In Renaissance Europe, rhetoric—the art of persuasion—was the foundation of humanist education. Early modern women were generally excluded fTom training in classical rhetoric, oratory, and the art of public speaking. They had no need of such knowledge, it was argued, since they were forbidden to stand for public office; they could not hold appointments as professors or lecturers at universities; and they were not permitted to preach in the churches. If women were given a humanist education, they were trained in reading, writing, and ancient and modern languages; they were not expected to perform as orators.
Despite cultural prohibitions, some women did study rhetoric and the principles of oratory. Women destined to be rulers (such as Queen Elizabeth I of England) or brides of rulers (such as Mary Stuart, who married the French Dauphin) were schooled in rhetoric; their social roles as public figures outweighed the restrictions of gender. As a young girl at the French court, Mary Stuart (who became Mary, Queen of Scots) even gave a public oration defending rhetorical education for women.
Other women of the merchant and professional classes acquired some knowledge of rhetoric because their class status provided them leisure for study, because they worked with their brothers’ tutors, and because their parents valued humanist education for women as well as men. The female professor of rhetoric, Beatriz Galindo of Salamanca, taught Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess who became the wife of HenryVIII of England. The Italian Laura Cereta learned Latin at a convent, participated in humanist debates in Brescia, and perhaps lectured at literary salons. In England, Sir Thomas More’s daughters, the Cooke sisters (Anna and Elizabeth), and the women of the Sidney family (Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth) received training in classical rhetoric.
In addition, many women writers used their training in rhetoric to defend women in pamphlet debates or to argue for the extension of humanist rhetorical education to women. Catherine des Roches wrote a defense of women’s education, Dialogues de placide et severe (1583), which nonetheless circumscribed women’s learning within the bounds of feminine modesty. In The Nobility and Excellence of Women (1601), Lucrezia Marinella defended women in the Italian debate about women, basing her argument on rhetorical commonplaces, arguing for women’s worth through the etymology of woman, woman’s nature and essence, the causes of women’s worth, women’s actions and virtues, and the refutation of men who cast blame on women. Following the example of the renowned Dutch polymath Anna Maria van Schurmann, who wrote a defense of women’s education in Latin, Bathsua Makin publicized the lives of ancient female orators, praising them as models for contemporary women in her Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673).
Certainly many early modern women demonstrate the influence of classical rhetoric. The Venetian scholar Cassandra Fedele, who was taught Latin and Greek by the Servite friar Gasparino Borro, circulated her humanist letter book in manuscript, published an oration, and even delivered public Latin orations, one of them at the University of Padua. In Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women (1589), Anger employs an erudite rhetoric, elaborating her argument through copious amplification as recommended by Erasmus, using examples (Hiliogabalus, Chilperic, and Xerxes for unrestrained lust in men), comparisons (God made men out of “filthy clay” but women out of “man’s flesh”), opposites (“Our good toward them is the destruction of ourselves”), and metaphor (“our body is a footstool to their vile lusts”). In Les Femmes illustres (1642) and in four volumes of Conversations (in the 1680s), Madeleine de Scudery offered model speeches and conversations featuring women speakers, adapting concepts of classical rhetoric to salon conversation and letter writing. In The Worlds Olio (1655), a collection of short essays, Margaret Cavendish discussed women’s and men’s speech, conversation, the physiology of speech, and eloquence. In her Orations (1662), Cavendish presented sample speeches by male speakers on public political topics and by women speakers on “The Woman Question” (also known as the Querelle des Femmes), a topos that had become ubiquitous in European letters by the middle of the sixteenth century.
Another source of rhetorical influence on women during the Reformation and CounterReformation was biblical and sermon rhetoric. Employing a biblical style and citations to Scripture as their main means of argument, several women defended women’s right to preach (at least in writing), thus entering religious debates: the German Argula von Grum-bach in her 1523 letter to the divines of the University of Ingolstadt, the French Marie Dentiere in her 1539 letter to Marguerite de Navarre, and the English Margaret Fell in her 1666 pamphlet defending women’s preaching, and in many other Quaker pamphlets. During these centuries there were also many women preachers in the Protestant sects.
Did the study of rhetoric lead women to claim their rights? There is no consensus on the influence of humanist rhetoric in European society. Some argue that early modern rhetoric, unlike that of ancient Greece and republican Rome, was adapted to the limitations of monarchy and the reinforcement of hierarchy. Others argue that the classical principles of republican rhetoric provided the Renaissance with models for participatory government and the tools to reform society. Women’s rhetoric ranged across these purposes, with some women taking more conservative and some more radical positions.
Jane Donawerth
See also Education, Humanism, and Women; entries for the women mentioned in this article; Literary Culture and Women.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Anna Maria van Schurman. Edited and translated by Joyce L. Irwin, 1998.
Cassandra Fedele. Edited and translated by Diana Robin, 2000.
Isotta Nogarola. Edited and translated by Margaret L. King and Diana Robin, 2004.
King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, eds. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See translations of works:
Laura Cereta. Edited and translated by Diana Robin, 1997.
Lucrezia Marinella. Edited and translated by Anne Dunhill, 1999.
Madeleine de Scudery. Edited and translated by Jane Donawerth and Julie Strongson, 2004.
Marie Le Jars de Gournay. Edited and translated by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel,
2002.
Tullia d’Aragona. Edited and translated by Rinal-dina Russell and Bruce Merry, 1997.
Secondary Works
Donawerth, Jane, ed. Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology. Lanham, MD: Row-man and Littlefield, 2002.
Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.
Levin, Carole, and Patricia A. Sullivan, eds. Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
World History
