Isotta Nogarola
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Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466) was an Italian writer and intellectual who is said to be the first major female
humanist Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. The meaning of the term "humanism" ha ...
and one of the most important humanists of the
Italian Renaissance The Italian Renaissance ( ) was a period in History of Italy, Italian history between the 14th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Western Europe and marked t ...
. She inspired generations of artists and writers, among them Lauro Quirini and , and contributed to a centuries-long debate in Europe on
gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...
and the nature of women. Nogarola is best known for her 1451 work ''De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato ''(trans. Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve). She also wrote many other dialogues, poems, speeches, and letters, twenty-six of which survive.


Early intellectual life

Nogarola was born in
Verona Verona ( ; ; or ) is a city on the Adige, River Adige in Veneto, Italy, with 255,131 inhabitants. It is one of the seven provincial capitals of the region, and is the largest city Comune, municipality in the region and in Northeast Italy, nor ...
, Italy, in 1418. Her parents, Leonardo Nogarola and Bianca Borromeo, were a well-to-do couple who would go on to conceive a total of four boys and six girls. Nogarola was also the niece of the Latin poet Angela Nogarola. Despite being illiterate herself, Nogarola's mother ensured that her children all received fine humanist educations, including her daughters. The children were taught the rhetoric necessary for public speaking, and many of them delivered public speeches and conducted debates in Latin, as was customary among well-educated men of that era. Both Isotta and her younger sister Ginevra became renowned for their classical studies, although Ginevra gave up writing upon her marriage in 1438. Nogarola's early letters demonstrate her familiarity with Latin and Greek authors, including
Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, writer and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises tha ...
,
Plutarch Plutarch (; , ''Ploútarchos'', ; – 120s) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo (Delphi), Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his ''Parallel Lives'', ...
and
Diogenes Laertius Diogenes Laërtius ( ; , ; ) was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Little is definitively known about his life, but his surviving book ''Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers'' is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek phi ...
, as well as
Petronius Gaius Petronius Arbiter"Gaius Petronius Arbiter"
Britannica.com.
(; ; ; s ...
and
Aulus Gellius Aulus Gellius (c. 125after 180 AD) was a Roman author and grammarian, who was probably born and certainly brought up in Rome. He was educated in Athens, after which he returned to Rome. He is famous for his ''Attic Nights'', a commonplace book, ...
.McCallum-Barry, Carmel (2016), 'Learned women of the Renaissance and Early Modern period: the relevance of their scholarship', in Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (eds.), ''Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly'' (Oxford), pp. 30-1 Nogarola's first tutor was Martino Rizzoni, who was himself taught by
Guarino da Verona Guarino Veronese or Guarino da Verona (1374 – 14 December 1460) was an Italian classical scholar, humanist, and translator of ancient Greek texts during the Renaissance. In the republics of Florence and Venice he studied under Manuel Chryso ...
, one of the leading humanists at that time. Nogarola proved an extremely able student, attaining respect for her eloquence in Latin, and by the age of 18, she had become famous.The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466): Sexism and Its Consequences in the Fifteenth Century,
Margaret L. King Margaret L. King (born 1947) is an American historian of the Italian Renaissance and a professor emerita of history at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. In 2025, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.https://www.amphilsoc.org/ ...
Signs , Vol. 3, No. 4 (Summer, 1978), pp. 807–822


Hostile reception of humanistic work

The reception of her activities was condescending, with her work considered primarily to be that of a woman and not belonging to the intellectual world into which she sought entry. Niccolo Venier thought the whole female sex should rejoice and consecrate statues to Isotta as the ancient Egyptians had to
Isis Isis was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingdom () as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her sla ...
. Giorgio Bevilaqua claimed never before to have met a learned woman. For her own part, Nogarola was concerned that her fame did not come from the sheer volume of intelligence she seemed to possess, but from the novelty of her gender, and despite her erudition, she had little choice but to defer to the contemporary social norms by deprecating herself as an ignorant woman. In 1438, after receiving praise from Guarino da Verona, Nogarola wrote him a letter, calling him a "wellspring of virtue and probity." She likened herself to a Cicero to his Cato, and a Socrates to his Plato. This news spread throughout Verona and inspired much ridicule from women in the city. A year passed without a reply, and she wrote again to Guarino, saying: "Why... was I born a woman, to be scorned by men in words and deeds? I ask myself this question in solitude... Your unfairness in not writing to me has caused me much suffering, that there could be no greater suffering... You yourself said there was no goal I could not achieve. But now that nothing has turned out as it should have, my joy has given way to sorrow... For they jeer at me throughout the city, the women mock me." This time, Guarino da Verona replied in a letter, saying: "I believed and trusted that your soul was manly... But now you seem so humbled, so abject, and so truly a woman, that you demonstrate none of the estimable qualities I thought you possessed." Upon the death of her father the next year, she travelled with her family to Venice, where she remained until 1441. However, anonymous accusations were made against her, alleging incest, male and female homosexuality, and licentiousness. “An eloquent woman is never chaste,” was one such allegation made against her.


Retreat to Verona and religious scholarship

Confronted with this hostile reception, Nogarola appears to have decided that devoting herself to literary studies meant the sacrifice of friendship, fame, comfort, and sexuality. In 1441, she returned to her property in Verona to live quietly, possibly with the company of her mother. She cut short her career as a secular humanist, instead turning to the study of the sacred letter. In 1451, she published her most famous and perhaps most influential work, ''De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato (''trans. Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve). In this literary dialogue, she discussed the relative sinfulness of
Adam and Eve Adam and Eve, according to the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions, were the first man and woman. They are central to the belief that humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors. ...
. Using a ''
reductio ad absurdum In logic, (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"), also known as (Latin for "argument to absurdity") or ''apagogical argument'', is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absur ...
argument,'' Nogarola demonstrated that women could not be held to be weaker in nature and more culpable in original sin. Isotta died in 1466, aged 48. She was honoured posthumously by two sonnets praising her chastity, but not her learning.


Known works

As well as her famous dialogues, Nogarola's works include a biography of
St. Jerome Jerome (; ; ; – 30 September 420), also known as Jerome of Stridon, was an early Christian priest, confessor, theologian, translator, and historian; he is commonly known as Saint Jerome. He is best known for his translation of the Bible ...
, a letter urging a
Crusade The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and at times directed by the Papacy during the Middle Ages. The most prominent of these were the campaigns to the Holy Land aimed at reclaiming Jerusalem and its surrounding t ...
(1459), and a consolatory letter to a father after the death of his child.


References


Further reading

* *Carmel McCallum-Barry (2016), 'Learned women of the Renaissance and Early Modern period: the relevance of their scholarship', in ''Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly'', ed. Rosie Wyles and
Edith Hall Edith Hall, (born 4 March 1959) is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the Bri ...
, 29-47. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Some full texts of her work in Angela Nogarola (ca. 1400) and Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466): Thieves of Language."
in ''Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, v. 3''. Early Modern Women Writing Latin, ed. Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, 11–30. New York: Routledge.


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Nogarola, Isotta 1418 births 1466 deaths Italian Renaissance humanists Writers from Verona 15th-century Italian women writers Italian feminists 15th-century writers in Latin Latin-language writers from Italy