Moral Combat : Women, Gender, and War in Italian Renaissance Literature

__Moral Combat__ explores dozens of primary texts to ask why women’s militarism became one of the central discourses of sixteenth-century Italy.

The Italian sixteenth century offers the first sustained discussion of women’s militarism since antiquity. Across a variety of genres, male and female writers raised questions about women’s right and ability to fight in combat. Treatise literature engaged scientific, religious, and cultural discourses about women’s virtues, while epic poetry and biographical literature famously featured examples of women as soldiers, commanders, observers, and victims of war.

Moral Combat asks how and why women’s militarism became one of the central discourses of this age. Gerry Milligan discusses the armed heroines of biography and epic within the context of contemporary debates over women’s combat abilities and men’s martial obligations. Women are frequently described as fighting because men have failed their masculine duty. A woman’s prowess at arms was asserted to be a cultural symptom of men’s shortcomings. Moral Combat ultimately argues that the popularity of the warrior woman in sixteenth-century Italian literature was due to her dual function of shame and praise: calling men to action and signaling potential victory to a disempowered people.

Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 The Philosophical History of the Armed Woman -- 2 The Poetic and the Real: The Chivalric-Epic Commentary of the Armed Woman -- 3 Women Writers Demanding Warrior Masculinity: Catherine of Siena, Laura Terracina, Chiara Matraini, and Isabella Cervoni -- 4 Classical and Christian Models of Warring Women: From Plutarch to Boccaccio -- 5 The Noble Warrior Woman (1440-1550) -- 6 The Fame of Women and the Infamy of Men in the Age of Warring Queens (1550-1600) -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index Contents 5 Illustrations 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 13 1. The Philosophical History of the Armed Woman 24 2. The Poetic and the Real: The Chivalric-Epic Commentary of the Armed Woman 55 3. Women Writers Demanding Warrior Masculinity: Catherine of Siena, Laura Terracina, Chiara Matraini, and Isabella Cervoni 91 4. Classical and Christian Models of Warring Women: From Plutarch to Boccaccio 132 5. The Noble Warrior Woman (1440–1550) 164 6. The Fame of Women and the Infamy of Men in the Age of Warring Queens (1550–1600) 209 Conclusion 241 Notes 245 Bibliography 303 Index 333