Elana Cassandra Tarabotti, born in Venice in 1604, became Sister Arcangela in the Benedictine convent of St. Anna, where she took the veil in 1620 and shortly afterwards, it is not known exactly when, took her final vows. She did not have a religious vocation and all of her life protested her confinement and that of other women through her writing, much of which was published and known to a large community, even beyond the city of Venice. Her works are critical of family and state politics, which protected wealth and nobility by relegating potentially expensive daughters to a life of imprisonment and by denying them as well a good education. She exposed the hypocrisy of the fierce contemporary criticism of female vanity, pointing out that men were just as vain and suggesting that their concern was not so much for the virtue of their wives and daughters as for their money, which they would more readily spend on themselves and on the prostitutes with they liberally associated. She argued for the merit of women and their right to attend to their beauty and adornment, one of the few areas of their lives in their control. Tarabotti wrote forcefully and convincingly, despite her lack of adequate formal training, and she unnerved her critics to the point that they mercilessly attacked her for the least evidence of literary shortcomings, indeed criticized her for typographical errors in a published work. She always responded promptly and fearlessly and seems to have had support and sympathy from many noble women and not a few erudite men.

      Her first work, La tirannia paterna (Paternal Tyranny), written in her early years in the convent, decried the injustice of her situation, laying the blame on fathers and the State whose common interests were being served. This early work, somewhat transformed, was published posthumously in 1654 under a different title, La simplicita ingannata (Simplicity Deceived). Her second polemical tract, L'Inferno monocale (Convent Hell), on the misery of the live of vocationless nuns, was never published, but its sequel, Il paradiso monocale (Convent Paradise), was, for obvious reasons. this latter work has been variously interpreted as expressing Sister Arcangela's repentance and acceptance of her religious vocation and, more convincingly, as a failed attempt to reconcile herself to that vocation, a failure that is expressed in conflicting attitudes and in a continuation, although attenuated, of her lifelong feminist polemic, an unflattering defense of the merit of women. This polemic returns to the center of her attention in the works that followed, in the Antisatira (Antisatire), a reply to F. Buoninsegni's Contro il lusso donnesco (Against the Luxuries of Women), in her published letters, and in her response, Che le donne siano della spetie degli uomini Difesa della donne (That Women Are of the Same Species as Men. A Defense of Women) to the works of Acidalius Valens, an erudite German, the disputatio perjucunda qua anonimus probare nititur mulieres homines non esse (A Most Delightful Disputation in Which an Anonymous [Author] Strives to Prove That Women Are Not Men), translated into Italian by Orazio Plata and published in 1595. Some historians have believed that Latin tract to be a joke though Arcangela did not and argued, or rather inveighed, against its heresy and its misogyny. The Church, too, took it seriously and put it on the Index for its heretical ideas in 1651. The Antisatira and the Lettre take up the defense of women, affirming that the ignorance of women derives from their having been deprived of an education. She refutes the argument that mixing men and women together in schools would lead women to sins of impurity, objecting that women cannot be held responsible for the lust of men. She argues for the "light of reason," a natural gift that has helped her overcome her educational handicap and permitted her to read with understanding, for example, the political works of Machiavelli, with, of course, the permission of her Superiors. She answers the accusation of vanity with counter accusations, often witty as well as accurate (for example, in answer to criticism of the excessively ornate dress of women, their exaggerated makeup, she replies that in contemporary fashion the "mustaches of men, that should fall down over the mouth to inhibit the production of obscene masculine language, are forced by iron and fire to rise menacingly towards the sky.")

      Besides being intelligent, clever, and combative, Arcangela Tarabotti was also ambition: she wanted to be heard and appreciated. She corresponded with important men and women, dedicated her writing to some of them, and even sent a copy of her Antisatira to Cardinal Mazarin. Through her pen she made herself quite important for her time and condition, and scholars are now beginning to recognize what an extraordinary feat that was. She is the subject of a recent biography (Zanette, 1960), but it does not present her life and works clearly with the critical detachment she deserves. her role as one of the early voices of Italian feminism has been firmly established and has begun to produce interesting analyses (Conti Odoriso, 1979; 1980) and to stimulate the scholarly interest she deserves.

Works

      [Baratotti, Galerana, pseudonym] La semplicita ingannata (1654), written 20 years earlier and entitled La tiranna paterna.

      L'inferno monacale, unpublished, one manuscript known to belong to the private collection of Count Giustiani

      Il paradiso monacale (1663 [1643])

      Antisatira, published anonymously by DAT [donna Arcangela Tarabotti] in F. Buoninsegni, Contro il lusso donnesco, satira menippea (1644)

      Lettres familiarie de complimento (1650)

      Che le donne siano della spetie degli uomini. Difesa delle donne de Galerana Barcitotti [pseudonym] contro Horatio Plata (1651)

Bibliography

      Bandini Butti, Maria (ed.), Poetesse e scrittrici, II (Enciclopedia biografica e bibliografia italiana, Serie VI), (Rome, 1942) p. 230

      Conti Ororiso, Ginevra, Storia dell'idea femminsta in Italia (Rome, 1980) pp. 35-49

      Labalme, Patricia H., "Women's roles on Early Modern Venice: an Exceptional Case" in Beyond their Sex: Six Learned Women of the European Past, Patricia H. Labalme, ed. (New York, 1980) pp. 129-152, esp. 135-138

      Zanatte, Emilio, Suo Arcangela monaca del Seicento veneziano (Rome-Venice, 1960)

Elissa B. Weaver

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