Although she did not have a religious vocation, Elana Cassandra Tarabotti took the veil in 1620 at her father's insistence. To protest her unwanted confinement, Tarabotti wrote several works, all highly critical of the family, the state, and conventional treatment of women.

      "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.¹"

      Her first work, La tirannia paterna (Paternal Tyranny originally published posthumously in 1654 under the title, La simplicita ingannata, Simplicity Deceived), suggested that men confined their daughters to convents, not for religious reasons, but to be spared the expense of a dowry. Her other works include:

      L'Inferno monocale (Convent Hell), on the misery of the live of vocationless nuns (unpublished, *one* unpublished manuscript copy of this work is known to exist)

      Il paradiso monocale (Convent Paradise), possibly a (failed) attempt to reconcile herself to that vocation

      Antisatira (Antisatire), a reply to F. Buoninsegni's Contro il lusso donnesco (Against the Luxuries of Women)

      Che le donne siano della spetie degli uomini Difesa della donne (That Women Are of the Same Species as Men. A Defense of Women) a response to the work 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)

      Unfortunately, her works have not been published in English, although Parental Tyranny is scheduled to be published in 1999 as part of the University of Chicago series, The Other Voices in Early Modern Europe. But you can believe that this book will be added to Sunny's collection and a file will appear in my Booknotes section. So check there in about a year for an excerpt.

1. Encyclopedia, p. 1222

References

      Article on Tarabotti An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, vol 2, L - Z, Katharina M. Wilson, 1991, Garland Publishing Company, NY and London, p. 1222-1223

      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

      Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini - Women are No Less Rational than Men , Arcangela Tarabotti Edited by Letizia Panizza, Text in Italian, Introduction in English, 1994, ISBN 1 899042 02 4 xl + 102 pp. paperback £13

      A Feminine Perspective

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