The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (49 page)

35
.   Aristotle,
On the Generation of Animals
, 2.3.737a, ln. 19–34, in
The Complete Works of Aristotle
, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1111–218, here, 1144. For a general overview of Aristotle’s biological misogyny, see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, “Aristotle and Woman,”
Journal of History of Biology
9:2 (Autumn 1976): 183–213.

36
.   Galen,
On the Usefulness of the Bodies Parts
, vol. II, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 628–30.

37
.   For a discussion of complexion theory, see Nancy Siraisi,
Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 101–4. On the transmission and medieval adoption of these ideas, Roger French,
Medicine before Science: The Rational and Learned Doctor from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 59–126.

38
.   Both John Buridan and John of Paris, cited in Lynn Thorndike, “De Complexionibus,”
Isis
49:4 (December 1958): 398–408, here, 398.

39
.   Bartholomew of England,
De proprietatibus rerum
, bk. XV, cap. 13 (London: Thomas East, 1582), 74v. Cited in Joan Cadden,
Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 183–84 and, on complexion more generally, 183–88.

40
.   Bartholomew of England,
De proprietatibus rerum
, bk. XV, cap. 13, 74v.

41
.   John Buridan,
Quaestiones super octo libros politicorum Aristotelis
, lib. III, quaest. XXVI (Paris, 1513, rprt Frankfurt: Minerva G.M.B.H., 1969), XLIXr. On ideas about female counsel in the Middle Ages, Misty Schieberle,
Feminized Counsel: Women Counselors in Late Medieval Advice Literature, 1380–1500
(Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, n.v., 2014).

42
.   Buridan,
Quaestiones
, lib. III, quaest. XXVI, XLVIIIv, where he introduces the possibility of feminine prudence at “Arguitur primo,” and XLIXv.

43
.   Nicole Oresme, “Le livre des politiques d’Aristote de Nicole Oresme,” ed. Albert Douglas Menut,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
, n.s., 60:6 (1970): 123.

44
.   Aquinas,
Summa of Theology
II-II, quest. 55, art. 3, sed contra, 1423. The passage from Paul’s letter is found at 2 Corinthians 4:2.

45
.   See above,
chapter 2
.

46
.   Albert the Great,
Quaestiones super de animalibus
, ed. Ephrem Filthaut, lib. XV, quaest. 11, in
Opera Omnia
, vol. XII (Münster: Aschendorff, 1955), 265. For discussions of this question, Alcuin Blamires, “Women and Creative Intelligence in Medieval Thought,” in
Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages
, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 213–30, here 215, Cadden,
Meanings of Sex Difference
, 185, and J. D. Burnley, “Criseyde’s Heart and the Weakness of Women: An Essay in Lexical Interpretation,”
Studia Neophilologica
54:1 (1982): 25–38, here, 33–35.

47
.   Albert the Great,
Super de animalibus
, lib. XV, quaest. 11, 265–66.

48
.   pseudo–Albert the Great,
Women’s Secrets
, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 59–60. On the work’s influence on
The Hammer of Witches
, see Lemay’s introduction, 49–58. Sarah Alison Miller,
Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body
(New York: Routledge, 2010), 55–89, on “secrets” in
Women’s Secrets
.

49
.   
The Hammer of Witches
, 169.

50
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.1.2, 5.

51
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Treasure
, and see above,
chapter 3
, “Institutional Transformations.”

52
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.2.1–2.2, 6.

53
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.8.3–8.7, 17–19. On Christine’s argumentative strategies, see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Christine de Pizan and the Misogynistic Tradition,”
Romanic Review
81:3 (May 1990): 279–92, and Sarah Gwyneth Ross,
The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 133–43.

54
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I 1.8.9, 20.

55
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Letter to the God of Love
, in
The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan
, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), ln. 267–72, 20.

56
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
II.47.1, 165.

57
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.10.1, 25.

58
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.9.3, 24.

59
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.11.1, 30–32.

60
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
II.13.1, 118 and
The Letter to the God of Love
, ln. 417–19, 71. Alcuin Blamires,
The Case for Women in Medieval Culture
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), takes up this challenge.

61
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.9.2, 22–23, and II.31.1, 119.

62
.   Ruth Morse,
Truth and Convention: Rhetoric, Representation and Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6, stressing the importance of rhetorical invention to the medieval practice of history, writes, “In the different conceptual space of the Middle Ages, true might mean in the main or for the most part, or even, it could have happened like this.” There was, in short, nothing untoward in Christine’s rewriting of history. For an excellent and comprehensive overview of medieval historical practice, see Matthew Kempshall,
Rhetoric and the Writing of History: 400–1500
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

63
.   Giovanni Boccaccio,
Famous Women
, trans. and ed. Virginia Brown (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), ch. LXXIV, 310–15. On Boccaccio’s
Famous Women
, see Glenda McLeod,
Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 59–80, who notes, 66, that for all Boccaccio’s praise of certain women, “Such women do nothing to refute long standing debasement of femininity; no matter how great their numbers or how impressive their achievement, they do not speak for their gender.” On Christine and Boccaccio, see Patricia A. Phillippy, “Establishing Authority: Boccaccio’s
De claris mulieribus
and Christine de Pizan’s
Livre de la cité des dames
,”
Romanic Review
77 (1986): 167–94.

64
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
II.20.1–20.2, 129–30.

65
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.9.2, 23–24.

66
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Letter to the God of Love
, ln. 600–16, 81. Christine was far from the only person to defend Eve in the Middle Ages. See Blamires,
The Case for Women
, 96–125.

67
.   Boccaccio,
Famous Women
, 16–25. Liliane Dulac, “Un mythe didactique chez Christine de Pizan: Sémiramis ou la Veuve héroïque,” in
Mélanges de Philologie Romane offerts à Charles Camproux
, tom. I (Montpellier: C.E.O, 1978), 315–31.

68
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.15.2, 40. See Maureen Quilligan,
The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s
Cité des dames (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 69–85, for an extended analysis of Christine’s claim in terms of oral and written authority.

69
.   Vincent of Beauvais,
Speculum Doctrinale
(Venice: Dominic Nicolini, 1591),
lib. X, cap. XXXVIII, “Qualiter antiqui patres excusantur a culpa adulterii,” 168r. This sort of argument has a long history and can already be found in the early fourth century, for example, Methodius,
The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity
, trans. Herbert Musurillo (Westminster: Newman Press, 1958), Logos I:2–3, 41–45.

70
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.43.1, 86–87.

71
.   Christine de Pizan,
The Book
I.48.1, 96–97.

72
.   For each of these stories in order, see Christine de Pizan,
The Book
II.9.1, 113–14 (Hypsipyle), II.26.1, 135–36 (Lady Curia), 129 (Tertia Aemillia). On Christine and prudence, Karen Green, “
Phronesis
Feminised: Prudence from Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I,” in
Virtue, Liberty and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women
, ed. Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 24–29.

73
.   Moderata Fonte,
The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men
, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 29. Despite Pietro’s assertions concerning the purpose of his mother’s book, Patricia H. Labalme, “Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists,”
Archivo Veneto
, ser. 5, 3 (1981): 81–109, here 90, argues: “the main purpose of the work is not the condemnation of the male sex with old and new arguments. The dialogue is a vehicle for the display of Modesta’s and Corinna’s encyclopedic, if superficial learning.” It is certainly this, but display needn’t prohibit critique as well.

74
.   Lucrezia Marinella,
The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men
, ed. and trans. Anne Dunhill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 39. On the social context for both these works, especially the collapse of the Venetian marriage market and a related increase in enforced female claustration, see Virginia Cox, “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,”
Renaissance Quarterly
48:3 (Autumn 1995): 513–581. See also Stephen Kolsky, “Moderate Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi: An Early Seventeenth-Century Feminist Controversy,”
Modern Language Review
96:4 (October 2001): 973–89. Ross,
Birth of Feminism
, 195–212, offers biographies for both women and places their work in context.

75
.   I take this from Labalme, “Venetian Women,” 109, who, making this argument using these examples, writes: “Venetian women, for all that they were confined and cloistered, were also, in the seventeenth century, made self-aware by law, by political legend and ritual, by social custom, by artistic and literary culture, by the reputations of foreign women and the exhibitionism of less private females than themselves. Is it not possible that this dichotomy, the very variety of experience, encouraged them to begin to measure themselves against each other and against men, impelled them to challenge old theories of inadequacy and subjugation, to come to their own defense, to produce a triad of female feminists, among the earliest in European history.”

76
.   Ross,
Birth of Feminism
, 206, notes that even the way in which both Fonte and Marinella present themselves in their writings differs from their female
predecessors, adopting a more “ ‘masculine’ mode, using only the sparest form of political rhetoric to flatter patrons.”

77
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 53.

78
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 46–47.

79
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 54–55.

80
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 57.

81
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 72.

82
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 73.

83
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 73–78.

84
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 226–230. Suzanne Magnanini, “Una selva luminosa: The Second Day of Moderata Fonte’s
Il merito delle donne
,”
Modern Philology
101:2 (November 2003): 278–96, stresses the connections between much of the second day’s conversation and the genre of the
selva
.

85
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 232–33.

86
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 233.

87
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 226.

88
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 237. For a recent overview on the rise of fashion in early modern Europe, see Carlo Marco Belfanti, “The Civilization of Fashion: At the Origins of a Western Social Institution,”
Journal of Social History
43:2 (Winter 2009): 261–83. On Venice in particular, see Jennifer Haraguchi, “Debating Women’s Fashion in Renaissance Venice,” in Elizabeth Rodini and Elissa B. Weaver,
A Well-Fashioned Image: Clothing and Costume in European Art, 1500–1850
(Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 2002), 23–34, on Fonte and Marinella, 31–32.

89
.   Fonte,
The Worth of Women
, 235.

90
.   Marinella,
The Nobility and Excellence of Women
, 166.

91
.   Marinella,
The Nobility and Excellence of Women
, 166–67.

92
.   Marinella,
The Nobility and Excellence of Women
, 167–68.

93
.   Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Letter to Ermalao Barbaro, June 1485,” in Quirinus Breem, “Document: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on the Conflict of Philosophy and Rhetoric,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
13:3 (June 1952): 384–412, here, 395. On rhetoric and masculine effeminacy in Pico’s letter, see Wayne A. Rebhorn,
The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Reason
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 133–47. “Although Renaissance critics of rhetoric generally refrain from joining Pico in denouncing the negative version of the art as
cinaedus
, or
sodomitical
,” Rebhorn explains at 143, “their presentation of it as a Siren has much the same effect, since they wind up identifying rhetors with women.”