Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France and Italy (review)

Strong Voices, Weak History is a collection of fifteen essays arising out of an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. The conference proceeded from the premise that while women writers in the early modern period were both numerous and successful in their own time, their success did not translate into adoption into their national canons in the long term, that “their presence in national literary histories, generally speaking, has been less stable than men’s, their niches more shallow or precarious, their memory more quickly occluded by time” (1). The essays respond to this premise through an exploration of the relationship of several early modern women writers to their various national canons.

The subtitle is somewhat misleading. Of the fifteen essays, ten concern Italy, three deal with English women and only two are about French writers. Moreover, two of these five (Benson and Fenster) are preoccupied at least somewhat with the relationship between English or French writers and Italy or the Italian canon. There are appealing historical reasons for this imbalance, in that early modern Italian women writers were much more widely recognized and more frequently anthologized than their sisters in England or France, especially in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Still, this reader was disappointed not to find a stronger representation from the other two nations, especially in light of the number of early modern French and English women writers whose work has been rediscovered over the past twenty years. That said, the range and quality of the articles made me wish I had been at the conference because they reflect a vigorous debate and energetic collective and individual scholarship.

Several essays address the ways in which early women writers negotiated their relationships to the canons of their day, particularly mid-century Petrarchism. In the opening essay, Virginia Cox observes that the new emphasis on vernacular poetry offered a space for highly skilled women poets such as Vittoria Colonna, who was also acceptable because she adhered to social roles considered appropriate for women. Cox finds paradoxical the complexity of ways Colonna’s persona was adopted by later women writers, especially as gender roles hardened later on. Fabio Finotti, in an essay on the courtly origins of new literary canons, places women’s emergence as poets as early as 1500 and finds them engaged both with the shift from Latin to vernacular poetry and with the transformation of Petrarchism. Victoria Kirkham seeks to discover why Laura Battifera, who was pre-eminent during her own life, disappeared so rapidly and completely from the literary landscape after her death. Kirkham finds a conflation of possible causes, including the often occasional topics of her poems, Battifera’s death while she was still preparing her collected work, and the eclipse of her artist husband’s work.

A particularly interesting group of essays examines the relationships of women writers to other canons and to contemporaneous literary conversations, including the dialogue (Smarr), the Church canon (Matter), and the debates about Eve (Fenster). Janet Levarie Smarr argues that French women writers established their own canon of dialogue writing, based on the mediaeval rather than the classical tradition. Some additional development of the section on the importance of the débat structure would have strengthened the analysis, but the argument as whole is compelling. Thelma S. Fenster explores the intervention of Isotta Nogarola and Christine de Pizan in the debates about Eve and the nature of women, in particular the Augustinian paradox that Eve’s weakness of mind makes her less sinful than Adam. The precise ways in which the two texts she cites speak to one another is not immediately clear, but Fenster’s evaluation of each writer’s self-awareness of her own paradoxical position as intellectually successful in relation to Eve’s purported weakness of mind makes for an...