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in 1643, while he was still imprisoned, The Celestial Divorce was
published, based on a manuscript Pallavicino had turned over
to a press in Geneva on his way to France. The book was an
immediate sensation, and not only in Italy, where bookshops
sold it under the counter. It was plagiarized in Protestant
countries, and soon editions appeared in German, Swedish,
French, Dutch, and English.
Proceedings against him did not begin until the following
August. On the basis of evidence transmitted by the papal
legate in Venice, Pallavicino was forced to admit his true
identity and acknowledge his authorship of several recent
anonymous books satirizing the Barberini and the Jesuits. A
sentence of death for lèse majesté was a foregone conclusion.
On March 5, 1644, the twenty-eight-year-old Pallavicino was
executed in Avignon by decapitation. Five months later the
flagrant nepotist Urban VIII was himself dead. By the end
of 1646, Charles de Brèche, Pallavicino s false friend Morfí,
died by an assassin s knife, whether or not in revenge for
Pallavicino s death is unknown.
Pallavicino s death, needless to say, dealt a heavy blow to
his colleagues in the Accademia degli Incogniti. The shock
silenced the usually garrulous group. When they returned to
speaking and writing, they masked their true meaning in even
more obscure linguistic codes and clouds of metaphor and
became very cautious about saying or writing anything that
might be hateful to the ears of the powerful. Loredan s com-
ments about the martyr of truth are revealing. He con-
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the li berti nes
cluded that it is imprudent to write and comment on the
actions of living princes. He recommended that those who
wrote about princes should only praise them should exer-
cise prudence of the pen. The Incogniti had felt the bitter
consequences of their claim that truth and satire were one
and the same. And they began to distance themselves from
Pallavicino s legacy, referring to him as an unquiet spirit
with a fleeting mind and confused thoughts. He had not un-
derstood that it was a crime to speak the truth. 35
Besides the arbiters of Catholic orthodoxy, one of Pal-
lavicino s most common targets was women. Pallavicino s mi-
sogyny was hardly without parallel, but as was also true of
his attacks on the Barberini papacy, it had an especially vitri-
olic character. What makes his misanthropy worth paying at-
tention to today is the rhetorical drubbing he received from
Suor Arcangela Tarabotti. The fifth letter in Pallavicino s Il
Corriero svaligiato is addressed to an Ungrateful Woman
and is an essay on the tropes of misogyny.
If you are looking for sphinxes, panthers, tigers, and other
wild beasts or monsters, cherchez la femme! A single woman,
and you will find all the most savage animals and brutish na-
tures together in one entity. As a rule, one does not find in
your sex any rational capacity other than the will, so sub-
merged by the passions that it has become an irrefutable ax-
iom to say that woman is without judgment. Whether her
lust is boundless or her rages out of control, she knows no
moderation, a quality from which one is led to draw the con-
clusion that a person is human. So when she would have us
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The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance
believe that she has plundered some human traits gentle
appearances, tender charms, and courteous behavior let it
also be said that she has stolen seduction from the siren,
cunning tricks from another monster, and that she dresses in
disguise to accomplish treachery. Like an octopus camou-
flaged on the reef to capture its prey, she transforms herself
with a show of male qualities to facilitate her lies.36
Tarabotti defended women through her counterassault on
men: Oh, you wicked hypocrites, you devils incarnate, not
unlike your master in your feigned expressions, your calcu-
lated betrayals, your false promises and all the rest, as only
you know better! Not for nothing is the word demon (de-
mone) of the masculine gender, as if the female sex does not
deserve to have attributed to it any of the names of Hell s in-
fernal monsters. 37 Tarabotti could not resist turning Pal-
lavicino s own misfortunes against him.
And there is also another modern author, whose name I shall
pass over in silence. He too invents shameful insults against
our sex with his satirical viper s tongue in a loathsome work.
What a liar, and malicious to boot, especially in letter 5
just as well he was put to death before the book s publica-
tion! Little wonder if he defaces woman s sacred features; he
is guilty of sacrilege against the entire Catholic Church. He
respects neither pope nor cardinals nor the Roman Curia;
and he uses strident vituperation to lash out against all
Christendom.38
She systematically dismantled the arguments in letter 5, down
to the point of turning Pallavicino s metaphors upside down
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the li berti nes
to work for the benefit of women rather than to their detri-
ment. This detractor has also blabbered on about woman
being like the vine, forgetting that the simile may also be
turned to woman s advantage: from the vine, after all, nour-
ishment of human life is pressed, that precious liquid that in-
creases our bodily heat and therefore our vital fluids and life
itself. 39
Tarabotti was herself among the most celebrated and con-
troversial authors of her day with her books on Convent Life
as Paradise (1643), Against Female Luxury, Menippean Satire, Anti-
satire (1644), Familiar Letters (1650), Women Are No Less Rational
Than Men (1651), Paternal Tyranny, which was retitled Innocence
Betrayed before publication (1654), and the scandalous tract
that was widely circulated in manuscript but unpublished in
her lifetime, Convent Life as Hell. Perhaps what is most in-
triguing is that Tarabotti relied on the same patronage net-
work as Pallavicino, the Accademia degli Incogniti, and espe-
cially its founder Giovanni Francesco Loredan. She was the
only woman writer to have earned Loredan s support, which
may have come through the intervention of her brother-in-
law, Giacomo Pighetti, who was himself a member. Her rela-
tionship with the Incogniti, however, was even more compli-
cated than the paradox inherent in the reliance of a Bene-
dictine nun on the notoriously anti-Catholic and libertine
academy might suggest. The complexity of the relationship
is an indicator of how intellectually open-minded the Incog-
niti really were. A letter from Loredan praising Tarabotti s
trees of learning introduces her Convent Life as Paradise, and
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The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance
she dedicated her own published correspondence to him. He
acted as her editor, helped get her books published, and in-
troduced her to his circle of friends and visiting intellectuals.
He published some of his letters to her and dedicated to her
part of his novella Abraham. But they also could be highly crit-
ical of each other. Her Antisatire was a response to a satire de-
livered before the Incogniti, and Loredan took her critique as
a personal affront and accused her of ingratitude. Another
Incognito wrote a sustained attack on her and even accused
her of being incapable of having written a book as fine as
Convent Life as Paradise. After her own brother-in-law criti-
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