Against misogynists

At the time in which Castiglione wrote the Libro del Cortegiano, a long tradition of misogynism was obstructing any attempt to recognise the dignity of the female figure, ratifying, positively, its beneficial function in the various circumstances of life’s relationships. Thus, to bring these tensions out into the open, Baldassarre introduced to the scene, in the third book of his work, an intense debate between Giuliano and Medici e Gaspare Pallavicino, who discussed the philosophical arguments upon which rested, conventionally, the presumed demonstration of female constitutional inferiority. These were revealed, as demonstrated by an intervention by Emilia Pio, to be abstract and archaic ideas, no longer congruent in renaissance culture.

In a similar manner, Niccolò Frisio attacks women bringing up the case of Eve, protagonist of the original transgression: “La prima donna, errando, fece altrui errare contro Dio, e per eredità lasciò all’umana generazione la morte, gli affanni e i dolori e tutte le miserie e calamità che oggidì al mondo si sentono” (The first woman, erring, made others err against God, and left as her inheritance to future human generations, death, struggles and suffering and all the  miseries and calamities that we hear about in the world today) (B. Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, edited by A. Quondam, Milan 2002, I, 243). But this false proof is liquidated by Giuliano de’ Medici, who replicates that, even if a woman was responsible for evil entering the world, this is not proof of the natural imperfection of women, as it was through a woman (Mary) that he who defeated sin, evil and death came to this world. This gave space to a severe denunciation of the hypocrisy that dominated these issues: in fact, men, argued Cesare Gonzaga, displayed severity towards women and reprimand them for behaviour, gossip and adultery, that they retained were legitimate for themselves