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

我的博士学位将研究15世纪威尼斯女性人文主义者的作品，将其作为早期现代女性作者发展的一个里程碑，描绘这些女性如何在男性主导的古典文学和文艺复兴人文主义领域中定义自己。尽管最近的项目（Stevenson 2005, Kaborycha 2016）试图解决这种不平衡，但在不断增长的新拉丁语研究中，很少涉及女性写作。我的研究将建立在选集的基础上，广泛的现有研究的背景性质，并对四世纪威尼托的人文主义信件进行更有质感的调查。威尼斯妇女在人文主义书信精英圈的参与与15世纪意大利妇女生产的更常见形式形成鲜明对比，例如在佛罗伦萨继续进行中世纪的虔诚写作。我将全面介绍15世纪威尼斯新拉丁主义者的书信写作，我将研究伊索塔·诺加罗拉、卡桑德拉·费德拉和劳拉·切莱塔编辑过的书信，并访问档案，以发现手稿。高度文学性的人文主义信件通常被分析为作者自我表现的载体（Van Houdt 2002）。考虑到四世纪女性人文主义者的稀缺，我们可以通过性别视角来审视她们的自我表现，关注孤独的女性声音与男性主导的古典传统之间的动态关系。古典语料库充斥着对女性的厌恶，几乎没有女性作家的例子，定义了人文主义作品。第一批女性人文主义者怎么会依赖于一个明显不鼓励女性作者的传统呢？

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?