Paternal Tyranny (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe) - Hardcover

Tarabotti, Arcangela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226789659 ISBN 13: 9780226789651

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Synopsis

Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) yearned to be formally educated and enjoy an independent life in Venetian literary circles. But instead, at sixteen, her father forced her into a Benedictine convent. To protest her confinement, Tarabotti composed polemical works exposing the many injustices perpetrated against women of her day.

Paternal Tyranny, the first of these works, is a fiery but carefully argued manifesto against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. Denouncing key misogynist texts of the era, Tarabotti shows how despicable it was for Venice, a republic that prided itself on its political liberties, to deprive its women of rights accorded even to foreigners. She accuses parents of treating convents as dumping grounds for disabled, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted daughters. Finally, through compelling feminist readings of the Bible and other religious works, Tarabotti demonstrates that women are clearly men's equals in God's eyes.

An avenging angel who dared to speak out for the rights of women nearly four centuries ago, Arcangela Tarabotti can now finally be heard.

About this title

About the Author:

Letizia Panizza is a research fellow in the Department of Italian at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the editor of Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society and coeditor of A History of Women's Writing in Italy. She also wrote the introduction to Lucrezia Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review:

"This scathing treatise by a seventeenth-century Venetian nun . . . should make uneasy reading for historians, theologians, Catholics, fathers, mothers, and brothers alike, as it exposes a system whereby daughters in Counter-Reformation Venice were 'imprisoned' in convents as nuns. . . . It is unusual to hear quite so loudly and clearly what a woman (let alone a nun) thought of her life in seventeenth-century Catholic Europe." (Kate Lowe Journal of Ecclesiastical History)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0226789659
• ISBN 13: 9780226789651
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 211