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

My PhD will examine the writings of fifteenth-century Venetian women humanists as a landmark in the
development 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 little
engagement 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 the
anthologising, broadly contextualising nature of extant research and offer a more textured investigation
into humanist letters authored in Quattrocento Veneto.
Venetian women's participation in the elite circle of humanist epistolarity contrasts with more usual
forms of women's production in fifteenth-century Italy, such as the continuation of medieval devotional
writing in Florence. Providing a comprehensive account of epistolary writings by fifteenth-century
Venetian Neo-Latinists, I will examine the edited letterbooks of Isotta Nogarola, Cassandra Fedele and
Laura Cereta and visit archives to uncover manuscript letters. The highly literary humanist letter is often
analysed as a vehicle for authorial self-presentation (Van Houdt 2002). Given the scarcity of Quattrocento
women humanists, their self-presentation may be examined through a gendered lens, focusing on the
dynamic 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. How
could the first women humanists rely on a tradition that apparently discouraged female authorship?