The Defining Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Lamentably little attention has been paid to Italian culture of the eighteenth century, a subject that is often missing from academic curricula and disregarded in scholarly and popular depictions of the European Enlightenment. The long-standing neglect of this transformative moment in Italian cultural history has in turn led to an underestimation of Italy's role in shaping the ideals and practical reforms of the Enlightenment Age. Among the most striking contributions made by Italy to the larger Enlightenment project was an unparalleled re-conceptualization of women's roles in society and civic life. In no other European country during the period were there discussions that approached the importance and vigor of those among Italian writers on the "Woman Question." From Venice to Naples, Rome to Milan, Italian Enlightenment reformers eschewed the age-old question of women's innate "worth" that had so dominated the debate about women in preceding centuries. Instead they focused on women's practical influence on the "public good." Seen as a crucial subject in its own right, the reassessment of women's social functions also led to new scrutiny and reform of related socioeconomic issues, from public health to education, child-rearing to bourgeois consumerism. Indeed, of all the "old questions" revisited and revised during this period, the "woman question" consistently occupied the center of Enlightenment discourse. Even more significant, in no other European country did women attain the authority achieved by select learned women across the Italian peninsula. These exceptional women writers, scientists, artists, and musicians fascinated their European contemporaries and became, in fact, prime attractions on the Grand Tour.

In the eighteenth century Italy was still a geographical entity rather than a political one, comprising an assortment of separate city-states ruled, except for the Republics of Genoa and Venice, by the Catholic Church, hereditary princes, and foreign sovereigns. A politically unified Italy existed as an abstract conception only in the equally conceptual realm of the Republic of Letters. Yet, it was in this virtual republic that Italian thinkers sought to re-engage with the rest of the European intellectual community after a long period of cultural isolation and decline, and to distinguish their peninsula as a nexus of progressive erudition and enlightened social reform.

From the outset of this movement in the final decades of the seventeenth century through its culmination in the 1770s, learned women served as symbols of Italian cultural resurgence, especially in such hubs of learning and sociability as Padua, Venice, Bologna, and Milan. It was in Padua in 1678 that Elena Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman in Europe to receive a university degree. Her thesis defense in philosophy took place in the city's vast cathedral before civic and religious leaders and more than twenty thousand spectators. To honor her triumph and thereby enhance their own cultural standing, several academies made her a member, including the prestigious Paduan Academy of the Ricovrati, co-founded by Galileo. The conferral of a university degree on Cornaro Piscopia and her induction into eminent academic societies signaled an unprecedented institutional recognition of learned women as a sign of cultural advancement.

Four decades later, in 1723, it was the same Academy of the Ricovrati that hosted a formal debate on women's education to which upper-class women flocked in "marvelous numbers." Although the debate replayed traditional misogynist polemics from centuries past, women effectively changed its outcome. In response to the outcry from women that arose in and outside of Padua, which allowed only the education of select noblewomen, the Academy included women's voices of dissent alongside the original arguments in their publication of the debate text in 1729. Two rebuttals by the artist and playwright Aretafila de' Rossi and the nine-year-old prodigy mathematician and classicist Maria Gaetana Agnesi forcefully denounced women's social and intellectual subjugation. No longer isolated voices of dissent spoken from the cultural margins, as in the cases of such early defenders of women's rights as the Venetian writer Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) and cloistered nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652), these advocates for women's education asserted their arguments via a widely circulated publication of a revered scientific academy. Although the text of the debate constituted a virtual sphere of egalitarian exchange only, as the century progressed so did women's authority in actual institutions of the public sphere.

Not only were women inducted in increasing numbers into premier literary and scientific academies, women themselves began to found important academies, such as the Agiati and the Vigilanti. Women also gained unprecedented authority in the university. In 1732, the Newtonian philosopher Laura Bassi became the second woman in Europe after Cornaro Piscopia to receive a university degree. In addition, Bassi, along with the legal scholar Maria Pellegrina Amoretti, the philosopher Cristina Roccati, the classicist Clotilde Tambroni, and the anatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini, held vaunted university teaching positions. Interestingly, Maria Gaetana Agnesi declined a chair in mathematics at the University of Bologna offered to her by Pope Benedict XIV.

Women's influence also burgeoned across the literary spectrum, especially in the fields of translation and poetry. Indeed, the presence of women distinguished the most influential literary academy, the Arcadia, whose colonies spanned the peninsula. That presence was most famously honored by the crowning on the Capitoline Hill in 1776 of the Arcadian improviser Corilla Olimpica as poet laureate, the only woman in Italy ever to achieve this distinction. Though few, women editors and publishers contributed as well to the circulation of new texts and ideas. Elisabetta Caminer Turra edited three of the most important literary journals of the age and operated her own publishing house, which allowed her to shape Enlightenment thought as few others. In addition, women's authority extended beyond academic settings and texts to the visual and performing arts, from portrait painting to opera, theater to musical performance and composition.

As prime subjects of public discourse and influential actors in the public sphere, women thus shaped this critical age in Italian history.

--Rebecca Messbarger, Ph.D.

Dr. Messbarger is Associate Professor of Italian at Washington University in St. Louis. Her publications include: The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002; and "The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Women's Learning in Enlightenment Italy," co-edited and translated with Paula Findlen, in The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.