Women in the Garden: The Decameron Reimagined in Moderata Fonte’s Il Merito Delle Donne*

The queen, then, accompanied by her women and three young men. . .took the path to the west with slow steps, chatting, jesting, and laughing with her followers all the while. . .and she led them, well before midmorning, to a most splendid and sumptuous mansion. After this they had a garden opened to them which was adjacent to the house and walled around, into which they went; upon entering it seemed to them of marvelous beauty. . .and at the center of the lawn there was a fountain of white marble with superbly sculpted reliefs.¹

Decameron

Realizing that the sun was somewhat hidden behind many little clouds, the women agreed to go down into the beautiful garden. . . and so they set off merrily, taking each other by the hand and descending the stairs. When they arrived there, one could not express with words how charming and delightful it seemed to them . . . there they saw the loveliest orange and lemon trees, with fruits and flowers of such sweet scent that the fragrance lightened the heart no less than the view delighted the eye. . .and wandering from place to place they arrived at a beautiful fountain, which stood in the middle of this garden.²

Il merito delle donne

In 1600, literate society in the bustling Republic of Venice witnessed the publication of local author Moderata Fonte’s (1555–92) exuberant polyphonic dialogue Il merito delle donne. Set in a sun-splashed garden, the text features a brigata of witty noble ladies who engage in verbal sparring over the merits of the male sex and married life under the auspices of a benevolent queen elected to guide the day’s conversation. The dialogue is open and its characters split into two camps, the first of which is charged “to freely speak as much evil as possible of [men],” the other with defending the traditional preeminence of Italian society’s husbands, fathers, and sons.³ The debate that ensues is by turns playful, biting, witty, and heartfelt. Although neither side is allowed to stifle the other and triumph absolutely, the text’s surface frivolity masks a serious purpose. Beneath the rhetorical quips, jabs, and token praises of men lies an insistent feminist critique of misogyny and the patriarchal suppression of womanly potential developed with the aid of Corinna, the work’s most eloquent and authoritative speaker.⁴ Through Corinna, Fonte incites her contemporaries to “wake up and recover our liberty, along with the honor and dignity that [men] have held usurped from us for so long.”⁵ The dialogue’s dynamic female speakers, whom the text portrays as contemporary or “real” Venetians, embody Fonte’s belief in women’s right to intellectual autonomy and social action and their deceptively entertaining speech has an edge that cuts.

Fonte’s subversive attack on the married state and her impassioned promotion of women’s worth fell under the aegis of the greater early modern European literary movement known as the querelle des femmes or debate about women. Historians traditionally date the inception of the querelle to 1405, the year in which the Italo-French scholar Christine de Pizan wrote the masterpiece Le Livre de la Cité des Dames.⁶ This text responded to the overt misogyny that characterized late medieval poetry like the Roman de la Rose, and as Pizan herself put it, inquired “how it happened that so many different men. . .are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many devilish and wicked thoughts about women and their behavior.”⁷ The question of women’s merit continued to animate the letterati of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, providing humanistically-trained intellectuals of both sexes a rhetorical battleground on which to test their pens. In this period the debate was largely theoretical in nature. While early female contributors to the querelle such as Laura Cereta and Olympia Morata served as living examples of women’s scholastic ability, their work was governed by the rhetorical dictates of pro et contra argument rather than a...