Humanism in exile: Celio Secondo Curione's learned women friends and exempla for Elizabeth I

Humanism in exile: Celio Secondo Curione's learned women friends and exempla for Elizabeth I Quod Socrates dixit, foeminas si diligenter instituantur, non minus aptas ac dociles ad literas et artes liberates omnemque virtutem ... quam mares ... Possem ex omni aetatum memoria exempla proferre. 1 Thus wrote Celio Secondo Curione in 1556, introducing the small volume of Olympia Morata's Works which, six years later, he was to dedicate to Queen Elizabeth I. It is not always easy to chart the interaction of cultural and religious ideas across Europe in the sixteenth-century era of reform, although the multiplicity of these interactions and their importance for future developments are well known. Basel was a pivot in the meeting of Italian humanism with English intellectual and reforming zeal. Its university's Faculty of Arts, of which Celio Secondo Curione was three times dean, saw a second flowering of humanism in this period.2 Thirty-seven English scholars were registered between 1554 and 1559, and other exiles crowded its periphery or, if lucky, found employment in the printing houses. Lady Dorothy Stafford became a close friend, admirer and prot6g6e of Curione; her indebtedness to Curione and to his humanist interests, her admiration for the political and ecclesiastical regime under which she lived in Basel, and her sincere and optimistic hopes for the reformation of 'true' religion in the England of Elizabeth, were set out in a letter which she and her kinswoman, Elizabeth Sandys, sent to then Italian mentor in Basel on 30 April 1559, some two months after their return to England from voluntary exile. The 1 The Dedication of 1556 to Isabella Brisena/ Bresegna Manriqez, in Curione's edition, Olympia Morata, Opera, Basel, P. Perna, 1558, fol. a 2. Thetextcontinues: 'nisi de Claris mulieribus integra volumina extarent, et omnium iam manibus versarentur' (Plato, The Republic, V, The Laws, VII). 2 According to H. G. Wackernagel, Die Matrikel der Universitiit Basel, Basel, 1956, vol. 2,1532/33-1600/01, pp. 514-15, Curione was dean in 1552,1561 and 1568-69. The university, which reopened in 1532 after three years of only partial activity, attracted an enormous number of foreign visitors from 1550 to 1580, and has been described as 'an emporium of ideas' by H. G. Guggisberg, Basel in the Sixteenth Century, Missouri, 1982, chap. 3, 'Basilea reformats, the second flowering of humanism', p. 37. P A R E R G O N ns 14,1 (July 1996) 166 R. A. Chavasse unpublished letter is in the collection of Curione's letters in Basel University Library.3 Celio Curione was uncommonly interested in the Reformation in England, The association of the 1559 letter from London with the publication of Curione's observations on the English Reformation in the Supplement, which he added to his edition of Marcantonio Sabellico's world history in 1560, helps to explain his concern.4 His list of religious exiles during Mary's reign is headed by the Staffords and Elizabeth Sandys, rather than by the names of exiles better known to history such as Peter Carew, Richard Morison and John Ponet, former Bishop of Winchester.5 Curione's friendship with the English exiles, especially those from the upper echelons 3 University Library, Basel, MS G, III, 1, 6, Londini, pridie Calendas Maias, 155 Dorothea Stafforda et Elizabeta Sanda D. Celio Secundo Curioni SPD, 'humanissimo viro et omni literarum genere exultissimo D. Caelio Secundo Curioni' (see letter and transcription, pp. 183-85, below). 4 See Markus Kutter, Celio Secondo Curione 1503-1569: sein Leben und sein Werk, Basel, 1955, pp. 238-40, for references to Curione's historical publications, including Sabellicus; and for references to D. Stafford and E. Sandys (though without comment on their significance), ibid., p. 239, n. 121. For references to England, see Gaetano Cozzi, Tntorno all'edizione dell'opera di Marcantonio Sabellico, curata da Celio Secondo Curione e dedicata a Sigismondo Augusto, Re di Polonia', in Civilta veneziana, Studi 19, Venice, 1965, pp. 165-77: 175-76. For reference to the English Reformation, see C. S. Curione, Pasquine in a Traunce (first published as Pasquillus exstaticus, Basel?, 1544), London, 1566, p. 70. 5 M . A. Sabellicus, Opera omnia, Basel, 1560, vol. 3: Supplement...