Stephen Kolsky. The Ghost of Boccaccio. Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy.

Stephen Kolsky. The Ghost of Boccaccio. Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy. Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Janet Levarie Smarr. Joining the Conversation. Dialogues by Renaissance Women. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005.

Both these works fill important gaps in criticism on early modern Italian and French texts by and about women since they strike a thorough and admirable balance between synthesis and analysis. They help us obtain a solid grip on a rather elusive and hard to define corpus of texts whose underlying formal and thematic connections, while obvious to critics of the period, remained in need to be addressed in scholarly works of a comprehensive, yet analytical scope. Both studies do a superb job at this, Kolsky from more philological point of departure, i.e., through an examination of discourses on women by eight male writers in light of their formal and thematic indebtedness to Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, and Smarr from the point of view of literary genre, namely by gauging the participation of female authors in the French and Italian literary Res Publica through the lens of the dialogue. A discussion of both works in a combined review is legitimate given that they could be seen as a joint effort at enhancing our understanding of a vast corpus of texts all too often heaped together under vague qualifiers such as women and love or querelle des femmes. Within this corpus, Kolsky and Smarr help the modern student and scholar disentangle the intricate web of thematic and humanist variety, gender notions, socio-historical context, and issues of literary form, by clearly dissecting the various resemblances and differences between a) texts by men about women, b) texts by women about women, love, spiritual matters, education, etc.; and, c) treatise and dialogue writing.

Kolsky combines close textual readings with an analysis of social context, intended audience, and linguistic matters, to investigate "the construction and deconstruction of gender" by a series of male writers haunted by the "phantasm" of De mulieribus claris (2). The introduction perspicaciously portrays Boccaccio's text as a ghost to be exorcised in varying ways by its imitators: both subversive and conservative, both historicizing and moralizing, both encomiastically and blamefully exemplifying, Boccaccio's ambiguous discourses on pagan heroines could not but trigger paradoxical representations of and attitudes toward the female sex in his followers, all of whom engaged in a "revision of stereotypes" (7) according to the parameters of Renaissance court society. The crisis of exemplarity is key in this respect: exemplary performances by women are "a vivid challenge to male superiority anal accepted modes of behaviour" (13). Thus, whether their texts are radical in their praise or conservative in their blame, all writers express in one way or another a male anxiety with women's transgressions into male domains. Kolsky follows these gender tribulations in texts written both in Latin and in the vernacular between 1480 and 1530 in Bologna, Ferrara, Mantua, and Milan, and by authors such as Vespasiano da Bisticci, Sabadino degli Arienti, Bartolomeo Goggio, Jacopo Foresti, Mario Equicola, Agostino Strozzi, Galeazzo Flavio Capra, and, in a more European context, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa.

The writings by Florentine biographer Bisticci, under study in the first chapter, manifest an "anxiety about the increasing influence of courtly culture on the republican way of life" (24). Bisticci's praise of women, especially in his Libro delle lodi delle donne (1486), aims at restoring conservative female values that counter Medicean courtly corruption by harking back to golden age republican family values. His praise of women flaunts exemplary Christian standards such as faith, constantia, sexual purity, domestic virtue, etc. Bisticci emphasizes, not surprisingly, biblical exempla that feature spiritual purity over the bodily needs, so prominent in court society, and highlights the classical women that exemplify virginity and motherhood (55), carefully omitting Boccaccio's heroines who ventured into the male sphere of action. Kolsky also judiciously points out that Bisticci's notion of female 'superiority' is but a form of hidden inferiority: female heroism is defined by how successfully women manage to overcome their corrupted nature.

Sabadino degli Arienti's Gynevera de le clare donne (1490), discussed in the second chapter, while confirming the need for female chastity and women's domestic roles, pushes Boccaccian boundaries by its "awareness, acceptance, and cautious encouragement of women taking leading political roles in court society" (63). Carefully mapping the patronage situation, which shows an author anxiously courting favors among Bologna's Bentivoglios and Ferrara's Estes, Kolsky buttresses his discussion of the Gynevera with that of two other texts by Arienti that adopt Boccaccian parameters: a more conservative Trattato della pudicizia (c. 1487) that centers on chastity alone as domain of female heroism, and an Elogio di Isabella (c. 1493), in which, in a not so hidden plea for patronage, Queen Isabella of Spain becomes a "living exemplum [of] a woman involved in the political configuration of her state" (103) who showcases nonetheless traditional Christian qualities such as virginity and chastity. This image is also the crux of the Gynevera: it offers to elite (Bolognese) women who were Arienti's potential benefactors a compromise between non-courtly family values, and more active roles in the courts (82). While in Boccaccio female experience involved either complete domestic confinement or absolute heroic transgression, the Gynevera biographies hesitantly demonstrate that domesticity can be combined with political and cultural participation, whereby women can positively contribute to justice and gender equity through their displacement of violent and disordered masculine power politics.

The writers connected to the nexus of Ferrara and Mantua courts, where women such as Isabella d'Este, though never formally in charge, wielded great unofficial power, take center stage in chapter three. Again Kolsky's book superbly distinguishes the double-edged nature of both praise and blame in Boccaccio's imitators. While Foresti's De plurimis claris selectisque mulieribus (1497), a massive collection of biographies emulating and expanding Boccaccio's text both in structure and methodology (visually supported by woodcuts, of which Kolsky's book includes some pertinent examples) is ultimately "uncomfortable with [women's] achievements" (125) and falis back on debasing stereotypes and a dogmatic insistence on the superiority of Christian women over pagan ones, Equicola's De mulieribus and Strozzi's Defensio mulierum (both 1501) make an uncommon yet powerful case for women's equal participation in selected court circles. Yet again, although radically challenging female inferiority, Equicola's call for exploiting women's intellectual potential through education only addresses those female elites he sought to court in the hope of patronage.

However undercut it may be by "paradoxical logics," the "superiority argument" as further explored by the writers under scrutiny in the last chapter, "emerges as an innovative contribution to the debate on women" (171). The topos is already dealt with in Goggio's De laudibus mulierum (1487), a text addressed to the Ferrara court that defends female involvement in court and political life through a positive "repackaging" (190) of Boccaccio's sometimes heavily misogynous view of founding female figures in pagan and Christian lineage, such as Queen Semiramis. Capra's use of the vernacular for his Della eccellenza e dignita delle donne (1525) stands out for allowing the superiority argument to reach a wider readership. Yet Kolsky's subtle reading evinces that Capra's exempla are perhaps the best case in point of how a "slippery concept of superiority" (196) betrays a hidden sense of female inferiority, or at least reiterates women's enclosure in conventional social roles. Kolsky's inclusion of Agrippa's De nobilitate et prcecellentia foemini sexus (1529) remains puzzling for the absence of a convincing direct link to Boccaccio's founding text and for the different intellectual audience for which Agrippa was writing, namely fellow humanists. Nevertheless Kolsky's discussion convincingly enlightens the links between Italian court writers and northern European humanism regarding the laus mulierum topos.

The angle Smarr adopts in her study, i.e., the dialogue as a genre that allowed women to "insert their voices into the larger cultural conversation" (1) is both original and challenging. On the one hand, this perspective allows an innovative and exhaustive outlook on women's writing from the mid-fifteenth until the late sixteenth century in France and Italy. On the other hand, Smarr is juggling with an "eclectic approach" (26) that not only has to cope with the inherent fluidity of the dialogue as genre (diphonic and polyphonic, spiritual and secular, allegorical and realistic, theatrical and epistolary, etc.), but also has to handle a wide array of authors and audiences, including aristocrats such as Marguerite de Navarre, humanists such as Olympia Morata, women from the mercantile classes such as Louise Labe, and courtesans, such as Tullia d'Aragona. Consequently, the long list of questions on voice, authority, form, gender, authorship, audience, patronage, and socio-economic context that guide Smarr's approach (30) lacks analytical focus. But this is doubtlessly unavoidable in a study of this nature, forced to negotiate a delicate balance between overview and in-depth analysis.

The book opens with a discussion of the ambiguous participation of female interlocutors in the main rhetorical models of early modern dialogue. By means of pertinent male-authored examples of both the spiritual kind, such as Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, and the secular kind, such as Erasmus's Colloquies and Bembo's Asolani, Smarr perspicaciously argues that, while modern readers are often struck by the passivity and lack of importance of women's voices, contemporary readers "would have been more likely struck by the fact that there were women present at all" (7). Her thorough discussion also points out to what extent these male authors provided models for their female counterparts.

The second chapter starts with a discussion of female appearances in male-authored spiritual dialogues that reflect a common experience for many women, i.e. receiving religious counsel from an authoritative male. The positive attitude aimed at women's spiritual education present in Jean Gerson's, Juan de Valdes's, and Bernardino Ochino's dialogues prepared the way for Marguerite de Navarre's Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, and Olympia Morata's and Chiara Matraini's religious dialogues. Smarr keenly points out that female adhesion to spiritual concerns triggers an intriguing gender revision in these texts by "emphasizing the genderless spirit rather than the gendered body as the site of identity" (78). Naturally women's access to education and learning is a crucial issue when considered from the opposition between human and divine wisdom, and Matraini in particular sought to benefit from her schooling as a pathway to grace.

Gender equality in dialogue and education also takes the forefront in the next chapter, but in a different context, namely social conversation as salon entertainment that squared off educated men with witty women in disputation or instructive discussion. Some male-authored examples are followed by Smarr's sound analysis of Tullia d'Aragona's Dialogo dell'infinita di amore and of Catherine des Roches's dialogues. Ina response to Speroni's Dialogo d'amore, in which she figured as a rather passive interlocutor, Tullia stages herself as an intellectual authority in control of her own dialogue, and positions herself among "admiring intellectuals, whose praises legitimized her participation in their intellectual and literary exchanges" (112). In Poitiers, the highly educated Catherine des Roches emphasized, in the same vein as Morata (whose work she knew), the importance of learning in increasing female virtue. Yet Catherine pushes beyond traditional religious learning to make medicine, law, and music crucial ingredients for women's intellectual development.

While the argument that private correspondence in the vernacular provided a newfound space for female participation in male learned communities is not original, Smarr is quite justified in dedicating a chapter to the role of epistolary dialogical writing in shaping women's participation at a more public level. She observes that for female letter-writers such as Laura Cereta, Isota Nogarola, Helisenne de Crenne, and Chiara Matraini, the link between the two genres was deeper than their general association in humanist thought: avoiding direct confrontation with men in oral settings, written epistolary dialogue provided greater freedom for women to refute male gender stereotypes from the physical isolation of their middle-class domestic environment (153). Helisenne's invectives from her Epistres take center stage in this chapter: her moral and reasoned defense against her husband's outrageous misogynous attacks intends to instigate a debate among readers to change "the views of the ignorant" (151). In this case however Smarr's claim about the link between dialogue and letter-writing remains rather unconvincing: Helisenne imitates what is after all a very classical poetic and epistolary gente.

Chapter Five, "Dialogue & Drama," constitutes a most original contribution, not only by exploring the significant link between theatricality and female dialogue writing, but also because it substantiates differences in emphasis between France and Italy: while Italian female dialogue writers generally preferred the historicity and communal aspects of the Ciceronian mode, not without a "proud identification" with classical Rome (188), the French women authors under scrutiny in this chapter fruitfully blended typically French medieval poetic and theatrical traditions (allegory, mythology, farce, debat, morality plays) with the satire of the Lucianic dialogue tradition. Labe's Debat de Folie et d'Amour and Catherine des Roches's dialogues, for instance, bridge Middle Ages and Renaissance by 'humanizing' their allegorical and mythological characters, which thus allows both authors to broach gender issues in unique dramatic fictionalizations of the guerre des sexes (e.g., between a male Love and a female Folly). However, since there is no evidence that these dialogues were actually performed, a theoretical deepening of the notion of theatricality would have made a stronger case than Smarr's insistence on their theatrical 'feel' or the vague reference to the reader's "mental theater" (189).

Finally, Smarr tunas to two examples of female-authored multi-voiced dialogues, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron and Moderata Fonte's Il merito delle donne, which both draw on the same two majors models for Renaissance polyphonic dialogue writing, Boccaccio's Decamerone and Castiglione's Cortegiano. While Smarr's categorization of these texts as "fully polyphonic" (191) in a chapter rather vaguely entitled "Many Voices," seems both forced and a little unclear (after all, quite a few of the other texts included more than two speakers, to think but of Labe's Debat), placing them at the end of her itinerary powerfully argues that the polyphonic dialogue was the exception rather than the rule for female dialogue writing, as Smarr had claimed in her opening pages (2). Even so, the indisputable fame of Marguerite's Heptameron somewhat belies Smarr's earlier claim on French women authors' avoidance of the Ciceronian model, which, although Smarr fails to mention it, was the founding paradigm for Castiglione and thus also for any imitation of his Cortegiano, be it male- or female-authored. Yet in spite of these formal issues, the chapter's sound intertextual readings clearly reveal how the multi-voiced dialogue allows female authors to both stage subversive feminist agendas and "fragment the authorial voice in a way that indicates the contradictions and ambivalences among and within women" (230). By avoiding the persuasive closure that diphonic dialogues tend to offer, the Heptameron and Il merito may thus well be the best examples of the enactment of "women's critical thought and its expression" (230).

In her conclusion Smarr pulls together the various "cross-threads" (231) from this impressive overview of female dialogue writing by pointing out with great accuracy the gender specificity of female dialogue production, and by allowing us to understand not only how women exploited dialogue to "join the conversation", but also, vice-versa, how early modern female authors contributed to and transformed the gente of the dialogue.

REINIER LEUSHUIS

Florida State University