Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 338 - All About Eve - the Defense of Women.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, All About Eve, the Defense of Women. In the previous episode, I talked about the way that humanists used their rhetorical skill to write showpiece letters with plenty of style but not much substance. But, of course, they did write about substantive questions sometimes. We've seen plenty of examples already, dialogues about ethics, treatises on the shortcomings of scholastic philosophy, meditations on the history of the Latin language itself. Another conventional topic within humanist literature was the virtue of women, or lack thereof. Actually, this genre of writing goes well back into the medieval age, as we saw in episode 293. Misogynist texts like the Romance of the Rose elicited defenses of women from the likes of Jean Lefebvre. Back in the 12th century, Peter Abelard had already stood up for the virtue and honor of women. This could be a rhetorical exercise, as is shown by the still earlier case of Mabaud of Rennes, who wrote two poems on the issue, one attacking women and one praising them. Most influential among Italian authors of the Renaissance was probably Boccaccio, thanks to his work On Famous Women, written in 1361. He helped inspire such works as In Praise of Women by Bartolomeo Goggio and Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies, which mentions Boccaccio explicitly. When you look through catalogues of virtuous women, you see why it was a genre that would appeal to Renaissance humanists. They could show off their learning by recounting anecdotes about figures from the ancient world and from religious history. Under the latter heading, one of the most frequent names that arises is an African one, Nicola, also known as the Queen of Sheba. Occasionally, authors also take pride in the excellence of more recent ladies from the Italian aristocracy, all the better if they are from the author's own family. A related genre that offered some of the same attractions was the treatise on family life. This too had ancient roots, as a number of classical authors had written on what they called economics, that is, household management. Economics in this sense was a topic closely associated with women, since as Aristotle had made clear in his Ethics and Politics, running the household is the proper task of the wife. So it is that we see reflections on gender in a work like Francesco Barbaro's work On Marriage. This is a treatise about women that is unapologetically written for men, indeed for rich men, and above all for one rich man in particular, Lorenzo de' Medici. Barbaro advises Lorenzo on the criteria to be used in selecting a wife and the duties and appropriate comportment of the wife after marriage. Along the way, he invokes a wide range of classical authors and historical figures, and occasionally alludes to the more recent past including, naturally, a pre-eminent member of the Barbaro clan. But despite his tales of praiseworthy women, Barbaro is far from a feminist. To the contrary, he unwittingly shows us what women of the period were up against. For Barbaro, women are quite literally put on earth to love and serve men and to bear their children. Their comparative physical weakness is proof that Aristotle was right to say that their place is in the home, though Barbaro congratulates himself for being more moderate in his views than the ancient sophist Gorgias, who thought they should never be seen in public at all. Still, Barbaro warns that when they do go out, just enough to display their virtue, they should mostly remain silent. Good character can be shown by gesture and posture. In an echo of the ethical debates we've seen in other authors, Barbaro again takes what he would see as a middle path by accepting the importance of external goods while putting chief emphasis on virtue. Thus, it is a prospective wife's character that should concern a husband. On the other hand, beauty compliments virtue well, and nobility and wealth don't hurt either. It's an attitude summed up nicely in the remark of one Jacopo Morosini, who wrote of how grateful he was for his excellent wife, because of her admirable conduct and also for all the cash. Still, it would be absurd to take a wife just for her money, something Barbaro revealingly compares to picking out a helmet for its gold trim or a book for its decoration. It's hard to imagine examples more obviously chosen for a wealthy male readership. The virtue of one's wife is, however, not its own reward. The reason her character is important is that she needs to be able to run well. In this designated sphere of female activity, the wife has significant authority. Though she should, of course, obey her husband in all things, everyone else should obey her. She is to deal with the servants and oversee the household with strict vigilance, something for which Barbaro uses the platonic comparisons of the good statesman and pilot of a ship. This is a picture of the typical way of life for Italian women of the period, and it makes clear why these women saw a stark choice between family life and intellectual endeavor. In fact, Barbaro's own children faced that choice. His daughters received a humanist education and some, ironically enough, opted to avoid marriage by entering into the convent. His book also nicely illustrates the way humanists included ancient philosophical lore, right along with other classical sources, like works of history and epic poetry. It was especially Aristotle who inspired the default view of women among male authors, such as we find it in Barbaro and others who wrote on the topic of female virtue. On the Aristotelian view, women can indeed be good, even outstandingly good, but since women are inferior to men, their virtue should be exercised in the household and not in the public sphere of political life. In the politics, Aristotle justifies this attitude with the remark that women are defective in respect of their rational capacities. Barbaro and other humanists did emphasize the importance of love and friendship in marriage, but would have done so while recalling Aristotle's claim that there can be no perfect friendship between man and woman because of their inequality. Then too, Aristotle's works on animals can be read as saying that the birth of a female human or animal is a kind of failure, with only the male members of each species representing natural perfection. But this was of course a period during which the works of Plato were becoming better known, making him a second authority to rival Aristotle, and Plato had some very unerus Deutenum things to say about women. He is certainly capable of crude misogyny himself, as at the end of the Timaeus where he says that bad men are reincarnated as women, that his most famous treatment of the topic, and the one most frequently cited by renaissance authors comes in the Republic when he argues that the most talented women can do philosophy, should be involved in warfare, and ought to participate in ruling the best city. So this was an obvious classical source for authors who sought to defend women against misogyny. A perfect example comes in a text we've mentioned previously, Balthasar Castiglioni's Book of the Courtier. Its third part is devoted to a debate between two characters, a misogynist and an anti-misogynist. The anti-misogynist gets Plato about right by saying that he was no great friend of women, yet still allowed them to participate in warfare and politics. When the misogynist presents the Aristotelian view that women are naturally defective, like blind people or trees that bear no fruit, he is refuted on the ground that nature needs women for the sake of reproduction, so their birth can hardly be a matter of accidental misfiring. While Castiglioni includes a spirited defense of women in his dialogue, it is hard to see the text as unambiguously feminist. The most philosophically sophisticated of the characters remarks at the end of the debate that both protagonists have exaggerated, suggesting that Castiglioni himself adheres to the supposedly moderate view that women are often good, yet still less worthy than men. The perfect court lady, who is the mirror image of the ideal male courtier presented in the rest of the work, has the carefully constrained role we would predict, to run her household well and be modest and charming. For a bolder defense of women, we need to turn to authors who were, well, women. We've met one of them already, Isoata Nogarola, one of the three humanists we focused on in the previous episode. I saved her most remarkable work for now because it is precisely about the virtues of men and women, or rather about the vices of one particular man and one particular woman, this is a dialogue devoted to the sinfulness of Adam and Eve. It's another well-worn topic. Misogynists right back through the middle ages had delighted in blaming Eve for the sinful choice that first corrupted human nature. The usual response from anti-misogynists, which we actually find in Castiglione, is that if sin was introduced through Eve, it was repaired through another woman, Mary, through whom Christ was given to us. Nogarola has a different approach. Her two main characters are Isoata, that is the author herself, and her great friend Luluvico Foscarini. This may be a humanist dialogue, and a rather intimate one at that, offering testimony to one of her most important personal relationships. Yet, it also recalls a scholastic disputed question, which takes its departure from St. Augustine's claim that Adam and Eve sinned unequally according to their sexes, but equally in pride. The real Nogarola and Foscarini might in fact have debated the question in an open forum. I like to imagine Francesco Barbaro sitting at the back, frowning at this public display of feminine intelligence. At first glance though, Nogarola's way of defending Eve might warm the heart of the coldest misogynist. Her character takes the line that Eve's weakness as a woman, her inferior intellect and temperamental inconstancy, helps explain her sinful choice. As a man, Adam had no such excuse. Just as we should blame a nobleman more than a peasant for committing the same infraction, or an adult more than a child, so we should condemn Adam more than Eve. Ironically, Foscarini is thus put in the position of having to refute sexist assumptions about womanly frailty in order to blame Eve as he wants to. Though he doesn't go so far as to argue that Eve was equal to Adam, he thinks that her more modest natural gifts were sufficient to make her fully culpable. As he puts it, just as teeth were given to wild beasts, horns to oxen, feathers to birds for their survival, to the woman mental capacity was given sufficient for the preservation and pursuit of the health of her soul. But there is a more radical line of thought pursued by the character of Isocta in the dialogue, namely that Eve acted out of a natural desire for good. This comes dangerously close to excusing her sin completely, though of course Nogarola doesn't explicitly suggest that conclusion. And the same justification of Eve appears in another dialogue about women written in Italian by Modesta Pozzo de' Zorzi in 1592 on the eve of her death during childbirth. Taking the pen name of Moderata Fonte, she wrote a number of poems, a chivalric romance and this remarkable work called The Worth of Women. Unlike Nogarola's dialogue, this one would pass the modern-day Bechtel test. Are women depicted talking to one another about something besides a man? In fact, we get a large cast of characters, all of them female, explicitly reveling in their freedom as they sit together in a garden with no one to monitor their discussion. In fact, one of them says that this is the best thing about the garden, no men. That comment sets the tone for the work pretty well, as some of the characters enthusiastically praise women and complain about men who are seen as largely vicious and useless, so that one would be well advised not to marry them. When women do marry, it debases them because of their husband's natural inferiority. But this is the 16th century, don't Fonte's characters have to admit that women are subject to men? No, except in the sense that we are all subject to natural disasters. Men are in fact given to women by God as a spiritual trial. While it is true that there are worthy men, they are the exception. True, one can find accounts of great men and historians, but excellent men are mentioned in those chronicles simply because they were so rare. And it's also true that there are bad women, but they too are rare and have typically been corrupted by the wicked men in their families. Here, Fonte is implicitly critiquing the genre of famous women, established by Boccaccio. It is ridiculous to list cases of female virtue as if this were exceptional, when what is really exceptional is female vice. In the face of all this, other characters in the dialogue do put the case in favour of men and marriage. But it's pretty clear that Fonte's sympathies lie with the critics, who are more eloquent, wittier, and also more learned. Indeed, the second part of the work is given over to disquisitions on natural philosophy by these characters, meaning that almost half the work consists of digressions from its main topic. More relentless in its focus and bolder still in its argument is the most powerful treatise in defence of women written in our period, On the Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, composed by Lucrezia Marinella at the close of the 16th century. This is a straightforward essay, not a dialogue, though it responds to a separate misogynist work by Giuseppe Passi called The Defects of Women. In her lengthy rebuttal, Marinella adeptly turns her opponents' arguments against them. Confronted with insulting etymologies of words having to do with women, Marinella offers positive derivations instead. The Italian for lady, donna, comes from domina, a female lore, while femina relates to fetu, fetus. Marinella points to a similar connection in Plato's dialogue about etymology, the cratilis. Throughout antiquity and the middle ages, it had been argued that women are inferior to men because of their physical constitution, their bodies lacking the heat that makes men so vigorous. Marinella would have known such arguments quite well since her father was a doctor who had written on gynecology. She flips them on their head, arguing that in fact, men are excessively hot, which is why they are so unreliable. As she puts it, women are cooler than men and thus nobler, and if a man performs excellent deeds, it is because his nature is similar to a woman's, possessing temperate but not excessive heat. Even the fact that men are physically stronger than women, which Barbaro took to show that women ought to stay in the home, in fact shows that women are superior, being more delicate and gentle. After all, blacksmiths are not nobler than kings in men of science. Marinella takes the same approach of appropriating her enemies' weapons when it comes to her greatest foe, which is not really Passi, but rather Aristotle. More than any of the authors considered so far, she highlights the conflict between Plato and Aristotle on the subject of women, making her work another entry in the running dispute over the authority of these two figures. Marinella's sympathies lie squarely with Plato, and not only for his recommendations about female political participation. She also thinks, speaking of participation, that the Platonist theory of forms supports her case. Women are beautiful and thereby come closer to instantiating the perfection of the forms. In the course of this innovative application of Platonist metaphysics to the battle of the sexes, Marinella cites a range of authorities including Plotinus, Ficino, and more unexpectedly, Petrarch, who had compared his beloved Laura to an ideal of perfection. Women perform a valuable service for men because their physical beauty is like a step on a ladder that leads to the divine realm of forms, as described by Plato in his Symposium. Whereas, she says, compared to women, all men are ugly. They would not be loved by women were it not for our courteous and benign natures. As for Aristotle, he was a fearful tyrannical man, where Plato was truly great and just. Like other misogynist authors, Aristotle suffered from envy, anger, and even intellectual limitations, having no rational basis for his views. Again, this reverses a standard trope used against women. For Marinella, it is actually men who are prey to their emotions and shaky reasoning. She knows Aristotle well enough to use his ideas in her own cause too. She sounds like a scholastic logician when she chastises Passi for legitimately drawing a universal conclusion about female wickedness from a few particular examples. She points out that in Aristotelian science, women cannot really be naturally defective since they are actually more numerous than men, and nature doesn't fail more often than it succeeds. And she accepts Aristotle's definitions of the virtues, the better to show that women more commonly satisfy these definitions. She also reflects on the way women were excluded from learning more about such philosophical ideas, something that, by the way, is well illustrated by the life story of Morarata Fonte, who had to get her brother to repeat his lessons to her after coming home from school. Marinella suspects that this sort of unfair treatment is, again, caused by envy and fear of female superiority. Man does not permit women to apply herself to such studies, fearing with reason that she will surpass him in them. This is stirring stuff, and perhaps more committed in its polemic than what we find in Fonte's worth of women. Admittedly, Fonte's characters do make strident remarks on behalf of women. In fact, one of them says almost the same thing we just found in Marinella, we have just as much right to speak about scientific subjects as they have, and if we were educated properly as girls, we'd outstrip men's performance in any science or art you care to name. But by depicting her more feminist characters in conversation with other women, who are more restrained in their views, Fonte is in theory remaining silent about her own position. Perhaps she is, like Castiglione, less radical than her most radical characters. Moreover, she seems to have a rather ironic attitude towards the whole debate, indeed the whole genre of writing about women's vices and virtues. I already mentioned her undercutting of the catalogues of outstanding female virtue. A similar effect is created when the discussions of scientific matters included in the second part of the dialogue are routinely interrupted by a character named Leonora. She wants to get back to complaining about men. At first this seems like a mere running gag, or perhaps a jocular anticipation of what the frustrated reader may be thinking. But it may be a more serious indication of Fonte's own frustrations with the putative topic of her treatise. Why should she always write about women and their conflict with men just because she is a woman? As one character says in justification of the scientific digressions, it's good for us to learn about these things so we can look after ourselves without needing help from men. With the work of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, we've come to the dawn of the 17th century. In fact, Marinella lived into the middle of that century, dying in 1653. And we could continue with today's topic by examining the Venetian author Archangela Tarabotti, who died one year earlier and wrote a work on the tyrannical practice of enclosing women, and yet another response to misogynist satires. But we'll have to leave her for another time, because we still have plenty of philosophy from 15th and 16th century Italy to discuss. So far, we've really only talked about one intellectual movement from that context, namely humanism. But if humanism was, as I suggested last time, the kind of gateway drug to ancient philosophy, we haven't yet gotten to the hardcore users. None of them was more intoxicated than Marsilio Ficino, just one of the men, and as we just saw with Lucrezia Marinella, women, who took a vivid interest in Plato. So, form the intention to join me next time as we enter into dialogue about Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.