Antisatire: In Defense of Women, against Francesco Buoninsegni by Arcangela Tarabotti

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Reviewed by: Antisatire: In Defense of Women, against Francesco Buoninsegni by Arcangela Tarabotti Julie Robarts Antisatire: In Defense of Women, against Francesco Buoninsegni. By Arcangela Tarabotti. Ed. and trans. by Elissa B. Weaver. (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: he Toronto Series, 70; Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 564) Toronto: Iter Press; Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 2020. xv+114pp. $42.95. ISBN 978-0-86698-622-9. Elissa B. Weaver's critical edition and translation of Arcangela Tarabotti's Antisatira makes this important seventeenth-century defence of women available in English for the first time. This edition presents the text as it appeared in the 1644 publication which combined both Tarabotti's Antisatira and the original satire to which it responds—Francesco Buoninsegni's Contro 'l lusso donnesco, Satira menippea (Against the Vanities of Women, a Menippean Satire). Weaver's translation and edition is based on her Italian critical edition of the same texts, published as Satira e Antisatira (Rome: Salerno, 1998). Buoninsegni had presented his semi-serious satirical discourse, consisting of prose and verse, in 1632 in Siena under the aegis of Ferdinando II de Medici. Tarabotti, in turn, recruited the patronage of Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, as the dedicatee of her book. Weaver's Introduction outlines Tarabotti's life and literary production. The literary contexts and reception of Buoninsegni's satire, and of Tarabotti's response, are also clearly laid out. here is a helpful summary of the main arguments of the Satire, and Tarabotti's point-by-point refutation, including analysis of the rhetorical techniques deployed by the authors according with the subgenre of the Menippean satire. Being true to the genre, Tarabotti's text is filled with digressions, and these return to the main themes of her life's work—the defence of women's rights to education and to exercise their free will in the choice of a life-path. Weaver writes: 'there is no doubt that she hoped through her writing to effect change, if only in the minds of men, and that she should be considered an early feminist thinker and activist' (p. 5). [End Page 302] Weaver's translation vividly renders Tarabotti's paradigm-shattering pronouncements and her frank style: 'As for those who denounce the members of my sex, I feel no obligation to trust not just Martial but neither Plato nor Aristotle, unless they first cease to be men' (p. 78). While the Antisatira was the second of Tarabotti's published works, it established her public reputation as an author, and is crucial to our understanding of the reception of her writing, as the work with the greatest number of surviving responses. In a subsequent work, Buoninsegni printed four lines of admiring acknowledgement in verse, and there were at least three other manuscript and print responses from male authors who sought to censure Tarabotti and refute or ridicule her arguments. Tarabotti's Antisatira was published by Francesco Valvasense, the preferred press of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, who in the following year published Lucrezia Marinella's final work, Essortationi alle donne (1645). While the Essortationi has been read as Marinella stepping back from the pro-women position shared by the two authors, the interest and editorial activity provoked by Tarabotti's Antisatira support a recent interpretation of Marinella's work as a virtuoso performance in literary dissimulation. (Amy Sinclair, 'Insinuatio in Lucrezia Marinella's Essortationi alle donne (1645): Exhorting Marital Harmony and Insinuating Feminist Critique', Renaissance Studies, 34 (2020), 444–46). Tarabotti's bluntly expressed feminism contrasts with Marinella's more artful approach. Weaver's notes trace the erudite web of literary authorities evoked by both Tarabotti and Buoninsegni. Eleven images break up the text, and illustrate the men's and women's fashions and hairstyles over which the authors were disputing. The critical apparatus, which includes a name and topic index, makes this an essential text for Anglophone scholars of early modern gender, and an ideal teaching text, even for students with little or no prior knowledge of Renaissance literature. Julie Robarts Australian National University Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association