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Bartolommeo Goggio: A Feminist in Renaissance Ferrara

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Werner L. Gundersheimer
Werner L. Gundersheimer*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

Readers in late medieval and early modern Europe had access to a lively and extensive literature on the nature of women. Philosophers, theologians, poets, physicians, and antiquarians of all kinds and degrees sought to describe and classify, analyze and dissect, justify or vilify the "second sex." As with other intense debates in those times, writers called upon the ancient sources of scientia and sapientia—factual knowledge and moral truth—to witness and buttress their arguments. The range of authorities was immense, both in time and substance, offering the diverse views of Aristotle and Augustine, of Ovid and Jerome, of Genesis and the Song of Solomon.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , Summer 1980 , pp. 175 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1980

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References

1 The term is Simone de Beauvoir's. See her Le deuxième sexe (2 vols., Paris, 1949). For a good introduction to the primary literature, there is Ruth Kelso, Doctrine of the Lady in the Renaissance (Urbana, 1956), esp. pp. 304-462, a bibliography of 473 fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works on women. For a recent survey of die literature, see N. Z. Davis, “ “Women's History’ in Transition: The European case,” Feminist Studies, 3 (1976), 83-103.

2 This is not the place to undertake a survey of the classical and medieval attacks on women which formed the arsenal for later polemics. These may be conveniently sampled in the anthology edited by J. O'Faolain and L. Martines, Not in God's Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (New York, 1973), chs. 1—8. They are discussed in S. B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975), with useful bibliography. For a recent discussion of a conventional expression of such attitudes by a Venetian writer of the mid-quattrocento, see M. L. King, “The Moral Philosophy of Giovanni Caldiera,” RQ,28 (1975), 554-557- See also, by the same author, “Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Italian Renaissance,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 59 (1976), 280-304. She also delivered a lecture, “Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance,” in April, 1978 at Swarthmore College, which is not yet published. King's studies of such eminent learned women as Isotta Nogarola, Costanza Barbara, Cecilia Gonzaga, Ginevra Nogarola, Cataruzza Caldiera, and Cassandra Fidele reveal that, in general, these women accepted the prevailing views of female physical and moral inferiority and saw themselves as partial exceptions to the rule.

3 See for example R. A. M. de Maulde la Clavière, Les Femmes de la Renaissance (Paris, 1898; Eng. tr. London, 1900); E. Rodocanachi, La Femme italienne avant, pendant et après la Renaissance (Paris, 1922); L. M. Richardson, The Forerunners of Feminism in French Literature of the Renaissance from Christine of Pisa to Marie de Gournay (Baltimore, 1929), with bibliography; F. L. Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument About Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1958(Columbus, Ohio, 1944).

4 E.g., David Herlihy, “Life Expectancies for Women in Medieval Society,” in The Role of Women in the Middle Ages, ed. R. R. Morewedge (Albany, 1975); the articles by Kelly-Gadol, S. M. Wyntjes, and R. T. Vann in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (Boston, 1977); S. Chojnacki, “Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice,” Studies in the Renaissance, 21 (1974), 176-203, K. Casey, “Reconstructing the Experience of Medieval Women,” in Liberating Women's History, ed. B. Carroll (Urbana, 1976), 224-249; C. R. Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas (New York, 1975), esp. ch. 4: “The Cult of Mary and the Practice of Misogyny“; and, above all, the recent studies on women in sixteenth-century France by N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), and her “Men, Women, and Violence: Some Reflections on Equality,” Smith Alumnae Quarterly (April, 1977), pp. 12—15, m which she emphasizes the simplistic terms in which much of the Renaissance debate was carried on.

5 L. B. Alberti, Opere volgari, I, ed. C. Grayson (Bari, 1960); translated by R. N. Watkins as The Family in Renaissance Florence (Columbia, S. C , 1969), esp. Bk. II, De re uxoria.

6 In addition to numerous Latin editions, there is a modern translation, Concerning Famous Women, with introduction and notes by G. A. Guarino (New Brunswick, N.J., 1963).

7 A good recent edition of the Corbaccio is that of T. Nurmela, // Corbaccio, Suomalaisen Tiedakatemian Toimituksia: Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B., No. 146 (Helsinki, 1968). A. K. Cassell has now provided a splendid English translation: The Corbaccio (Urbana, 1975), widi extensive notes and useful bibliography. The library of Borso d'Este contained a copy o'f this work, according to the inventory published by G. Bertoni, La Biblioteca Estense al tempo di Ercole I d'Este, 1471-1505 (Turin, 1903), p. 225, n. 136.

8 For the Defensione, see F. Zambrini, La Defensione delle donne d'autore anonimo: Scrittura inedita del sec. XV (Bologna, 1876; repr. 1968), Disp. CXLVIII of Scelta di Curiositi letterarie inedite o rare. This author opposes the “calumnies used against women,” but he does not attempt to prove their superiority. Although Zambrini published this as an anonymous treatise, Conor Fahy has proven it to be the work of Agostino Strozzi, an Augustinian canon with close ties to die court of Mantua in die early sixteenth century. See Fahy's “Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women,” Italian Studies, 13 (1956), 42 ff.

9 On Christine de Pisan, there are recent essays by S. H. Bell, “Christine de Pizan,” Feminist Studies, 3 (1976), 173-184; C. C. Willard, “A Fifteenth-Century View of Women's Role in Medieval Society: Christine de Pizan's Litre des Trois Vertus,” in The Role of Woman in the Middle Ages, pp. 90-120. The latter, in particular, serves as a useful corrective to the older study by R. Rigaud, Les Idies feministes de Christine de Pisan (Neuchatel, 1911).

10 British Library, Additional MS. 17,415: Ad divan Eleanoram de Aragona Inclitam ducissam ferrarie de laudibus mulierum Bartholomei Gogii. Goggio escaped the notice of M. E. Cosenza, Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of Italian Humanists, 6 vols. (Boston, 1962). Bertoni, pp. 229-233, published a 1493 inventory of Eleonora's library, consisting of 74 volumes. Of these, no. 61 (Bertoni, p. 232) is given as “Libro composto per messer Ba[r]tolomeo Gogio, de laudibus mulierum.” This is, of course, our manuscript, which is possibly the original presentation copy, and perhaps the only formal copy ever made. Fahy, “Three Early Renaissance Treatises,” provides a schematic introduction (pp. 32-36). Fahy argues that because it is “written in a poor hand, with occasional marginal corrections and additions, … it could hardly have passed as a dedicatory copy.” For anyone familiar with Ferrarese presentation manuscripts, these arguments are unconvincing. Many books—especially new works by relatively unimportant authors—were presented in relatively inelegant form. In this case, the hand appears to be Goggio's own.(which Fahy could not have known), and we may be dealing with what I have elsewhere called a “Type II humanist,” who might not have been able to afford a scribe, let alone an illuminator. See my Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton, 1973), pp. 221—222.

P. O. Kristeller, Iter Italicum (Leyden and London, 1963- ), cites two poems addressed to Goggio by authors at the court of Ferrara—Gasparo Tribracho and Ludovico Carbone. We may now suggest Goggio as the recipient of a poem “Ad Bartholomeum,” in Octavianus Cleophilus, Epigrammata, in three books, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Vat. Lat. 5163, f. 65. Kristeller also cites the manuscript of the De nobilitate humani animi opus (Biblioteca Estense, Modena, MS. Campori, no. 134, now Gamma S, 6, 7). The British Library manuscript is an octavo, written on paper in a good calligraphic book hand. Based on the similarity of the hand to that of some of Goggio's notarial letters from the same period, and on the frequent marginal interlineations in the same hand, I take it to be an autograph. Professor David Ruderman of the University of Maryland kindly reports (private communication) that a theological disputation at Ercole's court between the Jew Abraham Farissol and two clergymen occurred in the presence of the ducal family and Bartolommeo Goggio.

The work of Fra Jacopo [Foresti] da Bergamo, an encyclopedic collection of biographies of ancient and contemporary women, was published in Ferrara in 1497 by the printer L. De Rubeis de Valencia, not long after Goggio's work was presented.

11 See the revised edition (New York, 1968), p. iff.

12 G. Tiraboschi, Biblioteca Modenese, (Modena, 1781-86), V, 294, Tiraboschi quotes the poem by Tribracho, cited in manuscript by Kristeller (cf. n. 10 above).

13 Goggio is no. 195 in the catalogue of notaries preserved in the Ferrarese Archives. The packets, which are really wrapped packages full of documents arranged in chronological order, and measuring about five to seven inches thick, are sorted as follows: This collection has been cited, and used in a very preliminary way, in my article “The Patronage of Ercole I d'Este,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (1976), 6.

This is a sizable collection for a Ferrarese notary in this period. Most notaries have only a single packet. If one assumes that Goggio's career was in fact just beginning in 1450, and that at that time he was about twenty, he would have been about fifty-seven years old when the DLMwas written in 1487. This means that he would have been in his middle to late teens during the brief but brilliant rule of Leonello d'Este. Given his considerable erudition, it is possible that he was raised and trained in or close to the ambiance of Guarino da Verona or one of his disciples. Busta VI eives much evidence of Goggio's involvement in court business.

14 See above, n. 10. C. Trinkhaus, “In Our Image and Likeness“: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, I (Chicago, 1970), 392 (n. 16), lists this manuscript as having been “noted casually” from Kristeller's Iter. It was also cited by G. Bertoni, La Biblioteca Estense, pp. 163-164, who recognized the author's devotion to Eleonora.

15 L. Chiappini has written the only modern work on Eleonora and includes many documents: Eleonora d'Aragona, prima Duchessa di Ferrara (Rovigo, 1956). See also, by the same author, Gli Estensi (Verona, 1967), ch. 7. On Eleonora's library, see the inventory published by G. Bertoni, pp. 229-233. Goggio's book is included as item no. 61 in this inventory which is dated 1493. For a more extensive and detailed analysis of the cultural milieu surrounding Eleonora, see my essay “Women, Learning, and Power: Eleonora of Aragon and the Court of Ferrara,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. P. Labahne (New York, 1980), pp. 57—93.

16 See my Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Despotism, p. 172, n. 75

17 A good account of her actions, based on careful synthesis of the Ferrarese chronicles, is E. G. Gardner, Dukes and Poets in Ferrara (London, 1904.), pp. 189-197, also Chiappini, Eleonora d'Aragona, pp. 52-58. See also Art and Life at the Court of Ercole I d'Este: The “De triumphis religionis” of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, ed. W. L. Gundersheimer (Geneva, 1972), pp. 24, 54, 71-72.

18 See above, n. 15.

19 DLM,fol. 92.

20 There is some evidence that the work is a livre de circonstance. Goggio suggests (fol.3) that his theme will help the Duchess to overcome her grief at the recent departure of her son, Hippolito. The second youngest of her six children left Ferrara on June 18, 1487 to take up his duties as Archbishop of Esztergom, in Hungary, at the age of eight. Here I agree with the argument and dating proposed by Fahy, pp. 32-33 (see above, n. 8). This would have been an opportune moment to present a work that may have been in progress for some time. Given the colloquial tone of many passages, one might even hypothesize that the MS. may be the written version of a series of talks designed to entertain as well as to instruct.

21 The passage runs from fols. 15v-20. The most graphic sections are those describing the sufferings of St. Agatha (fol. 17) and St. Eulalia (fol. 18), but all of it is highly explicit. The conclusion reads: “Io non credo che cum penna de tute potesse scrivere ad pieno: faro questa conclusione che li hornini in comparatione ale done de costanza et forteza danimo non sono da nominare” (fol. 20).

22 See Summa Theologica, I, Q. 92, a. 1.

23 See De Generatione Animalium I, 20, for Aristotle's view of the passivity of the female.

24 For the Greek topos of arms and letters, and its Latin equivalent of ars et mars, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (New York, 1953; first published Bern, 1948), 178-179. Both of the great Ferrarese poets, Boiardo and Ariosto, use the theme, and Goggio might well have known Boiardo's treatment of it (Orlando Innamorato, 1, 18, 41-45). On the scholarly use of classical sources in the fifteenth century see R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 1969); Donald F. Kelley, Foundations of Modem Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970), esp. chs. 1, 2; E. Garin, Italian Humanism (New York, 1965; first published Bern, 1947, in German); R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954), chs. 6, 7.

25 DLM,fol. 27, where he refers both to the Asclepius and the Pimander. It may be that there was even greater awareness in Ferrara of the Platonic and Hermetic writings so closely linked with the Florentine neo-Platonic revival than E. Garin believed when he wrote “Motivi della cultura filosofica ferrarese nel Rinascimento,” in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961), pp. 402—431.

26 Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1949), p. 353.

27 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, I, 15-16; VI, 2.

28 Diodorus Siculus, , Bk. I, 18, 2.

29 Eusebius, Preparatio Evangelica, IV, 16, d; see also Flavius Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae, I, 4, sub. 3; and Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V, 14 (quoted by Eusebius).

30 Goggio would also have known, and might have used Augustine, De civitate Dei, XVIII, 23.

31 Possible sources for this section are Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, VI, 19; Strabo, Geography, II, 5, 4; and Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae, $6.

32 Orosius, Historiae, Bk. V, 16.

33 On late medieval preaching, and the attitudes towards women advanced by Dominicans and Franciscans in quattrocento Italy, see D. Hay, The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977), esp- cns- 4, 5, and the useful bibliography (pp. 159-176); J. R. H. Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to 1517 (Oxford, 1968); I. Origo, The World of San Bernardino (New York, 1962), and for the situation in Ferrara, P. T. Lomardi, / Francescani a Ferrara (Bologna, 1974); A. Franceschini, Spigolature archivistiche prime (Ferrara, 1975), esp. his article, “Confratemite di disciplinati a Ferrara avanti il Concilio Tridentino,” pp. 5—37.

34 Peter Lombard, Sententiae, II, 13.

35 he deuxieme sexe, I, 170. Many of Goggio's arguments reappear later (but, I am sure, independently) in the shorter, more schematic, and in some ways more powerful Latin treatise of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (c. 1529). C. Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana, 1965), offers a brief summary of this work. Given the similarities in the topics under which various fifteenth- and sixteenth-century authors consider women, it would be useful to have a comprehensive analysis of the ancient, patristic, and medieval loci from which they clearly descend. The more pressing task, however, is to clarify the strikingly diverse ways in which different writers used evidence drawn from these common sources. For example, Goggio's freedom from prejudice is striking in comparison both with male and female humanists, as may clearly be seen by comparing his treatment of Eve, which stresses her strength, with that of virtually all other defenders of women before 1500. They tend to stress her weakness or duplicity. What M. L. King has called the “implicit negative feelings” that accompany most discussions of the Amazons and such figures as Semiramis and Pope Joan are simply not present in Goggio's work.

36 Recent interpretations of Christine de Pisan's writings stress the moderation of her claims. Thus, C. C. Willard, “A Fifteenth-Century View,” (p. 116), points out that she “never even mentioned equality between the sexes.” At the same time, her reply to such misogynist texts as the Roman de la Rose appears to have had a much more practical aim than Goggio's work. She addressed her analysis to the status of women in contemporary society, moved beyond discussion of elites to express concern for a broader social spectrum, and argued for an expanded social role for women of all classes.

37 The phrase appears to be that of the editors, R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz, in the preface to the article by E. W. Monter, “The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft,” in Becoming Visible, pp. 119-136.

38 Willard, “A Fifteenth-Century View,” p. 116.