Laura Cereta

The neo-Latin humanist Laura Cereta (Cereto, Cereti, b. 1469–d. 1499) is considered one of the earliest proto-feminist voices in Italy because of her epistolary critiques of misogyny and women’s lack of access to education, as well as her defense of the female intellect and interrogations of marriage. In her letters she often plays on weaving and needlework with the art of writing and sleepless nights of study, transforming traditional “women’s work” into exercises of the female intellect. From Brescia, she is counted among the illustrious female humanists in the Veneto region, including Isotta and Ginevra Nogarola, their Aunt Angela, and Cassandra Fedele. She was the first of six children born to Silvestro Cereto, an attorney and magistrate, and Veronica di Leno. Cereta benefited from her father’s dedication to providing her with an education beyond the traditional skills of women. At age seven she entered a convent where she was educated in Latin. When she returned to the paternal household, her father continued to educate her in the liberal arts. At age fifteen, she married the Venetian merchant Pietro Serina, though her marriage lasted only eighteen months before he died of complications likely related to the Black Death. Unlike her contemporary Cassandra Fedele, Cereta’s marriage did not mark the end of her humanistic career. Indeed, she often wrote about her husband, as well as his untimely death and her subsequent grief. In 1488, three years after Serina’s death, Cereta published her autobiographical Epistolae familiares, containing eighty-two documents, and dedicated it to Cardinal Ascanio Maria Sforza. It circulated widely in the Veneto area, and it includes letters to noted intellectuals like Bonifacio Bembo and Agostino degli Emigli, as well as fictive addresses as characteristic of Francesco Petrarca’s epistolary collection, relatives (including her mother, husband, and maternal uncle), and her contemporary female humanist Cassandra Fedele, with whom she tried to begin a correspondence, seemingly to no avail. In addition to her Epistolae she also wrote a Latin dialogue titled “Asinarium Faunus” (On the Death of an Ass), and delivered a series of public lectures between 1486 and her death in 1499. Of the Quattrocento female humanists, Cereta’s writing seems more experimental as she covers a wide array of literary genres and traditions, while often imbuing them with her personal sentiments: her invectives against women and contemporary culture show the breadth of her literary knowledge, as she engages with writers like Juvenal and common misogynist tropes; she rewrites and corrects Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris with her own “respublica mulierum”; her public orations display her training in the studia humanititatis; she engages in the theological debate on original sin, as her predecessor Isotta Nogarola did; her letters to her husband are rife with Petrarchan amatory tropes, and those about his death reminiscent of Dante’s journey through Hell. Her letterbook is more reminiscent of Petrarch’s Rerum familiarum libri than what we find in her contemporaries, both male and female. In her 1487 letter to her sister Deodata di Leno, for example, she describes her ascent of Mount Isola, first, in a similar fashion to Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux (Familiares 4.1) and, then, only to ultimately abandon her literary model to emphasize the sensual experience as a way to explore Epicurean philosophy. While Cereta did not reach the same level of fame as Nogarola and Fedele, nor was her social circle as elevated as theirs, her letters display a level of self-awareness, confidence in her skill, and desire for fame that are unmatched by her contemporaries. As she famously declared in a letter to Nazaria Olympica, she wanted to give the name Laura, once praised by Petrarch, a “second, new immortality” through her.