Stephen Kolsky's latest book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the debates constituting the 'querelle des femmes' in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, by examining the responses of eight authors, over the period 1480 to 1530, to the legacy of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris. Although they do not form a homogenous group, despite their chronological proximity, all the texts included in Kolsky's study share a desire to engage with and in various ways move beyond and away from Boccaccio's work, classified as a 'phantasm', at once subversive and conservative, that cannot be easily exorcised by subsequent writers. Through illuminating close readings of key texts of the genre, this book offers for the first time to students and scholars alike direct access to primary sources, a number of them unavailable in modern editions.
The Libro delle lodi delle donne (c. 1480-86) by the Florentine Vespasiano da Bisticci, explored in Chapter 1, functions as a point of reference for later writings on famous women, representing as it does a highly conservative and restrictive vision of the moral worth of women as saintly exemplars and the need for societal restraint of potentially subversive female behaviour. Best known as the biographer of notable males, in his Vite degli uomini illustri, Bisticci seems to have composed his work on women as a necessary and complimentary exercise, aimed at delineating the two carefully defined spheres in which the sexes could comfortably exist and relate and thus at reinforcing the republican, conservative social order in Florence that was threatened in the 1480s by Medicean political influence. Moving away from Boccaccio's example, Bisticci elects to draw on Christian didactic and hagiographic writings for his models of female saintliness, with at their summit the most perfect model of the Virgin Mary. The text displays a fixation with sexual purity (echoed in the Vite degli uomini illustri) and an admiration for women predicated on piety alone, in an essentially passive and private mode.
Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti composed the Gynevera de le clare donne in around 1489-92, directing it to powerful women of the age including the work's dedicatee, Ginevra Sforza, as well as Eleonora d'Aragona and her daughter Isabella d'Este. In Chapter 2, Kolsky examines the ambiguities inherent in Arienti's text, which on the one hand fails to stray far from the traditional theoretical positions on female inferiority and on the other recognises and promotes notable examples of female agency, including women as actors on the political stage. Like Bisticci, Arienti has a political axe to grind, concerned with the stabilisation of a peaceful city state at a local level, one that can be achieved through the promotion into the public sphere of 'feminine' skills and qualities exemplified by the political and public conduct of certain elite women. While his revised conception of the role of women in public life did not progress far beyond such local, political concerns, nevertheless Arienti's model for a new kind of elite female agency was liberating and disturbing, helping to ignite the debates of the 'querelle des femmes' that spread across Europe in the next quarter century.
Chapter Three looks at Ferrara and Mantua, and the influence of these northern courts on the work of Jacopo Foresti (De plurimis claris selectisque mulieribus, 1497 and 1521), Mario Equicola (De mulieribus, c.1501), and Agostino Strozzi (Defensio mulierum, c.1501). Although small, both courts were highly influential as political and cultural centres in northern Italy and, crucially, in both cases powerful aristocratic women held positions of considerable authority and prestige (Eleonora D'Aragona at Ferrara, Isabella d'Este at Mantua). The writers who sought associations with these courts display a fascination with considerations of the scope of female power, producing texts that actively compete for intellectual space and authority at court. Foresti's work is a Latin compilation of one hundred and eighty six female biographies, encyclopaedic in scope encompassing Boccaccian, saintly and contemporary exempla, yet despite its size and range firmly restricting the potential for any kind of female agency. Equicola's far shorter discourse aims at personal advancement as well as advancing the cause of local elite women by rethinking the theoretical assumptions underpinning traditional misogyny in some radical ways. Strozzi's text also formulates new theoretical positions that allow for increasingly active participation by women in public and intellectual life, but retains an element of ambiguity imposed by the particular constraints of place and patronage, and fails to substantiate its pro- female arguments with convincing examples. The variances between these three works, born out of such similar geographical and cultural contexts, are particularly significant, demonstrating progress and innovation on the one hand and the continued evolution of conservative attitudes on the other, changing shape as they sought to keep abreast with and ultimately arrest the advance of innovations.
The final chapter examines a group of texts that argue for the superiority of women over men. This kind of argument has traditionally posed problems for the modern reader, uncertain as to how far to trust the seemingly slippery logic of the discourse. As Kolksy effectively demonstrates, however, the very act of challenging the 'ordained' order of things by implying the possibility of another kind of order was itself polemical and controversial, succeeding despite any inherent contradictions in opening up new vistas and playing on the rhetorical unease thereby provoked. The three texts analysed in this chapter (Bartolomeo Goggio's De laudibus mulierum [c. 1487], Galeazzo Flavio Capra's Della eccellenza e dignita delle donne [1525, 1525, 1533], and Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's De nobilitate et praecellentia foemini sexus [pub. 1529]) examine the notion of female superiority in strikingly diverse ways, underscoring the complexities inherent in sustaining such an argument in a committed and persuasive manner. Goggio's text, belonging chronologically with the group of works examined in Chapter Three, is despite its internal inconsistencies a productive challenge to the limitations traditionally placed on female agency, unusually composed in the vernacular and directed once again to Eleonora d'Aragona at Ferrara. Capra's work, arising out of the context of the Milanese court under the Sforza, argues from a broader European perspective, in a text marked by contradictory logic that allows an argument for superiority to effectively place women in a subordinate position to men by focusing on those virtues long characterised as 'feminine'. Finally, the German Agrippa dedicates his work to Margaret of Austria but engages closely with the models developed in the Italian courts, particularly Equicola, in order to argue for the equality of men and women before God and the consequent deviation from the divine plan that is the social subjugation of women on earth. All three works, more or less successfully, make a concerted attempt to renew debate on the role of women in society and constitute thought- provoking additions to that debate.
This is an important book in directing sustained and sensitive attention for the first time to a number of texts produced during the period when the 'querelle des femmes' debates began to extend beyond the northern Italian courts to a wider European readership, and in asking key questions concerning the sources and critical foundations of those texts. As Boccaccio is a starting point for Kolsky's examination, so Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano (1528) forms the clear endpoint, Castiglione's dialogue form allowing a consideration of both the pro- and anti-feminist arguments as they are played out in the preceding works. The donna di palazzo who engages in civil conversation with her fellow courtiers has escaped the limitations of the domestic sphere altogether, although she continues to be subject to the expectations of chastity and decorum governing gender relations in wider society. Castiglione's bold rethinking of the confines of marriage within this courtly context has come about via his engagement with the rich tradition of texts in the 'querelle' genre that are illuminated in this well conceived and instructive volume.