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20 Introduction

even wear hats in order to take them off in womens honor (97-108).²⁴ But she also writes in a passionately serious tonę about womens disempower-ment, as when she describes the entire sex as “always subjected and with-out freedom'’ (56-57) and complains of the injustice of their subordination, given that they have minds and souls equal or superior to mens (61-66). She claims, in fact, that women combine rationality with virtues such as mod-esty and flexibility in a mixture that preserves the social fabric.

This claim leads her into her most sustained argument, in which she rewrites the social relations between the sexes to define men not as the lords and masters of creation but as the beneficiaries of feminine intelli-gence and patience. In her counter-myth to the Fali caused by Eve, she pro-poses that the continuation of the human race has resulted from womens willingness to lay aside the fierce resistance that men deserve. Rather, to preserve the world, “so beautiful through our species," women are strate-gically silent and submissive (85-90). Ignorant men glory in the power they thereby gain over women, but wiser men recognize this voluntary vassalage as a reason for gratitude and respectful treatment of the female sex.

This view of gender relations is less radical than the critiąue of małe injustice to which Lucrezia Marinella would devote the second half of her Nobilta delle donnę or the freedom from men that Moderata Fonte cele-brates in her Merito delle donnę through the unmarried Corinna and the fi-nancially independent widów Leonora.²⁵ But Franco s position as a cour-tesan, in this case protecting another woman who shares her profession, accounts for the particular inflection she gives her view of womens supe-riority to men. For their forbearance, she insists, women deserve respectful treatment from men. This logie serves all courtesans, whose interest lay in managing the realities of their lives—mens ownership of the cash they needed, their potential violence, and their ability to destroy womens rep-utations—by encouraging their clients to follow the codę of chivalry. Franco clearly models this codę in the gentle tact with which she opens

24.    Here, with the exception of her remark about mens hats, Franco appears to be drawing on Livy, or, morc likely, on Agrippas summary, in his De nobilitate et praecellentia foetmnci sexus, of Livy’s history ot Coriolanus. Agrippa, following Livy, explains that to reward the women of Romę, through whose intervention Coriolanus was diverted trom attacking the city, the Roman senate gave them “the privilege of walking on the high side ot the Street, and men rising to render homage to them and ceding their place to them.” The senate also permitted them to wear “purple garments with golden fringes, even ornaments ot precious stones, " a list similar to Francos in the preceding tercets (lines 97-100). Sec Hcnricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the N obili ty and Preemmence oj the Female Sex (1509), trans. Albert Rabil (Chicago: University ot Chicago Press, 1996), 90. Rabil identities two Italian translations of Agrippas defense of women, both published in Venicc, the first by Francesco Coccio (Gabriele Giolito, 1554), the second by Alessandro Piccolomini or Ludovico Domenichi in 1545 and 1549 (27 n. 48).

25.    These two characters are the principal speakers in Moderata Fonte s U merito delle