Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought

Afterword

187 Afterword As we have seen, Lorenzino’s assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici in 1537 was not an isolated episode of political violence; rather, it fit into a series or a humanistic tradition of tyrannicides that extended from the first tyrant-slayers, Harmodius and Aristogiton, to republican thinkers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and beyond. This series or tradition was and is still characterized by a rhetoric of comparison and repetition. How does Lorenzino compare to Brutus? How does Alessandro compare to Phalaris or Holofernes? Is there a violated , Lucretia-like noblewoman on the scene? The tyrant-slayers and their supporters have always been particularly eager to justify these episodes of political violence by reproducing the narratives of learned men who enacted their ideals of liberty on the stage of politics. To study and collect knowledge about this tradition without questioning its social formation , then, is to reproduce and acquiesce to the conditions, categories, terms, and paradigms of its existence, as if this tradition of understanding violence and learning deserved some special honor because of its continued reproduction. My challenge in this book has therefore been to organize research about Lorenzino and republican politics in such a way as to question the social formation of this tradition. I have endeavored to honor this tradition and, at the same time, to trouble its conditions, categories , terms, and paradigms. My project has been one of reorganizing knowledge about the republican tradition to acknowledge the conditions in which we live today as feminist scholars. 188 | Afterword I have been inspired in this overarching argument of reorganizing knowledge and in the experimental organization of this book by the work of Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920), an important feminist critic of the Italian national project, who saw how terms, theories, traditions , concepts, institutions, and ideologies all formed part of a taxonomic code that, in her view, discouraged the troubling of its categories of knowledge. This code, which wrote women primarily in terms of introspection and psychology, would need to be completely destroyed and rewritten if women (and other untolerated groups) were to take their place as social subjects in a real democracy. In the course of her critiques of the family, taxonomies, intolerance, nationalism, colonialism, and prejudicial laws, Mozzoni, as we saw in Section Two, was especially critical of the obsequiousness toward tradition that she found in intellectuals, scholars, and lawmakers. Especially intellectuals (and in this case, she refers specifically to male intellectuals ) tune out the present by immersing themselves in literary and historical examples. The repetition of examples from the past, Mozzoni suggested, was the cause of continued intolerance in the present; over time, past examples of slavery and feudalism have gathered force as a stone gathers moss, until the force of example has acquired the force of law. For this reason, Mozzoni claimed, the citation of examples from the past, contrary to every truism about history we have been taught, has never served any purpose at all. To think that the example of history could be useful, she wrote, was “to pretend that a people could free itself from foreign domination by dint of legal demonstrations” (“sarebbe come pretendere che un populo si sbarazzi da uno straniero dominio a furia di legali dimostrazioni”).1 With this comparison between the rhetoric of historical examples, a rhetoric so central to Italy’s ideology of civic humanism, and the political inefficacy of “legal demonstrations,” Mozzoni hints at an important critique of our work as literary scholars of the past and our relation to current injustices. She is more explicit in her exhortation to develop new categories and new institutions that will reflect the conditions of emancipated women (“Il secolo che aspira al conquisto d’ogni ragionevole libertà non troverà esorbitante che la donna cerchi e studii il modo per dove iniziare la propria”).2 She writes of a different kind of intellectual organization generated from the ability to begin with immediate conditions before moving to more abstract speculation (“[Le donne] passerebbero senza fatica ‘dal noto all’ignoto, dal concreto all’astratto”).3 She asks us to see every aspect of social organization in Afterword | 189 relation to household economies of power and gender constructions. As Carlo Cattaneo observed, she was one of those women who took the risk of expressing new insights derived from her contact with the “dust of the laws” (“polvere dei codici”).4 One of those insights was that...