Humanist and feminist, author of a Latin autobiographical letterbook and a comic dialogue Laura Cereta was born into an urban, upper-middle-class family in Brescia in 1469. She was the daughter of Silvestro Cereto, an attorney and magistrate in Brescia, and Veronica di Leno, whose brother’s noble pretensions Cereta mocked. But almost everything we know about Cereta comes from the colorful image she crafted for herself in her own autobiographical letters. She learned Latin grammar and “to draw pictures with a needle” from the nuns at a convent, where she lived from ages seven to nine, wandering its secret passages “under lock and key.” She was not educated by her father or by a male tutor but by women. The eldest of six children, Cereta was soon saddled with her siblings’ care. But every night, when the labors of the day were done and her sisters and brothers were put to bed, Cereta continued her studies, savoring the
Roman poets, orators, philosophers, and the Bible, and writing until the early hours of the morning. At age fifteen, she saw her chance to get away. She married Pietro Serina, aVenetian merchant with a shop on the Rialto, and she left her childhood home. She had been living with her young husband no more than a year and a half when plague broke out in the Veneto, and first Serina’s brother Nicolai and then Serina himself succumbed. For the next thirteen years of her life, the widowed Cereta immersed herself in her grief over Pietro, her studies, and her writing. At the time of her own premature death in 1499, the thirty-year-old humanist had completed a book containing eighty-two Latin letters and a rather bizarre comic dialogue, which was placed first in her book.
Like her Latin-writing predecessor, Isotta Nogarola, Cereta inserted a dialogue into her letterbook. This work so annoyed the eighteenth-century bibliographer Jacopo Morelli that he noted in the Catalog of the Marcian Library in Venice that Cereta’s little “farce” had no business in a serious book of humanist letters. Unlike Nogarola’s philosophical dialogue, On the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve, Cereta’s work took as her model not Cicero but Lucian, the first-century satirist who fathered a burlesque, fantasy-driven tradition of dialogue writing that gained currency in fifteenth-century Italy. Her comic theater piece for three speakers, Dialogue on the Death of an Ass, resembles the short Lucianic dialogues of her humanist forerunners Guarino, Alberti, and Poggio. Based on one of the most popular books in the Renaissance, Apuleius’s late Latin novel, The Golden Ass, Cereta’s dialogue is a murder mystery. We are given clues but not told whether the ass’s death was an “assinicide” or an accident. The main speakers include the author herself (“Laura”) who delivers the funeral oration and acts as moderator; Soldus, the bereaved miller who owned the ass; and Philona-cus, the miller’s slave who seems to know more than he should about the alleged murder.
Cereta is believed to have lectured publicly in Brescia in the period 1486—1499 after her husband’s death. Certainly the dialogue, On the Death of an Ass, was well suited for public performance. Although we have no evidence that she performed specific pieces, some of her letters look like modern newspaper columns and would have been ideal for public readings. One such piece begins: “A nervous, noisy, and incessantly babbling woman, a stranger to everyone, appeared today just as the sun was setting and the evening was coming on; halfnaked and holding a snake tightly in her left hand, she danced at the crossroads without embarrassment. An angry commotion broke out somewhere towards the back of the stunned crowd. . . .” In another piece, Cereta reports the suffering the Venetians and their mercenary troops had inflicted on her city, her family, and her neighbors: “The wound brought to Brescian territory bleeds and drips. Almost the whole of Italy and even populous Calabria have come to despoil the single food supply that is here. The army has grown together into one great people, and having crossed the bridge over the Aglio, it replenishes the plains at night.”
Two epistolary essays in Cereta’s book, one on marriage and a second on women and education, stand among the earliest known polemics that put forward the case for women’s rights as a class action. Both letters belong to the inaugural period of the querelle des femmes, the debate about gender and woman’s nature that continued into the eighteenth century. In both works, Cereta borrows extensively from Boccaccio’s catalogue of illustrious women’s lives, De claris mulieribus, repudiating his misogynistic history of women much as Christine de Pizan did in her Le Livre de la Cite des Dames (Book of the City of Ladies, 1405). In her letter on marriage dedicated to Pietro Zecchi, Cereta’s cameo treatments of famous ancient women focus on the figure of the maternal, and in particular the female breast, as an emblem of the fecundity,
Loyalty, and strength of women. Lucretia, Dido, Veturia, Agrippina, and other morally ambiguous examples of mature womanhood in Latin literature are treated in Cereta’s essay with homage. “The powers of maternal authority are great,” she writes. Iconic of that authority is the nurturing breast of the mother, whose milk saves an old woman and a baby from death by starvation, and the bleeding breast of Lucretia, which brings an end to monarchy in Rome. At the close of this essay, however, Cereta paints a picture of women’s lives, both within and outside marriage, that is grim and hard. Women rear their children “amid wailing and all night vigils,” they abase themselves to their husbands to avoid being beaten, they are expected to settle family feuds, and they end their lives in a lonely widow’s bed.
In her other great feminist essay, addressed to Bibolo Semproni, Cereta argues that access to education equal to that of males should be every woman’s birthright. She portrays the history of generations of women poets, scholars, and prophets as a proud lineage (generositas) shared by all women. Cereta rejects the humanist model of the brilliant woman as exceptional. Rather, the long history of outstanding women in all walks of life constitutes a virtual “republic of women” (respublica mulierum) and testifies to the worth of women as a species.
Among the most moving of Cereta’s letters are those she wrote to her husband before he died. Here she reveals the complexity of her roles as his partner, friend, advisor, and lover. The expressiveness of these letters runs the gamut—from flirtatiousness to anger, from tenderness to frank sexual innuendo, from hope to impatience. The marriage was strained by Pietro’s many absences from home. Sometimes he disappeared for months at a time. Yet Cereta rises to the occasion when his shop on the Rialto burns to the ground, consoling him and giving wise counsel.
In the nine letters in which Cereta mourns her husband’s sudden death, we would expect a ritual excess of grief. And yet her letters to her friends about the death are so rasping, dry, and laconic that they command our attention and cannot be brushed away as mere formulas. “Lamentation alone is left for me to cultivate. Thus my pen, cut down in the bloom of its eloquence, has dried up. . . ,” she writes to her old friend, Alberto degli Alberti. Elsewhere she returns to her theme of the welling tears that, in an inversion of consolation, wash away words:
Rain steals over the eyes and fills them—a rain that not only washes over a widow’s face and her anxious heart, but that also purges her memory and her whole mind of the joy of speech. And so, may the gods of literature fight against the other gods for my poor sake.
Though Cereta’s work and thought were well known in Brescia during her lifetime, her humanist letterbook and her comic dialogue were not published until long after her death. In 1640, the first printed edition of her collected letters came out in Padua, but the first translation of her book from the Latin was not published until 1997.
Diana Robin
See also Education, Humanism, and Women;
Fedele, Cassandra; the subheading Letter Writing (under Literary Culture and Women); Nogarola, Isotta.
Bibliography Primary Works
Cereta, Laura. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Edited and translated by Diana Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Cereta, Laura. Laura Ceretae Brixiensis Feminae Clarissimae Epistolae iam primum e MS in lucem productae. Edited by Jacopo FilippoTomasini. Padua: Sebastiano Sardi, 1640.
King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and About the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. 2nd rev. ed. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991.
Secondary Works
Caccia, Ettore. “Cultura e letteratura nei secoli XV e XVI.” In Storia di Brescia, II. La domi-nazione Veneta (1426—1575). Pages 477—527.
Edited by Giovanni Trecanni degli Alfieri. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1961.
Cremona, Virginio.“L’umanesimo Bresciano.” In
Storia di Brescia, II. La dominazione Veneta (1426— 1575). Pages 542-566. Edited by Giovanni Tre-canni degli Alfieri. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1961.
Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism. Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Marsh, David. Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Rabil, Albert, Jr. Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981.
Robin, Diana. “Humanism and Feminism in Laura Cereta’s Public Letters” In Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Edited by Letizia Panizza, 368-384. Oxford: Legenda, University of Oxford, 2000.
Robin, Diana.“Space, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse.” In Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts:The Latin Tradition. Edited by Barbara K. Gold and Allen Miller, 165-187. Albany, NY: Charles Platter, 1996.
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