Female Renaissance ALL’ITALIANA
Will Stampa, Fonte, and Franco become the new Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Boccaccio? Changing the canon: female authors of Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance is an acclaimed time of cultural rebirth, already ongoing in the 15th and 16thcenturies. For a long time (and still!), the Italian Renaissance has been very male-centric in its study, despite the fact that recent research proves this to be an era of great female freedom (comparatively!) and cultural productivity in many regions of Italy. We are all familiar with Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Boccaccio…but who exactly are Gaspara Stampa, Moderata Fonte, and Veronica Franco? In this article I hope to introduce you to a range of female creators, giving you a glimpse into their work and lives in order to reinsert the often lost and forgotten female experience into the Renaissance.
When it comes to female authorship finding its place in the Renaissance canon, things can be made very difficult by years of women’s writing being overlooked. In the words of Virginia Cox, ‘A hard-wired academic commonplace within Italian literary scholarship, still enduring in some circles, has it that female authors featured as a salient collective phenomenon in Italy for a period of only a few decades in the mid-sixteenth century.’[1] This attitude has proved persistent and dangerous, and reduces what we now understand to be a fairly consistent and long period of high quality and plentiful women’s writing, from the 1540s to the early 17thcentury, to a singular historical outlier to be studied briefly, if at all. Many different and talented female voices can be heard from this period, thanks to the scholarship in this field from the mid-90s, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to just a selection…
The Cinquecento showed comparatively huge cultural participation from women, and in no area was this truer than in poetry. An estimated six female poets published Rime (a collection of poems in rhyme, a format popularised by Dante, and hence impressive!) during their own lifetimes in Italy between 1538 and 1575.[2] Also, in 1559, we see the unprecedented step of Venetian poetry editor, Lodovico Domenichi, of crafting an almost exclusively female-authored anthology with 331 poems by 53 different writers.[3]
An explanation for poetry’s popularity amongst women writers are the popular themes that were available to them in this genre. The celebrated literature of the time often contained stories of love, betrayal, and violence, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, or was political in nature, like Machiavelli’s Il Principe, a sphere from which women were generally excluded. Although we do find female participation in these genres, like Fonte, women preferred poetry where they could write devotional praise, either religious or love verse, that was less scandalous, and as such their honour and chastity were less likely to be questioned. It was inconceivable that women could write about anything from outside their own experience, so tales of adultery or deceit would have been read as autobiographical.
Gaspara Stampa was one of the six known women to publish a Rime, the Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa(Rhymes of the gentlelady Gaspara Stampa), which was published after her death in 1554 by her sister. Her poems are autobiographical in nature; following Petrarch's lyrical tradition of a love canzioniere they narrate the sole erotic trajectory of her love story with Count Collaltino di Collalto. The narrative arc takes us from their chance meeting to the affair’s end, a journey that shows the poets experiencing joy, jealousy, bitterness, and even anger – which leads her to address the Count with the informal ‘tu,’ a real Cinquecento scandal! A protofeminist in many ways, one of my favourite verses is her appeal to other women to share in her suffering as her lover has left and rejected her (relatable!):
‘Piangete Donne, e poi che la mia morte
Non move il Signor mio crudo e lontano,
Voi, che sete di cor dolce & humano,
Aprite di pietade almen le porte.’
(‘Ladies, weep, and since my death moves not / my lord who’s cruel and far away, then you, / who possess hearts that are sweet and humane, / at least out of pity open your gates.’ )
Veronica Franco is recognised as the most prolific author of her era; she was widely and successfully published throughout her lifetime and beyond. Her job as a cortegiana onesta (honest courtesan), enabled her access to the literati of Venetian society, who circulated and helped to publish her work, as well as furthering her humanistic education. The cortegiana onesta was employed for her abilities to entertain clients with her intellect as well as her body. Their humanistic education differentiated them from other (more lowly) sex workers like the meretrice and as such they occupied a unique position in Venetian society where they were respected and somewhat autonomous, with independent and often high incomes, and crucially no husbands. Yet, their dependency on male patronage secured them within the bounds of the patriarchal. As unchaste and independent women who operated in the public sphere they could also be subject to great criticism and suspicion, and Franco herself was put on trial for sorcery in the Venetian Inquisition. Her poetry is characterised by her life as a courtesan; she has a strong and proud voice, and a keen sense of justice, meanwhile her autonomy allowed her to polemically challenge male society. I particularly like her rousing call for female education and equality in her Lettere Familiari: ‘Quando armate ed esperte ancor siam noi, | render buon conto a ciascun uom potemo, | ché mani e piedi e core avem qual voi’ (When we too are armed and trained, we can convince men that we have hands, feet, and a heart like yours).
Moderata Fonte is another protofeminist writer from the 1500s in Italy. Her most celebrated work Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women), is a literary dialogue written in the defence of women after a wave of male-authored sexist and misogynistic writing emerged at the turn of the century. These literary battles between the sexes were part of the querelle des femmes (the question of women) an ongoing debate in which writers supported or debunked the assumed superiority of the male sex. Fonte’s writing is wonderfully entertaining and fascinatingly modern, a poignant and still relevant quote from Il merito delle donne is as follows: ‘Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.’
Thank you for reading and I hope you feel enchanted by the whole array of fantastic female authors emerging from this period. For those who seek to dig a little deeper, I direct you to The Other Voice series. Here, you can find modern editions of rediscovered works by marginalised voices from all across Early Modern Europe.