Abstract

This study casts light on both the vexed question of women's vernacular literacy as well as women's wider participation in literary culture during the Italian quattrocento. For decades now, scholars have puzzled over the phrase dealing with women's literacy in Giovanni Villani's Chronicle, where he states that in Florence between “eight thousand to ten thousand boys and girls are learning to read.” Feminist scholars in the 1980s in particular took an extraordinarily pessimistic stance on women's literacy in quattrocento Florence. Women's ability not only to read but also to write was called into question. “A girl who could read, and especially, write, was cause for amazement,” wrote Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Luisa Miglio considered women's writing in the quattrocento to have been both extremely rare and to have constituted a kind of “transgression.” “I do not know,” wrote Miglio, “if Margherita Datini or Alessandra Macinghi or other lesser known women who took a pen in hand were aware that theirs was an act of transgression, if they were truly able to measure the significance of that action, almost a theft or at least the appropriation of an instrument reserved to the male universe by the society in which they lived.”