Sharing as a bookmark. The comments, also.

Sharing as a bookmark. The comments, also.

Originally shared by Stiainín Jackson

So yesterday when I was researching I ended up looking up women in the Renaissance – I was mainly looking for info on courtship, but I fell down a rabbit hole and ended up reading about Isotta Nogarola instead.

She was an Italian humanist, one of a large well-to-do family, and her family employed a tutor to teach her.

Her own writings attracted a fair bit of attention but it upset her that every praise she received brought notice to her gender – she wasn't getting noticed as an intellectual, but rather as a "female intellectual".

It was a thing for intellectuals seeking a humanist career to write to other academics and ask for them to review their work. She contacted one of the foremost academics and when he didn't respond after a year or two, she contacted him again to say it was upsetting that he hadn't responded, when in the past he had praised her work.

He responded to that one saying that he'd once thought her work held estimable qualities and was manly, but now he realised she was just like any other woman.

Later she was the subject of rumours that she was promiscuous – entirely on the basis that no smart woman was a virgin. The source of the rumours was never found.

She ended up moving elsewhere because her home in Verona felt tainted. She ended up writing more works and did become famous, but again, only as a woman writer, not as a writer, and this rankled with her. She wanted her intelligence to be recognised regardless of her gender.

She had proposals but never married and threw herself into religious writing and studies, having male friends with whom she discussed philosophy, but never any reported romantic entanglements.

I feel that it really sucks that her story bears so many similarities to stories today of females within intellectual fields.

I trust and hope that by having the internet with us now, it is possible to get that support and recognition for those that are "other", but there's clearly a long way to go yet.