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Fraught Relations in the Letters of Laura Cereta: Marriage, Friendship, and Humanist Epistolarity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Amyrose McCue Gill
Amyrose McCue Gill*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

Laura Cereta is unique among Quattrocento female humanists in directly addressing the position of women as wives and as friends in her substantial corpus of erudite Latin epistolary prose. Questioning the ideals that governed intellectual, social, and personal expectations of matrimony, Cereta's letters reflect her self-consciously double status as humanist and spouse. Her fierce critique of marriage as a site of female oppression and complicity implies an alternative that requires of humanists, husbands, and wives a radical rethinking of marriage in terms of friendship, as well as of the very project of humanist epistolarity.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , Winter 2009 , pp. 1098 - 1129
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Albert R. Ascoli and Deanna Shemek for their astute comments on several drafts of this article, and to Ann Crabb, Reinier Leushuis, and Diana Robin for their practical and thoughtful suggestions. My sincere thanks to Aileen Feng for sharing her unpublished work on Cereta and for encouraging me to consider Cereta's interrogation of marriage and friendship in terms of a broader critique of humanism. Thanks are also due Robert A. Fredona, who kindly assisted me with Cereta's Latin, and Diana Robin, who painstakingly corrected my transcriptions. All errors contained herein remain mine alone. Finally, I could not have undertaken this study without Albert Rabil's generous, unexpected gift of microfilm copies of Cereta's letters. All English translations of Cereta's letters are from Diana Robin's edition, cited here as Cereta, 1997.

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