Letters and Orations (review)

255 Short Notices Fedele, Cassandra, Letters and Orations, ed. and trans. Diana Robin (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe), Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2000; paper, pp. xxvii, 181; R.R.P. US$15.00; ISBN 0226239322. Cassandra Fedele's collection of letters written to the literary and social aristocracy of Italy in the sixteenth century allow a fascinating glimpse in the life of a not-very-ordinary woman. Indeed, Cassandra was widely acclaimed throughout Europe as having an intellect equal to a man's, was invited to Queen Isabella's court, to deliver orations to the University of Padua, to the Doge and the Venetian senate and was accorded a state funeral on her death at 94. The correspondence by her, and to her, is divided into sections: letters to women patrons, family members, princes and courtiers, academics and literary friends, men of the church, unknown correspondents and humanist form letters. It concludes with her three public lectures. The letters cover a range of purposes: compliments to her, her fulsome praise to political figures to ensure her position, requests for herself and others, and praise of learning generally. There is a useful bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and each section is annotated for those to w h o m the innumerable humanist allusions may be obscure. Her correspondents reveal an appreciation of the necessity for education of w o m e n . Although Cassandra's reputation and accomplishments were outstanding, and therefore rare, the learning whichfillsthese pages was shared by her female correspondents, and applauded by the male writers. Thus the introduction, 'The Misogynist Tradition, 500 B.C.E-1500 B.C.E.', which oversimplifies the marginalisation of women throughout history, is not supported 256 Short Notices by the accompanying letters (and the insistence on marginalisation also diminishes the various contributions of w o m e n to history). A more nuanced feminism might question whether Cassandra's absorption into the male public sphere is necessarily a validation of her gender. Indeed, Cassandra's letters are so imbued with the language of her peers that little of a personal voice remains. The letters raise the interesting question of whether entry into the humanist tradition produces another voice or submerges it. Moreover, although Cassandra's self-deprecation and use of diminutives (homuncula, virguncula, vocula) are described by Mazzoni as expressions of her perceived inferior position, such selfdeprecation was also a topos of male authors - and, one suspects, a means to elicit further compliments. Perhaps more information about the humanist epistolary conventions would help the novice reader. The artificiality of such mannered epistles, and the hyberbolic, almost sycophantic, admiration expressed therein require a subtlety of reading to discern intent. Nevertheless, this edition provides a valuable source for those involved in cultural or gender studies, or the Early M o d e m period when, as this translation phrases it, there was vast appreciation for the 'enormity of [a person's] learning' (p. 79). Rosemary Dunn School of Humanities James Cook University Griffin, Nigel, ed. and trans., Las Casas on Columbus: Background and the Second and Fourth Voyages (Repertorium Columbianum 70), Turnhout, Brepols, 1999; cloth, pp. xii, 494; R.R.P. EUR74.00; ISBN 2503508839. The perennial interest in Columbus's discoveries and the bringing together o worlds which were previously isolated, with incalculable effects on global history, has led to a combined international effort to produce an up-to-date series of all the original contemporary source materials relating to Columbus's four voyages, and an accurate English translation which takes into account modern techniques ofphilology. Since itsfirstprinting in 1875-6, Bartolome de Las Casas's Historia de las Indias has been a critical source for historians, particularly those who sympathise with his vocal opposition to the violent Spanish treatment of the Indians. Although later Spanish editions have appeared, and the 1994 volumes of Las Casas's complete works are well regarded, this new edition gives a better ...