Salugsugan, Alexa Valaree P.

CL 133 WFV
Critical Essay (2976)
17 May 2017

M(i)s. Reading: Gendering the Act of Reading in Dante, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan

The early modern period is a remarkable time in European history that opened countless
opportunities in the realm of discovery. The liberation of the human body and mind through education, a
result of the renewed interest in studying classical texts, marked the deviation of the age from medieval
tradition. It has been common assumption that women were excluded from this intellectual rebirth, just as
they were excluded from any form of intellectual pursuit in the Middle Ages. In this respect, “women’s
reading” in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is as equally interesting as the topic of “women’s writing.”
This paper shall thus attempt to consolidate a brief review of “women’s reading”—or more specifically,
women readers and attitudes towards them—in the period and analyze its relation to the discourses on
women readers demonstrated in Dante, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan. Looking at these authors’ texts
also reveal how they are informed by and how they informed attitudes towards women and the feminine in
literary tradition.

The assumption of women’s lack of access to education is not wholly untrue for the Renaissance,
since liberal education was still largely withheld from women. However, literacy—the ability to read and
write in either Latin or the burgeoning vernaculars—was becoming more and more accessible to both men
and women of the emergent middle class. According to Rebecca Powell Lartigue, though nobles had likely
more educational opportunities by the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, literacy in Italy and England still
spread more gradually in the period as a result of economic forces (21). In Florence alone, the chronicler
Giovanni Villani described schools circa 1338 as having between 9,550 to 11,800 boys and girls in a
population of 120,000 who attended school in Florence (Lartigue 21).

Lartigue also states that where medieval women’s learning opportunities generally depended on
the opportunities of the dominant men in their families, by the fourteenth century “women gained literacy
in the vernacular for … business required it and it was considered useful to their devotional practices” (24).
Lartigue further argues that another proof to the growing expectation of literacy among women during the
Renaissance was the commonality of books in Virgin Mary iconography during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, which provided a “model of a literate holy woman to follow and encouraged literacy's use for
devotional purposes” (26). On the other hand, Cynthia Ann Anderson has written about women gaining
literacy skills as part of their domestic duties: “The ability to read and write was especially desirable for the

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training of a future wife, who might need to handle correspondence or keep track of supplies in the
household” (6). This only meant that literacy among women was not always used for scholarly or literary
purposes, but more often than not, was pursued because of pragmatic needs.

As for the interpretive practices involved in “women’s reading,” Kara Ann Doyle states that there
must be a difference made between medieval and modern notions of resistant reading, since “in medieval
texts, resistant (or, as [Doyle] will term it, self- differentiating) female reading … is often characterized as
proof of a woman's desire to show her conformity with gender roles” (15). Modern feminist ways of reading
the literary text would prescribe reading how female characters resist dominant patriarchal ideology; for
medieval—and I would extend, Renaissance—texts, this is not always the case. Christine de Pizan, for
example, would appear to be prefiguring modern feminist notions of gender equality, but she also reinforces
women’s gender roles as dictated by her time period. Another facet of “women’s reading” in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance is in how “reading like a woman” was perceived. The act of reading in the Middle
Ages was exegetical, with “the text as container of veiled but potentially spiritually beneficial truths, which
must be uncovered through the process of interpretation,” similar to the interpretation of Scripture (Doyle
17). More importantly, however, is how this mode of reading is grounded in a binary opposition that
relegated the literal, the temporal, the sensual, the body—and, hence, the feminine—in contrast to the
celebration of the figurative, the spiritual, the divine, and the mind—the masculine (Lartigue 10). The
feminine way of reading is associated with the carnal; and if one misunderstood or misinterpreted the text,
the reader is culpable for taking the text too literally, for being unable to give it higher meaning.

From this mode of reading, fears of “textual seduction” typically accompanied the increased
literacy of women of the Renaissance—but according to Lartigue, it was an anxiety brought not so much
by the notion that women were inexperienced readers, but more because almost every one of the newly
literate was inexperienced (27). The sexual threat posed by women’s increased access to literacy is overtly
tied to misreading or misinterpreting the literary text, which could cause loss of virtue. Lartigue writes that
even “Italian humanists who generally encouraged women's vernacular literacy (insofar as they thought
appropriate to their station) discouraged women from reading particular works deemed too ‘lascivious’ or
‘dishonest,’ including Dante's Vita Nuova, Petrarch's sonnets, and Boccaccio's Decameron, supposedly out
of concern for the effects the texts could have on inexperienced female readers (28). “Inexperienced” here
does not just mean that women were prone to the feminine/carnal mode of reading; it can also be extended
to the distrust in the newly literate who have not been properly trained and equipped yet in reading more
scholarly texts—hence the fear of misreading as presaging moral decline.

“Canto V” in Dante’s Inferno echoes this anxiety of “textual seduction” in the story of Francesca
da Rimini and her lover Paolo, who are damned in the circle of lust. In this Canto, Dante’s discourse on the

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feminine/carnal reader is articulated by the woman, Francesca, who narrates: “On a day for dalliance we
read the rhyme / of Lancelot, how love had mastered him … when we read / how her fond smile was kissed
by such a lover, / he who is one with me alive and dead / breathed on my lips the tremor of his kiss” (39-
40). According to Francesca, they were two lovers reading an Arthurian romance, a medieval text
exemplifying the courtly love tradition, and it was the “[t]hat book, and he who wrote it” that led them to
sin as “the high old story drew” (40). Ciardi notes in his translation that in the original Italian, Francesca
calls both the book and the author “Galeotto,” which means pander—it is also the Italian rendering of the
French name “Gallehault,” the character who urged Lancelot and Guinevere to make love (43).

In blaming the literary work, Francesca poses herself as a victim of the pandering courtly romance,
which led her to commit the sin of the carnal. In doing so, Francesca provides a critique of the literary
tradition valorizing the extramarital relations of lover and beloved, with which her lover Paolo, “seized …
with passion for [her] sweet body[,] … took [her] so strongly with delight in him” (39). Additionally, she
can also be read as giving warning to the dangers of reading using the feminine/carnal mode, which
ultimately led her and her lover to misread the courtly romance. Lartigue states that “they read for pleasure
… rather than for instruction, for surface details rather than deeper meaning, and thus succumb to sin. Dante
the author suggests the blame lies on the readers, not on the text or its author” (14). Dante also gives
Francesca the power to articulate her case by choosing her to represent the sin of lust—the deeply sensual
language she employs as she does so is apparent. Thus, while Francesca is warning of reading in the
feminine/carnal mode, she speaks in this very mode as she articulates the body. This strategy of
representative characters’ language reflecting the space they occupy and the sin they committed is
consistent in the Commedia. In the Inferno, this can be observed in how Dante’s language grows more
coarse and vulgar as he descends deeper into hell. In the Inferno, the speaker is the sin. For this reason, it
is made obvious why Francesca is in hell, because she ultimately remains a reflection of the perversion of
free will and of immoderate love manifested in her use of language.

Nancy Ruggieri Colaiaco has argued that Dante’s Canto V is a “dialogical text [expressing] the
tension between the female voice and the theological and cultural setting which shaped medieval gender
roles” (98). However, Colaiaco tends to emphasize the feminism of Francesca too much, in the sense that
she claims that Dante’s dialogic discourse was successful in giving subversive power to the female beloved.
Colaiaco also argues that “[t]he prominent image of the book and the act of reading emphasize the poet's
condemnation of medieval courtly love literature that has the potential to lead the soul to eternal damnation”
(87). On the other hand, Lartigue’s aforementioned argument argues the opposite by stressing that the act
of misreading is the true source of damnation; but Lartigue also tends to neglect how Dante deliberately
used a specific literary tradition to comment on the sin of lust. Both these arguments are useful in arriving

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at a conclusion as to Dante’s discourse on women readers; I argue for something that is more in between.
Dante does not seem to be condemning women readers or the act of reading itself; he is more overtly
critiquing the feminine/carnal mode which takes the textual manifestations of love literally. However, still
significant is his choice of Francesca—the woman, the beloved—who becomes the mouthpiece of the
feminine/carnal even as she warns of its dangers. Thus, although she is granted a voice as a woman, this
power is limited by Dante’s deliberate use of language to establish Francesca’s place in hell. Francesca’s
body is lust; Francesca is perversion. It thus seems anachronistic to assume that Dante’s choice to give
Francesca voice was a manifestation of his desire to subvert gender in the literary text; for, even as he
arguably does this, he is still conforming to gendered modes of interpretation by condemning the
articulation of the female body.

Boccaccio’s Decameron can be read as a response to Dante’s “Canto V” because of the overt
subtitling of the work as “the Book of Prince Galehaut.” By this, Boccaccio deliberately positions the
Decameron in juxtaposition with Dante in a self-aware declaration of his work as a “galeotto,” a pander. In
the foreword, Boccaccio writes about his own experience of eros in saying that his own desire “has proved
wellnigh unendurable, not because [his] beloved has rebuffed [him] … but because [his] disordered appetite
has ignited in [his] heart an uncontrollable fire” (3). Unlike Francesca, Boccaccio is blaming neither the
literary work nor the beloved for inciting in him such perversions; rather, he recognizes that the
“uncontrollable fire” is borne from excess and immoderation. The connections to Dante’s Inferno are made
even more apparent by the rampant fire imagery; unlike Francesca and Paolo, who were consumed by
immoderation and are thus eternally consumed by the fires of hell, Boccaccio was able to temper his desire
until “it began to wane of its own accord” (3).

What emerges in Boccaccio are not Francescas who are easily ensnared by immoderate love; rather,
readers are confronted with women of the brigata who listen to and tell risqué stories and yet do not fall to
sin. Interestingly, Boccaccio also addresses women readers in the foreword to declare the work as providing
comfort for them “who timorously and bashfully conceal Love’s flame within their tender breasts” (4). He
proposes a radical idea questioning the misguided belief in the inability of women readers to ‘correctly’
interpret the literary text. He recognizes that “the womenfolk to whom [he] has been alluding will be able,
as they read [the stories], to derive entertainment … and, equally, helpful advice for they will contrive to
grasp what is to be avoided and what to pursue” (5). Thus, Boccaccio is openly “pandering” in the
Decameron, expressly challenging his readers—especially the women—to appreciate his work with their
own moral judgment. He entrusts the test of reading and interpretation to his audience; for the stories in the
Decameron can arguably serve both to instruct and to please the reader.

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 According to Judith Serafini-Sauli, “the written word was perceived as fraught with dangers, for
private and silent reading could facilitate the dissemination of subversive ideas, both political and erotic”
(30). The threat of reading in this statement is observably tied to the relation of women with the private
sphere. Some women already read and wrote texts pragmatically for their own use in the home; but the
male public generally argued that to allow them to read for pleasure or for education in private would be to
give them ammunition for immorality. However, in the Decameron, Boccaccio subverts that very idea in
the third story of the third day, where a lady “dared not apprise [her lover] of her feelings by … writing him
a billet-doux,” instead using the verbal form of the confession to unwittingly rope the clergyman into
articulating her desire for her (183). It was the spoken and not the written word that facilitated eros here.

Thus, in the Decameron, ways of reading and interpretation are rendered more flexible than in
Dante. Where Dante expressly condemned feminine/carnal mode, Boccaccio necessitates a new way of
reading because he has written a text dwelling on the carnal, vulgar, and bodily while upholding the
appearance of being intellectual, virtuous, and spiritual. Furthermore, the masculine way of reading does
not hold ground in the Decameron—nor does the feminine—because the entire book ultimately attempts to
draw out the ridiculously real in medieval and Renaissance tradition. Through the pandering quality of the
Decameron, Boccaccio is able to challenge the gendering of the act of reading by suggesting that neither
the literary text, nor the motivations and manners by which it is read, truly secure the reader’s morality.

Christine de Pizan frames her discourse on reading and education interestingly in The Book of the
City of Ladies. As the only woman among the three authors, “women’s reading” actively takes place in
Christine’s study, where she cultivates knowledge as a woman surrounded by masculine intellectual
production. In the first part of The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine can be observed as adopting the
self-aware mode of reading Boccaccio seems to be imparting when she tries reading Maltheolus’ book—
when she realizes that she got neither instruction nor pleasure from it, she was able to reject it, “seeing the
kind of immoral language and ideas it contained, the content … likely to appeal only to those who enjoy
reading works of slander” (2). However, Christine finds herself ascribing to Maltheolus’ discourse on
women even as she knowingly rejects it, after realizing that it has not only been Maltheolus who wrote
slanderous things about women. She was confronted with the fact that the very people she studied, “all
manner of philosophers, poets and orators too numerous to mention … are unanimous in their view that
female nature is wholly given up to vice” (2). Overwhelmed by this thought, Christine “sunk deep into a
trance” and became “[s]ick at heart” as she came to direct masculine hate towards herself (3-4). Thus,
“textual seduction” gains new meaning in Christine’s study, because it is no longer the courtly romance
who seduces the woman reader to misread; it is the book—now revealed to be a masculine construction—

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that causes her to mistrust herself and her intellectual capacity. Thus, in writing The Book of the City of
Ladies, Christine de Pizan is able to reclaim knowledge and the book to defend rather than defame women.

Her defense of women, however, is limited by her own time. She uses a self-differentiating mode
of writing in order to create a feminine historiography but it is through her book that she also reinforces
medieval gender roles. Her defense for women is ultimately articulating a discourse that seems to say “not
all women” or “but some women.” However, there are also specific parts where she seems to agree with
Boccaccio’s discourse of self-awareness—in telling the story of Cornifica, for example, Christine cites
Boccaccio who believes that “women who have no confidence in their own intellectual abilities act as if
they were born in the backwoods and had no concept of what is right and moral” (29). She also argues that
if women were educated like men, they would no doubt be as learned in the arts and sciences, but goes back
to saying that “it’s not necessary for the public good for women to go around doing what men are supposed
to do” (27-28). Hence, Christine de Pizan can be interpreted as not opposed to the idea of women’s access
to literacy—in fact, she seems to be promoting it by the mere act of creating a text of women—but her
position on women’s education is more conservative. It remains a significant breakthrough, however, that
Christine is able to reclaim the book—and thus, the pursuit and production of knowledge—after she was
confronted with the failure of the masculine mode to prevent textual seduction. What this proves, ultimately,
is that the masculine author, who ensconces dangerously hateful views, is equally culpable for the
misreading not just of the literary text, but of the self by women, readers or not. The literary text is able to
write the tradition of misogyny and women’s self-hate in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into
existence—as is evinced by the various gendered discourses on reading found in Dante, Boccaccio and
Christine de Pizan.

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 WORKS CITED

Anderson, Cynthia A. “With Her Own Hands”: Household Instructional Texts and the Medieval and
Renaissance Woman, Texas A&M University, Ann Arbor, 2000, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
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Ciardi, John. The Inferno, Dante Alighieri. Signet, 2009.
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York University, Ann Arbor, 1999, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global,
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