600 margaret l. king
Venetian society.94 also published in 1600, lucrezia Marinella’s Nobility
and Excellence of Women responds to a male detractor while distilling the
discussions of women’s nature in philosophical texts from antiquity to
her own time.95
during the early 1600s, arcangela Tarabotti, finally, wrote several works
trumpeting the injustice of coerced monachization, of which she had her-
self been a victim, a practice by which property-holding Venetian fathers
limited the claims on patrimony and protected the interests of their sons
and, to a lesser extent, married daughters.96 unlike Fonte and Marinella,
who both came from families of professionals and acquired an education
at home in the libraries of their male kin, Tarabotti was of humbler origin
and was an auto-didact dependent on the slim talent and few books avail-
able in the convent to which she had been consigned. This preparation
was sufficient, however, to produce the shockingly angry On Paternal Tyr-
anny, the most famous of her oeuvre, which lambasted fathers in particu-
lar and male self-interest in general for the denigration of women.97
This explosion of female outrage sputtered out after the early 17th cen-
tury. But in a last daring gesture, as it seems in retrospect, in 1678 a Vene-
tian woman descended from one of the greatest families of the Venetian
nobility—although one that had declined over the previous century, as
had so many, in wealth and status—was examined for and succeeded in
obtaining a degree in philosophy from the university of Padua. elena luc-
rezia cornaro Piscopia was in fact, it can be affirmed now that controversy
has settled, la prima donna laureata del mondo, the world’s first woman
university graduate; and none would succeed her for about 200 years.98
94 Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein is Clearly Revealed their Nobility and
their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. Virginia cox (chicago, 1997). For Fonte, see, in
addition to titles previously cited: Paola Malpezzi Price, Moderata Fonte: Women and Life
in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Madison, n.J., 2003); and naomi Yavneh, “lying-in and dying:
Moderata Fonte’s death in childbirth and the Maternal Body in renaissance Venice,”
Rinascimento 43 (2003), 177–203.
95 lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices
of Men, ed. and trans. anne dunhill, intro. letizia Panizza (chicago, 1999). For Marinella,
see in addition to titles previously cited, Paola Malpezzi Price and christine ristaino,
Lucrezia Marinella and the “Querelle des Femmes” in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Madison,
n.J., 2008).
96 For Tarabotti, in addition to titles previously cited, see elissa Weaver, ed., Arcangela
Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice (ravenna, 2006); also Meredith K. ray, Writing
Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto, 2009), chapter 9.
97 arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny, ed. and trans. letizia Panizza (chicago, 2004).
98 For cornaro, see Francesco ludovico Maschietto, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia
(1646–1684): The First Woman in the World to Earn a University Degree, ed. catherine
Marshall, trans. Jan Vairo and William crochetiere (Padua, 1978; Philadelphia, 2007); and