The Century of Women: Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse by Rebecca Messbarger (review)

Abstract

1070 Reviews Given the predominant classicizing culture promoted by Leonelio and Guarino, vernacular lyric in Ferrara?to borrow the title of Chapter 2?was slow to establish itself and even slower to react to the experiments of Petrarch's rime. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, the firstindications?analysed in Chapter 5?are to be found in Latin lyrics from the mid-century, in particular those of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (a tentative defender of 'modern' writers in the Politia), and subsequently those of Boiardo. Boiardo's emergence as the outstanding exponent of Petrarchan lyric in the fifteenthcentury is thus set in the context of his association both with the Latin lyric tradition and with individuals prominent in Ferrarese culture at the time of the Council, including his chief (but not native Ferrarese) predecessor in the canzoniere form, Giusto de' Conti. The wealth of information contained in each of Pantani's chapters, on topics ranging from book ownership (Chapter 1) to Humanist debates (Chapter 3) and the contribution of minor poets in the early part of the century (Chapter 2), is immensely valuable, though it threatens at times to overwhelm the reader, and Pantani's style in Italian?elaborate, Latinate, and academic?does not lend itself to quick and easy absorption of the argument. Nevertheless, the patient reader who perseveres will be rewarded with a stimulating and satisfying conclusion in which Pantani rightly em? phasizes just how rapidly the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta entered Ferrarese poetic consciousness once the vernacular was set free from the classicizing constraints of the cultural politics of Leonelio and Guarino, and how widely it was absorbed and reused, not only in the love lyric, but also in religious poetry. This wide-ranging survey should prove of much use to scholars working on many aspects of literature in fifteenth-centuryItaly. ROYAL HOLLOWAY,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON JANEE. EVERSON The Century of Women: Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse. By Rebecca Messbarger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xi + 209pp. ?28. ISBN 0-8020-3652-x. Rebecca Messbarger's volume seeks to throw light on the intricacies of the woman question in eighteenth-century Italy 'through an analysis of the prolific public dis? course about women produced by male and female authorities of the Settecento' (p. 3). To this end she focuseson five'paradigmatic eighteenth-century textual events' (p. 19): the debate on women's education held at the Accademiadei Ricovrati in Padua in 1723, Antonio Conti's 'scientific' misogynist tract (1721), Diamante Medaglia Faini's oration on women's education to the Accademia degli Unanimi (1763), Carlo Sebastiano Franci's article in defence ofwomen published in that most eminent of Ita? lian Enlightenment journals, //caffe,in the 1760s, and Gioseffa Cornoldi Caminer's journal La donna galante ed erudita (1786-88). Women's education was a frequent object of debate, and Chapters 1 and 3 focus precisely on this, giving close analytical readings of the contributions made by men at the 1723 Padua dispute, the changes involved in the transition to the printed version of 1729, the additions at this stage of two pieces written by women, in particular Aretafila Savini de' Rossi's Apologia infavor e degli studii delle donne, and also the ora? tion delivered some fortyyears later by Medaglia Faini, Quali studi convengano alle donne. The author points out not only the differingpositions among male contributors as to whether or not women should receive an education, and if so, what kind, but also the fundamental ambiguity of their positions, the perpetual oscillation between the conviction that women are quite simply incapable of certain types of study and the afflrmation that women risk losing their 'femininity' as a result of educational MLRy 99.4, 2004 1071 excesses. Women's debating techniques are also seen as fundamentally ambivalent inasmuch as they appropriate the modes of male discourse. In the debate on women in the Settecento, startling results sometimes ensue from the enlightened emphasis on a 'scientific' approach. The theories regarding the biological constitution of women put forward in 1721 by Antonio Conti, one of the most renowned exponents of enlightened philosophy, form the topic of Chapter 2. Conti maintained that women's muscles are weaker than...