Laura Cereta: Italian Humanist

Laura Cereta (letter to Giovanni Olivieri, 1 August 1485)

Laura Cereta's "portrait,"
from the 1640 edition of her work

We know that the Italian humanist Laura Cereta was born in September of 1469 and that she died in 1499, just thirty years old. But I am using the date of one of her letters written to the scholar Giovanni Olivieri (her brothers' teacher) as the reason for today's post--it's not a significant letter, but it'll do as a reason for writing today.

Like her predecessor Isotta Nogarola, Laura Cereta is an extraordinarily well educated Italian humanist.* Born in Brescia, Cereta was the daughter of Silvestro Cereto, who was a lawyer and a magistrate in Brescia. Her mother was Veronica di Leno, a member of an old Brescian family--we know little about her, and in Cereta's surviving correspondence, only one letter to her mother is included. 

We know when Cereta was born only because she gives that information in a letter--"I was born in the fourth month before the coming of the seventieth year in the century one thousand four-hundred of our Savior." (She also says that she was named for a laurel tree growing in the family's "burgeoning garden.")

Cereta was sent first to a convent to be educated; she tells us that she was seven years old, and that the woman who taught her there was "highly esteemed both for her counsel and sanctity." She was "entrusted" to this nun "whose learning, habits, and discipline I, who was to be educated, intently absorbed." 

This esteemed woman taught Cereta embroidery--a useful remedy for her "nights of insomnia." After two years, when Cereta was nine, she left the convent and returned home. Her father, she says, was "fearful" that she might "slip into indolent habits," but she did not--as she writes, she "immersed" herself "night and day . . . in long vigils of study." 

At home, she learned Latin and Greek from her father, studied Seneca and Cicero, "attended lectures on mathematics," and "devoured the mellifluous-voiced prophets of the Old Testament and figures from the New Testament." 

But at age fifteen or sixteen, she was married to a young merchant from Venice, Pietro Serina; a handful of letters written to him, from 1485, survive. The marriage is not without its stresses--in one letter, dated 22 July 1485, the young Cereta writes that her husband seems to "pick arguments" with her whether she is silent, as a wife should be, or speaks when she feels "impelled to." "Apparently neither option is permitted," she observes tartly.

And yet, Cereta is not silent. In fact, in a letter from 13 August 1485, she says exactly what she thinks when her husband says that she does not love him:

Do you want me to believe that you expect me to comb my hair in a stylish fashion for your homecoming? Or to feign adoring looks with a painted face? Let women without means, who worry and have no confidence in their own virtue, flutter their eyelashes and play games to gain favor with their husbands. This is the admiration of a fox and the birdlime of deceitful birdhunting. I don't want to have to buy you at such a price.

Within a year, however, Serina was dead. Cereta did not marry again.

After her husband's death, Cereta returned to her study. Her surviving work includes autobiographical letters, letters on marriage and education, exchanges with other women, texts prepared for public lecture, and a literary dialogue. Although her letters circulated in manuscript among humanist scholars in the late fifteenth century, they were not published until 1640. 

In her work, Cereta addresses a number of feminist themes. Like Christine de Pizan, whose Book of the City of Ladies she most probably did not know, Cereta argues against misogynistic attitudes even while she accepts women’s traditional place in society. As her editor Diana Robin indicates, "Though . . . Cereta does see women as an oppressed class, she neither focuses her anger on ills within the culture as a whole that perpetuate gender and class inequities nor calls for the overthrow of the patriarchal state."

In Cereta's letter to Bibolo Semproni, which takes the form of a "defense of liberal education for women," she challenges the notion of the "exceptional woman." Semproni has clearly praised Cereta as unique among women, singling out for praise an individual woman whose accomplishments distinguish her from other women.

But Cereta rejects Semproni’s praise. The gifted and powerful woman is not extraordinary, she argues; rather, she comes from "a noble lineage . . . legitimate and sure." She has descended from "an enduring race," a "republic of women." Having dispensed with Semproni’s praise, Cereta then launches into a "history of women."

Following her abbreviated history, Cereta returns to her point that all women have ability, not just an exceptional few: "Nature has granted to all enough of her bounty; she opens to all the gates. . . ." Cereta also suggests that, while men may occupy positions of power, women have their own abilities, which may challenge, perhaps even frighten, men:

I shall make a bold summary of the matter. Yours is the authority, ours is the inborn ability. But instead of manly strength, we women are naturally endowed with cunning; instead of a sense of security, we are suspicious. Down deep we women are content with our lot. But you, enraged and maddened . . . are like someone who has been frightened. . . . Look, do you tremble from fear alone of my name? I am savage neither in mind nor hand. What is it you fear?

Finally, we might read Cereta’s correspondence with women as, in itself, a kind of history of women and an acknowledgement of their "monstrous regiment." Among her many letters are those addressed to Isabella of Castile, queen regnant of Spain; Beatrice of Aragon, queen consort of Hungary; Eleanor of Aragon, duchess and regent of Ferrara; and Beatrice d’Este, duchess of Bari and Milan.

(Isabella of Spain [1451-1504] married Ferdinand II of Aragon. Ferdinand was the nephew of Alfonso V and an uncle of Alfonso’s son Ferrante; Ferrante was the father of both Eleanor of Aragon [1450-93] and of Beatrice of Aragon [1457-1508]. Beatrice d’Este [1475-97] was Eleanor of Aragon’s daughter.)

Two manuscript collections of her work survive, one from the fifteenth century and one from the sixteenth. In 1640, a collection of her work is published in Padua by Jacopo Filippo Tommasini: Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis Feminae Clarissimae Epistolae iam primum e MS in lucem productae (available on Google Books, which you can access by clicking here).

A brief essay on Cereta's life is available at Italian Women Writers. There is an excellent introduction, one that includes biographical material, in Diana Robin's English translation of Cereta's work: Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist.

*Portions of this post are adapted from Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe.

Isotta Nogarola: Finding a Place in the "Republic of Letters"

Isotta Nogarola (letter to Damiano del Borgo dated 18 April 1439/40)

An eighteenth-century medallion,
in marble, depicting Isotta Nogarola
(Padova Musei Civici)

Isotta Nogarola was born in the northern Italian city of Verona, probably in 1418.* After the death of her father, Leonardo Nogarola, Nogarola’s mother, Bianca Borromeo, made sure that not only her sons but her daughters were carefully educated; Isotta and her older sister Ginevra were tutored by the humanist scholar Martino Rizzoni. But at the age when most women were either married or became nuns, Nogarola chose a different “career” for herself: she decided on a life of scholarship.

Her first letters, from 1434-35, were addressed to family and friends, but the circle was widened as she engaged in a literary dialogue with scholars, educators, and statesmen. A letter to one of these correspondents, Damiano dal Borgo, dated 18 April 1439 or 1440, is used as the occasion for today's post.  

  

Like Nogarola, dal Borgo was from Verona, but he was living in Venice (Nogarola and her family would relocate to Venice in 1439). Between the years 1438 and 1441, the two exchanged letters, and a series of eighteen letters to dal Borgo from Nogarola survives.

In one of his early letters to her, dal Borgo had made a slighting remark about the talkativeness of women. In response, on 18 April, Nogarola writes, “I learned from [your letter] that you trust the words of our comic poet who claims a silent woman has never been found in any age.” Nogarola is “disturbed,” as she says, for two reasons: first, “because you were writing to me when you surely knew I would take offense,” and second, “because night and day you are reading about how many women surpass not only other women but also men in every kind of virtue and excellence and, we claim, in eloquence.” 

Published edition of Nogarola's

Dialogue on the Unequal Sin

of Adam and Eve, 1563

(La Bibliothèque nationale de France)

To refute dal Borgo’s slighting remark, Nogarola writes a brief history of women, including women noted for their eloquence (Cornelia, Camilla, and Sappho, for instance), but also, and more particularly, women who had earned their reputation by means of their accomplishments in battle and in government. Here she mentions the Amazons, who “increase[d]” their republic without men. The Amazons had “subdue[d] the greater part of Europe” and “occup[ied] a number of cities in Asia,” she reminds dal Borgo, and all “without men.” These women were “powerful . . . in their knowledge and virtue in war.”

As her recent editors note, Nogarola does not indicate any familiarity with the work of her slightly older contemporary, Christine de Pizan. Nor does she mention any other female contemporaries when she drew up her catalogue of women worthies, perhaps anxious about establishing herself as a humanist scholar; for whatever reasons, her “famous” women are all drawn from the mythological and historical past.

And although she characterizes herself in a way that is remarkably similar to Pizan’s opening scene in The City of Ladies—Nogarola writes about receiving her scholarly visitors in her libraria cella, her “little library”—she is not interested in constructing a republic for womankind, as Pizan was, at least figuratively. Nogarola’s interest is in finding a place for herself in the res publica litterarum, in the humanist republic of letters.

A 1497 woodcut, showing Isotta Nogarola
in her "book-lined cell"
(from Jacopo Philippo Gergomensis,
De claris mulieribus, fol. CLI)

Nogarola is also known for her spirited entry into the humanist debate about women in On the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve, from 1451.

In this epistolary debate, Nogarola writes herself as “Isotta” and her “adversary,” Ludovico Foscarini, the friend she was debating, as “Ludovico.” Her work represents “the first work of its kind in European literature,” her editors note, one which moved beyond the relative sin of Adam and Eve to a larger discussion of gender; thus Nogarola’s dialogue “stands among the founding works of the controversy on gender and the nature of woman (the querelle des femmes) that persisted on the continent and in England until the end of the eighteenth century.”

On the life and “career” choice of Isotta Nogarola, I recommend Margaret L. King and Diana Robin's Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations. 

According to King and Robin, Nogarola’s works were “published” in her lifetime by the circulation of copies; she herself “copied out and collected her letters to assemble them for publication in a bound manuscript volume." Some of her works are also “embedded in humanist miscellanies.” Her collected works were not published until the nineteenth century. 

*Portions of this post are adapted from Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe.