Margaret Franklin. Boccaccio's Heroines. Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.

Margaret Franklin. Boccaccio's Heroines. Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.

Margaret Franklin's study has two main aims, each of which is given roughly half the volume. The first is to argue that Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus [On Famous Women] is not as incoherent or contradictory as previous scholars (such as Stephen Kolsky, Pamela Benson, and Constance Jordan) have suggested, but rather presents a consistent ideology and set of standards for judging its diversely famous women. The second is to show how differently Boccaccio's examples were used in both textual and visual arts during the fifteenth century in the Tuscan republics on the one hand and in the courts of northern Italy on the other. The study is thus of interest to several audiences: Boccaccio scholars, art historians, and anyone interested in early Renaissance gender studies.

In regard to the coherence of Boccaccio's volume and its ideology, Franklin argues for a socially conservative Boccaccio who follows Aristotelian views about women's inherent inferiority. He is willing to praise women for their public leadership only when they remain sexually chaste or faithful to their husbands and loyally subservient to male interests, but attacks any woman actively seeking her own power and glory. Women who take charge from motives of ambition rather than duty are seen to weaken and feminize the men they should be serving, and get their just comeuppance in the end. Franklin offers a number of positive and negative examples from the book to support her claims. The distorting lens of modern concerns, she suggests, has created ambivalences for modern readers that did not exist for their fourteenth- and fifteenth-century counterparts. The three biographies added last, Franklin admits, break away from this scheme but only in order to seek the potential patronage of Queen Joan of Naples. The examples of Joan herself and of Camiola, whose story allows Boccaccio to praise Joan's grandfather King Robert, can readily be seen as patronage-seeking exceptions, but it is harder to understand how Cornificia fits this justification or why Boccaccio should in her biography launch suddenly into a declaration radically at odds with his previous ideology, as Franklin has set it forth. On the whole, however, Franklin presents a good case for Boccaccio's gendered sense of virtue.

Boccaccio's repeated notion that some women's bodies contained a manly soul enabled potentially disruptive women to be accepted as models for both male and female behavior. Thus Boccaccio could urge young women of Florence to imitate only the chaste modesty of an ancient queen while prodding men to match her public achievements. Franklin observes that these double models were the women most likely to be painted in the following century.

Being an art historian, and not a Boccaccio scholar, Franklin has thoroughly researched the scholarship on Famous Women but is unaware of some of relevant issues concerning his other works. For example, she situates the Famous Women cleanly in the tradition of moral exempla; an awareness of the critical problematization of Boccaccio's use of that tradition in the Decameron might have occasioned a fuller defense of this claim, although certainly Boccaccio could have operated quite differently in two different works, genres, and languages. Similarly, Franklin contrasts Boccaccio's apparently positive treatment of the Amazons with the more usual mode in which they are viewed as abnormal and in need of being resubjected to men through death or marriage; Boccaccio's representation of Amazons in the Teseida completely fulfills this description of the more typical treatment, and might have raised some interesting issues regarding their assessment in Famous Women, but those are issues that someone else will have to raise.

Whether or not the reader is fully convinced of the consistency of values in Boccaccio's volume of female biographies, the discussion of how his examples were used by subsequent writers and artists in different social contexts is quite persuasive. Franklin analyzes and compares the male and female worthies painted on the walls or furnishings of rich Tuscan merchants; the women, she concludes, offered to men a model of civic service while giving women in the family a model of feminine fidelity and grace. In republican Florence and Siena, conservative values were maintained through the following century; in the courts of Ferrara and Mantua, however, women were assuming positions of real public power and commissioning for their own private viewing female portraits with a less submissive air. The powerful female viewer could identify just as well with the determined and independent public actions of those painted examples as with their matrimonial fidelity. Twenty black and white illustrations help the reader see what she is writing about. Franklin focuses especially on works commissioned by or for Eleanora d'Aragona d'Este and Isabella d'Este Gonzaga. She plausibly identifies Mantegna's "Woman drinking" and elsewhere chastises other art historians for assuming that Dido is always Vergil's Dido rather than Boccaccio's "corrected" biography. Along with paintings, she discusses the fifteenth-century imitations of Boccaccio's book; dedicated to well educated and powerful women, their authors reworked Boccaccio's biographies into examples of the newly evolving ideology that women are inherently capable of the same accomplishments as men.

Buried in the middle of this study is the question that must clearly have been at its origin: why Tuscan households would have begun painting in a positive light the images of women whose public actions would not have been considered proper for the women who viewed them. Boccaccio not only made such examples available, writes Franklin, he also made them palatable. Eventually social developments beyond Florence turned his work to uses he could not have imagined.

JANET LEVARIE SMARR 

University of California San Diego