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 In February 1752, the governor of Milan and captain general of Lombardy, Count Gianluca Pallavicini, was invited to attend a soirée at the Palazzo Agnesi . The governor, a convinced supporter of Maria Theresa’s administrative reform, was “very attached” to the Agnesi, and on confidential terms with Pietro. That night Pallavicini enjoyed the usual blending of Gaetana’s conversation and Teresa’s cantatas. The following morning, Pietro, as was customary, went to the Palazzo Regio-Ducale to thank the governor for his attendance. To his surprise, he found Pallavicini less than enthusiastic about the way in which the Agnesi conversazione was being run. The governor told him that unpleasant rumors had been circulating in the city recently , accusing Pietro of neglecting his daughters’ collocamento—literally, their position in society—for the sake of his own social standing. In other words, he was being held responsible for preventing the two women from either getting married or entering the cloister and thus acquiring a decorous social status. Such an opinion could only have been strengthened by Pietro’s recent rejection of a marriage proposal for Teresa. The suitor, one Pietro Antonio Pinottini, was apparently an “excellent” young man but had been “provided with a mediocre fortune.” That the governor should pay attention to these criticisms offended Pietro deeply, and he responded using “words that, with hindsight, were less than respectful for the dignity of the great minister.” The discussion degenerated rapidly into a “clamorous quarrel,” and Pietro abruptly left the palace, greatly altered. In the following days, according to the physicians, the confusion in his mind made “his physical constitution change as well.” He suffered “a violent chest pain” and, within two weeks, on 19 March 1752, he died.1 Negative judgments about the way in which Pietro managed his household must have been shared by a significant portion of the Milanese elites 124 chapter seven A New Female Mind if the governor himself felt obliged to remind him of his paternal duties. The main criticism raised against Pietro was that he kept his daughters in a peculiar social limbo, in which Teresa could be a full-time composer and Gaetana a legitimate philosopher and mathematician. There is no evidence that similar concerns had ever been raised in previous years. Instead, there are plenty of indications that, in the mid-eighteenth century, a significant shift in beliefs about women’s social status and intellectual abilities was taking place within Italian culture. The unusually active role of women in early eighteenth-century Milanese society had been noted—and often lamented—by contemporaries. Thus, in his discourse on the conditions of the Milanese state in the 1720s, Giuseppe Bini complained about the despotic power (imperio) of aristocratic women, which he believed was having dire consequences on the social and moral order . There is no country, he concluded, “where men, and particularly husbands and ministers, are more dominated by women than this one.” Similar opinions were gathered in a report written at the time of the French occupation of the city (1736), entitled Mémoires sur le milanois. The anonymous author voiced current concerns about “the great credit enjoyed by the [female] sex,” and the fact that women’s “bizarre will” was more respected in this city than the “lumières de la Raison.”2 The twin motifs of women’s excessive power and moral degeneration enjoyed enormous popularity in eighteenth-century Italy, as illustrated by the vast amount of misogynist literature.3 Devout Catholic authors found their main sources in works such as those by the Jesuit Paolo Segneri, who focused on the spiritual and social danger of women and said that a strict regime of segregation was the only way to neutralize them.4 In this literature , the celebration of ritiratezza (or fuga mundi, flight from the world) and chastity as supreme feminine virtues was normally associated with moralistic criticism of phenomena such as the conversazioni and the cicisbeismo. The term cicisbeo, or cavalier servente, refers to a man who keeps company with a married woman and whose presence is benevolently tolerated by her husband. Critics portrayed this custom as yet another manifestation of women’s excessive power, and one particularly apt to increase the grave moral decadence of the Italian aristocracy. Interestingly, cicisbeismo was strictly connected by its critics to the world of the conversazione, and indeed was often referred to as conversazione moderna—that is, the modern way of conversing.5 The aberrant nature of cicisbeismo sprang...

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