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Sola Fenice nova forma io prendo1
A woman living outside the bond of marriage or without the companionship of a man is a topos that figures conspicuously in the oeuvre of the Vicentine noblewoman Maddalena Campiglia (1553-95). Diachronically, the treatment of marriage in Campiglia's body of work moves from an initial celebration of the chaste union between Mary and Joseph (1585), to the representation of a recalcitrant nymph who disrupts the social normalization encoded in a traditional marriage (1588), and ultimately to the words of a nymph whose ardent expression of love for another nymph receives a male-voiced imprimatur of social acceptability (1589). The repeated treatment of such questions as marriage and secular celibacy in Campiglia's works lends an overall coherence to her oeuvre and suggests an interpretive framework for approaching her unique female protagonists.
Virginia Cox's observation that Moderata Fonte's protofeminist Il merito delle donne (ca. 1592, pub. 1600) is one of the first texts that provides a virtual handbook of "a clear status and a clear identity for the secular unmarried woman" (563) is a significant claim that can also be made apropos Campiglia's body of work. How to live without a husband in a secular context-known in critical parlance as the "third state" of secular celibacy2-emerges as a dominant motif in Campiglia's repeated engagement with situations that articulate a partial or complete rupture with normative marriage practices and the imposed gender roles within that institution. As two early modern women authors in the Venetian context who seem to have written without knowledge of the other's work, both Fonte and Campiglia dialogue with the well-established and largely misogynistic tradition of the trattatistica sul prender moglie. In doing so, they voice a protofeminist, oppositional response to this tradition and write the parameters of a new genre: the trattatistica sul non prender manto. While Fonte's II merito delle donne voices a celebration of women as much as it exposes men as a domineering, manipulative, cruel and ignorant sex with which to best shun commerce, Campiglia eschews such strong censure and instead focuses her textual attention on praising the intellect, fidelity, chastity, beauty and steadfastness of women. Men in Campiglia's world are denounced only to the extent to which their desire prevents the full realization and...