Women and Literary Academies in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Italy

• In Event: Learned and Literary Women in Italy and France: Academies, Epistolarity

Abstract

The rise of academies in Italy is a typical Renaissance phenomenon that escalated by the end of the 16th centuries. Literary criticism has so far dismissed academies as vacuous and pompous places for discussion of irrelevant pedantic themes. This paper considers the role of academies in the promotion and support of women in spaces outside traditional settings such as the court, religious spaces, or the university. I will focus on the Academy of the Ricovrati in Padua which hosted female academicians, who were mostly Italian but also French. This academy elected Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman graduate in the world, and subsequently a sizeable number of French learned women. The paper will explore the motivations behind such inclination towards women in the Ricovrati.

Author

• Patrizia Bettella, University of Alberta