With one exception, Bruni commends the same education to women as to men. The exception, however, is significant.

After recommending reading aloud both prose and verse for rhythm and inflection, and learning to write in a literary manner, he continues]: "Let us now say something about knowledge. Here again I have in mind someone whose intellect shows the greatest promise, who despises no branch of learning, who holds all the world as her province.... Disciplines there are, of whose rudiments some knowledge is fitting, yet whereof to obtain the mastery is a thing by no means glorious, e.g., arithmetic, geometry, astrology [astronomy], and rhetoric. I include rhetoric with some hesitation, since if any living men have labored in this art, I would profess myself to be of their number. But there are many things here to be taken into account, the first of which is the person whom I am addressing. For why should the subtleties of...a thousand...rhetorical conundrums consume the powers of a woman, who never sees the forum? That art of delivery...is so far from being the concern of a woman that if she should gesture energetically with her arms as she spoke and shout with violent emphasis, she would probably be thought mad and put under restraint. The contests of the forum, like those of warfare and battle, are the sphere of men. Hers is not the task of learning to speak for and against witnesses, for and against torture, for and against reputation.... She will, in a word, leave the rough-and-tumble of the forum entirely to men.

Leonardo Bruni: On the Study of Literature - To Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro

 

Comment by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr.:

Bruni did not envision women in the public arena. It was not decorous, he believed, to see women speaking in public or taking on public functions. Study was perfectly appropriate to women, but not the public display of their learning. The tension that such an attitude might cause- and in this case did cause - is not difficult to see. Women are encouraged to become highly cultured, and in a way characteristic of men who, by virtue of that culture, become public figures; but they are denied the public arena for which these disciplines prepare them. That denial leads to difficulties for the learned women of the fifteenth century which are evident in their lives and works. In addition to excepting rhetoric as an appropriate object of study, Bruni also makes one other qualification: the education of women is to focus more heavily upon religion than that of men. This recommendation, echoed by other male humanists, as will be amply evident in the texts translated here, is related as well to attitudes that confined women to the private arena.

© 2002 Mikael Hörnqvist

Renässanshumanismen