| This study explains the first sustained entrance of secular learned women into literary society, within a model that I am calling "the intellectual family." Sponsored and often educated by their learned fathers, women authors from the fifteenth century onward negotiated the problem of gender by publicizing her works within the safety of family networks and using familial metaphor when approaching male patrons. Women used the domestic context to achieve a new degree of cultural legitimacy and to engage with the prominent debates of the era, especially the debate on women. Illustrious products of the intellectual family, from Christine de Pizan to Bathsua Makin, did not yet argue for women's political equality, but they represented and often advocated women's intellectual equality. The intellectual family thus constitutes an initial step toward feminism: it created a viable category for the female voice in literary society.;Italy and England are the principal contexts of this study. Part 1, "The Household Academy" (1400 to 1580), focuses upon women humanists in both contexts, whom learned fathers taught the classical languages alongside their brothers. Part II, "The Household Salon" (1580-1680), traces the expansion of the domestic framework from father-run academies to the domestic salons of wife-husband teams. Women authors of this later period, I argue, took a dominant role in their intellectual families and concomitantly transformed the debate on women from a discussion of womankind's abstract merits to an initial argument for sexual equality.;This dissertation is an experiment in collective biography and comparative intellectual history. The twenty-five principal case studies rest upon a range of archival, manuscript and printed materials. Wills and family documents reveal the mechanics of "the intellectual family"; women's writings are the most important literary sources. Women authors fashioned themselves as proper "family women," but what they wrote was often a critique of the patriarchal order. The "intellectual family" was thus a subversive success: it legitimized the first feminists. |
