A new learned women continued to publish translations of an commentaries on classical texts and to write and publish their letters and orations in Latin and Greek. Among these, Olympia Morata (1536-55), the daughter of a classical scholar at the ducal court in Ferrara, was the most prolific. Protestant-leaning Morata, who had already written a Latin commentary on Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes and letters, dialogues, and poems in Greek and Latin by the time the Roman Inquisition came to Ferrara, was forced in 1550 to flee in Germany. Morata's Opera omnia, which reflect a gradual movement over time away from the classically inspired prose and poetry of her youth to religious and devotional works, were posthumously published in Basel in four editions (1558, 1562, 1570, 1580). Another northern Italian woman humanist a generation younger than Morata, Tarquinia Molza (1542-1617), not only wrote poetry in her native Modenese dialect but also published her Italian translations of Plato's Charmides and selections from the Crito.

      The long-term influence of humanism on the literary culture of women was significant. it would be a mistake to define Renaissance humanism too narrowly, associating with it only those writers who published their wok in Greek or Latin or who translated from those languages, since, after the fifteenth century, most educated Italians wrote and published in the vernacular. Many of the sixteenth-century women writers who succeeded the pioneer women humanists of the fifteenth century, if not humanists themselves, were profoundly influenced by humanism. The vernacular love poet Tullia d'Aragona (1506-66) composed an Italian prose work in which she gave new lie and meaning to a Neoplatonic theme that had become humanist trope: the infinity of love. and although both Aragona's On the Infinity of Love and Lucrezia Marinella's (1571-1653) The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Deficiencies of Men were written in Italian, each of these women chose to frame her discourse in the most characteristic of all humanist genres: the dialogues.

      In assessing the impact of early modern women writers - many of whom were forced to work, through no fault of their own, in relative isolations - it is always tempting to overemphasize the novelty of their works. Despite their originality, Cereta's letters, particularly those on classical themes, are thoroughly grounded in the humanism of her age and that of her predecessors. A close reading of Cereta's letters suggests, as we have seen, that while she had a working knowledge of the ancient Roman authors who constituted the core of the humanist school curriculum, the exemplars she had at her side as she wrote were the early humanist scholars of the classics. her writings show the impact of Petrarch's Ciceronianism, Salutati's civic republicanism, and Valla's Christian Epicureanism on her humanist. Her feminism points to still another strain of influence: her negative response to Boccaccio's De claris mulierbus and her positive response to the new defensio mulierum tradition (then in the making) represented first by Christine de Pizan and then by the later Quattrocento writers of the northern courts and cities. Whether or not Cereta knew the writings of Christine or, for that matter, those of Goggio, Vespasiano, and Sabadini, their writings which praised and defended women as a class created a new cultural climate for the reception of Cereta's feminist letters. The call for substantive institutional changes in the social, legal, and economic status of women would have to wait for the end of the sixteenth century with the Ventian feminists Modesta da Pozzo, Lucrezia Marinella, and Arcangela Tarabotti, for whose polemics Christine de Pizan and Cereta (both of them by then forgotten) had laid the groundwork.

      A number of key themes associated with early feminist critics of the Enlightenment such as Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), Anna Barbauld (1743-1825), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), and Ann Finch (1661-1720), among others, surface first in the work of Laura Cereta, namely: the privileging of the emotions in a genre (criticism) long assumed to be the domain of the rational faculties only; the attempt to reconstruct and redefine the concept of gender; the mutual support of women by women and the idea of a community of women; the construction of housework as a barrier to women's literary aspirations; the mainstreaming of women's writing into genres and venues that were once for men only; and the use of the culture of the salon (in Cereta's time the convent) to bridge the borders between the private and the public spheres so often closed to women." pp 16-18

      "The first of these orations, on marriage, begins with a prologues on the position of the planets and constellations indicating that this is a propitious moment for her correspondent, Pietro Zecchi, to marry. To persuade Zecchi that the loving commitment of a woman in marriage is a good thing for a man, Cereta present a series of famous exempla of virtuous wives from the ancient world." p. 63

      "In an epilogue to the essay, Cereta summarized her ideas about women and education. All human beings, women included, are born with the right to an education (Naturam discendi aeque omnibus unam impartiri licentiam), she writes - a radical statement for a fifteenth-century humanist. The idea that the capacity or greatness of a man's mind is not necessarily tied to class or birth is a familiar enough one in Quattrocento humanist thought; the extension of this notion to include gender is not." pp 73-74

      "All history is full of such examples. My point is that your mouth has grown foul because you keep it sealed so that no arguments can come out of it that might enable you to admit that nature imparts one freedom to all human beings equally - to learn. But the question of my exceptionality remains. And here choice alone, since it is the arbiter of character, is the distinguishing factor. For some women worry about the styling of their hair, the elegance of their clothes, and the pearls and other jewelry they wear on their fingers. Others love to say cute little things, to hide their feelings behind a mask of tranquillity, to indulge in dancing, and lead pet dogs around on a leash. For all I care, other women can long for parties with carefully appointed tables, for the peace of mind of sleep, or they can yearn to deface with paint the pretty face they see reflected in their mirrors, But those women for whom the quest for the good represents a higher value restrain their young spirits and ponder better plans. They harden their bodies with sobriety and toil, they control their tongues, they carefully monitor what they hear, they ready their minds for all-night vigils, and they rouse their minds for the contemplation of probity in the case of harmful literature. For knowledge is not given as a gift but by study. For a mind free, keen, and unyielding in the face of hard work always rises to the good, and the desire for learning grows in the depth and breadth.

      So be it therefore. May we women, then, not be endowed by God the grantor with any giftedness or rare talent through any sanctity of our own. Nature has granted to all enough of her bounty; she opens to all the gates of choice, and through these gates, reason sends legates to the will, for it is through reason that these legates transmit desires. I shall make a bold summary of the matter. Yours is the authority, ours is the inborn ability. But instead of manly strength, we women are naturally endowed with cunning, instead of a sense of security, we are naturally suspicious. Down deep we women are content with our lot. But you, enraged and maddened by the anger of the dog from whom you flee, are like someone who has been frightened by the attack of a pack of wolves. The victor does not look for the fugitive; nor does she who desires a cease-fire with the enemy conceal herself. Nor does she set up camp with courage and arms when the conditions are hopeless. Nor does it give the strong any pleasure to pursue one who is already fleeing." pp 78 - 79

      * indicates Primary Source

      * Mary Astell, The English Feminist: Reflections on Marriage and Other Writings, ed and intro by Bridget Hill (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1986)

      R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)

      * Thomas Elyot, The Defense of Good Women: The Feminist Controversy of the Renaissance, Facsimile Reproductions, ed. Diane Bornstein (New York: Delmar, 1980)

      Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)

      Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance, foreword by Catherine R. Stimspon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)

      * Patricia H. Labalme, Beyond their Sex, Learned Women of the European Past, (New York and London: NYU Press, 1980)

      Sarah B. Pomeroy, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (NY: Schoken Books, 1976)

      Albert Rabil, Jr., Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981)

      Rinaldina Russell, ed. Italian Women Writers A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1994)

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