Irene Peirano Garrison, Harvard University
While many of the pedagogical tools and practices employed today in the study of Latin were
developed in the early modern period, much work remains to be done to delineate and
complicate these genealogies and histories (Moss; Jardine and Grafton; Waquet; Ostler). This
paper seeks to disrupt narratives of linear continuity between early modern Latin pedagogies and
19th century practices and to problematize the definition of Latinity in the early modern period by
focusing on the gender politics of knowing Latin in a selection of 15th-17th educational treatises.
Despite the fact that there is a considerable body of Latin written by women, mostly privately
educated, in this period (Stevenson; Churchill, Brown and Jeffrey), Latin language study was
constructed as a “male puberty rite” (Ong 1959) arguably well into the 19th century. In the first
part of the paper, I examine this debate in 15th century Italian texts, focusing on Leonardo
Bruni’s De studiis et litteris (c.a. 1424), the oratory of Cassandra Fedele and the epistolary
collection of Isotta Nogarola (King and Rabil). In these texts, each written with very different
styles and agendas, the virgo erudita is not just a conundrum that defies the laws of nature but
more importantly a rhetorical gambit designed to spur men towards a higher standard of wisdom.
Secondly, women problematize the tension between the practical aims of a Latin education -its
importance as a vehicle for learning useful skills such as rhetoric, but also arithmetic and
geometry- and its ethical dimension. On the one hand, there is a vigorous debate about the limits
of a woman’s ability to enter into the performance of knowledge, indexical of manly superiority.
On the other, these texts advocate for the study of Latin as a means to ameliorate the supposedly
weaker nature of women through the reading of the sacred texts, for example. Two roughly
contemporary 16th century texts- Erasmus’ Colloquium abbatis et eruditae and Juan Luis Vives’
De institutione Christianae Feminae (1524)-develop a distinctive model of female Latinity, one
able to contrast the allure of the ornamental arts and focused on domesticity and late antique
Christian authors. The paper concludes with a discussion of two works by Anna Maria von
Schurman, the autobiographical narrative of her education in Eukleria (1673) and her Dissertatio
Logica of 1638, a syllogistic exercise on the topic of the role of Latin in the education of women.
Engaging with both Erasmus and Vives, Schurman’s model for the study of Latin provides a
female-gendered alternative which grounds Latin in a political and intellectual discourse that
challenges assumptions about an early modern return to the classical.