Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance by Francesca D'Alessandro Behr (review)

The society of Venice in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries presented extreme constraints yet manifest possibilities for women with intellectual aspirations. On one hand, their lives were strictly circumscribed by marriage or the convent, opportunities to cultivate a humanist education were vanishingly rare, and virtue—understood literally as "vir-tus" or "manliness" (4)—came to be defined in the female sphere primarily through the passive qualities of chastity and obedience. On the other hand, the comparatively tolerant political and cultural setting of the city, animated by vernacular print, religious debate, and lively academies, created limited openings for women writers and scholars to flourish, usually with the support of their male relatives or the ruling nobility. Francesca D'Alessandro Behr's study focuses on two such authors, Moderata Fonte (1555–1592) and Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), who along with Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652) were first broadly introduced to modern scholars by Patricia Labalme in her article of 1981, "Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists." Remarkably, both Fonte and Marinella achieved an independent education in the classics and, in their own literary works, responded to the conventions of ancient poetry. These authors purposefully took up the genre of heroic epic, deeply associated since Homer with masculine ideals of strength, power, and violence, and reformulated it in the Italian vernacular. Their poems vaunt women's vigor and courage as warriors and their equality to men in martial skill, while at the same time launching subtle critiques of arms and war and, by extension, the values of the epic genre as a whole. Alongside these texts, in which feminist themes often emerge indirectly and by way of what is left unspoken, D'Alessandro Behr explores polemical treatises by Fonte and Marinella which declare women's worth and point of view more overtly. Her thesis, bolstered by close readings of the two authors, is that their education in the classics empowered them to take a relativist and critical approach to their own society and to question the subjugation of women and female perspectives in contemporary Italy.

The heroic epics at the center of the book, Fonte's Tredici canti del Floridoro (Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro) of 1581 and Marinella's L'Enrico, overo Bisantio acquistato (Henry, or Byzantium Gained) of 1635, draw inspiration from medieval chivalric romances and ancient poems of war and quest. D'Alessandro Behr concentrates less on the medieval origins of these works than on the authors' reception of classical epic, mythology, elegy, and pastoral. The first chapter explores the protagonist of Fonte's Floridoro, the lady knight Risamante, a skilled warrior who is fighting to recover part of the kingdom of Armenia. In two climactic duels, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the (unfinished) poem, Risamante at first kills her enemy but then mercifully spares another foe. In this progression D'Alessandro Behr sees the author rewriting the gratuitous violence of the final duel between Aeneas and Turnus in Virgil's Aeneid (book 12), as well as the fight between Ruggiero and Rodomonte in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (canto 46). Initially, the female warrior, wearing male disguise, finds herself trapped in the retributive violence at the heart of the epic form, but by the end of her quest, she has evolved to view brutality and bloodshed as a problem rather than a solution: unmasked as a woman, and revealing her "soft and humane heart," Risamante rushes to her adversary and "with a compassionate hand" removes his helmet, reviving him (Floridoro 13.63–64). By contrast, two amazons from Marinella's L'Enrico, Meandra and Claudia, diverge from the choices of Fonte's Risamante and fail to live up to feminine ideals of temperance and mercy. Like her they are trained and skillful combatants, but they succumb to the epic...