaissance humanists, Reformation attitudes on social order, and a burgeoning interest in the evidence of experience as opposed to doctrine and theory. Especially important for scholars of early modern England, continental literature by and about women demonstrates a prodigiously innovative quality of thought not matched in England much before the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The exception here is, of course, the debate on women's rule, which, through an accident of history, forced English clerics and ministers to argue for the competence of a women in authority long before there was much popular support for the idea.

Certain features of this continental literature on women are, I think, remarkable. They emerge with particular clarity in two contexts: that of political order, in which the question of the author's rhetorical power to persuade a reader is set against the historical evidence of various kinds of institutionalized authority; and that of Christian doctrine, in which a theoretical scheme of creation privileging the more spiritual classes of creature over those more physical, earthy, and material is qualified by accounts of diversity. The two contexts inform each other, particularly in discussions of sex and gender: if males are assumed to be more rational and educable than females, their social and political preeminence may be justified. If not, then not: a different and more complex order must obtain. Pro-woman argument engages both these contexts. Works such as the autobiography of Cecilia Ferrazzi reveal not that a woman lacked power - to persuade, to inform, to engage an audience - but rather that because she could not identify her interests with those of any existing institution, she lacked authority. And works such as Moderata Fonte's dialogue asserting the superiority of women to men undermine the notion of a creational hierarchy by illustrating the diversity within nature, a move that opens many possibilities: at the very least, women can imagine relations with men that approach something like virtual parity.

Here I need to take some exception to King and Rabil's claim that "Women were excluded from power: the whole cultural tradition insisted on it" ("Editors' Introduction," Declamation, xxii). I find less consensus in the cultural tradition and would instance the works in their series for a start. Women were powerful: they were eloquent, persuasive, and influential. What they were not was authoritative; they lacked the means to make their desires more than the motive force behind a request, petition, or plea; for the most part, they were excluded from those institutions that would have given their positions legitimacy. This liability informs the general character of their literary output and of works by men who argued in their behalf. With no grounding in a recognized form of collectivity, writers who spoke with "the other voice" had to appeal the reason, the sense of fair play, and the affection of men to authorize the changes they themselves could not.

The most desperate and alienated of "other voices" recorded in this series is surely Cecilia Ferrazzi's. Born in 1609, she was accused and convicted of "pretense of sanctity" by the Inquisition, in Venice, in 1664-65 (14). Schutte's well-documented introduction discusses the substance of Ferrazzi's testimony in four official interrogations; these are supplemented by the material in her life story, as she told it to a secretary - a story solicited as corroboration for the information gathered in the interrogations and constituting, in Schutte's words, an "inquisitorial autobiography" (5). Together, Ferrazzi's words reveal how her contemporaries looked at her and her extraordinary activities: while she acted as if she were divinely inspired, they reacted with fear and disbelief. Her career at the margins of society followed the death of her parents and her position as governess in the family of the Venetian patrician, Paolo Lion, where she also began to care for young women who, without a dowry or property of any kind, were in danger of falling into prostitution. This activity became suspect when Ferrazzi, an epileptic and probably tubercular, asserted that she heard voices and had visions. She denied a rumor that she received the stigmata, listened to confession, and administered communion, but these events and her irregular behavior, together with the fact that some people regarded her as "a living saint" (14) eventually drove the process of her trial.

Identified as a non-conformist and deprived of any ordinary or customary means to understand what was happening to her or why, Ferrazzi's words suggest that she never knew who she was or should strive to be. Separated from the church, the institution to which she most belonged by conviction and temperament, she floated in a kind of cognitive limbo. Once, as commanded by her confessor, she told a dove who habitually visited her in her room to go to him; she concluded that she did not "consider whether it [the dove] was God or the Devil"; her task was not to know but to obey (43). And after undergoing exorcism, she reflected that "whether the aforementioned things (her visions) were illusions of the demon, as I've always suspected and feared, I leave to the appropriate people to judge, submitting entirely and forever to their will" (73-74). Thus she functioned as a kind of conduit for official pronouncements on her state of being - they testified to the power of her image while they also sought to control its effects.