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Did Women Have a Renaissance?
by Joan Kelly-Gadol
Reprinted from Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthai
and Clandia Koonz 1977 by Houghton Mifflin Co. Used by' permission.
I first worked out these ideas in 1972-1973 in a course at Sarah Lawrence College entitled
"Women: Myth and Reality" and am very much indebted to students in that course and my
colleagues Eva Kollisclì, Gerald Lerner, and Sherry Ortner. I thank Eve Fleisher, Martin
Fleisher, Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz for their valuable criticism of an earlier
version of this paper.
One of the tasks of women's history is to call into question accepted schemas of periodization.
To take the emancipation of women as a vantage point is to discover that events that further the
historical development of men, liberating them from natural, social, or ideological constraints, have
quite different, even opposite, effects upon women. The Renaissance is a good case in point. Italy was
well in advance of the rest of Europe from roughly 1350 to 1530 because of its early consolidation of
genuine states, the mercantile and manufacturing economy that supported them and its working out of
post-feudal and post-guild social relations. These developments reorganized Italian society along
modern lines and opened the possibilities for the social and cultural expression for which the age is
known. Yet precisely these developments affected women adversely, so much, so that there was no
“renaissance” for women, at least not during the Renaissance. The state, early capitalism, and the
social relations formed by them impinged on the lives of Renaissance women in different ways
according to their different positions in society. But the starting fact is that women as a group,
especially among the classes that dominated Italian urban elite, experienced a contraction of social and
personal options that the men of their classes did not experience as markedly, as was the case with the
bourgeoisie and the nobility.
Before demonstrating this point, which contradicts the widely held notion of the equality of
Renaissance women with men, we need to consider how to establish, let alone measure, loss or gain
with respect to the liberty of women. I found the following criteria most useful for gauging the relative
contraction (or expansion) of the powers of Renaissance women and for determining the quality of
their historical experience:
1) the regulation of female sexuality, as compared with male sexuality;
2) women's economic and political roles, (i.e., the kind of work they performed as
compared with men, and their access to property, political power, and the education or
training necessary for work, property, and power);
3) the cultural roles of women in shaping the outlook of their society, and access to the
education and/or institutions necessary for this;
4) ideology about women, in particular the sex-role system displayed or advocated in the
symbolic products of the society, its art, literature, and philosophy.
Two points should be made about this ideological index. One is its rich inferential value. The
literature, art, and philosophy of a society, which give us direct knowledge of the attitudes of the
dominant sector of that society toward women, also yield indirect knowledge about our other criteria:
namely, the sexual, economic, political, and cultural activities of women. Insofar as images of women
relate to what really goes on, we can infer from them something about that social reality. But, second,
the relations between the ideology of sex roles and the reality we want to get at are complex and
difficult to establish. Such views may be prescriptive rather than descriptive; they may describe a
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situation that no longer prevails or they may use the relation of the sexes symbolically and not refer
primarily to woman in sex roles at all. Hence, to assess the historical significance of changes in sexrole
conception, we must bring such changes into connection with all we know about general
developments in the society at large.
This essay examines changes in sex-role conception, particularly with respect to sexuality, for
what they tell us about Renaissance society and women's place in it. At first glance, Renaissance
thought presents a problem in this regard because it cannot be simply categorized. Ideas about the
relation of the sexes range from a relatively complementary sense of sex roles in literature dealing
with courtly manners, love, and education, to patriarchal conceptions in writings on marriage and the
family, to a fairly equal presentation of sex roles in early Utopian social theory. Such diversity need
not baffle the attempt to reconstruct a history of sex-role conceptions, however, and to relate its course
to the actual situation of women. Toward this end, one needs to sort out this material in terms of the
social groups to which it responds: to culture-society in the first case, the nobility of the petty despotic
states of Italy; to the patrician bourgeoisìe in the second, particularly of republics such as Florence. In
the third case, the relatively equal position accorded women in Utopian thought (and in those lowerclass
movements of the radical Reformation analogous to it) results from a larger critique of early
modern society and all the relations of domination that now form private ownership and control of
property. Once distinguished, each of these groups of sources tells the same story.
Each discloses, in its own way certain new constraints suffered by Renaissance women as the
family and political elite were restructured in the great transition from medieval feudal society to the
early modern state. The sources that represent the interests of the nobility and the bourgeoisie point to
this fact by a telling, double index. Almost all such works—with certain notable exceptions, such as
Boccaccio and Aristotle—establish chastity as the female norm and restructure the relation of the
sexes to one of female dependency and male domination. The bourgeois writings on education,
domestic life, society constitute the extreme in this denial of women's independence. Suffice it to say
that they sharply distinguish a specific domestic realm of women from the superior public realm of
men, achieving a veritable "renaissance" of the outlooks and practices of classical Athens, with its
domestic imprisonment of citizen wives (2). The courtly Renaissance literature we will consider was
more gracious. But even here, by analyzing a few of the representative works of this genre, we find n
new repression of the noblewoman's affective experience, in contrast to the latitude afforded her by
medieval literature, and some of the social and cultural reasons for it. Dante and Castiglione, who
continued a literary tradition that began with the courtly love literature of 11th and 12th
century
Provence, transformed medieval conceptions
of love and nobility. In the love ideal they formed, we can discern the inferior position the Renaissance
noblewoman held in the relation of the sexes by comparing her with her male
counterpart and with her medieval predecessor as well.
Love and the Medieval Lady
Medieval courtly love, closely bound to the dominant values of feudalism and the church,
allowed in a special wav for the expression of sexual love by women. Of course, only aristocratic
women gained their sexual and affective rights in this way. If a knight wanted a peasant girl, the
twelfth-century theorist of The Art of Courtly Love, Andreas Capellanus, encouraged him "not [to]
hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace her by force.” Toward the lady, however, "a true lover
considers nothing good except what he thinks will
please his beloved"; for if courtly love were to define itself as a noble phenomenon, it had to attribute
an .essential freedom to the relation between lovers. Hence, it metaphorically extended the social
relation of vassalage to the love relationship, a "conceit" that Maurice Valency rightly called "the
shaping principle of the whole design" of courtly love. Of the two dominant sets of dependent social
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relations formed I by feudalism—les liens de dépendence, as Mare Bloch called them —vassalage, the
military relation of knight to lord, distinguished itself (in its early days) by being freely entered into.
At a time when everyone was somebody's "man," the right to freely enter a relation of service
characterized aristocratic bonds, whereas hereditability marked the servile work relation of serve to
lord. Thus, in medieval romances, a parley typically followed a declaration of love until love freely
proffered was freely returned. A kiss (like the kiss of homage) sealed the pledge, rings were
exchanged, and the knight entered the love service of his lady.
Representing love along the lines of vassalage had several liberating implications for
aristocratic women. Most fundamental, ideas of homage and mutuality entered the notion of
heterosexual relations along with the idea of freedom as symbolized on shields and other illustrations
that place the knight in the ritual attitude of commendation, kneeling before his lady with his hands
folded between hers, homage signified male service, not domination or subordination of the lady, and
it signified fidelity, constancy in that service. "A lady must honor her lover as a friend, not as a
master," wrote Marie de Ventadour, a female troubadour or trobniritz. At the same time, homage
entailed a reciprocity of rights and obligations, a service on the lady's part as well. In one of Marie de
France's romances, a knight is about to be judged by the barons of King Arthur's court when his lady
rides to the castle to give him "succor" and pleads successfully for him, as any overlord might.
Mutuality, or complementarity, marks the relation the lady entered into with her ami (the favored nanie
for "lover" and, significantly, a synonym for "vassal"). This relation between knight and lady was
very much at variance with the patriarchal family relations obtaining in that same level of society.
Aware of its incompatibility with prevailing family and marital relations, the celebrants of courtly love
kept love detached from marriage. "We dare not oppose the opinion of the
Countess of Champagne who rules that love can exert no power between husband and wife," Andreas
wrote (p. 175). But in opting for a free and reciprocal heterosexual relationship outside marriage, the
poets and theorists of courtly love ignored the all; most universal demand of patriarchal society for
female chastity, in the sense of woman’s strict bondage to the marital bed.
The reasons why they did so, and even the fact that they did so, have long been disputed, but
the ideas and values that justify this kind of adulterous love are plain. 6 Marriage, as a relation
arranged by others, carried the taint of social necessity for the aristocracy. And if the feudality
denigrated marriage by disdaining obligatory service, the church did so by regarding it not as a
"religious" state, but an inferior one that responded to natural necessity.
Moreover, Christianity positively fostered the ideal of courtly love at a deep level of feeling.
The courtly relation between lovers took vassalage as its structural model, but its passion was
nourished by Christianity's exaltation of love. Christianity had accomplished its elevation of love by
purging it of sexuality, and in this respect, by recombining the two, courtly love clearly departed from
Christian teaching. The toleration of adultery it fostered thereby was in itself not so grievous. The
feudality disregarded any number of church rulings that affected their interests, such as prohibitions of
tournaments and repudiation of spouses (divorce) and remarriage. Moreover, adultery hardly needed
the sanction of courtly love, which, if anything, acted rather as a restraining force by binding sexuality
(except in marriage) to love. Lancelot, in Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth century romance, lies in bed
with a lovely woman because of a promise he has made, but "not once does he look at her, nor show
her any courtesy. Why not? Because his heart does not go out to her. The knight has only one heart,
and this one is no longer really his, but has been entrusted to someone else, so that he cannot bestow it
elsewhere." 7 Actually, Lancelot's chastity represented more of a threat to Christian doctrine than the
fact that his passion (for Guinevere) was adulterous, because his attitudes justified sexual love.
Sexuality could only be "mere sexuality" for the medieval church, to be consecrated and directed
toward procreation by Christian marriage. Love, on the other hand, defined as passion for the good,
perfects the individual; hence love, according to Thomas Aquinas, properly directs itself toward God."
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Like the churchman, Lancelot spurned mere sexuality—but for the sake of sexual love. He defied
Christian teaching by reattaching love to sex; and experiencing his love as a devout vocation, as a
passion, he found himself in utter accord with Christian feeling. His love, as Chrétien's story makes
clear, is sacramental as well as sexual: . . . then he comes to the bed of the Queen, whom he adores and
before whom he kneels, holding her more dear than the relic of any saint. And the Queen extends her
arms to him and, embracing him, presses him tightly against her bosom, drawing him into the bed
beside her and showing him every possible satisfaction. . . . Now Lancelot possesses all he wants. . . .
It cost him such pain to leave her that he suffered a real martyr's agony. . . . When he leaves the room,
he bows and acts precisely as if he were before a shrine. (p. 329)
It is difficult to assess Christianity 's role in this acceptance of feeling and this attentiveness to
inner states that characterize medieval lyric and romance, although the weeping and wringing of
hands, the inner troubles and turmoil of the love genre, were to disappear with the restoration of
classical attitudes of restraint in the Renaissance. What certainly bound courtly love to Christianity,
however, aside from its positive attitude toward feeling, was the cultivation of decidedly "romantic"
states of feeling. In Christian Europe, passion acquired a positive, spiritual meaning that classical
ethics and classical erotic feeling alike denied it. Religious love and courtly love were both suffered
as a destiny, were both submitted to and not denied. Converted by a passion that henceforth directed
and dominated them and for which all manner of suffering could be borne, the courtly lovers, like the
religious, sought a higher emotional state than ordinary life provided. They sought ecstasy; and this
required of them a heroic discipline, an ascetic fortitude, and single -mindedness. Love and its ordeals
alike removed them from the daily, the customary, the routine, setting them apart as an elite superior
to the conventions of marriage and society. Religious feeling and feudal values thus both fed into a
conception of passionate love that, because of its mutuality, required that women, too, partake of that
passion, of that adulterous sexual love.
The lady of medieval romance also suffered. She suffered "more pain for love than ever a
woman suffered" in another of Marie de France's romances. As the jealously guarded wife of an old
man, ravished by the beauty of her knight when she first saw him, she could not rest for love of him,
and "frane et noble" (i.e., free) as she was, she granted him her kiss and her love upon the declaration
of his—"and many other caresses which lovers know well" during the time she hid him in her castle."
So common is this sexual mutuality to the literature of courtly love that one cannot take seriously the
view of it as a form of Madonna worship in
which a remote and virginal lady spurns consummation. That stage came later, as courtly love
underwent its late medieval and Renaissance transformation. But for the twelfth century, typical
concerns of Provencal locs-partitz, those poetic "questions" on love posed at court (and reflecting the
social reality of mock courts of love played out as a diversion) were:
"Must a lady do for her lover as much as he for her?" or, "A husband learns that his wife has a lover.
The wife and the lover perceive it—which of the three is in the greatest strait?"'" In the same vein,
Andreas Capellanus perceived differences between so called "pure" and "mixed" love as accidental,
not substantial. Both carne from the same feeling of the heart and one could readily turn into the other,
as circumstances dictated. Adultery, after all, required certain precautions; but that did not alter the
essentially erotic nature even of "pure" love,
which went "as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting
the final solace" (p. 122).
The sexual nature of courtly love, considered together with its voluntary character and the non
patriarchal structure of its relations, makes us question what it signifies for the actual condition of
feudal women. For clearly it represents an ideological liberation of their sexual and affective powers
that must have some social reference. This is not to raise the fruitless question of whether such love
relationships actually existed or if they were mere literary
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conventions. The real issue regarding ideology is, rather, what kind of society could posit as a social
ideal a love relation outside of marriage, one that women freely entered and that, despite its
reciprocity, made women the gift givers while men did the service. What were the social conditions
that fostered these particular conventions rather than the more common ones of female chastity and/or
dependence? No one doubts that courtly love spread widely as a convention. All ranks and both sexes
of the aristocracy wrote troubadour poetry and courtly romances and heard them sung and recited in
courtly gatherings throughout most of medieval Europe. But this could happen only if such supported
the male-dominated social order rather than subverted it. The love motif could, as Gottfried of
Strasbourg's Tristan (e. 1210) did, stand as an ideal radically opposed to the institutions of the church
and emerging feudal kingship. But in its beginnings, and generally, courtly love no more threatened
Christian feeling or feudalism than did chivalry, which brought a certain "sacramental" moral value
and restraint to the profession of warfare. While courtly love celebrated sexuality, it enriched and
deepened it by means of the Christian notion of passion. While the knight often betrayed his lord to
serve his lord's lady, he transferred to that |relationship the feudal ideal of freely committed, mutual
service. And while passionate love led to adultery, by that very fact it reinforced, as its necessary
premise, the practice of political marriage. The literature of courtly love suppressed rather than
exaggerated tensions between it and other social values, and the reason for this lies deeper than
literature. It lies at the institutional level, where there was real agreement, or at least no contradiction,
between the sexual and affective needs of women and the interests of the aristocratic family, which the
feudality and church alike regarded as fundamental to the social order.
The factors to consider here are property and power on the one hand, and illegitimacy on the
other. Feudalism, as a system of private jurisdictions, bound power to landed property; and it
permitted both inheritance and administration of feudal property by women." Inheritance by women
often suited the needs of the great landholding families, as their unremitting efforts to secure such
rights for their female members attest. The authority of feudal women owes little to any gallantry on
the .part of feudal society. But the fact that women could hold both ordinary fiefs and vast collections
of counties—and exercise in their own right the seigniorial powers that went with them—certainly
fostered a gallant attitude. Eleanor of Aquitaine's adultery as wife of the king of France could have had
dire consequences in another place at another time, say in the England of Henry VIII. In her case, she
moved on to a new marriage with the future Henry II of England or, to be more exact, a new alliance
connecting his Plantagenet interests with her vast domains centering on Provence. Women also
exercised power during the absence of warrior husbands. The Lady presided over the court at such
times administered the estates, took charge of the vassal services due the lord. She was the lord —
albeit in his name rather than her own—unless widowed and without male children. In the religious
realm, abbesses exercised analogous temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction over great territories, and
always in their own right, in virtue of their office. This social reality accounts for the retention of
matronymics in medieval society, that is, a common use of the maternal name, which reflects the
position of women as landowners and managers of great estates, particularly during the crusading
period. It also accounts for the husband's toleration of his wife's diversions, if discreetly pursued. His
primary aim to gel and maintain a fief required her support, perhaps even her inheritance. As Emily
James Putnam put it, "It would, perhaps, be paradoxical to say that a baron would prefer to be sure that
his tenure was secure than that his son was legitimate, but it is certain that the relative value of the two
things had shifted." Courtly literature, indeed, reveals a marked lack of concern about illegitimacy.
Although the ladies on the romances are almost all married, they seldom appear with children, let
alone appear to have their lives and loves complicated by them. Muddy as the tenet that love thrives
only in adultery reflected and reinforced the stability of arranged marriage, so the political role of
women, and the indivisibility of the fief, probably underlies this indifference to illegitimacy.
Especially as forms of inheritance favoring the eldest son took hold in the course of the twelfth century
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to preserve the great houses, the claims of younger sons and daughters posed no threat to the family
estates. Moreover, the expansive, exploitative aristocratic families of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries could well afford illegitimate members. For the feudality, they were no drain as kin but
rather a source of strength in marital alliances and as warriors.
For all these reasons, feudal Christian society could promote the ideal of courtly love. We
could probably maintain any ideology that tolerates sexual parity that:
1) it can threaten no major institution of the patriarchal society from which it emerged and
2) men, the rulers within the ruling order, must benefit by it.
Courtly love surely fit these requirements. That such an ideology did actually develop, however, is due
to another feature medieval society, namely, the cultural activity of feudal women. For as responsive
as courtly love might seem to men of the feudality whose erotic needs it objectified and refined, as
well as objectifying their consciousness of the social self /(as noble) it did this and more for women. It
gave women lovers, peers rather than masters; and it gave them a justifying ideology for adultery
which, as the more customary double standard indicates men in patriarchal society seldom require.
Hence, we should expect what we need find: women actively shaping these ideas and values that
corresponded so well to their particular interest.
In the first place, women participated in creating the literature of courtly love, a major
literature of their era. This role they had not been able to assume in the culture of classical Greece or
Rome. The notable exception of Sappho only proves the point: it took women to give poetic voice and
status to female sexual love, and only medieval Europe accepted that voice as integral to its cultural
expression. The twenty or more known Provencal trobairitz, of whom the Countess Beatrice of Die is
the most renowned, celebrated as fully and freely as any man the love of the troubadour tradition:
“Handsome friend, charming and kind, when shall I have you in my power?
If only I could lie beside you for an hour and embrace you lovingly— know this, that l'd give
almost anything to see you in my husband's place, but only under the condition that you swear to do
my bidding."
Marie de France voiced similar erotic sentiments in her lais, her short tales of romance. Often
adulterous and always sexual, they have caused her to be ranked by Friedrich Heer as one of the "three
poets of genius" (along with Chrétien de T'royes and Gautier d'Arras) who created the romnn courtois
of the twelfth century.1'' These two genres, the romance and the
lyric, to which women made such significant contributions, make up the corpus of courtly love
literature.
In addition to direct literary expression, women promoted the ideas of courtly love by way of
patronage and the diversions of their courts. They supported and/or participated in the recitation and
singing of poems and romances, and they played out those mock suits, usually presided over by
"queens," that settled questions of love. This holds for lesser aristocratic women as well as the great.
But great noblewomen, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie of Champagne, Eleanor's daughter by
her first marriage to Louis VII of France, could make their courts major cultural and social centers and
play thereby a dominant role in forming the outlook and mores of their class. Eleanor, herself grand
daughter of William of Aquitaine, known as the first troubadour, supported the poets and sentiments of
Provence at her court in Anjou. When she became Henry II's queen, she brought the literature and
manners of courtly love to England. When living apart from Henry at her court in Poitiers, she and her
daughter. Marie, taught the arts of courtesy to a number of young women and men who later dispersed
to various parts of France, England, Sicily, and Spain, where they constituted the ruling nobility. Some
of the most notable authors of the literature of courtly love belonged to these circles. Bernard of
Ventadour, one of the outstanding troubadours, sang his poems to none other than the lady Eleanor.
Marie de France had connections with the English court of Eleanor and Henry II. Eleanor's daughter.
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Marie of Champagne, was patron both of Andreas Capellanus, her chaplain, and Chrétien de Iroves,
and she may well be responsible for much of the adulterous, frankly sexual behavior the ladies enjoy
in the famous works of both. Chrétien claimed he owed to his "lady of Champagne" both "the material
and treatment" of Lancelot, which differs considerably in precisely this regard from his earlier and
later romances. And Andreas's De Remedio, the baffling final section of his work that repudiates
sexual love and women, may represent not merely a rhetorical tribute to Ovid but a reaction to the
pressure of Marie's patronage.16
At their courts as in their literature, it would seem that feudal women consciously exerted
pressure in shaping the courtly love ideal and making it prevail. But they could do so only because
they had actual power to exert. The women who assumed cultural roles as artists and patrons of
courtly love had already been assigned political roles that assured them some measure of
independence and power. They could and did exercise authority, not merely over the subject laboring
population of their lands, but over their own and/or their husbands' vassals. Courtly love, which
flourished outside the institution of patriarchal marriage, owed its possibility as well as its model to the
dominant political institution of feudal Europe that permitted actual vassal homage to be paid to
women.
The Renaissance Lady: Politics and Culture
The kind of economic and political power that supported the cultural activity of feudal noblewomen in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries had no counterpart in Renaissance Italy. By the fourteen century, the
political units of Italy were mostly sovereign states that, regardless of legal claims, recognized no
overlords and supported no feudatories. Their nobility held property but no seigniorial power, estates
but not jurisdiction. Indeed, in northern and central Italy, nobility in the European sense hardly existed
at all. Down to the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1530, there was no Italian king
to safeguard the interests of (and thereby limit and control) a "legitimate" nobility that maintain by
inheritance traditional prerogatives. Hence, where the urban bourgeoisie did not overthrow the claims
of nobility, a despot did, usually in the name of nobility but always for himself. These signorie, unlike
the bourgeois republics, continued to maintain a landed, military "class" with noble pretensions, but its
members increasingly became inherently the warriors and ornaments of a court. Hence, the
Renaissance aristocrat, who enjoyed neither the independent political powers of feudal jurisdiction nor
legally guaranteed status in the ruling estate, either served a despot or became one.
In this sociopolitical context, the exercise of political power by women was far rarer than under
feudalism or even under the traditional kind of monarchical state that developed out of feudalism. The
two Giovannas of Naples, both queens in their own right, exemplify this latter type of rule. The first,
who began her reign in 1343 over Naples and Provence, became in 1356 Queen of Sicily as well. Her
grandfather, King Robert of Naples—of the same house of Anjou and Provence that hearkens back to
Eleanor and to Henry Plantagenet—could and did designate Giovanna as his heir. Similarly, in 1414,
Giovanna II became Queen of Naples upon the death of her brother. In Naples, in short, women of the
ruling house could assume power, not because of their abilities alone, but because the principle of
legitimacy continued in force along with the feudal tradition of inheritance by women.
In northern Italy, by contrast, Caterina Sforza ruled her petty principality in typical
Renaissance fashion, supported only by the Machiavellian principles of fortuna and virtù (historical
situation and will). Her career, like that of her family, follows the Renaissance pattern of personal and
political illegitimacy. Born in 1462, she was an illegitimate daughter of Galeazze Maria Sforza, heir
to the Duchy of Milan. The ducal power of the Sforzas was very recent, dating only from 1450, when
Francesco Sforza, illegitimate son of a condottiere and a great condottiere himself, assumed control of
the duchy. When his son and heir, Caterina's father, was assassinated after ten years of tyrannous rule,
another son, Lodovico, took control of the duchy, first as regent for his nephew (Caterina's half
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brother), then as outright usurper. Lodovico promoted Caterina's interests for the sake of his own. He
married
her off at fifteen to a nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, thereby strengthening the alliance between the
Sforzas and the Riario family, who now controlled the papacy. The pope carved a state out of papal
domains for Caterina's husband, making him Count of Forlì as well as the Lord of Imola, which
Caterina brought to the marriage. But the pope died in 1484, her husband died by assassination four
years later—and Caterina made the choice to defy the peculiar obstacles posed by Renaissance Italy to
a woman's assumption of power. Once before, with her husband seriously ill at Imola, she had ridden
hard to Forlì to quell an incipient coup a day before giving birth. Now at twenty-six, after the
assassination of her husband, she and a loyal castellan held the citadel at Forlì against her enemies
until Lodovico sent her aid from Milan. Caterina won; she faced down her opponents, who held her six
children hostage, then took command as regent for her young son. But her title to rule as regent was
inconsequential. Caterina ruled because she mustered superior force and exercised it personally. To
the end she had to exert repeatedly the skill, forcefulness, and ruthless ambition that brought her to
power. However, even her martial spirit did not suffice. In the despotism of Renaissance Italy, where
assassinations, coups, and invasion were the order of the day, power stayed closely bound to military
force. In 1500, deprived of Milan's support
by her Uncle Lodovico's deposition, Caterina succumbed to the overwhelming forces of Cesare Borgia
and was divested of power after heroic defense of Forlì. Because of this political situation, at once
static and unstable, the daughters of the Este, Gonzaga, and Montefeltro families represent women of
their class much more than Caterina Sforza did. Their access to power was direct and provisional, and
was expected to be so.
In his handbook for the nobility, Baldassare Castiglione’s description of the lady of the court
makes this difference in sex roles quite clear. On the one hand, the Renaissance lady appears as the
equivalent of the courtier. She has the same virtues of mind as he and her education is symmetrical
with his. She learns everything—well, almost everything—he does: "knowledge of letters, of music, of
painting, and . . . how to dance and how to be festive."'7 Culture is an accomplishment for
noblewoman and man alike, used to charm others as much as to develop the self. But for the woman,
charm had become the primary occupation and aim. Whereas the courtier's chief task is defined as the
profession of arms, "in a Lady who lives at court a certain pleasing affability is becoming above all
else, whereby she will be able to entertain graciously every kind of man" (p. 207). One notable
consequence of the Renaissance lady's need to charm is that Castiglione called upon her to give up
certain "unbecoming" physical activities such as riding and handling weapons. Granted, he concerned
himself with the court lady, as he says, not a queen who may be called upon
to rule. But his aestheticizing of the lady's role, his conception of her femaleness as centered in charm,
meant that activities such as riding and skill in weaponry would seem unbecoming to women of the
ruling families, too. Elisabetta Gonzaga, the idealized duchess of Castiglione's Courtier, came close in
real life to his normative portrayal of her type. Riding and skill in weaponry had, in fact, no
significance for her. The heir to her Duchy of Urbino was decided upon during the lifetime of her
husband, and it was this adoptive heir—not the widow of thirty-seven with no children to compete for
her care and attention – who assumed power in1508. Removed from any direct exercise of power,
Elisabetta also disregarded the pursuits and pleasures associated with it. Her letters express none of the
sense of freedom and daring Caterina Sforza and Beatrice d'Este experienced in riding and the hunt.'"
Altogether, she lacks spirit. Her correspondence shows her to be as docile in adulthood as her early
teachers trained her to be. She met adversity, marital and political, with fortitude but never opposed it.
She placated father, brother, and husband, and even in Castiglione's description of her court, she
complied with rather than shaped its conventions. The differences between Elisabetta Gonzaga and
9
Caterina Sforza are great, yet both personalities were responding to the Renaissance situation of
emerging statehood and social mobility.
Elisabetta, neither personally illegitimate nor springing from a freebooting condottiere family,
was schooled, as Castiglione would have it, away from the martial attitudes and skills requisite for
despotic rule. She would not be a prince, she would marry one. Hence, her education, like that of most
of the daughters of the ruling families, directed her toward the cultural and social functions of the
court. The lady who married a Renaissance prince became a patron. She commissioned works of art
and gave gifts for literary works dedicated to her; she drew to her artists and literati. But the court they
came to ornament was her husband's, and the culture they represented magnified his princely being,
especially when his origins could not. Thus, the Renaissance lady may play an aesthetically significant
role in
Castìglione's idealized Court of Urbino of 1508, but even he clearly removed her from that equal, to
say nothing of superior, position in social discourse that medieval courtly literature had granted her.
To the fifteen or so male members of the court whose names he carefully listed, Castiglione admitted
only four women to the evening conversations that were the second major occupation at court (the
profession of arms, from which he completely excluded women, being the first). Of the four, he
distinguished only two women as participants. The Duchess Elisabetta and her companion, Emilia Pia
at least speak, whereas the other two only do a dance. Yet they speak in order to moderate and "direct"
discussion by
proposing questions and games. They do not themselves contribute to the discussions, and at one point
Castiglione relieves them even of their negligible role:
“When signor Gasparo had spoken thus Signora Emilia made a sign to Madame Costanza Fregosa, as
she sat next in order, that she should speak; and she was making ready to do so, when suddenly the
Duchess said: "Since Signora Emilia does not choose to go to the trouble of devising a game, it would
be quite right for the other ladies to share in this ease, and thus be exempt from such a burden this
evening, especially since there are so many men here that we risk no lack of games." (pp. 19-20)
The men, in short, do all the talking; and the ensuing dialogue on manners and love, as we might
expect, is not only developed by men but directed toward their interests. The contradiction between
the professed parity of noble women and men in The Courtier and the merely decorative role
Castiglione unwittingly assigned the lady proclaims an important educational and cultural change as
well as a political one. Not only did a male ruler preside over the courts of Renaissance Italy, but the
court no longer served as arbiter of the cultural functions it did retain. Although restricted to a cultural
and social role, she lost dominance in that role as secular education came to require special skills
which were claimed as the prerogative of a class of professional teachers. The sons of the Renaissance
nobility still pursued their military and diplomatic training in the service of some great lord, but as
youths, they transferred their nonmilitary training from the lady to the humanistic tutor or boarding
school In a sense, humanism represented an advance for women as well as for the culture at large It
brought Latin literacy and classical learning to daughters as well as sons of the nobility. But this very
development, usually taken as an index of the equality of Renaissance (noble) women with men.1''
spelled a further decline in the lady's influence over courtly society. It placed her as well as her
brothers under male cultural authority. The girl of the medieval aristocracy, although unschooled, was
brought up at the court of some great lady. Now her brothers' tutors shaped her outlook, male
educators who, as humanists suppressed romance and chivalry to further classical culture, with all this
patriarchal and misogynous bias. The humanistic education of the Renaissance noblewoman helps
explain why she cannot compare with her medieval predecessors in shaping a culture responsive to her
own interests.
10
In accordance with the new cultural values, the patronage of the Este, Sforza, Gonzaga, and
Montefeltro women extended far beyond the literature and art of love and manners, but the works they
commissioned, bought, or had dedicated to them do not show any consistent correspondence to their
concerns as women. They did not even give noticeable support to women's education, with the single
important exception of Battista da Montefeltro, to whom one of the few treatises advocating a
humanistic education for women was dedicated. Adopting the universalistic outlook of their humanist
teachers, the noble women of Renaissance Italy seem to have lost all consciousness of their particular
interests as women, while male authors such as Castiglione, who articulated the mores of the
Renaissance aristocracy, wrote their works for men. Cultural and political dependency thus combined
in Italy to reverse the roles of women and men in developing the new noble code. Medieval courtesy,
as set forth in the earliest etiquette books, romances, and rules of love, shaped the man primarily to
please the lady. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rules for women, and strongly patriarchal
ones at that, entered French and Italian etiquette books, but not until the Renaissance reformulation of
courtly manners and love is it evident how the ways of the lady carne to be determined by men in the
context of the relation of the sexes here assumed its modern form, and nowhere is this made more
visible than in the love relation.
The Renaissance of Chastity
As soon as the literature and values of courtly love made their way into Italy, they were
modified in the direction of asexuality. Dante typifies this initial reception of courtly love. His Viìa
Nuova, written in the "sweet new style" (dolce stil nuovo) of late thirteenth-century Tuscany, still
celebrates love and the noble heart: "Amore e 'I cor gentil sono una cosa." Love still appears as
homage and the lady as someone else's wife. But the lover of Dante's poems is curiously arrested. He
frustrates his own desire by rejecting even the aim of union with his beloved. "What is the point of
your love for your lady since you are unable to endure her presence?" a lady asks of Dante. "Tell us,
for surely the aim of such love must be unique [novissimo]1."1" And novel it is, for Dante confesses
that the joy he once took in his beloved's greeting he shall henceforth seek in himself, "in words which
praise my lady." Even this understates the case, since Dante's words neither conjure up Beatrice nor
seek to merit her. She remains shadowy and remote, for the focus of his poetry has shifted entirely to
the subjective pole of love. It is the inner light, his inner light, that Dante objectifies. His love poems
present a spiritual contest, which he will soon ontologize in the Divine Comedy, among competing
states of the lover poet's soul. This dream-world quality expresses in its way a general change that
carne over the literature of love as its social foundations crumbled. In the north, as the Romance of the
Rose reminds us, the tradition began to run dry in the late-thirteenth-century period of feudal
disintegration—or transformation by the bourgeois economy of the towns and the emergence of the
state.
And in Provence, after the Albigensian Crusade and the subjection of the Midi to church and
crown, Guiraut Riquier significantly called himself the last troubadour. Complaining that "no craft is
less esteemed at court than the beautiful mastery of song," he renounced sexual for celestial love and
claimed to enter the service of the Virgin Mary.21 The reception and reworking of the troubadour
tradition in Florence of the late 1200s
consequently appears somewhat archaic. A conservative, aristocratic nostalgia clings to Dante's love
poetry as it does to his political ideas. But if the new social light of the bourgeois commune found
little positive representation in his poetry, Florence did drain from his poems the social content of
feudal experience. The lover as knight or trobairitz thus gave way to a poet scholar. The experience of
a wandering, questing life gave way to scholastic interests, to distinguishing and classifying states of
feeling. And the courtly celebration of romance,
11
modeled upon vassalage and enjoyed in secret meetings, became a private circulation of poems
analyzing the spiritual effects of unrequited love. The actual disappearance of the social world of the
court and its presiding lady underlies the disappearance of sex and the physical evaporation of the
woman in these poems. The ladies of the romances and troubadour poetry may be stereotypically
blond, candid, and fair, but their authors meant them to be taken as physically and socially "real." In
the love poetry of Dante, and of Petrarch and Vittoria Colonna, who continue his tradition, the beloved
may just as well be dead —and, indeed, all three authors made them so. They have no meaningful,
objective existence, and not merely because their affective experience lacks a voice. This would hold
for troubadour poetry too, since the lyric, unlike the romance, articulates only the feelings of the lover.
The unreality of the Renaissance beloved has rather to do with the quality of the Renaissance
lover's feelings. As former social relations that sustained mutuality and interaction among lovers
vanished, the lover fell back on a narcissistic experience. The Dantesque beloved merely inspires
feelings that have no outer, physical aim; or, they have a transcendent aim that the beloved merely
mediates. In either case, love casts off sexuality.
Indeed, the role of the beloved as mediator is asexual in a double sense, as the Divine Comedy shows.
Not only does the beloved never respond sexually to the lover, but the feelings she arouses in him turn
into a spiritual love that makes their entire relationship a mere symbol or allegory.
Interest even in this shadowy kind of romance dropped off markedly as the work of Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio led into the fifteenth-century Renaissance, that of Greco-Roman art and
letters. The Florentine humanists in particular appropriated only the classical side of their
predecessors' thought, the side that served public concerns. They rejected the dominance of love in
human life, along with the inwardness and seclusion of the religious, the scholar, and the lovesick
poet. Dante, for example, figured primarily as a citizen to his biographer, Lionardo Bruni, who, as
humanist chancellor of Florence, made him out as a modern Socrates, at once a political figure, a
family man, and a rhetor: an exemplar for the new polis.22 Only in relation to the institution of the
family did Florentine civic humanism take up questions of love and sexuality. In this context, they
developed the bourgeois sex-role system, placing man in the public sphere and the patrician woman in
the home, requiring social virtues from him and chastity and motherhood from her. In bourgeois
Florence, the humanists would have nothing to do with the old aristocratic tradition of relative social
and sexual parity. In the petty Italian despotisms, however, and even in Florence under the princely
Lorenzo de' Medici late in the fifteenth century, the traditions and culture of the nobility remained
meaningful." Castiglione's Courtier, and the corpus of Renaissance works it heads, took up the themes
of love and courtesy for this courtly society, adapting them to contemporary social and cultural needs.
Yet in this milieu, too, within the very tradition of courtly literature, new constraints upon female
sexuality emerged. Castiglione, the single most important spokesman of Renaissance love and
manners, retained in his love theory Dante's two basic features: the detachment of love from sexuality
and the allegorization of the love theme. Moreover, he introduced into the aristocratic conception of
sex roles some of the patriarchal notions of women's confinement to the family that bourgeois
humanists had been restoring.
Overtly, as we saw, Castiglione and his class supported a complementary conception of sex
roles, in part because nobility that did no work at all gave little thought to a sexual division of labor.
He could thus take up the late medieval querelle desfemmes set off by the Romance of the Rose and
debate the question of women's dignity much to their favor. Castiglione places Aristotle's (and
Aquinas's) notion of woman as a detective man in the mouth of an aggrieved misogynist, Gasparo; he
criticizes Plato's low regard for women, even though he did permit them to govern in The Republic; he
rejects Ovid's theory of love as not "gentle" enough. Most significantly, he opposes Gasparo's
bourgeois notion of women's exclusively domestic role. Yet for all this, Castiglione established in The
12
Courtier a fateful bond between love and marriage. One index of a heightened patriarchal outlook
among the
Renaissance nobility is that love in the usual emotional and sexual sense must lead to marriage and be
confined to it—for women, that is.
The issue gets couched, like all others in the book, in the form of a debate. There are pros and
cons; but the prevailing view is unmistakable. If the ideal court lady loves, she should love someone
whom she can marry. If married, and the mishap befalls her "that her husband's hate or another's love
should bring her to love, I would have her give her lover a spiritual love only; nor must she ever give
him any sure sign of her love, either by word or gesture or by other means that can make him certain
of it" (p. 263). The Courtier thus takes a strange, transitional position on the relations among love, sex,
and marriage, which bourgeois Europe would later fuse into one familial whole. Responding to a
situation of general female dependency among the nobility, and to the restoration of patriarchal family
values, at once classical and bourgeois, Castiglione, like Renaissance love theorists in general,
connected love and marriage. But facing the same realities of political marriage and clerical celibacy
that beset the medieval aristocracy, he still focused upon the love that takes place outside it. On this
point, too, however, he broke with the courtly love tradition. He proposed on the one hand a NeoPlatonic
notion of spiritual love, and on the other, the double standard. 24
Castiglione's image of the lover is interesting in this regard. Did he think his suppression of
female sexual love would be more justifiable if he had a churchman, Pietro Bembo (elevated to
cardinal in 1539), annunciate the new theory and had him discourse upon the love of an aging courtier
rather than that of a young knight? In any case, adopting the Platonic definition of love as desire to
enjoy beauty, Bembo located this lover in a metaphysical and physical hierarchy between sense
(below") and intellect ("above"). As reason mediates between the physical and the spiritual, so man,
aroused by the visible beauty of his beloved, may direct his desire beyond her to the true, intelligible
source of her beauty. He may, however, also turn toward sense. Young men fall into this error, and we
should expect it of them, Bembo explains in the Neo-Platonic language of the Florentine philosopher
Marsilio Ficino. "For finding itself deep in an earthly prison, and deprived of spiritual contemplation
in exercising its office of governing the body, the soul of itself cannot
clearly perceive the truth; wherefore, in order to have knowledge, it is obliged to turn to the senses . . .
and so it believes them . . . and lets itself be guided by them, especially when they have so much vigor
that they almost force it" (pp. 33?-339).
A misdirection of the soul leads to sexual union (though obviously hot with the court lady).
The preferred kind of union, achieved by way of ascent, uses love of the lady as a step toward love of
universal beauty. The lover here ascends from awareness of his own human spirit, which responds to
beauty, to awareness of that universal intellect that comprehends universal beauty. Then, "transformed
into an angel," his soul finds supreme happiness in divine love. Love may hereby soar to an
ontologically noble end, and the beauty of the woman who inspires such ascent may acquire
metaphysical status and dignity. But Love, Beauty, Woman, aestheticized as Botticelli's Venus and
given cosmic import, were in effect denatured, robbed of body, sex, and passion by this elevation. The
simple kiss of love-service became a rarefied kiss of the soul: "A man delights in joining his mouth to
that of his beloved in a kiss, not in order to bring himself to any unseemly desire, but because he feels
that that bond is the opening of mutual access to their souls" (pp. 349-350). And instead of initiating
love, the kiss now terminated physical contact, at least for the churchman and/or aging courtier who
sought an ennobling experience—and for the woman obliged to play her role as lady.
Responsive as he still was to medieval views of love, Castiglione at least debated the issue of
the double standard. His spokesmen point out that men make the rules permitting themselves and not
women sexual freedom, and that concern for legitimacy does. Not justify this inequality. Since these
13
same men claim to be more virtuous than women, they could more easily restrain themselves. In that
case, "there would be neither more nor less certainty
about offspring, for even if women were unchaste, they could in no way bear children of themselves . .
. provided men were continent and did not take part in the unchastity of women" (pp. 240-241). But
for all this, the hook supplies an excess of hortatory tales about female chastity, and in the section of
the dialogue granting young men indulgence in sensual love, no one speaks for young women, who
ought to be doubly "prone," as youths and as women, according to the views of the time.
This is theory, of course. But one thinks of the examples: Eleanor of Aquitaine changing
bedmates in the midst of a crusade; Elisabetta Gonzaga, so constrained by the conventions of her own
court that she would not take a lover even though her husband was impotent. She, needless to say,
figures as Castiglione's prime exemplar: "Our Duchess who has lived with her husband for fifteen
years like a widow" (p. 253). Bembo, on the other hand, in the years before he became cardinal, lived
with and had three children by Donna
Morosina. But however they actually lived, in the new ideology a spiritualized noble love
supplemented the experience of men while it defined extramarital experience for the lady. Poor
women, chastity had become the convention of the Renaissance courts, signaling the twofold fact that
the dominant institutions of sixteenth century Italian society would not support the adulterous
sexuality of courtly love, and that women, suffering relative loss of power within these institutions,
could not at first make them responsive to their heeds. Legitimacy is a significant factor here. Even
courtly love had paid some deference to it (and to the desire of women to avoid conception) by
restraining intercourse while promoting romantic and sexual play. But now, with cultural and political
power held almost entirely
by men, the norm of female chastity came to express the concerns of Renaissance noblemen, as they
moved into a new situation as a hereditary, dependent class.
This changed situation of the aristocracy accounts both for Castiglione's widespread appeal and
for his telling transformation of the love relation. Because The Courtier created a mannered way of
life that could give to a dependent nobility a sense of self-sufficiency, of inner power and control,
which they had lost in a real economic and political sense, the book's popularity spread from Italy
through Europe at large in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although set in the Urbino court of
l508, it was actually begun some ten years after that and published in 1528—after the sack of Rome,
and at a time when the princely states of Italy and Europe were coming to resemble each other more
closely than they had in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The monarchs of Europe, consolidating
and centralizing their states, were at once protecting the privileges of their nobility and suppressing
feudal power." Likewise in Italy, as the entire country fell under the hegemony of Charles V, the
nobility began to be stabilized throughout sixteenth-century Italy, new laws began to limit and relegate
membership in a hereditary aristocratic class, prompting a new concern with legitimacy and purity of
the blood. Castiglione's demand for female chastity in part responds to this particular concern:" His
theory of love as a whole responds to the general situation of the Renaissance nobility. In the discourse
on love for which he made Bembo the spokesman, he brought to the love relation the same psychic
attitudes with which he confronted the political situation. Indeed, he used the love relation as a symbol
to convey his sense of political relations. The changed times to which Castiglione refers in his
introduction he experienced as a condition of servitude. The dominant problem of the sixteenthcentury
Italian nobility, like that of the English nobility under the Tudors, had become one of
obedience.
As one of Castiglione's courtiers expressed it, God had better grant them "good masters, for,
once we have them, we have to endure them as they are" (p. 116). It is this transformation of
aristocratic service to statism, which gave rise to Castiglione's leading idea of nobility as courtiers that
shaped his theory of love as well. Bembo's aging courtier, passionless in his rational love, sums up the
14
theme of the entire book: how to maintain by detachment the sense of self now threatened by the loss
of independent power. The soul
in its earthly prison the courtier in his social one, renounce the power of self-determination that has in
fact been denied them. They renounce wanting such power; "If the flame is extinguished, the danger is
also extinguished" (p. 347). In love, as in service, the courtier preserves independence by avoiding
desire for real love, real power. He does not touch or allow himself to be touched by either. "To enjoy
beauty without suffering, the Courtier, aided by reason, must turn his desire entirely away from the
body and to beauty alone, [to] contemplate it in its simple and pure self" (p. 351). He may gaze at the
object of his love-service, he may listen, but there he reaches the limits of the actual physical relation
and transforms her beauty, or the prince's power, into a pure idea. "Spared the bitterness and
calamities" of thwarted passion thereby, he loves and severs an image only. The courtier gives
obeisance, but only to a reality of his own making: "for he will always carry his precious treasure with
him, shut up in his heart, and will also, by the force of his own imagination, make her beauty [or the
prince's power] much more beautiful than in reality it is" (p. 352).
Thus, the courtier can serve and not serve, love and not love. He can even attain the relief of surrender
by making use of this inner love-service "as a step" to mount to a more sublime sense of service.
Contemplation of the Idea the courtier has discovered within his own soul excites a purified desire to
love, to serve, to unite with intellectual beauty (or power). Just as love guided his soul from the
particular beauty of his beloved to the universal concept love of that intelligible beauty (or power)
glimpsed within transports the soul from the self, the particular intellect, to the universal intellect.
Aflame with an utterly spiritual level (or a spiritualized sense of service), the son then "understands all
things intelligible, and without any veil or cloud views the wide sea of pure divine beauty, and
receives it into itself, enjoying that supreme happiness of which the senses are incapable" (p. 354).
What does this semi-mystical discourse teach but that by "true" service, the courtier may break out of
his citadel of independence, his inner aloofness, to rise and surrender to the pure idea of Power? What
does his service become but a freely chosen obedience, which he can construe as the supreme virtue?
In both it is sublimated acceptance or resignation and its inner detachment from the actual. Bembo's
discourse on love exemplifies the relation between subject and state, obedience and power, one that
runs through the entire book.
Indeed, Castiglione regarded the monarch's power exactly as he had Bembo present the lady's
beauty, as symbolic of God: "As in the heavens the sun and the moon and the other stars exhibit to the
world a certain likeness of God, so on earth a much liker image of God is seen in... princes." Clearly, if
"men have been put by God under princes" (p. 307), if they have been placed under princes as under
His image, what end can be higher than service in virtue, than the purified experience of Service? The
likeness of the lady to the prince in this theory, her elevation to the pedestal of Neo-Platonic love, both
masks and expresses the new dependency of the Renaissance noblewoman. In a structured hierarchy
of superior and inferior, she seems to be served by the courtier. But this love theory really made her
serve—and stand as a symbol of how the relation of domination may be reversed, so that the prince
could be made to serve the interests of the courtier. The Renaissance lady is not desired, not loved for
herself. Rendered passive and chaste, she merely mediates the courtier's safe transcendence of an
otherwise demeaning necessity. On the plane of symbolism, Castiglione thus had the courtier dominate
both her and the prince; and on the plane of reality, he indirectly acknowledged the courtier's actual
domination of the lady by
having him adopt womanly ways in his relations to the prince.
Castiglione had to defend against effeminacy in the courtier, both the charge of it (p. 92) and
the actuality of faces "soft and feminine as many attempt to have who not only curl their hair and
pluck their eyebrows but preen themselves . . . and appear so tender and languid . . . and utter their
words so limply" (p. 36). Yet the close-fitting costume of the Renaissance nobleman displayed the
15
courtier exactly as Castiglione would have him, "well built and shapely of limb" (p. 36). His clothes
set off his grace, as did his nonchalant case, the new manner of those "who seem in words, laughter, in
posture not to care" (p. 44). Castigl;ione’s courtier is to be attractive, accomplished, and seem not to
care; to charm and do so coolly—how concerned with impression, how masked the true self. And how
manipulative: petitioning his lord, the courtier knows to be "discreet in choosing the occasion, and will
ask things that are proper and reasonable; and he will so frame his request, omitting those parts that he
knows can cause displeasure, and will skillfully make easy the difficult points so that his lord will
always grant it" (p. 111). In short, how like a woman—or a dependent, for that is the root of the simile.
The accommodation of the sixteenth- and seventeenth century courtier to the ways and dress of
women in no way bespeaks a greater
parity between them. It reflects, rather, that general restructuring of social relations that entailed for
the Renaissance noblewoman a greater dependency upon men as feudal independence and reciprocity
yielded to the state. In this new situation, the entire nobility suffered a loss - hence, the courtier's
posture of dependency, his concern with the pleasing impression, his resolve "to perceive what his
prince likes, and . . . to bend himself to this" (pp. 110-111).
But as the state overrode aristocratic power the lady suffered a double loss. Deprived of the
possibility of independent power that the combined interest tests of kinship and feudalism guaranteed
some women in the Middle Ages, and that the states of early modern Europe would preserve in part,
the Italian noblewoman in particular entered a relation of almost universal dependence upon her
family and her husband. And she experienced this dependency at the same time as she lost her
commanding position with respect to the secular culture of her society. Hence, the love theory of the
Italian courts developed in ways as indifferent to the interests of women as the courtier, in his selfsufficiency,
was indifferent as a lover. It accepted, as medieval courtly love did not, the double
standard. It bound the lady to chastity, to the merely procreative aspect of sex in a political marriage,
just as her weighty and costly costume came to conceal and constrain her body while it displayed her
husband's noble rank. Indeed, the person of the woman became so inconsequential to this love relation
that one doubted whether she could love at all. The question that emerges at the end of The Courtier as
to "whether or not women are as capable of divine love as men"
(p. 350) belongs to a love theory structured by mediation rather than mutuality. Woman's beauty
inspired love but the lover, the agent, was man.
And the question stands unresolved at the end of The Courtier—because at the heart the
spokesmen for Renaissance love were not really concerned about women or love at all.
Where courtly love had used the social relation of vassalage to work out a genuine concern with sexual
love, Castiglione's thought moved in exactly the opposite direction. He allegorized love as fully as
Dante did, using the relation of-the-sexes to symbolize the new political order. In this, his love theory
reflects the social realities of the Renaissance. The denial of the right and power of women to love, the
transformation of women into passive
"others" who serve, fits the self-image of the courtier, the one Castiglione sought to remedy. The
symbolic relation of the sexes thus mirrors the new social relations of the state, much as courtly love
displayed the feudal relations of reciprocal personal dependence. But Renaissance love reflects, as
well, the actual condition of dependency suffered by noblewomen as the state arose. If the courtier
who charms the prince bears the same relation to him as the lady bears to the courtier, it is because
Castiglione understood the relationship of the sexes in the same terms that he used to describe the
political relation (i.e., as a relation between servant and lord). The nobleman suffered this relation in
the public domain only whereas the lady, denied access to a freely chosen mutually satisfying love
relation, suffered it in the personal domain as well. Moreover, Castiglione's theorv, unlike the courtly
love it superseded, subordinated love itself to the public concerns of the Renaissance nobleman. He set
forth the relation of the sexes as one of dependency and domination, but he did so in order to express
16
and deal with the political relation and its problems. The personal values of love, which the entire
feudality once prized, were henceforth increasingly left to the lady. The courtier formed his primary
bond with the modern prince.
In sum, a new division between personal and public life made itself fit as the state came to
organize Renaissance society, and with that division the modern relation of the sexes made its
appearance, (2) even among the Renaissance nobility. Noblewomen, too, were increasingly removed
from public concerns—economic, political, and cultural—and although they did not disappear into a
private realm of family and domestic concerns as fully as their sisters in the patrician bourgeoisie, their
loads of public power made itself fit in new constraints placed upon their personal as well as their
social lives. Renaissance ideas on love and manners, more classical than medieval, and almost
exclusively a male product, expressed this new subordination of women to the interests of husbands
and male-dominated kin groups and served to justify the removal of women from an "unladylike"
position of power and erotic independence. All the advances of Renaissance Italy, its pro-capitalist
economy, its states, and its humanistic culture, worked to mold the noblewoman into an aesthetic
object decorous, chaste, and doubly dependent—on her husband as well as the prince.
Notes
1. The traditional view of the equality of Renaissance women with men goes back to Jacob
Burckhardt's classic. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). It has found its way into
most general histories of women, such as Mary Beard's Women as Force in History (1946), Simone de
Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), and Emily Jaines Putnam's The Lady (1910), although the latter is a
sensitive and sophisticated treatment. It also dominates most histories of Renaissance women, the best
of which is E. Rodocanachi, La femme italienne avant, pendant et après laRenaissance, Hachette,
Paris, 1922. A notable exception is Ruth Kelso, Dottrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, University
of IIlinois Press, Urbana, 1956, who discovered there was no such parity.
2. The major Renaissance statement of the bourgeois domestication of women was made by Leon
Battista Alberti in Book 3 of Della Famiglia (e. 1435), which is a free adaptation of the Athenian
situation described by Xenophon in the Oeconomicus.
3. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John J. Parry, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1941, pp. 150-151.
4. Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the
Renaissance, Macmillan, New York, 1961, p. 146.
5. "E il dompna deu a son drut far honor/Cum ad amic, mas non cum a seignor." Ibid., p. 64.
6. Lanval (Sir Launfal), l..es lais de Marie de Franco, ed. Paul Tuffrau, L'Fdition d'Art H. Piazza,
Paris, n.d., p. 41. English ed., Lays of Marie de Franco, |. M. Dent and E. P. Dutton, London and New
York, 1911.
7. Excellent trans, and ed. by W. W. Comfort, Arthiirinn Romances, Dent and
Dutton Everymans Library, London and New York, 1970, p. 286.
8. Thomas Aquinas, Stimma Theologiae, pt. 1-2, q. 28, art. 5.
9. Lanval, Les lais, p. 10.
10. Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Sodai Cusloins of thè Sixteentli Century, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1920, pp. 10-11.
11. As Mare Bloch pointed out, the great French principalities that no longer required personal
military service on the part of their holders were among the first to be passed on to women when male
heirs were fighting. Feudal Society, | trans. L. A. Manyon, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1964, p. 201.
12. David Herlihy, "Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701 - 1200," Traditio, 18
(1962), 89-120. Also, "Women in Medieval Society," Thè Simili History Lecture, University of St.
17
Thomas, Texas, 1971. For a fine New York on abbesses, see Joan Morris, Tlie Lady Was a Bishop,
Collier and Macmillan, New York and London, 1973. Marie de France may have been an abbess of
Shaftesbury.
13. Emily James Putnam, Thè Lady, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1970, p. 118.
See also the chapter on the abbess in the same book.
14. From The Women Troubadours, trans, and ed. bv Meg Bogin, Paddington Press, New
York / London, 1976.
15. Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe (1100-1350), Mentor Books, New York, 1963, pp.
167, 178-179.
16. This was Amy Kelly's surmise in "Eleanor of Aquitaine and Her courts of Love,"
Speculum, 12 (January 1937), 3-19.
17. From The Book of the Courtier, by Baldesar Castiglione, a new translation by Charles S.
Singleton (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 20. Copyright 1959 by Charles S. Singleton and
Edgar de N. Mayhew. This and other quotations throughout the chapter are reprinted by permission of
Doubledav & Co., Inc.
18. Selections from the correspondence of Renaissance noblewomen can be found in the
biographies listed in the bibliography.
19. An interesting exception is W. Ong's "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty
Rite," Studies in Philology 56 (1959), 103-124; .also Margaret Leah King's "The Religious
Retreat of Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466)," Signs, Summer 1978.
20. Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, trans. Barbara Reynoids, Penguin Books, Middlesex,
England and Baltimore, 1971, poem 18.
21. Frederick Goldin, trans., Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouveres, Doubleday, New York, 3, p.
325.
22. David Thompson and Alan E. Nagel, eds. and trans. The Three Crowns of Florence:
Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccacio, Harper & Row, New York, 1972.
23. For Renaissance humanistic and courtly literature, Vittorio Rossi, II quattrocento, E.
Vallardi, Milano, 1933; Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, 1956. On erotic life, interesting remarks by David Herlihy, "Some
Psychological and Social Roots of Violence in the Tuscan Cities," Violence and Civil Disorder in
ltalian Cities, 1200-1500, ed. Lauro Martines, Univcrsitv of California Press, Berkeley, 1972, pp. 129-
154.
24. For historical context, Keith Thomas, "The Double Standard," Journal of the History of
Ideas, 20 (1959), 195-216; N. ]. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretive history
of Kiss Symbolism, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969;MortonHunt, The Natural
History of Love, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1967.
25. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean World, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1973; A,
Ventura, Nobiltà e popolo nella società Veneta, Laterza, Bari, 1964; Lawrence Stone, The
Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, Clarendon Press, Oxford,1965.
26. The status of women as related to the distinction of public and private spheres of activity in various
societies is a key idea in most of the anthropological studies in Women, Culture, and Society, eds.
Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, Stanford University
Press, Stanford1974.
Suggestions for Further Reading on Renaissance women:
• Stanley Chojnacki, "Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice,"
Studies in the Renaissance, 21 (1974), 1976-203;
18
• Susan Groag Bell, "Christine de Pizan," Feminist Studies, 3 (Spring/Summer 1976), 173-184;
Joan Kelly-GadoI, "Notes on Women in the Renaissance,"
Conceptual Frameworks in Women's History (Sarah Lawrence Publications, Bronxville, N.Y., 1976);
• Margaret Leah King, "The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola," Signs, Summer 1978;
• Kathleen Casey, "Reconstructing the Experience of Medieval Woman," Liberating Women
History, ed. Berenice Carroll (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1976), 224-249. With the
exception of Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (University of Illinois
Press, Urbana, 1956), and Ernst Breisach, Caterina Sforza: A Renaissance Virago (University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967), all other serious studies stem from the first wave of the
feminist movement. They form a necessary basis, although they concern themselves almost
exclusively with "exceptional" women and are not sensitive to socioeconomic factors. Among
them, Marian Andrews (pseud. Christopher Hare), The Most Illustrious Ladies of the
ItalianRenaissance (Scribner's, New York, 19047;
• Julia Cartwright (Mrs. Ady), Isabella d’Este, 2 vols: Dutton. New York 1904) and Beatrice
d’Est 1899); Ferdinand Gregorius, Lucrezia Bargia (Blom, 1968 reprint of 1903 ed.);
• E. Rodocanachi, La femme italienne avant, pendant et après la Renaissance (Hachette, Paris,
1922);
• T. A. Trollope, A. Decade o f Italian Women,Vol. 1. (Chapman & Hall, London, 1859).
• David Herlihy, "Mapping Households in Medieval Italy," The Catholic Historical Review, 58
(April 1972), 1-24; "Viellir a Florence au Quattrocento," Annales, 24 (November-December
1969), 1338-1352; "The Tuscan Town in the Quattrocento," Medieval et Humanistica, 1
(1970), 81-110;
• Richard C. Trexler are in History of Childhood Quarteria, 1, nos. 1 and 2 (T-173) demographic
studies on infanticide and foundlings in Florence;
• Gene Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (Harper, New
York, 1971). Excellent selections from wills, marriage contracts, government minutes, legal
judgments, etc.,
• Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood : A Social History of family Life (Knopf, New York,
1965) ; Histories of family life and childrearing among the courtly aristocracy of early modern
France supplements very nicely with Castiglione's portrayal of the courtier and court lady.
• David Hunt, Parents and Children in History (Harper, New York, 1972).
• Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965) is
indispensable reading for information about aristocratic social life.
Primary sources on medieval and Renaissance love used in the text in English translation are:
• Andreas Capeilanus, The Art of Courtly love (trans. John J. Parrv, Columbia University Press,
New York, 1941);
• of Marie de France (}. M. Dent and E. P. Dutton, London and New York, 1911);
• Chrétien de Troves's Lancelot from Artinninn Rolinnres (trans, and ed. W. W. Comfort, Dent
and Dutton Everyman's Library, London and New York, 1970); Baldassare Castiglione, The
Book of the Courtier (trans. Charles S. Singleton, Doubleday, New York, 1959);
• Dante Alighieri, in Vita Nuova (trans. Barbara Reynolds, Penguin Books, Middlesex, England
and Baltimore, 1971).
• F. X. Newman, The Meanings of Courtly Love (The State University of New York Press,
Albanv, 1967), for contemporary opinion and a good bibliography.
• Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love (Macmillan, New York, 1961).
19
• William Haller, "Hail Wedded Love," A Journal of English Literary History, 13 (June 1946),
79-97, (article on the literature of love, sex, and marriage in early modern Europe)
• Paul Siegel, "The Petrarchan Sonneteers and Neo-Platonic Love," Studies in Philolology, 42
(1945), 164-182. (article on the literature of love, sex, and marriage in early modern Europe)