Letters from the Cloister: defending the literary self in Arcangela Tarabotti's Lettere familiari e di complimento.

When the Venetian nun and protofeminist writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) published her Lettere familiari e di complimento in 1650, she positioned herself within a literary tradition that had gained new momentum in the sixteenth century and retained its cachet well into the next. No longer the sole province of Humanist writers, for whom letter writing had constituted a link to a classical tradition rooted in the letters of Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and Seneca, the epistolary genre had been revitalized with the publication of the first volume of letters of Pietro Aretino in 1538. (1) Written in the vernacular rather than Latin, the "new" epistolary genre was accessible to a broader public and supplied a discursive space in which nearly any topic could be broached--from quotidian observations to literary and political concerns, and, in some cases, religious dissent or social criticism. (2) Writers, male and female, were intrigued by the letter collection's boundless possibilities as a forum for public self-fashioning and responded with enthusiasm to Aretino's example. By the time of Tarabotti's collection, over 500 letter collections had been published in Italy, some 3/4 of these in Venice. (3)

Theorized throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as a natural, innately feminine practice distinct from other more "literary" forms of writing, the epistolary medium was, on one hand, considered particularly suited to women. Spontaneity and sincerity, thought to be "feminine" qualities, were prized in epistolary expression and, indeed, with the vogue for vernacular letter collections came a great interest in women's letters in particular, paving the way for collections by Lucrezia Gonzaga, (4) Chiara Matraini, Veronica Franco, Isabella Andreini and, of course, Tarabotti. (5) In spite of such gendered characterizations, however, epistolary writing was a complex endeavor for women writers, one that called into question not only ideas about "feminine" writing style, but also deepseated cultural conventions that equated female silence with that most prized of feminine virtues, chastity. (6) As literary texts which aspired to the appearance of unmediated personal exchanges, published letters blurred the gendered boundaries between public and private spheres, between speech and silence. The woman epistolarian engaged in what was considered a "private" or feminine literary medium, but, in giving voice to her experience, rendered that experience--and herself--public, available and accessible to her readers. The act of publishing her letters--or allowing someone else to publish them--was thus a transgressive one, likely to open her up not only to accusations of lack of literary merit in comparison to men, but to speculation about her moral character. As Elizabeth Goldsmith notes in a study of the French epistolary tradition, "To publish a woman's letters, even if the purpose of publication was to praise female epistolary style, was in some way to violate her personal integrity." (7)

What, then, did it mean for a cloistered nun such as Tarabotti to publish a collection of personal correspondence? As the author of a number of protofeminist and polemical works, Tarabotti was a well-known figure in Baroque Venice, a vocal participant in the ongoing querelle des femmes, or debate over women, that continued to be waged in the pages of pro- and anti-woman treatises in Italy, from Giuseppe Passi's Donneschi difetti (1599) to Lucrezia Marinella's Della nobilta ed eccellenza delle donne (1600), and Lucrezio Bursati's Vittoria delle donne (1621). (8) A fervent defender of women, Tarabotti was quick to respond to attacks against her sex: her Antisatira (1644), for example, was a biting response to a satire on female vanity by the Sienese academician Francesco Buoninsegni, (9) while a later work, Che le donne siano della specie degli uomini (1651), was composed to refute the more serious claim that women did not have souls, advanced in a sixteenth-century Latin treatise translated into Italian in 1647. (10) Tarabotti's earlier, unpublished works, the Tirannia paterna and the Inferno monacale, also took up the cause of women, condemning the practice of coerced monachization--the placing of girls with no religious vocation in convents, for primarily economic reasons--and arguing for the intellectual superiority of women to men. Both of these works circulated in manuscript; Tarabotti does not seem to have attempted to have the Inferno published, but we know from her Lettere that she tried repeatedly, and failed, to bring the Tirannia to press. (11) Her first published work was the more meekly titled Paradiso monacale (1643), in which she defended the convent for those with genuine vocation. (12) The Paradiso would bring Tarabotti her first real taste of literary recognition, yet even this seemingly orthodox text would eventually generate great controversy, as we will see further on.

As Tarabotti has become the increasing focus of scholarly investigation in recent years, attention has tended to center on her more overtly polemical works. Her letters, however, as is often the case with epistolary collections, have been largely relegated to service as a biographical resource: indeed, until recently, the most extensive treatment of the Lettere was to be found in Emilio Zanette's biography of Tarabotti, which is based largely on the information provided by the nun in her Lettere. (13) Yet such an approach does not account for the distinctly literary element of Tarabotti's letters or the degree to which the nun might have intervened in them in order to construct a public persona or respond effectively to her critics. Far more than a mere collection of correspondence, Tarabotti's epistolario is, first of all, a literary work. Although the fiction of a published letter is that it is a genuine, spontaneous document, untouched by artistic intervention, this was rarely the case with early modern letter collections. Many, if not most, early modern published letters were subject to revision prior to publication; still others were composed expressly for publication. Archival evidence demonstrates that Tarabotti, like many of her contemporaries, subjected her correspondence to a process of selection before unveiling it in public, choosing to exclude some of it from the printed collection, and publishing at least one letter in revised form, with an eye to her public persona. (14) The letters included in Tarabotti's epistolario are not a random sampling, but rather chosen, I would argue, to convey a particular image of the author. As Tarabotti's polemical works encountered increasing hostility among the Venetian literary community--manifested most clearly in accusations that she had not written them herself--the nun who devoted herself to the defense of all women found herself forced to defend a cause still closer to her heart: her own literary reputation. It was in this context of literary embattlement that Tarabotti, who had experimented with such genres as treatise and satire in the 1640's, turned her attention to the lettera familiare, a medium through which she could respond directly to her critics while rallying the support of her friends. Like Aretino before her, Tarabotti understood the power of the published letter as a tool with which to take note of one's friends (and profit from the public connection to influential figures) and punish one's enemies--and the nun had no shortage of either.

Critics have also tended to overlook the transgressive nature of Tarabotti's epistolario. Epistolary exchange, which formed the basis for most of Tarabotti's relationships beyond the convent, was strongly discouraged for nuns in seventeenth-century Venice. To go so far as to publish a book of familiar letters, therefore, was not only to challenge the cultural constraints on the female voice faced by all women writers in the early modern period, but to defy the actual restrictions placed upon nuns in particular. Why--and how--did Tarabotti undertake such a project? Did she, as a writer, enjoy privileges other nuns did not? Certainly her connection to some of the most influential figures in Venetian publishing must have protected and encouraged her literary undertakings.

This essay seeks to place Tarabotti's Lettere within the context of the convent in Counter Reformation Venice and in relation to the Venetian literary milieu to which she had close links. I will attempt to show how Tarabotti's letter collection was a direct response to the accusations that had been made about her works, beginning with the Paradiso and intensifying after the publication of the Antisatira in 1644, and that it was one of her boldest literary ventures. In the Lettere, Tarabotti sought to defend her literary reputation with the only tools she had: her pen and her understanding of the power of the epistolario to manipulate public perception. Yet in venturing into epistolary authorship, she transgressed the boundaries between public and private, male and female, convent and the secular world beyond it.

Tarabotti wrote and published her Lettere in the increasingly rigid climate of post-Tridentine Venice. In the wake of the Council of Trent's directives regarding Italy's religious communities, convent walls were reinforced, windows narrowed or walled over, and nuns forbidden to set foot outside the convent after the profession of vows. As a result of the Church's efforts to reform its convents and "protect" its nuns, Tarabotti's life as a woman religious was passed entirely within the private, wholly segregated space of Sant'Anna in Castello, the small Benedictine convent she entered as a girl and where she reluctantly professed her vows in 1623. (15) Increasingly, middle- and upper-class Venetian families were placing their daughters in convents as an alternative to marriage, whether in reaction to the increasing economic burden of overblown dowries, (16) or, as historian Jutta Sperling maintains, to avoid "downward" marriages in the face of a diminishing pool of suitable bridegrooms. (17) The economic rationale of the family was mirrored in the political rationale of the Venetian State, which encouraged the practice as a means of containing the power and reach of the patriciate. (18) Yet whereas just a century earlier such a destiny did not necessarily impose strict limits on women's contact with the outside world (indeed, nuns often left the convent for brief periods to visit their families (19), the picture was quite different by Tarabotti's time. In an effort to impose order and regularity on religious institutions, the Decretum de regularibus et monialibus issued in 1563 at the Council of Trent had made clausura, or enclosure, mandatory in all women's convents. Unlike many of the decree's other provisions, which were equally applicable to both male and female religious, clausura was intended only for women, alone considered in need of this degree of "protection" from the world outside. The imposition of clausura on women, as historian Gabriella Zarri points out, demonstrates the different value placed on the vows of chastity for male and female religious. (20)

If the preservation of female virtue was considered essential for all women, it was in the convents that this dictate was most tangibly realized. Indeed, the ideal structure for convents was a protected space (although not an isolated one, which might cause its own problems), with high walls, few windows, and a parlatorio--the space in which nuns could receive supervised visits from family or others with permission--protected by grates and small windows. These were to be opened only for certain religious authorities and immediate family, thus ensuring the separation of the nun from the outside world even in what limited contact was permitted her. (21) The convent, in effect, was reconceptualized and materially restructured to create what Sperling refers to as an "additional hymen," an additional, external barrier to safeguard the virginity of the women inside. (22)

Just as the physical containment of nuns within convents was intended to protect their honor by vastly limiting their contact with the world outside, so too efforts were made to prevent or limit a less direct form of interaction with that world: letter-writing. Like visits to the parlatorio, it was feared that epistolary exchange with the outside world might expose nuns to thoughts, material or contact with persons from which they ought to be protected. Letter-writing, like in-person visits, was to be strictly regulated and limited to immediate family and others with express permission, as we read in this decree issued to all female monasteries in Venice in 1636:

   Mossi da degni et importanti rispetti che concernono il servitio
   del Signor Dio, l'honore, la lama, et la quiete de' monasteri, et
   il riguardo del publico et privato beneficio ... commettiamo in
   virtu di santa obedienza a tutte le abbadesse, priore, et superiore
   che sono et che saranno pro tempore delli monasteri di monache a
   noi soggetti, che ne per loro stesse, ne per altre monache
   permettino in modo alcuno qualsivoglia visita o colloquio etiandio
   per poco spatio di tempo, e sotto qualsisia imaginabil pretesto,
   ne' parlatori o altro luogo, overo pratica et intelligenza, o per
   messi, o per lettere, o per via di presenti, o in altra maniera con
   persone straniere, o forestiere, ancorche fossero personaggi grandi
   cosi ecclesiastici come secolari di qualsisia grado, qualita, e
   stato, e sotto che colore esser si voglia, se non saranno parenti
   in primo o secondo grado di esse monache, o se non vi sara la nostra
   licenza speciale in scritto ... (emphasis added) (23)

The penalty for violating this decree was at least six months of confinement to one's cell, in addition to the suspension of parlatorio privileges, the revocation of a voice in convent affairs, and the suspension of eligibility for any kind of office within the convent. (24) Similarly, a 1644 order (issued in the same period in which Tarabotti was engaged in some of the very correspondence later published in her Lettere) of the Venetian patriarch Giovan Francesco Morosini exhorted nuns not to write letters at all, even to their most immediate family. (25) Even earlier, less severe regulations governing letter-writing insisted that any letters written or received by the nuns were subject to review by the Mother Superior to ensure that both content and correspondent were acceptable. (26) Bishop Antonio Grimani specified at the end of the sixteenth century that no nun should go to the parlatorio to receive letters, but rather that when a letter came for her it should be brought directly to the Mother Superior who after reading it might give it to the nun; the same process was to be followed when a nun wrote a letter. (27) Grimani went on, however, to recommend that nuns abstain from letter writing "se non quando hanno urgente necessita" because the "inquietudine" of writing could only disturb their tranquillity. (28)

If letter-writing, even to kin, was seen as a threat to the boundaries constructed between the cloister and the external world and thus strongly discouraged for nuns, then Tarabotti made a remarkably subversive gesture in not only writing, but publishing, a book composed entirely of personal correspondence. Although there were a few precedents for epistolary publication by women religious, such collections as those of the Dominican tertiary Osanna da Mantova, the Genovese nun Battistina Vernazza and, of course, Catherine of Siena, were--in addition to being published posthumously (and not originally intended for print)--distinctly spiritual in nature, distinguishing them from Tarabotti's manifestly secular letters. As historian Mario Rosa points out, Tarabotti's secular writings made her an "anomaly" at a time when nuns who chose to write usually produced spiritual works or devotional poetry. Her array of correspondents, moreover, is equally unusual: of 256 letters, a mere nine are addressed to family: two to Tarabotti's sisters, the remaining seven to her brother-in-law Giacomo Pighetti, who played an active role in her literary career. Tarabotti has several female corespondents (some of whom, like Pighetti, have a connection to the literary world), but the majority of the remaining 247 missives are directed to male writers, members of the French diplomatic community in Venice (who, prohibited from interacting with Venetian aristocracy for fear of espionage, often turned to the convents for conversation (29)), leaders (including Cardinal Jules Mazarin of France and two doges of Venice), and a very few religious figures. (30) The majority of Tarabotti's correspondents are of no relation at all to the nun; it is, moreover, unlikely that Tarabotti asked for and received permission to correspond with all of these persons as required by the order cited above.

Given such a climate of restriction, Tarabotti must have harbored some trepidation about succeeding in having her letters published. After all, she planned to publish an entirely secular work in which she, and her writing, were the principal protagonists, a defense of her literary oeuvre in which she would take aim at her enemies (and, not infrequently, at men in general) while praising her friends, many of whom would not be considered proper associates for a Benedictine nun. Not only was there no shortage of men (and even women) who might resent the way they were depicted in the Lettere, but objections were sure to be raised on the basis of the writer's religious status. As Zanette points out, there was no mistaking the nature of the Lettere, the manuscript of which must have exuded a "mondanita e ... spregiudicatezza, che non avrebbe potuto ingannare nemmeno il piu sonnolento e il piu cieco dei revisori." (31) Moreover, in addition to their almost single-minded focus on the writer's literary persona, Tarabotti's letters reveal a steady subtext of resistance to the fate of the monaca forzata. In several points, Tarabotti refers to the convent as a prison ("carcere") (32) and to herself as a "martyr" of religion (67); in one letter she declares that her pen (re)produces not precious gems, but rather the sighs of women imprisoned in convents ("povere incarcerate," 68). Nor does she miss the opportunity to target, as in her more overtly political works, the padri difamiglia guilty of putting these women there in the first place, predicting that they will be excluded from Paradise. (33) And yet, in spite of the secular quality of the Lettere and such challenging references to the practice of monacazione forzata and its effect on its victims, Tarabotti was able to obtain the licenza (34) necessary to publish the work. This was probably due in large part to Tarabotti's powerful allies among the Venetian literary elite, in particular Giovan Francesco Loredano, to whom the nun dedicates her epistolario, a founder of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti. (35) As historian Mario Infelise points out, Loredano was the "vero e proprio controllore dell'editoria veneziana degli anni '30 e '40," deeply involved in the city's literary scene in a variety of roles, from taking on new manuscripts for publication to examining page proofs. (36) Indeed, in an era of decreasing literary production in Venice (a result of the crisis years that followed the plague of 1630 and the increasing restrictions imposed on print culture in Counter-Reformation Venice), Loredano and the Incogniti were a driving force behind many of the new works being published. (37) Several letters contained in Tarabotti's published collection reiterate that Loredano played a role in the publication of Tarabotti's letters, helping the nun bypass the initial difficulties she seems to have encountered: Tarabotti recalls, for example, that it was Loredano who first urged her to publish them and who, "con gentilissime esibizioni s'offerse d'esser quel nume favorevole che le facesse comparir alla luce." (38) Loredano's involvement in the publication is confirmed by a letter found in his own epistolario, in which he apologizes to Tarabotti for the errors introduced into her Lettere during printing. (39) With his all-important connections to the world of Venetian publishing, Loredano's support was crucial to Tarabotti, if not always completely reliable. Although he encouraged Tarabotti to publish her letters, he lost interest in the project--to her consternation--at least once before helping her bring it to press. The ups and downs of this interaction are reflected in several letters published in her volume, but Tarabotti's dedication of her Lettere to him suggests that their relationship endured his periodic inconstancy.

Tarabotti herself was an astute literary negotiator when it came to her Lettere, and seems to have anticipated the criticism she might face in "going public" with her correspondence. In an effort to deflect such criticism, Tarabotti distances herself at points from the publication of her volume, stating in one letter that unnamed friends had collected her missives without her consent in order to publish them (209). This was not an uncommon strategy for epistolary writers, who wished to publish their correspondence while avoiding the taint of literary narcissism and preserving the veneer of intimacy and spontaneity so prized in familiar letters. Another letter published in the collection, however, reveals Tarabotti to have been personally involved in seeking the necessary licenza and privilegi for the Lettere. In a letter to an unnamed correspondent, possibly the politically well-located Bertucci Valier (who would later become doge), a member of the riformatori dello studio di Padova, the body responsible for issuing publishing permissions, (40) Tarabotti astutely links the Lettere to another work she wished to publish, one which would have been deemed more appropriate for a nun. This was the Lagrime written in honor of her deceased consorella Regina Dona, with whom Tarabotti had first entered the convent. (41) Tarabotti indicates that she expects the Lagrime, which are appended to the Lettere, to convince the censors to grant permission to publish both works together.

   I miei oscurissimi inchiostri sen vengono agli splendori di Vostra
   Eccellenza per impetrare lumi da poter anche loro legitamamente
   comparir nel Teatro del Mondo. Addimandano le licenze dal signor
   Secretario Quirini, e dal reverendissimo Padre Inquisitore, ne
   credo che Vostra Eccellenza neghi incontro felice a tal richiesta,
   mentre vedra nel fine dell'opera delineate le glorie della mia
   dilettissima amica. (199)

In her request, Tarabotti downplays her Lettere, which in actuality comprise the major focus of the volume (referring to them as the very "dark" or "obscure" products of her pen), in favor of the Lagrime, the "glorie"--that praise Regina's memory. The very phrasing of Tarabotti's request assumes that the presence of this smaller--and far less controversial--work will prove reason enough to publish the larger one. Even more interesting is Tarabotti's request that her application for a licenza be kept secret: "Supplico percio, genuflessa, Vostra Eccellenza favorite quell'anima santa ed ottenermi con celerita le licenze, ma che non si sappia ch'io le ricerca" (199; emphasis added). This stipulation suggests that Tarabotti, well aware of the potential objections to the publication of a book of personal correspondence by a cloistered nun, sought to stave off such opposition until the book had already been printed.

How had Tarabotti come to establish, from within the convent, the literary network she relied on to publish not only the Lettere, but her other works as well? Certainly Tarabotti's brother-in-law Pighetti must have played a key role. Married to Tarabotti's sister Lorenzina, Pighetti was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, the loosely-knit group of writers co-founded by Loredano and known for their often anti-clerical works. The group included such figures as Gerolamo Brusoni, the aspostate friar and novelist whose works La gondola a tre remi and Il carrozzino alla moda would be placed on Index; Francesco Pona, a Veronese doctor and the author of La lucerna, also placed on the Index, Giovanni Dandolo, a Venetian noble who wrote a letter of presentation for the Lettere; and Pietro Paolo Bissari, founder of the Accademia dei Rifioriti in Vicenza. It was almost certainly Pighetti who put Tarabotti in touch with Loredano; Pighetti may have also introduced Tarabotti to Angelico Aprosio, an Augustinian friar and bibliophile who was an early admirer of the nun. (42) Tarabotti's relationships with many of these men, however, would be fraught with tension, eventually disintegrating among accusations and deep animosity.

Initially, however, the members of the Incogniti seem to have had great admiration for the outspoken Benedictine nun, based largely on her Tirannia paterna, which circulated in manuscript, and on her Paradiso monacale, her first published work. We know from archival evidence that she sent both to Aprosio, whom she designated as her "defender" prior to their later falling out. (43) The Tirannia must have appealed to the anticlerical sentiments of the Incogniti, who would have admired the nun's bold criticism of coerced monachization (especially those Incogniti who, like Brusoni, were themselves unhappily consigned to the monastery). The Paradiso, too, the least polemic of Tarabotti's writings, elicited an initially positive reaction. Indeed, some of the most important writers of the period contributed poems to it, including Lucrezia Marinella, who had left her mark some years before on the querelle des femmes. Loredano, too, spoke admiringly of the Paradiso in his letters and wrote a letter of presentation for the text; Tarabotti repeatedly calls attention in her Lettere to Loredano's contribution, casting him as a champion who protects it against its foes (17). Other letters in Tarabotti's epistolario, moreover, show that the nun, confident of the good reception of her Paradiso, used the work as a means of introduction, sending copies of it to to the Doge of Venice, Francesco Erizzo, his future successor Francesco Molin, and others.

Yet from the beginning, accusations flew that Tarabotti lacked the erudition and education necessary for authorship, or, conversely, that the erudition of her works was such that someone had surely helped her to compose them. In the case of the Paradiso, Tarabotti's opponents--including former allies such as Brusoni and Aprosio--would eventually go so far as to accuse her of not having authored the work at all. Such allegations infuriated Tarabotti, who felt she understood the motivations behind them. As she would write in the Antisatira, men, not content to exclude women systematically from learning, were so threatened by women's intellectual potential that they could not believe women could write without male assistance. This, she continues, is precisely what happened with regard to the Paradiso:

   Percio e avvenuto che molti maligni o ignoranti asseriscano che 'l
   Paradiso monacale non possa esser dettame dell'ingegno mio, o volo
   della mia penna, o pur, che, essendo, sia anche necessita ch'abbia
   ricevuto ornamento, fregi, e ricchezze di tratti di filosofia e
   telogia da spiriti elevati e intelligenti. (Antisatira 74)

Tarabotti's consciousness of her vulnerability to such allegations is constantly reflected in her Lettere. Removed from the literary world not only by sex but by her physical confinement within the convent of Sant'Anna, Tarabotti had only her pen with which to defend her name and her work. Her discomfort with this position is evident throughout her letters, which she uses as a forum in which to confront and dismantle negative claims about all of her works, from the unpublished Tirannia paterna to the Paradiso and the Antisatira, all of which were in danger of being marked as "imposters." Tarabotti understood that she could use the public space of her Lettere to turn the tables on her literary foes, re-presenting key episodes such as her falling out with Aprosio from her point of view and shaping her readers' interpretation of events. By providing in the Lettere glimpses into the conception, composition, circulation, and reception of her other works, Tarabotti invokes the first-person authority of letters to persuade readers of her authorial authority and to set the parameters for any debate over her works.

It is within this defensive framework that Tarabotti begins to unravel for readers of the Lettere the complicated background to the rumors about her Antisatira and Paradiso monacale, which constitutes a significant portion of the letters. She repeatedly explains--in order to deride--the true nature of the allegations, responding, for example, to the doubts Aprosio has expressed concerning the authorship of her works with the maternal language typical of her references to her writing: "... i miei parti non ebbero giamai altro padre ch'e il mio rozzo ingegno, ne altra madre chela mia stessa ignoranza, e chi altramente suppone se n'inganna" (25). In another letter, she ties Aprosio's accusations into a broader context of misogyny stretching back to the story of Adam and Eve, noting:

   M'e arrivato all'orrecchio che Vostra Paternita abbia qualche
   dubbio che 'l Paradiso monacale uscito alla luce delle stampe non
   sia opera dell'ingegno mio; forsi ch'ella non creda ch'una femina,
   in emenda della prima delle donne che distrusse un paradiso, possa
   formarne un nuovo. (77-78)

Tarabotti turns Aprosio's insinuations on end, however, by noting that they are actually a form of praise. They imply that her critics find her work so good that they can only assume it has been written by a more experienced or gifted writer than she (78).

Tarabotti also responds in the Lettere to criticism concerning actual errors in the Paradiso, arguing that the errors were introduced by the printer, Oddoni. (44) She complains, however, that "Gli errori sono infiniti, e di maniera conspicui, che non paiono della stampa ma di chi ha scritto" (117). The distinction is significant: the errors are especially vexing because they are not common printers' errors, and might appear to be those of Tarabotti herself. (45) Ever conscious of her vulnerability as a woman author and as a nun, Tarabotti knows that her public will be quick to turn on her. "Mi sento morire di passione," she writes, "perche a questo modo non posso se non tirarmi dietro le risa d'ognuno, tanto piu che come donna, parera al volgo ch'abbia voluto a guisa di scimia immitar i litterati senza saper quello che mi dica" (117). Similarly, she insists that the errors in the Paradiso's Latin citations are not hers and offers the testimony of her correspondent Giovanni Polani as corroboration of her claim: "Che nel Paradiso vi siano molti errori nelle sentenze latine lo so anch'io, ma sono piu della stampa che miei, come l'illustrissimo signor Gio[vanni] Polani e altri ne ponno far fede" (127). At the same time, she frequently falls back disingenuously on stereotypical ideas about untrained women writers to deflect such criticism, modestly reminding one correspondent of the errors to be found in the work of a woman who

   dalla gramatica o da altre scienze non ha avuto un lume
   imaginabile, e nell'ortografia non si serve d'altra regola che del
   dizionario. In una tale, non avvezza a scrivere se non qualche
   lettera, non puo esser capacita a bastanza per componere senza
   spropositi. (68) (46)

If there was controversy over the Paradiso, it was the publication of the still more controversial Antisatira the following year that fanned the flames. After 1644, even those who had praised the Paradiso shifted sides, as Tarabotti herself remarks in one letter: "... questi gran scrittori che gia con mille adulazioni avendomi loro esortata ad esponer alla publica luce il mio Paradiso monacale, ora con perfidia ... lo biasimano, e dubitano se possa esser frutto de' miei sudori ..." (34). Several writers prepared responses of their own to the Antisatira, including Brusoni, whose Antisatira satirizzata (which does not appear to have been published) Tarabotti deigns "the best of them" (145), and Aprosio, whose vitriolic and personal attack on the nun, the Maschera scoperta, threatened to expose her as the woman behind the initials "D[onna]A[rcangela] T[arabotti]" under which the work had been published. Tarabotti's Antisatira was certainly not the first parry in the ongoing querelle des femmes in Venice. Indeed, both Marinella and Moderata Fonte before her had argued for the superiority of women to men. Why, then, did the Antisatira elicit such reaction, whereas the equally provocative (albeit unpublished) Tirannia had received only applause? Even Aprosio, now Tarabotti's most ardent foe, had read the Tirannia with admiration. The Tirannia, however, had targeted the state and the social structures responsible for a particular problem: the forced monachization of girls too young to give informed consent. It touched on issues of authority and religious and social dissent that were in keeping with the Incogniti's own views (one need only think of the Dianea of Loredano or the satirical Anima del Pallavicino, also probably the work of Loredano (47)), while remaining within the context of Tarabotti's experience as a cloistered nun. The Antisatira, on the other hand, was a decidedly secular work with a much broader focus: it targeted men in general, pointing out their vanities and shortcomings in a manner that if satirical, was taken seriously. In addition, Tarabotti was responding directly to Buoninsegni in the Antisatira, a figure esteemed by the Incogniti. Although Tarabotti herself insisted that she had great professional admiration for Buoninsegni and pointedly excluded him from the men she parodied in her Antisatira, and although Buoninsegni himself claimed to have only respect and appreciation for the Antisatira, (48) others took offense as what they perceived as a personal attack on Buoninsegni. Loredano, for example, complained that Tarabotti had shown herself to be "most ungrateful," while Aprosio professed himself shocked by her extreme "impertinence." (49) Tarabotti's critics expressed their disapproval by insisting that the Antisatira and the Paradiso were so different in style that they could not have come from the same pen. Tarabotti responds disdainfully to this argument in her Lettere, remarking, for example, to Pighetti that it betrays a remarkable lack of understanding of the craft of writing. "Poca pratica di scrivere debbono aver certo questi tali," she scoffs, "mentre si maravigliano che lo stile del Paradiso sia differente da quello dell'Antisatira, onde mostrano di non sapere che lo stile va diversificato in conformita delle materie" (159). Similarly, in a letter to Enrico Cornaro, a lawyer and writer to whom Tarabotti addresses a number of letters, the nun explains that she is sending him two of her works "tanto differenti di materia, di stile, e di concetti, ch'a pena paiono fratelli ..."--that is, the Paradiso and the Antisatira--but pointedly adds that this is merely the opinion of "gente ch'ha poca cognizione come si scrive"; whereas her worthy correspondent need not be reminded of the "necessita di diversificar lo stile in conformita della materia che si tratta" (263-4). In both letters, Tarabotti seizes upon her detractors' own criticisms to portray them as dilettantes who, unable to grasp the essential relationship between style and content, can hardly call themselves writers; Tarabotti, by contrast, implies that she is a true writer, able to grasp such complexities.

By inserting numerous letters related to the furor over the Antisatira into the collection, Tarabotti is able to respond to and disparage the accusations of her critics while guiding the reactions of her readers to that episode, which was the catalyst for her falling out with her former allies Aprosio, Pighetti, and even Loredano. Tarabotti reveals how Pighetti angered and disappointed her by siding with Aprosio against the Antisatira and refusing to acknowledge his early support of the text, and how Aprosio infuriated her with his ungentlemanly bid to expose her in his Maschera scoperta as the "D.A.T." whose name appeared on the frontispiece of the work. Upon seeing a copy of Aprosio's manuscript, (50) Tarabotti set out, successfully, to have its publication suppressed--another remarkable indication of the contacts she had managed to establish within the publishing world. Although the nun rejected Pighetti's protestations of innocence regarding his involvement in the affair, she eventually softened toward him for his role in the matter (254), but no such rapprochement was forthcoming with Aprosio, who continued to deny that he meant to reveal her as the author of the Antisatira. Tarabotti makes short work of this denial, informing her adversary that she has seen the manuscript of the Maschera scoperta and there can be no mistake. The frontispiece clearly reveals her name, and she sends it back to him as incontrovertible proof (252). Insisting that she did not mean to keep the Maschera from being published, but only to force Aprosio to refrain from naming her (253), Tarabotti establishes herself in a position of moral and literary superiority, using to her advantage the deep-seated ideas about women and public exposure she was accustomed to fight (and indeed flouted entirely in her Lettere).

Tarabotti takes a similar tack in a letter to another correspondent, the Duke of Parma (whom she mistakenly identifies as Ferdinando, rather than Odoardo, Farnese, an error that may indicate this was not a letter she actually sent), describing reaction to the Antisatira and focusing particularly on the mean-spirited response prepared by Aprosio. Here, too, she uses her status as a cloistered nun to her advantage, casting herself as a vulnerable innocent set upon by a pack of wolves. Pointedly, she remarks that not only do her foes come at her in numbers--something by which she pretends to be flattered--but some attack in disguise, "incogniti sott'abiti ingannevoli" (32). Her words here are a clear reference to Aprosio--a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti--and his Maschera, written under a pseudonym even as it proposed to expose Tarabotti's authorial identity. Tarabotti then goes on to argue that her Antisatira does not target all men, only those guilty of the vices she condemns. By attacking the Antisatira so virulently, writes Tarabotti, her foes show themselves to be threatened by its content, and thus part of the group she targets:

   Vostra Serenita c'ha letto il mio libro sa benissimo che faccio
   una solenne dichiarazione quando patio contro degli uomini
   d'escludere i buoni; onde costoro col tentar di vendicarsi contro
   di me, si dichiarano offesi, e in conseguenza rei, e
   dell'universita dei peggiori. (33)

By including in her Lettere such missives dealing head-on with the furor over her works, Tarabotti exposes the controversy for what it is: male hostility to women's speech, as she explains to Guid' Ascania Orsi, an educated noblewoman who also corresponded with Loredano: "[M]ettere alla stampa ci vuole una gran testa," Tarabotti tells her friend, "essendo che tutti vogliono dir la sua particolarmente contro di noi, perche ostinatemente gli uomini non vogliono che le donne sappiano comporre senza di loro" (46). Subverting characterizations of the familiar letter as non-literary, non-threatening, and specifically "feminine," Tarabotti uses her epistolario as a platform from which to participate in public debate with the literary community beyond the convent walls, a forum in which to mount a pointed defense of her literary persona.

The Lettere, then, are much more than a collection of personal correspondence cobbled together for publication. Rather, they constitute a deliberate project of literary self-construction and an astute manipulation of a highly popular genre. Just as several of Tarabotti's other works can be characterized as defensively dialogic--the Antisatira a direct response to Buoninsegni's critique of women, the later Che le donne siano a rebuttal of the claim that women did not have souls--so too the Lettere, the most overtly dialogic of all Tarabotti's works, serve as a kind of defensive literary history, a blow-by-blow (and sometimes contradictory) account of Tarabotti's works from inception to publication, aimed at establishing her as the author of the works while revealing the inconstancy of her male critics.

That Tarabotti saw her Lettere as tangible proof of her literary integrity is made particularly clear in a letter directed to Henri Bretel de Gremonville, the French ambassador to Venice (141-44), who had become a dear friend. (51) Bretel de Gremonville, who boarded his two daughters in the convent of Sant'Anna, turned to the convent parlatorio for conversation and friendship: both he and his wife visited and corresponded with Tarabotti frequently. (52) Tarabotti explains to the Ambassador that her principal motive in publishing her Lettere is to defend herself against the hostile response to her works and to preserve her literary reputation. Incensed by the questioning of her authorship, Tarabotti tells Bretel de Gremonville that her published letters are intended to combat such malicious rumors. First, the Lettere will demonstrate that she is a capable and accomplished writer who counts many illustrious figures among her correspondents. Second, by following her familiar correspondence as it develops, her readers will be able to trace Tarabotti's literary history: they will see for themselves how she has struggled over the composition and publication of her works, and they will be convinced of their legitimacy. Finally, her correspondents will attest to the authenticity of the letters themselves, verifying that they appear in the same form in which they were originally dispatched. Tarabotti explains to Bretel de Gremonville:

   Tuttavolta, dicano cio che vogliono, lasciamoli ciarlare, gia che
   il mondo in un volume delle mie lettere, che fra poco si lasciera
   veder alia luce, potra comprendere s'e vera quella ciancia che i
   miei scritti abbiano bisogno della lor lima per illustrarsi. Vostra
   Eccellenza e altri soggetti di vaglia potranno sempre attestare se
   le mie lettere siano capitate nelle loro gloriose mani in quella
   forma, per apunto, che saranno impresse dallo stampatore. (143-44)

By studying her literary history, Tarabotti suggests, her authorship of all her works can be vindicated. By making public what was once private, by exposing her familiar correspondence--and with it, the background of her literary evolution--to the eyes of the general reader, Tarabotti proposes to protect her literary reputation. Her Lettere become a public exposure of the private motivations behind such literary intrigues as Aprosio's efforts to malign Tarabotti in the Maschera on the one hand, and, on the other, a validation of authorship, via the private evidence of epistolary testimony. Tarabotti embraces the legitimacy of her entire body of work in the Lettere as if it were her biological offspring, declaring, "Ne vi sia piu chi creda i miei parti essere adulterini, gia ch'io a guisa dell'acqullotto li faccio conoscere ad ogn'uno per legittimi" (63). The Lettere familiarie di complimento constitute Tarabotti's determined effort to abolish any doubt regarding her works and replace it with an enduring epistolary representation in which it is she who shapes the interpretation of her literary history. Defying the constraints on epistolary communication for nuns, Tarabotti mines her literary past to shape and re-present that story with the authority that epistolary exchange evokes. An important example of the ways in which epistolary writing came to serve authors as a tool of self-construction and revision, the Lettere thus offer the reader more than a reflection of Tarabotti's epistolary prowess or of her connections to Venetian literary and political society. Rather, they force the reader to piece together her story, and in this very process of interpretation to begin to reconstruct it on Tarabotti's own terms, not those of her critics.

NOTES

(1) In all, there would be six volumes of Aretino's hugely successful Lettere, with numerous reprints (detailed in Amedeo Quondam's classic study of the epistolary genre in Italy, Le carte messaggere [Rome: Bulzoni, 1981] 287).

(2) Indeed there was a vast typology of letters, from the comic to the spiritual, but it was in the familiar letter that writers addressed the widest range of subjects. On the lettera familiare as a tool of dissent see for example Ann Jacobsen Schutte, "The Lettera Volgare and the Crisis of Evangelism," Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975): 639-88.

(3) Quondam 30.

(4) Although Lucrezia Gonzaga's Lettere (1552) have traditionally been attributed to Ortensio Lando, I argue elsewhere that archival, biographical, and stylistic evidence strongly supports Gonzaga having authored her collection herself, with some degree of editorial intervention by Lando, with whom she was linked (see Ray, "A gloria del sesso feminile": Epistolary Constructions of Gender in Early Modern Italian Letter Collections, Diss. U of Chicago, Ann Arbor: UMI, 2002).

(5) The preceding century had seen examples of women's letter-writing in the Latin Humanist tradition: Laura Cereta's Epistolae familiares, for example, circulated in manuscript by 1488-92, well before their publication in 1640 (Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis Feminae Clarissimae Epistolae iam primum et MS in lucem productae, ed. Jacopo Filippo Tomasini [Padua, 1640]; see Diana Robin, ed., Laura Cereta. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997]). Cereta's contemporary, Cassandra Fedele, also composed a book of Humanist letters which reaches us only in the form of a 1636 edition (Clarissimae Feminae Cassandrae Fidelis venetae. Epistolae et orationes, also edited by Tommasini [Padua, 1636]; see Diana Robin, ed., Cassandra Fedele. Letters and Orations [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000). The interest in women's letters ran particularly deep in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, even leading some male writers to capitalize on the trend by publishing letter collections under women's names (see for example Ortensio Lando's Lettere di molte donne valorose [Venice, 1548]).

(6) Such a link between female silence and chastity was repeatedly traced out in Renaissance comportment literature: see for example Francesco Barbaro's Re uxoria (1416) and Book III of Leon Battista Alberti's I libri della famiglia (1433-34, 1440). The conflict between women's literary production and their perceived honor has been insightfully discussed by Ann Rosalind Jones in her study of early modern women's lyric poetry, in which she theorizes a tension between public accessibility and private chastity (The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe 1540-1620 [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990] 11-35).

(7) Elizabeth Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Women's Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989) vii.

(8) For an overview of the querelle des femmes in Renaissance Europe, Constance Jordan's Renaissance Feminisms: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980) remains an excellent source.

(9) Buoninsegni had read his satire to an academic audience in Siena in 1632; it was published in Venice in 1644 as Contro 'l lusso donnesco: satira menippea. The modern edition of Buoninsegni's text and Tarabotti's response is by Elissa Weaver (Satira e Antisatira [Rome: Salerno, 1998]).

(10) The Latin treatise was the Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas homines non esse (generally attributed to the German Humanist Valens Acidalius). The Italian translation, Che le donne non siano delle specie degli uomini (Venice, 1647) was published under the name Horatio Plata, possibly a pseudonym for Giovan Francesco Loredano, an important figure on the Venetian literary scene, or for another member of the Accademia degli Incogniti to which he belonged (see Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini: la teoria dell'impostura delle religioni nel Seicento veneziano [Florence: la Nuova Italia, 1983, new and revised edition] 221-22). The translation caused a great deal of furor in Venice, leading to the trial and imprisonment of the printer Vaivasense, suspected of having published it, and the placing of the book on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1661. Tambotti's response has been edited and translated by Letizia Panizza (Che le donne siano della specie degli uomini: Women Are no Less Rational than Men [London: Institute of Romance Studies, 1994]); the Latin treatise, the Italian translation, and Tarabotti's response are translated in Theresa M. Kenney, Women Are Not Human: An Anonymous Treatise and Responses [New York: Crossroad, 1998]).

(11) The Inferno monacale has been edited by Francesca Medioli (L' 'Inferno monacale' di Arcangela Tarabotti [Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990]). The Tirannia paterna was published posthumously in 1654 as La semplicitd ingannata, possibly a title bestowed by Tarabotti herself (see Tarabotti, Lettere [Venice: Guerigli, 1650] 86). It was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1661 (for a description of the censured points in the Semplicita ingannatu see Natalia Costa-Zalessow, "Tarabotti's Semplicita ingannata," Italica 78.3 [2001]: 314-25). A modern edition and translation of the Semplicita ingannata is forthcoming from Letizia Panizza. Tambotti also refers in the Antisatira to a Purgatorio delle malmaritate, that would have constituted the middle installment of her "trilogy" that included the Inferno monacale and the Paradiso monacale (Antisatira 59) and in her letters she mentions several devotional works: La via lastricata per andare al cielo, La contemplazione dell' anima amante, and La luce monacale (Lettere 47), but these works have not been located and may not have been completed.

(12) Venice, Oddoni, 1643. The date on the frontispiece, MDCLXIII, is an error for MDCXLIII. Once considered a revocation of Tarabotti's thought in the Tirannia paterna and the Inferno monacale or evidence of a religious conversion, scholars have more recently agreed that this is an overstatement. Tarabotti never takes issue in her works with convent life for those who enter it willingly; but only with the abusive practice of consigning girls to convents to serve economic and political ends; nor does she abandon in the Paradiso her customary defense of women (see for example Ginevra Conti Odorisio, Donna e societa nel Seicento [Rome: Bulzoni, 1979] 98-99 and Medioli, L' 'Inferno monacale' 155-61).

(13) Emilio Zanette, Suor Arcangela Tarabotti monaca del Seicento veneziana (Rome-Venice, Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1960). Despite its paternalistic approach to its subject, Zanette's monograph remains a rich source of information for the study of Tarabotti and her works. A modern edition of Tarabotti's Lettere, edited by Meredith Ray and Lynn Westwater, is forthcoming from Rosenberg & Sellier.

(14) See for example Tarabotti's letters to the Genoese friar Angelico Aprosio in the Biblioteca aprosiana (Manoscritti aprosiani, vol. E, VI, 22, cc. 122r-134v); or those to Vittoria delia Rovere in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (Mediceo del Principato, 6152), which were originally transcribed by Francesca Medioli in "Arcangela Tarabotti: Truth, Fiction, and Narrative Devices" (paper given at the conference Arcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice, Chicago, 18-19 aprile, 1997); now published in Medioli, "Arcangela Tarabotti's Reliability About Herself: Publication and Self-Representation (Together With a Small Collection of Previously Unpublished Letters)" (The Italianist: Journal of the Departments of Italian Studies, University of Reading, University College Dublin 23 [2003] 54-101). Among the letters the nun chooses not to include in her epistolario, for example, is one asking Aprosio's help in revising the Paradiso monacale (letter dated 17 September, 164- [BUG, E VI 22, c.122]), although the collection does contain another that asks Aprosio to proofread the Paradiso for errors (see note 46 below). A manuscript letter to Aprosio that appears in print undergoes some changes in wording and spelling and omits a passage in which the nun refers to herself as "morta e sepolta gia tanti anni" (BUG E VI 22, e. 133). Tarabotti's correspondence with Aprosio has been published by Medioli in an appendix to Flavia De Rubeis, "La scrittura forzata. Le lettere autografe di Arcangela Tarabotti" (Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa [Florence: Leo Olskchi, 1996]: 142-55). See also Medioli's discussion of the autograph letters in the same journal, entitled "Alcune lettere autografe di Arcangela Tarabotti: Autecensura e immagine di se" (133-41).

(15) Tarabotti writes that she entered Sant'Anna at age eleven, which would have been in 1615 (Lettere 141). Zanette's research, however, suggests that she entered in 1617 (27); Medioli and other Tarabotti scholars concur (see for example Medioli, L' 'Inferno monacale' 113).

(16) See Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994, 308) and Stanley Chojnacki, "Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State," Gender and Society in Early Renaissance Italy, eds. J. Brown and R. C. Davis (Essex: Longman, 1998) 70. By this period, the dote spirituale, or dowry, was about 1,000 ducats for all Venetian convents, and was fixed by the Pregadi, the Venetian senate. This amount was still far less than the average dowry for marriage (see Medioli et al, "De monialibus," Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 33:3 [1997]: 88).

(17) Sperling argues that the increasing numbers of nuns had less to do with the escalation of marriage dowries than with the patriciate's reluctance to surrender its grip on exclusivity: that is, faced with a diminishing pool of potential grooms, patrician families preferred the convent to a downwardly-mobile marriage for their daughters (Convents and the Body Politic [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999]). Sperling's argument is meant to explain the high levels of monachazation for patrician girls. Tarabotti was not of a patrician family and her consignment to the convent may have stemmed from other, perhaps more specifically economic factors, or simply from the fact that--as she herself tells us--she was lame and thus less marriageable (see Lettere 81).

(18) For a discussion of the "ideologia cittadina" behind the practice of coerced monachization, see Gabriella Zarri, "Monasteri femminili e citta (secoli XV-XVIII)," Storia d'Italia. Annali 9. La chiesa e il potere politico, eds. G. Chittolini and Miccoli (Turin: Einaudi, 1986) 359-429; now in Zarri, Recinti: donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima eta maderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).

(19) Zarri, "Monasteri femminili" 387.

(20) It is, Zarri writes, an extension of the general ideals of modesty and seclusion to which women in general were expected to conform: "... il nesso Ira pudicizia, come virtu prettamente femminile, e ritiratezza, come mezzo per conservarla, era elemento centrale della cultura del tempo e non si riferiva esclusivamente alla condizione monastica" (Zarri, "De monialibus" 660-61). See also Medioli, "An Unequal Law: The Enforcement of Clansura Before and After the Council of Trent," Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Meek (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000) 136-52. Historian Mario Rosa echoes this view in his assertion that seventeenth-century convent reform placed more emphasis on chastity than on poverty or obedience, making convents places for the preservation of virtue rather than the fostering of sanctity (see "La religiosa," L'uomo barocco, ed. Rosario Villari [Bari: Laterza, 1991] 226).

(21) Zarri, "Monasteri femminili" 411-12.

(22) Sperling 134.

(23) Archivio Patriarcale, Venezia, Sezione Antica, Monalium 7, Order of Cardinal Cornelius Patriarch. I have modernized punctuation and dissolved abbreviations.

(24) "... sotto pena contravenendo a quest'ordine in qualsivoglia parte alle abbadesse, priore, e superiore sudette di restare immediatemente prive del loro carico, incapaci et inhabili per sempre di poterne havere altri; at alle monache di dover star per sei mesi almeno continuati in una cena senza poter mai uscire, et di piu di esser immediatemente prive per tre anin, oltre li detti sei mesi, di voce attiva e passiva, de' gradi, carichi et preeminenze che havessero o potessero pretendere di qualsivoglia sorte, e di poter accostar<s>i a' parlatori, porte, mode, et altri luoghi ..." (ibid.).

(25) Zanette 365-67.

(26) See Bishop Antonio Grimani's Constitutioni, et decreti approvati nella sinoda diocesana, sopra la retta disciplina monacale sotto L'illustrissima, & Reverendissimo Monsignor Antonio Grimani Vescovo di Torcello. L'anno della Nativita del Nostro Signore. 1592. II giorno 7.8. & 9. d'aprile, chap. XLVI "Dene Lettere, & Polize" (Venice, 1592) and Patriarch Lorenzo Priuli, Ordini, & avvertimenti, che si devono osservare ne' Monasteri di Monache di Venetia: Sopra le visite, & clausura, 10r. (Venice, 1591). I thank Jutta Sperling for pointing out these two references.

(27) Only if the Mother Superior recognizes the handwriting of an incoming letter as that of a nun's father, mother, sister or brother, may she give it to the nun without first reading it (Grimani chap. XLVI).

(28) Grimani chap. XLVI.

(29) Zunette 313.

(30) Of the 256 letters, 83 are addressed to recipients indicated simply with an initial (usually "N."); in many cases the content of the letters provides sufficient clues to establish their identity.

(31) Zanette 375.

(32) See Lettere 65,127,155,216.

(33) Playing on her own physical weakness, the nun predicts that while her own crookedness of body will ensure her entry to heaven, men's crookedness of soul will keep them out of it: "Io ad ogni modo mi glorio d'esser zoppa, pereche cost certo saro delli invitati a quella gran cena che voi altri dritti del corpo, ma zoppi dell'anima e stropiati nell'operazione dal padre di famiglia sete stati esclusi per sempre" (81).

(34) The publication permit issued by the Riformatori dello studio di Padova and the Inquisitor of Venice attesting to a work's suitability for printing: specifically, that it contained no heretical material.

(35) A prolific writer of both religious and profane works, Loredano (1606-1661) held a number of important positions within the Venetian Republic, serving as a State Inquisitor and a member of the Council of Ten. The Accademia degli Incogniti, which he co-founded, dates to about 1631 (in an earlier incarnation it was known as the Accademia Loredana) and was one of the most well-known of the numerous Venetian academies in this period. On Loreduno and the Incogniti, see Spini; see also Monica Miato, L'Accademia degli Incogniti di Giovan Francesco Loredan, Venezia (1630-1661) (Florence: Olschki, 1998), in spite of significant errors with regard to Tarabotti and her works.

(36) Mario Infelise, "Ex ignotus notus? Note sul tipografo Sarzina e l'Accademia degli Incogniti" Libri tipografi biblioteche. Ricerche storiche offerte a Luigi Balsarno (Florence: Olschki, 1997) 221. On Loredano and Venetian print culture of the period see also Infelise, "La crise de la librairie venetieune. 1620-1650," Le Livre et l'historien. Etudes offertes a Henry-Jean Martin (Geneva, Droz, 1997) 343-53, and "Libri e politica nella Venezia di Arcangela Tarabotti," Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea 8 (2002): 31-42.

(37) Infelise, "Ex ignotus notus?" 221; "Libri e politica" 32.

(38) Tarabotti, Lettere 36. Although she goes on in this letter to accuse Loredano of falling back on his promises, another letter also suggests that Loredano was actively involved in the publication process (209).

(39) Loredano, Lettere (Venice: Prodocimo, 1692) 50.

(40) Zanette's suggestion that this letter was intended for Bertucci Valier (377nl) is based in part on a later letter to Valier thanking him for his help in obtaining the proper publishing permit for an unidentified book that could be the Lettere (Tarabotti, Lettere 234).

(41) Zanette 83.

(42) For brief descriptions of these and other members of the Incogniti, see Spini; see also Le glorie degli Incogniti (Venice, Valvasense, 1647); and Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie d'Italia (Bologna, Licinio Cappelli, 1926, vol. 5, ad vocem). For a closer look at Aprosio and his work, see Emilia Biga, Una polemica antifemminista del '600. La "Maschera scoperta" di Angelio Aprosio (Ventimiglia, Civica Biblioteca Aprosiana, 1989) and Quinto Marini, Frati barocchi (Modena: Mucchi, 2000) 153-80.

(43) See letter dated 30 December, 1642 (BUG, c. 132): "V[ostra] S[ignoria] che mi ha inanimita a metter [il Paradiso] alia luce sara anche obligata a diffendedo dalle maledicenze degli huomini i quali cominciano con le loro solite pretendenze a poner in dubio che d'una Vergine possa nascer parto senza che vi concora il loro aiuto." See also Tarabotti's letter to Aprosio dated 17 September, 164- in which she sends him the Tirannia paterna (BUG, c. 122).

(44) As for the most part they were (Zanette 252).

(45) Some of the errors, however, were in fact Tarabotti's; see her letter to the French ambassador to Venice Henri Bretel de Gremonville (141 44 [misnumbered 143-46]).

(46) It is interesting to note that this letter is addressed to Aprosio, in the warmer days of their later turbulent acquaintance: at this early stage, Tarabotti is still seeking Aprosio's counsel as a literary mentor, and sends her Paradiso to him for his feedback.

(47) See Spini 175 for this attribution and in general for an overview of the libertine production of the Incogniti.

(48) Buoninsegni declared his admiration for Tarabotti in a letter to Aprosio: "Io rendo infinite grazie a quella madre che ha voluto onorarmi, slimando le mie bagatelle, fatte per far ridere un'ora nell'Accademia il nostro serenissimo padrone, degne delle censure dell'ingegno elevato di cotesta madre" (letter dated Siena, 15 September, 1644, BUG, E VI 6, Int. I, cited in Giuseppe Portigliotti, Penombre claustrali [Milan: Treves, 1930] 285 and Weaver 25). For her part, Tarabotti insisted that she never wrote to offend Buoninsegni, "ma solo per ischerzo" (Lettere 35).

(49) See Loredano, Lettere 274, and Aprosio [Cornelio Aspasio Antivigilmi], La biblioteca aprosiana (Ventimiglia, Bologna, Manolessi, 1673) 167.

(50) Zanette hypothesizes that Brusoni, in prison during this period, may have had an early copy of the Maschera and sold it to Tambotti (259). For a detailed discussion of the episode of the Maschera, see Biga; Marini suggests this "scontro" with Tarabotti and the subsequent failure of the Incogniti to come to Aprosio's defense was a determining factor in Aprosio's decision to leave Venice (170-71).

(51) A pagination problem arises at this point in the Lettere; I give the page numbers as they should be. Bretel de Gremonville's tenure in Venice came from 1645-1647, a period of intense Venetian distrust of the French.

(52) See Tarabotti's letter to the girls' mother, Madame de Grtmonville (190-91), and her fond farewell to them upon their return to France (215).

MEREDITH KENNEDY RAY

University of Delaware