Women's Writing in Italy, 1400–1650

Chapter Two. Translation: (1490‒1550)

chapter two     TRANSLATION (1490‒1550)  As chapter 1 documents, the fifteenth century was crucial for the emergence of the figure of the secular female intellectual in Italy: barely visible at the beginning of the century, by its end she was an established, if still exotic, cultural type. The diffusion of exemplary discourses on “famous women” in Latin and the vernacular had familiarized at least the literate elites of Italy with the notion that women were capable of “virile” achievement and literature had proved one of the fields in which female attainment most easily translated from classical anecdote into modern reality. Despite this, however, while Latin remained the dominant literary language of Italy, the presence of women on the literary scene was necessarily limited. Although, by the end of the fifteenth century, humanistic education was no longer restricted solely to the upper aristocracy, female erudite from outside those social strata, such as Cassandra Fedele and Laura Cereta, still remained extremely rare. It was only with the rise of vernacular literature in the late fifteenth century, and especially with the assertion of the volgare as the dominant literary language in Italy in the early sixteenth, that the necessary conditions existed for women to become a more substantial presence on the Italian literary scene. Besides the rise of the vernacular, another, associated circumstantial factor facilitating the diffusion of the practice of women’s writing in this period is the ever-increasing impact of the new technology of printing on Italian literary culture. This was a development apparent especially after 1500, even though printing had been introduced into Italy more than three decades earlier. A consequence of the expansion of the printing industry 37 with very significant implications for women was the increasing availability of books and the progressive lowering of their cost. Although these developments were important in expanding literacy as a whole, they may be assumed to have had a particular effect on literacy in women, since women were so much more dependent than men in their acquisition of literacy skills on the availability of books within the home. For women to attend school in this period was still uncommon, although some received an elementary education in convents; where they were educated at all, this tended to occur within the domestic setting, either at the hands of a tutor, in the grander of households, or under the tutorship of parents or other relatives.1 The likelihood of women acquiring literacy skills thus depended quite crucially on the presence of books within the household. Even without considering the further, more concerted ways in which print culture contributed to the diffusion of women’s writing—most apparent around the middle of the century, when publishers avidly reached out for and encouraged this commercially attractive novelty—this alone would be sufficient to lend an epochal significance within the history of women’s writing to the transition from manuscript to print.2 That said, however, it must be noted that it is only from around the 1540s that the effects of typographical culture begin to be seen in their full force within the history of women’s writing. The transition from manuscript to print, in Italy as in Europe in general, was gradual and cumulative rather than sudden and dramatic, and the first decades of the new century cannot be seen as radically novel in this regard. The first slice of time under investigation in this chapter—around 1490–1510—may be seen as still part of this transitional period. It is largely, thus, linguistic and literary rather than technological change that will initially be the focus of analysis here. 1. Women, the Courts, and the Vernacular in the Early Sixteenth Century The reemergence of the vernacular as a force seriously to be reckoned with in Italian literary culture is conventionally dated to the 1470s in Florence , where we see the young Lorenzo de’ Medici presiding over a remarkable flourishing of vernacular poetic production in his dual guise as poet and patron. This is not to say that experimentation with the vernacular was entirely absent during the period of Latin humanistic dominance. Where prose writing is concerned, we find a series of important works being produced by Florentine humanists in the 1430s (Alberti’s Della famiglia, Matteo Palmieri’s Della vita civile, Leonardo Bruni’s lives of Dante and Petrarch ), while in poetry we might cite a work like Giusto de’ Conti’s Pe38 Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 [18.218...