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

Section Two: Wings for My Courage

84 section two Wings for My Courage Accept my best wishes . . . and overlooking my boldness, place the blame on Mr. Naudé, who, having fashioned wings for my courage when he requested my works for admission into your most splendid Library, will now have to intercede for my pardon. [emphasis mine] [Riceva questi augurij . . . e condonando a tanto ardire v’attribuisca la colpa al Sign. Naudeo, il qual’ havendo fabricato l’ali all’ardimento mio all’hora, che fu a richiedermi l’opere mie per ricovrarle nella fioritissima Bibliotheca di Vostra Eminenza, dovrà al presente intercedermene il perdono.] —Arcangela Tarabotti to Cardinal Giulio Mazarin, Lettere familiari e di complimento (1650) The weaknesses of my scanty intellect . . . dare to insert themselves between [frapporsi] the most famous writers, in order to enter the most flourishing Library of such a virtuous Prince. [My works] even hope that his [Mazarin’s] incorrigible sense of justice will not let anyone commit outrage to the naive offspring of a holy virgin. [Le debolezze del mio povero ingegno . . . ardiscono di frapporsi trà i più celebri Scrittori, per entrar nella fioritissima Bibliotheca di cosi virtuoso Prencipe, sperando pure, che la di lui inemendabile Giustitia non lascierà far oltraggio a i semplici parti d’una Vergine Sacra.] —Arcangela Tarabotti to Madame Anne de Gremonville, French ambassadress in Venice, Lettere familiari e di complimento (1650). Wings for My Courage | 85 Historians have traditionally told a story of republican thought that, requiring the rape of a noblewoman as a precondition of republican freedom, culminated in the French Revolution and the consolidation of republicanism as a conversation among brothers.1 In the course of my research on Lorenzino, I have looked for a way out of this apparent historical destiny, seemingly etched in concrete in our political imaginations , imagining the possibility of an earlier moment on the road to the French Revolution, a historical perspective that included in the meaning of republicanism the voices of women—not as violated ciphers but as political writers and intellectuals of influence. In Section One I told the story of those who constructed and conserved knowledge of Lorenzino in historiography and in state archives, making visible the relationship between knowledge of tyrannicide and the political contexts in which such knowledge was conserved. Now, in this section, I intervene in the tradition of republican thought with my studies of a particular relation of knowledge and research between Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–52), a Venetian political theorist and nun who made gender central to her political reflections, and Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653), the “father” of library science and librarian of the Mazarine, one of the first modern libraries of state in Europe. A vast physical and existential distance separated Tarabotti’s convent of Sant’Anna del Castello from Naudé’s Parisian library, which opened to the public in 1643. But Tarabotti’s and Naudé’s thinking converged in the attention they paid to the centrality of the daughter in political knowledge. Tarabotti saw the daughter as pivotal to men’s construction of the ragion di stato, while Naudé represented the library of state, so central to negotiations of political power, as “daughter” to the librarian. Naudé, perhaps vaguely intuiting the importance of Tarabotti’s perspectives to political theory, requested her works for inclusion in the Mazarine, thereby producing both “wings for her courage ” and an image of her writings “taking up shelf space”—or inserting themselves (“frapporsi”)—among the most famous writers of this celebrated library. I take the image of this connection between Naudé and Tarabotti to create a series of imaginary shelf lists that would document the (hypothetical) space taken up by Tarabotti’s works among the writers of the Mazarine. Two areas of research and theory, in particular , guide me in this scholarly enterprise: on the one hand, the history of books and libraries, and on the other, feminist approaches to issues of historicity. In the first area of research, Roger Chartier and other historians of 86 | Section Two writing and the book remind us: “There is no text apart from the physical support that offers it for reading, hence there is no comprehension of any written piece that does not at least in part depend upon the forms in which it reaches its readers.”2 Chartier extends this principle in two directions to suggest that (1) there is no comprehension of any text that does not at least in part depend on the physical...