CODA
CODA Z In their very di√erent ways, Lucrezia Marinella’s La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne and Chiara Matraini’s Dialoghi spirituali, published within two years of each other in Venice, represent something of a high point within the history of Italian women’s experimentation with authoritative voices and roles. Both Matraini and Marinella represent themselves as women deserving of an audience, and one extending beyond women to men. Neither feels the least need to apologize, as so many early female writers had, for her feebleness of intellect as a woman or her audacity in speaking in public. Neither shows herself in the least apologetic for the sex she was born into. ‘‘I have never desired to be a man,’’ Marinella states in her initial note to the reader, ‘‘do not now, and never shall, even if I outlive Nestor.’’∞ This assertiveness of tone was something of a trend in the period, apparent even in the work of a nun like Diodata Malvasia, who requests in the preface to her 1617 history of the Marian icon of the Bolognese Monte della Guardia that ‘‘if some imperfection is found in this work, let femininity be blamed only in my individual instance, for the female sex as a whole is possessed of the capacity for heroic greatness and may perhaps even be said to manifest the virtues required for that status in a greater degree than do men.’’≤ With the hindsight of history, we can find something poignant in reading confident rhetoric of this kind from intellectual women in the early Seicento, at the beginning of a century that would prove as unpropitious for them as the previous century had been kind. Marinella herself, toward the end of her long life, would disavow the feminist arguments of La nobiltà et l’eccellenza quite explicitly, arguing in her Essortationi alle donne et a gli altri se saranno loro a grado, of 1645, that women would be happier if they renounced any ambition to intellectual recognition and remained within their ‘‘proper’’ domestic Coda 251 sphere.≥ Marinella’s late-life miserabilism was prophetic. In the forty years following her death in 1653 only two works by secular female authors were published in Italy, while most of the handful of works published by cloistered female authors appeared only after their death.∂ It was only in the last decade of the Seicento, with the rise of the classicizing Arcadia movement, that the figure of the female author once again came to hold a respected place within Italian literary culture and the rich legacy of the earlier tradition of women’s writing in Italy began to be eagerly recouped.∑ In view of the twentieth-century literary-historiographical tendency to limit women’s writing in Italy to a few decades in the mid-sixteenth century, it is worth underlining that this Arcadian recuperation made no distinction between the early and mid-sixteenth-century female poets we now think of as canonical and the later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century female writers discussed in this book, who appear to us now as recent critical discoveries. The important series of re-editions of female-authored texts published by Antonio Bulifon in Naples beginning in the 1690s included Marinella ’s Rime sacre, Andreini’s Rime, and Sarrocchi’s Scanderbeide, as well as collections of verse by Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Tullia d’Aragona, and Laura Battiferra. Similarly, Luisa Bergalli’s important 1726 anthology of female-authored poetry, Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, gives as substantial a place to late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury female poets as to their mid-sixteenth-century predecessors, with Andreini, Marinella, Lucia Colao, Lucchesia Sbarra, and Maddalena Salvetti ranking alongside Colonna, Gambara, d’Aragona, Battiferra, Gaspara Stampa, and Olimpia Malipiero (fl. 1559–68) as the best-represented poets in the collection .∏ The project of a monograph on Counter-Reformation Italian women ’s writing, which would have seemed outlandish in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would have seemed far less so in the formative era of Italian literary historiography in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the ideological structures that would later make the notion of ‘‘Counter-Reformation women’s writing’’ seem a virtual oxymoron were not yet in place. Another lesson we can learn from late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury ways of doing literary history is the desirability of considering secular and religious literary production in conjunction. Here again, Bergalli can serve as a model: her anthology freely mixes...
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