The single self: feminist thought and the marriage market in early modern Venice

Renaissance Quarterly, Autumn, 1995 by Virginia Cox

The year 1600 witnessed A significant though little-noted event in Italian cultural history: the publication of the first substantial full-length works by Italian women writers arguing the case for women's moral and intellectual equality with men.(1) The writers in question were two Venetians, Lucrezia Marinella and Modesta Pozzo (Moderate Fonte); their works, respectively, a polemical treatise, La nobilta et l'eccellenza delle donne, and a dialogue, Il merito delle donne.(2) These texts, long neglected, have recently begun to attract a certain amount of critical attention: particularly Fonte's Merito, far the more accessible of the two and a work, as is now being recognized, of considerable literary merit.(3)

The obvious intellectual context for these works is the long-running debate on women's equality that by the end of the sixteenth century had been consuming a steady stream of ink in Italy and Europe for over a hundred years.(4) Marinella's Nobilta very self-consciously enters the lists of this debate: commissioned as a reply to Giuseppe Passi's virulently misogynistic I difetti e mancamenti delle donne (1599), it eruditely recapitulates a century of debate on women and pits itself explicitly against the most prestigious vernacular exponents of traditionalist positions.(5) Fonte's Merito has a more oblique relation to the tradition of "defenses of women," but beneath the surface sprezzatura of its lively and spontaneous dialogue, it too draws heavily on the stock of arguments and exempla that had accumulated over a century of debate.

To this extent, then, Marinella's Nobilta and Fonte's Merito delle donne may be viewed as tardy interventions in a long-running querelle whose parameters had been set in the early decades of the sixteenth century and which had for years been running rather wearily down well-marked polemical lines. It would be mistaken, however, to regard these writers' analyses of the injustices suffered by their sex simply as a rhetorical exercise, conducted in isolation from the social realities around them. Certainly we cannot ignore the massive presence in these works of elements deriving from literary sources: it would be hopelessly naive to read them as unmediated expressions of women's discontent with their lot. But it will be my contention here that it is only by placing these works in their sociohistorical context, by tracing their links--sometimes direct, sometimes more oblique--with the realities of women's condition in Venice in the period, that we can fully understand the peculiar set of emphases they bring to bear on the subject under discussion.

The bulk of this study will be devoted to examining the social context of Fonte and Marinella's thought and the way in which the realities of women's condition are reflected in their writings. First, however, it will be necessary to examine in a certain amount of detail these writers' relation to the previous tradition of writing on women's equality and to identify those elements in their thought that distinguish them from their predecessors in the debate. A caveat seems appropriate here. It is already, in itself, a problematic enterprise to attempt to make thematic comparisons between two texts as disparate in their genre, method, and emphases as Il merito and La nobilta delle donne. The problem is compounded in this case by the character of Fonte's Merito, which as a dialogue, and a particularly artful one, is peculiarly resistant to reduction or summary. It would take a great deal more space than is dedicated to them here to do justice to the complexities of these texts. It is hoped that the sacrifice of nuance in what follows will be forgiven in the interests of clarity.

TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN MODERATA FONTE AND LUCREZIA MARINELLA

As has been noted, by the time that Fonte and Marinella were writing, the debate on women's equality already had a venerable tradition. From Castiglione's day, and earlier, sympathetic trattatisti had affirmed that women were the equals of men in body and mind. Women's capacity to participate on equal terms with men in public life and even in warfare had been widely recognized and scrupulously documented with exempla from classical history and legend. By Fonte and Marinella's day, these arguments had become such commonplaces that a writer like Tommaso Garzoni--to cite a recent example they may well have known--could liquidate the question of women's capacity to govern a kingdom with no more than a rhetorical question and a handful of names.(6)

Garzoni, however, in common with the majority of Cinquecento "defenders of women," makes no attempt to move from affirming women's natural abilities to analyzing the reasons why, historically, women have been denied the opportunity to exercise those abilities. Indeed, one of the principal forms of argumentation employed in defenses of women from Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus onwards, the list of famous female figures from history, tends to militate against any such analysis. If exceptional women have written books, fought in battles, and governed kingdoms, then the implication is that there is nothing fundamental in the structure of society preventing others from doing the same.(7) The task of achieving equality between the sexes is perceived as a purely cultural operation: all that needs to be done is to modify men's perceptions of women's capacity for virtu.