Confronting the “Temple Of Chastity”: Isabella d’Este in the Context of the Female Humanists

“Confronting the ‘Temple of Chastity’: Isabella d’Este in the context of the Female Humanists.” Active in fourteenth and fifteenth-century North Italy, the so-called female humanists wrote classically inspired texts with the aspiration of entering into the traditionally masculine realm of intellectual discourse and of achieving recognition for their competence. Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua from 1490–1537, assembled and commissioned a classically inspired collection of antiquities and paintings, also with the purpose of contributing intellectually and achieving recognition. Whereas the female humanists were vigorously rejected, Isabella can be argued to have succeeded to some degree. It is tempting to speculate that as a politically influential consort Isabella was immune to the petty slander and manipulations that brought about the marginalization of other intellectually ambitious women. However, the virtual absence of other consorts testing the traditional boundaries of female collecting and patronage is telling. I argue that the integration of chastity as a motif in her collections, through which she effectively challenged the ideology at the same time that she yielded to it, allowed Isabella to achieve intellectual self-expression and recognition.