Introduction

In his La nobiltà delle donne, first published in Venice in 1549 by Gabriele Giolito, Lodovico Domenichi (1515–1564) condemned ‘alcuni huomini tanto freddi et gelosi che non comportano che le donne loro scrivano o leggano cosa alcuna’ [those men who are so cold and possessive that do not want their women to write or read anything], and particularly those husbands who ‘hanno sospetto […] che se la moglie legge i sonetti del Petrarca, le novelle del Boccaccio o i romanzi dell’Ariosto, ella incontanente non perda la honestà sua et subito non si doni in preda agli amadori suoi’ [are afraid […] that their wives may suddenly lose their virtues and surrender to their admirers if they read Petrarch's sonnets, Boccaccio's short tales and Ariosto's romances]. This passage is a translation, from Latin into the Italian vernacular, of a sentence taken from the Ad commendationem sexus muliebris oratio by Girolamo Della Rovere (1530–1592), a text published in 1540, in which the catalogue of the readings prohibited to female readers also contained Jacopo Sannazaro's lyrics and Serafino Aquilano's poems. Both Della Rovere and Domenichi open their lists of ‘forbidden books’ with Petrarch, revealing how his sonnets were considered a means of corruption of female virtue and behaviour; this, however, is the point of view of ‘rozi et materiali ingegni’ [rough and ignorant minds], rather than the perspective of the two authors, who argued in favour of women's education and their access to different readings, Petrarch included.