'Why are there so few learned women?': The female Neo-Latin authorial voice in the Venetian Quattrocento

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My PhD will examine the writings of fifteenth-century Venetian women humanists as a landmark in thedevelopment of early modern female authorship, delineating how these women defined themselves visa-vis the male-dominated spheres of classical literature and Renaissance humanism. There is littleengagement with women's writing in the growing body of Neo-Latin research, though recent projects(Stevenson 2005, Kaborycha 2016) seek to address this imbalance. My study will build upon theanthologising, broadly contextualising nature of extant research and offer a more textured investigationinto humanist letters authored in Quattrocento Veneto.Venetian women's participation in the elite circle of humanist epistolarity contrasts with more usualforms of women's production in fifteenth-century Italy, such as the continuation of medieval devotionalwriting in Florence. Providing a comprehensive account of epistolary writings by fifteenth-centuryVenetian Neo-Latinists, I will examine the edited letterbooks of Isotta Nogarola, Cassandra Fedele andLaura Cereta and visit archives to uncover manuscript letters. The highly literary humanist letter is oftenanalysed as a vehicle for authorial self-presentation (Van Houdt 2002). Given the scarcity of Quattrocentowomen humanists, their self-presentation may be examined through a gendered lens, focusing on thedynamic between the lone female voice and the male-dominated classical tradition. The classical corpus,replete with misogyny and offering few examples of women writers, defined humanist production. Howcould the first women humanists rely on a tradition that apparently discouraged female authorship?