"Tullia d'Aragona, celebrated courtesan and poet, had her Dialogue on the Infinity of Love published in Venice by the well-known house of Giolito de' Gerrari in 1547. For a woman to enter the ongoing debate on human love was an unprecedented occurrence and, in cultural and social history, would be a unique event for centuries to come. In collections of short stories and in dialogues, women were depicted by men as participants in discussion on topical or philosophical subjects, but never before had a woman authored a work in which she cast herself as the main disputant on the ethics of love, a field exclusively in the male domain." p 21

      Biographical notes from pp. 22-27

• D'Aragona spoke Tuscan and, like her mother, was an educated courtesan.
• D'Aragona read music, played the lute, sang, composed verse, as was expected of both honest courtesans and court ladies.
• Naturally sharp, d'Aragona was conversant on a wide range of subjects
• D'Aragona moved from town to town, eventually living in Adria, Venice, Ferrara, Siena, Florence, Rome, and Venice,
• Moral climate grows conservative as century progresses; d'Aragona was denounced while living in Siena in 1544 for not wearing the fashion prescribed for a courtesan. Henceforth she struggled to preserve her image as a refined courtesan. She had powerful protectors, but Siena's political regime fell. She moved to Florence where denunciations eventually followed her. She was granted an exemption to the sumptuary laws for courtesans on the grounds that she was a poet. Shortly thereafter her poems were published. By the end of the year, her book was published in Venice.

      "In circulation, however, there were already treatises that presented a more realistic view of life and dealt sympathetically with human sexuality. Even in his predominantly Platonic Book on the Nature of Love, begun in 1495 and published in Mantua in 1525, Mario Equicola had stated that whoever loves permanently must love the body as well as the soul, because the nature of love requires that not only the lovers' souls be loved, but that their senses too be satisfied in their natural need for sensual pleasure. In Agostino Nifo's On Beauty and Love (1531), love is a condition brought about by the sensual appetite ("affectus appetitus sensitivi") and the beautiful is defined as what moves the soul through the senses and impels human beings to a bodily fruition, which is achieved through the senses of touch and in sexual intercourse." p. 29

      "Platonic love seems to idealize women while at the same time marginalizing them as intellectually inferior and thus incapable of spiritual relationships. Tullia's interest is not in condemning homophilia, but rather in probing the misogynistic nature of Platonic love and in using that very bias to expose the element of sensuality that exists even in a category of love that professes to be purely spiritual in nature." p. 35

      "What makes Aragona's position unprecedented, however, as well as unsurpassed by subsequent writers, is her linking the discussion of love and sex to gender issues. Aragona keeps her readers aware of the ongoing debate about women by repeated allusions that only seem to be tangential to the ongoing conversation. Varchi expresses several current prejudices about the female sex. He protests that in discussions and conversations women always argue irrationally. He also advances the opinion, often debated in his times, that women have no aptitude for love. At one point, in order to appease his interlocutor, he throws in the Platonic belief that women can exercise great power over men through their spiritual qualities and the beauty of their bodies. But Tullia will have none of all his clichés.

      Aragona's ideas about gender are more sharply focused. To start with, we are made to understand that, in her opinion, many women possess higher moral qualities than do a host of men. As to the complaints vented by poets about their beloved's, the general perception of men's and women's relative merits would be different, Tullia maintains, if women, instead of men, were to write about them. More significantly, before and after the debate on love's infinity, Tullia raises two fundamental issues of gender bias, and by doing so she gives a radical turn to her theory of love." p. 36-37

      "Rather than proposing the gender issue for discussion, Aragona takes for granted that no reasonable man would want to doubt the essential equality of men and women. In this assumption, she was in tune with the most advanced views of some of her contemporaries. While more traditional treatises on the subject implied women's moral inferiority, even when they aimed at showing, by exemplification, that exceptions are possible, there were, nonetheless, new texts in circulation that argued in principle for women's equality. Mario Equicola's On Women (1501), Galeazzo Flavio Capra's On the Excellence and Dignity of Women (1525), and Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's The Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, whose Italian version became available as recently as 1544, all advanced the view that women's inferior position in society was not natural, but rather was due to men's tyranny and maintained by law, custom, and by the low-quality education given to girls.

      By standing on this side of the question, Aragona is able to call the bluff of Platonic theories and contest the Aristotelian notion of women's inferiority. The equality of the sexes implied throughout the dialogue and is upheld by Tullia at crucial points. Her definition of honest love presumes the intellectual and sexual equality of women and men. By advocating a kind of love that partakes of the intellectual and the sensual faculties of both lovers, Aragona implicitly argues for women's capacity for intellectual discourse and for their equal participation in the joyous life of the senses." pp. 38-39

      "Signs of her attitude toward reigning authorities are given repeatedly. Aragona believes that one must trust reason, not authority. "I want you to bow to experience," Tullia says to Varchi. "I trust it by itself far more than the reasons produced by the whole class of philosophers!" She will accept authority only if validated by her own judgment, that is, "her understanding of it." She endorses freedom of thought: "let people judge for themselves and speak their opinions freely." " p. 39

      "The Christian concept of morality, with its rigid dichotomy of the spiritual and the physical realms, stigmatized any concession to the sensual nature of humankind. Sexual pleasure was considered a sin, sanctioned only by marriage, providing it was immediately connected with procreation. In practice, however, men excusably indulged in it, until the time came presumably to redirect their lives and submit all resources to the requirements of a career, which, more often than not, was being pursued within the ranks of church bureaucracy. Women's destiny and conduct were classified according to categories that reflected the practical and the moral obligations of men. Nuns, wives, and prostitutes were respectively pledged to religious discipline and abstention, to matrimonial duties and to the venal purveyance of sexual pleasure. It is not without significance that an extraordinarily large class of courtesans flourished in the cities, especially in Rome and Venice, where greater possibilities of bureaucratic employment existed for men

      During the Counter Reformation, the church began to impose on its members and on the faithful a code more consonant with its own principles of behavior. Tullia d'Aragona, whose expectations and life-style had been fashioned in an earlier, more permissive society, attempted to resist the tide of restrictive regulations. Not only was her livelihood at risk, but her very sense of self, as a refined purveyor of intellectual and sensual rewards, was seriously threatened. Her defense came in the form of a theory that calls for a radical revision of standard principles, for a morality of love that acknowledges the dichotomous nature of both women and men.

      Aragona's dialogue became famous upon publication as the work of a celebrated courtesan and has maintained that fame ever since. Its significance, however, and the complex motivations for writing it, have largely been misunderstood or ignored. I hope that the present study and the translation of the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love will correct some of the misunderstandings incurred by many casual readers and that they will introduce Tullia d'Aragona to the appreciative audience she deserves." p. 42

      Noted the book:

      Rinaldina Russell, "Tullia d'Aragona" in Italian Women Writers, ed. Rinaldina Russell, 26-34 (Westport, Ct and London: Greenwood, 1994)

      The Dialogue on the Infinity of Love follows the introduction and bibliography.

      "Tullia: Yes, but I'll tell you something that's very true: when one is speaking of our mortal world, it's really not acceptable to introduce elements of the divine, because the latter is so perfect that we shall never be able to comprehend it, and each individual is entitled to pronounce his own opinion about it." p. 63

      "Tullia: Oh what a trickster you are! Do you think I can't see what you are up to? Just think what would have happened if Madonna Laura had gotten around to writing as much about Petrarch as he wrote about her: you'd have seen things turn out quite differently then! Anyway, why aren't you keeping your promise to me?" p. 69

      "Varchi: So you want me to bow to authority!

      Tullia: No, Sir. I want you to bow to experience, which I trust by itself far more than all the reasons produced by the whole class of philosophers.

      Varchi: So do I. But what experience would that be?

      Tullia: Surely you know far better than I do that innumerable men, both in ancient and modern times, have fallen in love. Then, because of anger or some other feeling, whatever the reason might have been, they have stopped loving and jilted the women they had loved." p. 71-72

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