Worth of Women

320 Pages·018.17 MB·English

THE WORTH
OF
WOMEN
A Series Edited by
Margaret L. King and
Albert Rabil, Jr.
OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES
HENRICUS CORNELIUS AGRIPPA
Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex
EDITED BY ALBERT RABIL, JR.
LAURA CERETA
Collected Letters
EDITED BY DIANA ROBIN
TULLIA D'ARAGONA
Dialogue on the Infinity of Love
EDITED BY RINALDINA RUSSELL AND BRUCE MERRY
CECELIA FERRAZZI
Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint
EDITED BY ANNE JACOBSON SCHUTTE
ANTONIA PULCI
Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival
EDITED BY JAMES WYATT COOK
Moderata Fonte
(Modesta Pozzo)
THE WORTH
OF
WOMEN
Wherein Is Clearly Revealed
Their Nobility and
Their Superiority^ to Men
Edited and Translated
by
Virginia Cox
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago & London
Virginia Cox is a lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge and a
fellow of Christ's College. She is the author of The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary
Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1997 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1997
Printed in the United States of America
06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 0-226-25681-2 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-226-25682-0 (paper)
This translation was supported by a generous grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fonte, Moderata, 1555-1592.
[Merito delle donne. English]
The worth of women : wherein is clearly revealed their nobility and their
superiority to men / Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo) ; edited and translated by
Virginia Cox.
p. cm. — (The other voice in early modern Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-25681-2 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-226-25682-0 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Women—Early works to 1800. 2. Women—Social conditions—Early works to
1800. 3. Women—History—Renaissance, 1450-1600. I. Cox, Virginia.
II. Title. III. Series.
HQ1148.F65 1997
305.4—dc21 96-52270
CIP
® The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Series vii
Acknowledgments xxvii
Moderata Fonte and "The Worth oj Women"
Introduction l • Life and Early Works 2
Structure and Arguments 6 • The Question of Unity 9
"The Worth of Women" and Renaissance Literary Tradition 12
Fortunes and Influence 20 • Suggestions for Further Reading 23
Key to Abbreviations 2 4
Note on the Text 25
A Note on Fonte's Sources 26
The Worth oj Women
Dedicatory Letter 27 • Life of Moderata Fonte 31
First Day 43 • Second Day a 9
Appendix
The Theme of Women's Equality with Men
in Moderata Fonte's "Floridoro" 26i
Works Cited 26 5
Index 279

THE OTHER VOICE IN
EARLY M O D E RN EUROPE:
I N T R O D U C T I ON TO THE SERIES
Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr.
THE OLD VOICE AND THE OTHER VOICE
In western Europe and the United States women are nearing equality
in the professions, in business, and in politics. Most enjoy access
to education, reproductive rights, and autonomy in financial affairs.
Issues vital to women are on the public agenda: equal pay, child care,
domestic abuse, breast cancer research, and curricular revision with an
eye to the inclusion of women.
These recent achievements have their origins in things women
(and some male supporters) said for the first time about six hundred
years ago. Theirs is the "other voice," in contradistinction to the
"first voice," the voice of the educated men who created western cul
ture. Coincident with a general reshaping of European culture in the
period 1300 to 1700 (called the Renaissance or Early Modern period),
questions of female equality and opportunity were raised that still re
sound and are still unresolved.
The "other voice" emerged against the backdrop of a 3,000-year
history of misogyny—the hatred of women—rooted in the civiliza
tions related to western culture: Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Chris
tian. Misogyny inherited from these traditions pervaded the intellec
tual, medical, legal, religious and social systems that developed during
the European Middle Ages.
The following pages describe the misogynistic tradition inherited
by early modern Europeans, and the new tradition which the "other
voice" called into being to challenge its assumptions. This review
should serve as a framework for the understanding of the texts pub
lished in the series "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe."
Introductions specific to each text and author follow this essay in all
the volumes of the series.
vn
viii Editors' Introduction to the Series
THE MISOGYNIST TRADITION, 500 BCE-1500 CE
Embedded in the philosophical and medical theories of the ancient
Greeks were perceptions of the female as inferior to the male in both
mind and body. Similarly/ the structure of civil legislation inherited
from the ancient Romans was biased against women, and the views on
women developed by Christian thinkers out of the Hebrew Bible and
the Christian New Testament were negative and disabling. Literary
works composed in the vernacular language of ordinary people, and
widely recited or read, conveyed these negative assumptions. The so
cial networks within which most women lived—those of the family
and the institutions of the Roman Catholic church—were shaped by
this misogynist tradition and sharply limited the areas in which
women might act in and upon the world.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND FEMALE NATURE. Greek biology assumed that
women were inferior to men and defined them merely as child-bearers
and housekeepers. This view was authoritatively expressed in the
works of the philosopher Aristotle.
Aristotle thought in dualities. He considered action superior to
inaction, form (the inner design or structure of any object) superior
to matter, completion to incompletion, possession to deprivation. In
each of these dualities, he associated the male principle with the su
perior quality and the female with the inferior. "The male principle in
nature," he argued, "is associated with active, formative and perfected
characteristics, while the female is passive, material and deprived, de
siring the male in order to become complete." 1 Men are always identi
fied with virile qualities, such as judgment, courage and stamina,-
women with their opposites—irrationality, cowardice, and weakness.
Even in the womb, the masculine principle was considered supe
rior. Man's semen, Aristotle believed, created the form of a new hu
man creature, while the female body contributed only matter. (The
existence of the ovum, and the other facts of human embryology,
were not established until the seventeenth century.) Although the
later Greek physician Galen believed that there was a female compo
nent in generation, contributed by "female semen," the followers of
both Aristotle and Galen saw the male role in human generation as
more active and more important.
In the Aristotelian view, the male principle sought always to re
produce itself. The creation of a female was always a mistake, there -
1. Aristotle, Physics, 1.9 192a20-24 (The Complete Works oj Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes,
rev. Oxford translation, 2 vols. [Princeton, 1984], 1:328).
Editors' Introduction to the Series ix
fore, resulting from an imperfect act of generation. Every female born
was considered a "defective" or "mutilated" male (as Aristotle's termi
nology has variously been translated), a "monstrosity" of nature. 2
For Greek theorists, the biology of males and females was the key
to their psychology. The female was softer and more docile, more apt
to be despondent, querulous, and deceitful. Being incomplete, more
over, she craved sexual fulfillment in intercourse with a male. The
male was intellectual, active, and in control of his passions.
These psychological polarities derived from the theory that the
universe consisted of four elements (earth, fire, air and water), ex
pressed in human bodies as four "humors" (black bile, yellow bile,
blood, and phlegm) considered respectively dry, hot, damp, and cold,
and corresponding to mental states ("melancholic," "choleric," "san
guine," "phlegmatic"). In this schematization, the male, sharing the
principles of earth and fire, was dry and hot,- the female, sharing the
principles of air and water, was cold and damp.
Female psychology was further affected by her dominant organ,
the uterus (womb), hystera in Greek. The passions generated by the
womb made women lustful, deceitful, talkative, irrational, indeed—
when these affects were in excess—"hysterical."
Aristotle's biology also had social and political consequences. If
the male principle was superior and the female inferior, then in the
household, as in the state, men should rule and women must be sub
ordinate. That hierarchy does not rule out the companionship of hus
band and wife, whose cooperation was necessary for the welfare of
children and the preservation of property. Such mutuality supported
male preeminence.
Aristotle's teacher Plato suggested a different possibility: that
men and women might possess the same virtues. The setting for this
proposal is the imaginary and ideal Republic that Plato sketches in a
dialogue of that name. Here, for a privileged elite capable of leading
wisely, all distinctions of class and wealth dissolve, as do conse
quently those of gender. Without households or property, as Plato
constructs his ideal society, there is no need for the subordination of
women. Women may, therefore, be educated to the same level as men
to assume leadership responsibilities. Plato's Republic remained imagi
nary, however. In real societies, the subordination of women remained
the norm and the prescription.
The views of women inherited from the Greek philosophical
2. Aristotle, Generation oj Animals, 2.3 737a27-28 (Barnes, 1:1144).