Weaving Virtue: Laura Cereta as a New Penelope

Abstract

The pen and the spindle were traditionally ascribed to the two sexes as representing appropriately gendered behaviour. The spindle represented women’s domestic role, and in this context images of women with an idle distaff represented abdication of responsibility and sloth. The abandonment of proper activity within the domestic space compromised a woman’s reputation for chastity, and threatened to undermine her only virtue. In his mid-fourteenth-century anthology of biographies De claris mulieribus (“Of Famous Women”), Giovanni Boccaccio suggested that for a woman to achieve virtue comparable to a man’s, it was necessary to transcend her sex, symbolically represented by putting aside the tools that tied her to her gender. This became a common trope in Italian pro-feminine literature associated with the querelle des femmes. Laying aside their traditional textile tools and taking up the pen, however, left the few ambitious young women who dared to engage with their humanist peers open to accusations of unchaste behaviour. In the late fifteenth century, the Italian humanist Laura Cereta (1469–1499) paired writing and needlework as homologous tasks, conflating the work of both sexes and countering the need to put aside feminine concerns as an intellectual. The pairing of textiles and text in Cereta’s writing, which Diana Robin describes as entirely absent in the work of male humanists, responded to the dilemma faced by women who sought virtuous fame. Cereta celebrates feminine skill with textiles as equivalent to writing. This is expressed both linguistically, through a shared vocabulary of text and textile, and by identification with classical figures famed for their textile work: notably Penelope, an exemplum of female chastity. This essay will analyse the role of textiles, particularly weaving, in the letters of Laura Cereta, and suggest that it underpinned her attempt to maintain a chaste reputation while attaining virtue with the pen.