the venetian intellectual world 599
well as those of the natives Franco, discussed above, and Gaspara Stampa.91
not only did the presses give women’s voices an outlet—if in part because
a male audience of readers found those products titillating—but also
they presented for general consideration books about women, such as
poligrafo lodovico dolce’s best-selling 1545 Dialogo della institution delle
donne [Dialogue on the Education of Women], presented as his own work
although in fact a translation and plagiarism of the influential 1524 treatise
on the Education of a Christian Woman by the Valencian-born humanist
Juan luis Vives.^ in this setting, the woman humanist cassandra Fedele,
daughter of a clan of Venetian cittadini of the secretarial order, was a
celebrity, trotted out in her advanced old age to give latin orations to
visiting royalty.92
at around the turn of the 17th century, three female authors boldly
challenged prevailing attitudes towards women; extraordinary, for a single
city, for a brief moment, to produce this concentrated message of female
resistance, unequalled, if at all, until later in the century when the salons
of France and the drawing rooms of england also yielded a harvest in
their different genres of female expression.93 Written in the hours before
her death in 1592, though not published until 1600, Moderata Fonte’s
Worth of Women displays in dialogue seven women representing different
combinations of age, marital status, and attitudes toward the condition
of women and excoriates the prevailing system of male control in elite
91 See Gaspara Stampa, Works, ed. and trans. Jane Tylus (chicago, 2010). For women
writers and Venetian publishers, see especially robin, Publishing Women, especially
chapter 2 and appendices; and with some caution, the profiles of colonna, d’aragona,
Stampa, Franco, and Moderata Fonte (discussed below) in irma B. Jaffe, with Gernando
colombardo, Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women
Poets (new York, 2002). For the Petrarchism of colonna and Stampa, see ulrike Schneider,
Der weibliche Petrarkismus im Cinquecento: Transformationen des lyrischen Diskurses bei
Vittoria Colonna und Gaspara Stampa (Stuttgart, 2007). For the literary activity of women
more broadly, see Virginia cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008). The
“other Voice in early Modern europe” series published by the university of chicago Press
(chicago) publishes volumes of works in translation by all of the figures named.
92 cassandra Fedele, Letters and Orations, ed. diana M. robin (chicago, 2000).
93 For these women as a group (individuals to be considered below), see: Ginevra
conti odorisio, Donna e società nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Arcangela Tarabotti
(rome, 1979); claire lesage, “Femmes de lettres à Venise aux xvie et xviie siècles: Moderata
Fonte, lucrezia Marinella, arcangela Tarabotti,” Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 13 (2001),
135–44; and Patricia h. labalme, “Venetian Women on Women: Three early Modern
Feminists,” Archivio veneto, ser. 5, 197 (1981), 81–109. in addition to those named here, see
also anne Jacobson Schutte, “irene di Spilimbergo: The image of a creative Woman in
late renaissance italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 44.1 (1991), 42–61.