Transgressing those Rules of Silence Imposed on Women: Isotta Nogarola and Isabella di Morra

Abstract

We know of many cultured women who lived in Italy during the XV and XVI centuries. Aristocrats, courtesans, poetesses who wrote their Petrarchist verses dedicated to an impossible love: from Veronica Gambara to Vittoria Colonna. Nevertheless, other women who tried to break that scheme and to write something other than verses, like Isotta Nogarola, had to undergo scorn and solitude, and they had to sink in silence, in spite of their fight. Others even died because of their “revolt”, as Isabella di Morra, at the hands of her own brothers who, just because of the suspicion of an epistolary relation with a noble Spanish poet, Diego Sandoval de Castro, assassinated both of them. In this article we present the history of both women, separated in time by almost a century, forced into oblivion and silence because of maintaining a will firm, for wanting “to transgress those rules of silence imposed on women”.