Humanist scholar and writer Costanza Varano was an active participant in the fifteenth-century revivification of Classical Latin as an intellectual medium. Her corpus of Latin writings, while somewhat modest in comparison to other humanists, nonetheless attests her mastery of the epistolary, oratorical, and poetic genres. A member of the hereditary nobility, Varano corresponded with some of the most important political figures of the day—many of whom were her relatives either by birth or by marriage. She married Alessandro Sforza (brother of Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan) on 8 December 1444 and had a daughter, Battista (b. 1446); she died giving birth to another child the following year.
The violent power struggles in Varano’s birth town of Camerino resulted in the execution of her father (Pier Gentile da Varano) in 1433.Varano’s mother, Elisabetta, immediately fled with her daughter Costanza and son Rodolfo, as well as two other children, and sought refuge in Pesaro, where she was born and where her mother, Battista da Montefeltro Malatesta, resided. Good fortune followed tragedy: Malatesta was a brilliant scholar in her own right, and she gave her granddaughter a thorough education in the humanities.
References in Varano’s writings display her familiarity with many of the Classical and patristic authors that boys read, especially Aristotle (in Latin translation), Cicero, Virgil, Quintillian, and Lactantius. More than a passive reader of Latin, however, her compositional skills compare favorably with those of her male contemporaries (Parker 2002, 31). Among Varano’s admirers was Guarino Guarini, a famous humanist pedagogue, who sent her a lengthy letter of praise in 1444. Guarino considered Varano’s erudition to be proof that the eloquence attributed to the learned women of antiquity had returned, and he exhorted her to continue her studies. He also addressed her as a colleague. It was natural, he reasoned, that fellow intellectuals should write to each other, “since ‘equals mix freely with equals,’ as the old proverb goes and as Cicero says” (Pares enim cum paribus veteri proverbio, ut est apud Ciceronem, facillime congregan-tur; Feliciangeli 1894, 58).
Varano most often used her learning to serve the interests of her family. Among her best-known works is a 1442 oration to Bianca Maria Visconti, wife of Francesco Sforza and duchess of Milan, in which she requested that Visconti intercede with her husband to return Camerino to the Varano family. She wrote an eloquent epistle to King Alfonso of Aragon with this same end in view. Varano’s oration and letter obtained the desired result. She delivered a celebratory oration (1443) to the people of Camerino, which inaugurated her family’s return to sovereignty, but also flattered her auditors and assured them that the Varano family would rule with justice and equanimity. Her marriage the following year to Francesco Sforza’s brother solidified the peaceful conclusion to these long-standing and bloody con-flicts. Varano demonstrated her continued dedication to family interests in 1447/1448, when she wrote to Pope Eugenius IV, begging him to revoke the excommunication placed on her grandfather, Galeazzo.
Varano’s letters and poems to her fellow women humanists show an altogether different rhetorical program. Her encomia of Cecilia Gonzaga (ca. 1443) and Isotta Nogarola (ca. 1443/1444) celebrate the presence of learned women in her own day, in conjunction with their ancient Roman foremothers. In eulogizing women intellectuals, she put her Latin in the service of protofeminism. The importance of erudite women like Costanza Varano, however, does not rest on her literary legacy alone. Varano was a widely admired intellectual, who provoked contemporaries and later observers to think in new ways about female capability. The catalogues of famous women popular in Italy from the fifteenth century onward continually recalled her life and achievements, and she often served as a point of reference in the related genre of “defenses of women.” One such text laudedVarano, her grandmother, Battista Malatesta, and the learnedVeronese sisters, Isotta and Ginevra Nogarola, as important members of a new community of knowledge: “scholarly women, embellished with most beautiful letters” (donne studiose, e di bellissime lettere adornate; Garzoni 1586, 171—172).
Sarah Gwyneth Ross
See also Cereta, Laura; Education, Humanism, and Women; Fedele, Cassandra; Literary Culture and Women; Nogarola, Isotta.
Bibliography
Feliciangeli, B.“Notizie sulla vita e sugli scritti di Costanza Varano-Sforza.” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 23 (1894): 1—75.
Garzoni, Tommaso.“Discorso. . . sopra la nobilta delle donne.” In Le Vite delle Donne Illustri della Scrittura Sacra. Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1586.
Jardine, Lisa.“ ‘O Decus Italiae Virgo’:The Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance.” The Historical Journal 28, no. 4 (December 1985): 799-819.
King, Margaret, and Albert Rabil, eds. “Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance.” In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Edited by Patricia Labalme, 91-116. New York: New York University Press, 1984.
King, Margaret, and Albert Rabil, eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works By and About the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1983.
Parker, Holt N.“Costanza Varano (1426-1447): Latin as an Instrument of State.” In Women
Writing Latin from Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe. 3 vols. Vol. 3. Edited by Laurie Churchill et al., 31-54. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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