Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender by Aileen A. Feng (review)

Aileen Feng's monograph is a reply to Virginia Cox and Chiara Ferrari's book Verso una storia di genere della letteratura italiana (2012), in which the authors "challenge the categorization of women's writing as separate from that of men, calling on scholars to account for gender in all its aspects: language use, how texts are circulated, how the relationship between the author and his/her readership is construed, and how gender is constructed in different genres of literature" (11). And, in fact, Writing Beloveds is an analysis of the different ways in which Petrarchism was used by men and women during the fifteenth and sixteenth century in order to address the growing number of learned women in Italian intellectual circles.

Feng writes, "This book engages with three distinct fields – Petrarchism, the intellectual history of early modern women, and gender and women's studies – yet bridges them in a new way by revealing how humanist Petrarchism mediates gendered interactions" (7). In her introduction, Feng inserts her study between the two main scholarly trends that deal with Petrarchism, one that focuses on the poetical perspective and one that focuses on issues of social and political concern. Writing Beloveds seeks to be a synthesis of these two approaches to prove that Petrarch's poetry and political works were indeed gendered; and it seeks to answer how this feature influenced the way in which women were represented and represented themselves through the reuse of Petrarch's own tropes. The author substantiates her argument through the careful analysis of correspondence between men and women during the sixteenth century.

Feng starts discussing Petrarchan love and political tropes in chapter 1. She describes, in great detail, the way in which Petrarch deals with the figure of the beloved and of the patron. Her aim, in doing so, is to show the ways in which the author negotiates his own position in relation to these two figures. Feng analyzes both the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Africa to explore these relationships. By looking carefully at these two texts, she points out how Petrarch was able to prove that his position as a poet is one of power and not of submission. Moreover, the author carefully draws a line between the language and the images used by Petrarch to show how he is able to renegotiate his position as a poet. In fact, she shows how Petrarch uses his writings as the means to gain control of the relationship with his addressee. Feng identifies "intellectual masculinity" as the tool through which the poet is able to reach his purpose, underlining how to Petrarch, his relationship to his patron and his lover are the same. Indeed, she claims that it is his intellect and rationality, acquired through study and his gender, that have allowed him to come to this conclusion. In fact, it is through Petrarch's own perception of himself as both a man and a poet that he is able to avoid succumbing to either love or political subjugation, thus defining "intellectual masculinity."

The rest of the chapters are built on the idea of Petrarch's poetry as concerned with issues of gender and politics. In chapter 2 Feng describes the epistolary exchange between men and women in the early-fifteenth century. Specifically, she analyzes the letters exchanged between Isotta Nogarola and Lauro Quirini, Cassandra Fedele and Bertuccio Lamberti, and Alessandra Scala and Angelo Poliziano. The author aims to show how female intellectuals were regarded in the fifteenth century by their male counterparts. The main aspect that she considers in this chapter is the literary model to which Italian intellectuals looked in their writings, and the way in which this model needed to be reconsidered when dealing with learned women. In fact, the model was mainly based on Cicero's political writings and it did not include or even consider women. However, as Feng points out, by the fifteenth century, Italian society had changed so much that it...