Questione di genere/i. Il dibattito sulla donna nelle scritture femminili attraverso i generi letterari (da Vittoria Colonna a Isabella Andreini)

Abstract

This anthology offers a selection of texts from Italian literature on the querelle des femmes. “Of women (des femmes)” here means both ‘about women’ and ‘written by women’.The Italian women writers take a stand in the debate on the sexes, from the first group of women poets to the explicit theoretical arguments of the early 17th century. That is, from the most admired woman poet of the modern age, Vittoria Colonna, to a celebrity of Italian theater such as Isabella Canali Andreini. The path is organized into five literary macro-genres: poems, epic, prose narrative, treatises and epistolography. This choice allows for a better understanding of the dialectic between adherence to models and the specificities of women's writing. In various ways, the fourteen women authors anthologized (Andreini, Bigolina, Colonna, D'Aragona, Forteguerri, Franco, Gambara, Marinelli, Matraini, Moderata Fonte, Morra, Sarrocchi, Stampa, Terracina) not only ideally took up Ariosto's invitation (OF XXXVII 23) to immortalize their value through writing, but they also defended «the worth of women » aware that the supposed inferiority does not stem from nature: «but because she is raised in other pursuits, / for her education she is held in low regard»(Moderata Fonte, Floridoro, IV 4, tr. by Kisacky).