Overview
Modern feminism did not spring forth fully formed in the twentieth century when women in the West at last succeeded in their long struggle to gain full legal rights as citizens. Predicated on the absolute equality of women and men, contemporary feminism has deep roots in late medieval and early modern social and political thought.
Renaissance feminism has been defined variously as the product of the late medieval querelles des femmes (the debate on women), as the emergence of a new voice of protest in Eu-rope, and as the rise of a new female consciousness, articulated for the first time in the writings of early modern women. Renaissance feminist works praised women’s contributions to civilization throughout history in the spheres of government, science, literature, theater, art, music, and war, while they protested the barring of women from access to higher education, the universities, lawmaking, state politics, property ownership, and the work-place. Among the early modern feminists were both men and women. They wrote in a wide range of genres, including treatises, dialogues, letters, dramas, poetry, biographies, histories, and romances. Four subentries follow in this general survey: the Renaissance Inauguration of the Debate on Women, Feminism in Italy, Feminism in France, Feminism in England.
The Renaissance Inauguration of the Debate on Women
Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la cite des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, ca. 1404-1405) marks the emergence of the feminist voice in Europe. A world history of distinguished women, Pizan’s City of Ladies was the first important French text in the querelles des femmes. Representing a revision of Giovanni Boccaccio’s history of women, the De claris mulieribus (Famous Women, 1374), Pizan’s City demonstrates women’s equality with men through examples from classical antiquity as well as the Bible and argues that the cause of women’s low status is their lack of access to education rather than any inborn deficiency. While Boccaccio’s Famous Women with its one hundred and six female biographies represents
Accomplished women as exceptions to the rule of women’s assumed inferiority, Pizan’s work argues the universality of female virtue (King 1991, 223—224).Women who are portrayed as exotic or even monstrous beings, such as Zenobia of Palmyra and Semiramis of Assyria in Boccaccio’s Famous Women, are refigured as scholars and builders of town and state in Pizan’s City of Ladies.
Feminism in Italy
By the end of the fifteenth century in Italy, the rediscovery of the literature of Greece and Rome, humanist educational theory, and the new universal histories of women by Boccaccio and Pizan awakened interest among intellectuals in the nature of woman, women’s education, and gender inequity. A succession of defenses of women were commissioned by prominent noblewomen who welcomed rebuttals to such misogynistic works as Guillaume de Lorris’s popular Roman de la Rose (1265) with its equally woman-baiting complementary text by Jean de Meun. At the request of Bianca Maria Sforza, duchess of Milan, Antonio Cornazzano composed his encomium of women, the De mulieribus admirandis (1467). Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote his defense of the female sex, the Il libro delle lode e commendazione delle donne (ca. 1480), for the Florentine noblewoman Francesca Acciaiuoli; Giovanni Saba-dino degli Arienti dedicated his eulogy, Gyne-vera de le clare donne (1483), to Gynevera Sforza di Bentivogli; Bartolomeo Goggio, his De laudibus mulierum (1487) to Eleonora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara; and Agostino Strozzi, his Defensio mulierum (ca. 1501) to Marguerita Cantelma, a friend of Isabella d’Este, then the most influential female patron in Italy.
During the same years that male writers were circulating their defenses of women in the northern courts, a group of Italian women made public the volumes of humanist, Ci-ceronian-style Latin letters they had authored, again challenging the assumption of women’s intellectual inferiority. Among the first large-scale works by women to circulate in manuscript, the letterbooks of Isotta Nogarola (her Opera omnia, ca. 1434—1461), Cassandra Fedele (her Epistolae et orationes, ca. 1487—1497), and Laura Cereta (her Epistolae, ca. 1485—1488) heralded the emergence of female self-fashioning in European literary culture and with it a new feminist consciousness. These fifteenth-century letterbooks (epistolae familiares) publicized their female authors’ education in the classics and their literary style, while it depicted their ideas, experiences, relationships, and intellectual and emotional responses to the people and events that marked their lives. Fedele’s elegant Latin letters made it clear that women should have equal access to higher education; moreover, she argued that issue in an oration she delivered before the Venetian senate. Nogarola publicly questioned the conventional wisdom of Eve’s responsibility for the Fall in a debate with the governor of Verona. Of the three women humanists, only Cereta can be characterized as a modern feminist since many of her eighty-three letters directly confront such women’s issues as schooling, marriage, child care, widowhood, the problem of gossip, and the fashion industry and its effect on women.
Despite the explosion of women’s publishing with the rise of the commercial press in sixteenth-century Italy, it was not until the seventeenth century that women writers launched a frontal attack on the institutions that oppressed women. Works by a group of Venetian feminists—Moderata Fonte’s dialogue for seven women Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600), Lucrezia Marinella’s treatise La nobiltd et l’eccellenza delle donne e mancamenti de gli huomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, 1601), and Arcangela Tarabotti’s polemic La tirannia paterna (Paternal Tyranny; also published as La semplicitd ingan-nata, Innocence Deceived, 1654)—actively urged women to challenge the patriarchal institutions of their city, which these writers saw as based not on innate gender differences but on a simple seizure of power by men. As one of the speakers in Fonte’s dialogue argues, “if women are men’s inferiors in status but not in worth, [male governance] is an abuse. . . that men have. . . translated into law and custom and it has become so entrenched that they claim. . . that the status they have gained through their bullying is theirs by right” (Cox 1997, 7).The principal speaker Corinna vows not to marry. Refusing to subordinate herself to any man, she also warns her friends against marriage.
Similarly discoursing on Greek philosophy and Roman natural history in her treatise, La nobilta et I’eccellenza delle donne, Lucrezia Marinella attacks the misogynistic arguments of her countrymen. She presents a point-bypoint refutation of Giuseppe Passi’s vicious I donneshi difetti (The Defects of Women, 1599) and exposes the underlying misogyny of her countrymen Giovanni Boccaccio, Ercole and Torquato Tasso, and Sperone Speroni. Forced by her father to take holy orders, the nun Ar-cangela Tarabotti published a polemic against the dowry system in her Paternal Tyranny, which has been described both as a feminist critique of the major texts of contemporary misogyny and “the first manifesto about women’s inalienable rights to liberty, equality, and universal education” (Panizza 1999, 1).
Feminism in France
In France from 1540 to 1640, outspoken advocates of female autonomy brought feminism and the querelles des femmes to the salons of Paris and Poitiers. Such feminist writers as Helisenne de Crenne, Madeleine Neveu des Roches and her daughter Catherine Fradonnet des Roches, and Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565—1645) insisted on the importance of independence for women and represented marriage as an institution deeply perilous to that autonomy. Among Helisenne’s major works, her Les epistres et in-uectiues de ma dame (Familiar and Invective Letters, 1539) portrays the author engaged in a powerful defense of the female intellect with her fictional, misogynist husband, while her best-selling novel, Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours (The Torments of Love, 1538), tells the story of a woman trapped in a disastrous marriage.
During the chaos and violence of the civil wars of religion in France (1562—1563; 1579-1584), Madeleine and Catherine des Roches established and sustained a salon that became the center of literary activity in Poitiers. The three volumes the Des Roches wrote and published together during these years—Les CEuvres de Mes-dames des Roches de Poictiers, Mere et Fille (The Works of the Dames des Roches, Mother and Daughter, 1579), Les Secondes xuvres. . . (1583), and Les Missives de Mes-dames des Roches de Poictiers, Mere et Fille (The Letters. . ., 1586)—address such issues as education for women, the problem of marriage for women, violence against women, the status of women intellectuals, and female friendship and its connection to female learning.
In 1641, Marie le Jars de Gournay, the prolific polemicist whom Michel de Montaigne would name his “fille d’alliance” (chosen daughter) published the last revisions of her two most influential feminist treatises, Le Grief des dames (Women’s Grievance) and L’Egalite des hommes et des femmes (The Equality of Men and Women, first published in 1622). Like her Italian contemporary, Arcangela Tarabotti, Gournay saw the abuses of patriarchal authority and power in the family and the state as analogues for one another and as mutually reinforcing. Gournay’s autobiography, Apology for the Woman Writing (revised 1641), exemplifies the trend among early modern women writers of fashioning a print portrait of themselves for public consumption.
Feminism in England
In sixteenth-century England, defenses of women were primarily the preserve of male writers. Among the most influential of these early defenses were SirThomas Elyot’s Defence of
Good Women (1540) and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (1529; translated from the Latin into English by David Clapam, 1542). Both Elyot and Agrippa opposed Juan Luis Vives’ misogynistic On the Education of the Christian Woman (1523; translated fTom the Latin by Richard Hyrde, 1540), which proposed a separate educational program for women suited to their purported inferiority and their one goal in life—chastity (Beauchamp 2002, xlix). Rejecting Vives’s and Aristotle’s opinions on women, Elyot defended women as men’s physical and intellectual equals. Citing Christine de Pizan’s Zenobia of Palmyra as his exemplar of the ideal female ruler, Elyot supported a wife’s right to disobey her husband to pursue a higher imperative, that of morality (Jordan 1990,121).
One of the most radical defenses published in the sixteenth century, Agrippa’s Declamation argued that women and men differed only in “the location of the parts of the body for which procreation required diversity” (Rabil 1996, 43).The Declamation espoused complete economic and political freedom for women and characterized both marriage and the convent as forms of state-sanctioned internment, for “when [a woman] has reached the age of puberty, she is delivered over to the jealous power of a husband, or she is enclosed forever in a workhouse for religious” (Rabil 1996, 95; Jordan 1990, 122-125).
The most famous of all English arguments in favor of women’s capacity to rule, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen (1590), was also a defense of Queen Elizabeth’s monarchy (reigned 1558-1608). While clearly indebted to Lodo-vico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516-1532) and Ariosto’s portrayal of his heroine Bradamante, Spenser’s Faerie Queen departs from its Italian model in ways resonant of the English approach to the querelle. As Pamela Benson notes, the essential premise of Ariosto’s epic poem is the physical, moral, and intellectual equality of women and men. Spenser’s queen, however, is distinguished by her chastity, her femininity, and her difference from males (Benson 1992, 148-149).
Writers connecting the discourse on women’s rights to economic issues enter the debate for the first time in force in the seventeenth century. Ester Sowernam’s pamphlet, Ester Hath Hang’d Haman; or An answer to a lewd pamphlet entituled The Arraignment of Women (1617), blames men and the patriarchal system for keeping their wives honorable but poor while paying their prostitutes generously yet depriving them of status (Jordan 1990, 300301). Rachel Speght’s Mousel for Melastomus (1617) portrays marriage as slavery (Jordan 1990, 298), while Constantia Munda’s Worming of a Mad Dogge (1617) links the increase in men’s abuse of women to the number of misog-ynistic treatises produced by the presses. An earlier defense of women, Her Protection for Women (1589), published under the byline Jane Anger, is an advice manual for women in their relationships with men, not a work of protest on behalf of women as a class. The authorship of all four works has been contested, with some scholars attributing them to male writers (Wynne-Davies 1999, 360; Benson 1992, 223-224; Woodbridge 1984, 63-66).
Beyond the defenses of women, a palpably new female consciousness and a novel crafting of the feminine self emerge in seventeenth-century England and can be seen even at the close of the prior century. Modern scholars have credited a number of writings women published (or circulated in manuscript) between the time of Elizabeth I’s regency and that of Charles II with having “inverted gender identities and expectations to produce a radically new female-centered commentary [on] . . . love in the early modern period” (Wynne-Davies 1999, 363). Exemplary of such new writings are, among other titles, Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay (1573), Aemila Lanyer’s feminist poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), Mary Wroth’s prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), and sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Am-philanthus (ca. 1620), and Katherine Philips’s erotically charged poems to “Rosania” and “Lucasia” (ca. 1650—1660).
Diana Robin
See also Education, Humanism, and Women; entries for the women writers mentioned; Querelles des Femmes.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. Translated and edited by Albert Rabil, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1996.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Famous Women. Edited and translated by Virginia Brown. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Cereta, Laura. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Edited and translated by Diana Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Des Roches, Madeleine and Catherine. From Mother and Daughter. Edited by Anne R.
Larsen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Fedele, Cassandra. Letters and Orations. Edited and translated by Diana Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo). The Worth of Women. Wherein Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Superiority to Men. Edited and translated byVirginia Cox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Gournay, Marie Le Jars de’. In Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works. Edited by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Marinella, Lucrezia. The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men. Edited and translated by Anne Dunhill, with an introduction by Letizia Panizza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Nogarola, Isotta. Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations. Edited and translated by Margaret L. King and Diana Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Tarabotti, Arcangela. Paternal Tyranny. Edited and translated by Letizia Panizza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Vives, Juan Luis. The Instruction of a Christen Woman. Edited byVirginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Mar-
Garet Mikesell. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Secondary Works
Benson, Pamela Joseph. The Invention of Renaissance Woman:The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.
Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Rabil, Albert.“Feminism.” In Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. Edited by Paul F. Grendler, 336-338. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999.
Robin, Diana. “Humanism.” In The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature. Edited by Rinaldina Russell, 153-157.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance. Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Wynne-Davies, Marion, ed. Women Poets of the Renaissance. NewYork: Routledge, 1999.
World History
