At the outset of this paper, I want to correct the longstanding misapprehension that Antonia Pulci was a member of the Gianotti family. She was not. She was a Tanini, the daughter of Francesco d'Antonio di Giannotto Tanini and Iacopa da Roma. The confusion about her birth family evidently arose from her grandfather's patronymic. I have seen her will and the relevant documents in the Florentine archives, and I refer those of you interested in the biographical question to the introduction of my edition of her plays, Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 11. Here, however, we must concern ourselves with Pulci's representations of the concerns of women.

A gratuitous and invidious misogyny sometimes informs writing about the lives of saints--hagiography. Sometimes misogyny even typifies the personal writings of nuns. The perception of women as the weaker and less rational vessel, responsible for the Fall, more subject to sin, pervades even the work of such a figure as St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)--the Spanish religious mystic.⁽¹⁾

In none of Antonia Pulci's plays, however, do examples of such misogyny appear. On the contrary, Pulci's female saints and her secular women are typically more intelligent, more rational, more constant in their purposes, more compassionate and more emotionally stable than their male counterparts. In their respective plays Pulci's heroines, and even her minor female characters, are presented as the proactive forces who themselves change and who produce change. Once Saints Theodora, Domitilla and Guglielma have embarked on courses of action, they follow through. They are good at predicting the consequences of their actions, and they accept those consequences unflinchingly.

Though St. Guglielma, for instance, has been an obedient wife and daughter (and though she has good reason to regret both), she nevertheless assumes responsibility for the spiritual welfare both of the brother-in-law who attempted to seduce her and the husband who undervalued her. The secular Rosana instructs her beloved Ulimentus in his duty to his parents even though his following her advice opposes her own best interests. Inspired by God, a Roman lady, Donna Iacopa (a minor character bearing the name of Pulci's mother), appears on the scene with funeral necessities for St. Francis. Saints Domitilla and Theodora face martyrdom more than willingly.

Even though women who are other than Christian and less than good--pagans, false friends, and prostitutes--do appear in Pulci's plays, their misapprehensions and vices arise from their choices, circumstances, and rearing, never, from innate weaknesses associated with their gender. It is her female characters' propensity to act in ways that match their reasoned words and her own regular refusal to allow those characters to conform to anti-female stereotypes or to express derogatory views about women that mark her drama distinctively with another voice. And Antonia Pulci's voice, Christine di Pizan's apart, is one of the earliest to be raised in Renaissance Europe.⁽²⁾

Beyond this principled refusal to pander to popular antifeminist attitudes, another aspect of Pulci's plays that identifies them with an emergent European female consciousness appears in her frequent heightening of realism through the expression of "womanly concerns."

Apart from her activity as a playwright--an enterprise in which, as a woman, she was perhaps unique in her place and time, Pulci pursued a not atypically bifurcated career, first as a wife and primary care-giver to her nieces (she never had children of her own), and later as a nun and as the founder of an order, the sisters of Santa Maria della Misericordia.⁽³⁾ Many situations that Pulci developed in her plays reflect these womanly concerns and her piety as well.

Often her principal character is a woman, as in St. Domitilla, St. Guglielma, St. Theodora, and Rosana. The situations some of these women encounter parallel those that Pulci had to deal with in her own life--often so closely that one is hard pressed to resist seeing in her plots thinly veiled displacements of her own experience and circumstances. The relations between fathers and daughters, between sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, lovers and beloveds, and mothers and children often emerge thematically. Guglielma, for example, though she would prefer a religious life, is pressured by her parents into marrying the King of Hungary, and Domitilla and Theodora, likewise, though they resist the pressure, are bullied by uncles, would-be husbands, and rulers in an effort to break their wills. Antonia Pulci's brother, Nicolò Tanini, as we shall see, encouraged to remarry after her husband, Bernardo Pulci, died. The choice between marriage or convent faced virtually every young woman in Renaissance Italy;⁽⁴⁾ Pulci herself faced it, certainly after the death of her husband, and presumably before her marriage as well.

After Guglielma becomes the queen of Hungary, she encourages her recently converted husband to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and to take her along. The king tells her that she, instead, must stay at home and run the kingdom. The king is hardly out of sight before Guglielma's brother-in-law attempts to seduce her; she successfully resists. This is, of course, already in the fifteenth century a stock dramatic situation traceable to the deutero-canonical story of Susanna (Sus.:1-64), whom Mary D. Garrard calls the "archetype of innocence and purity, first threatened and then miraculously saved."⁽⁵⁾ Pulci's handling of its consequences, however, is anything but conventional and reflects both her sensitivity to the issues of psychology and power implicit in the situation and her careful thinking about them as issues confronting women.

Guglielma, though she is the queen and the regent, finds herself almost totally silenced and disempowered by her brother-in-law's attempt. Such silencing and disempowerment, of course, remain frustrating realities that often confront women in their interactions with powerful men. The queen dares not tell the court lest the kingdom be thrown into confusion. She decides to wait to speak out until her husband returns:

"I will keep still, woe, now how great a wrong

That he's attempted to seduce the queen!

The king's great majesty has been disgraced.

My court will be in turmoil if I speak--

O God, you're my defender, you my guide;

Susanna was, I know, preserved by you;

I don't know what I ought to do or say;

I shall keep silent till the king returns."

(St. Guglielma, lines 231-38)

Unfortunately, the brother gets to the king first and accuses her of loose and treacherous behavior. Without consulting Guglielma, the king believes his brother's accusation and condemns her to death--a sentence from which no human appeal seems possible. Pulci also makes clear the projective psychological mechanism by which the rejected brother attributes to Guglielma his own treachery and lasciviousness. Her purity, he decides, is a sham; surely she has deceived his brother with others, and so she deserves to die.

"I know for sure that only on account

Of fear does she appear so brusque and pure

To one who'd tempt her, put her to the test,

For being false is nothing new to her.

Let's see how much that heaven of hers will care,

For I shall find a way to be avenged;

I'll pay you back for that, know what you may,

And I am sure that you'll regret it soon."

(St. Guglielma, lines 239-46)

Clearly, Pulci recognized and articulated the tendency of every would-be rapist or ardent seducer to attribute his own desires to his victim, and she perceived the fine line between the seducer's lust and the violence implicit in his threat.

Other womanly concerns, like the dangers associated with child-bearing and the grief that comes with child-rearing, and the jealousy of husbands are frequently treated in Pulci's plays. From a literary perspective, these concerns are directly traceable to the hagiographies (writings about the lives of saints) from which much of the matter of Pulci's plays was drawn and from the advice of advocates of celibacy like St. Jerome and his followers. Pulci sets them, however, in the context of her characters' often difficult decision making, and moves them from the level of abstract argument to that of human and specifically feminine problems.

Concern over the grief associated with child rearing appears both in St. Francis, and in the less securely attributed Rosana. In both plays parents express the disappointment that they feel at the way their children have turned out. Perhaps Pulci found in such arguments some consolation that she and Bernardo had produced no offspring.

Certainly Queen Rosana's lament over her childless condition and her litany of attempted remedies: baths, herbs, medicines, physicians, prayers, and charms, might well be a reflection of Antonia Pulci's own disappointment at her and experience with her childlessness (Rosana I, lines 177-184), if this less securely attributed play indeed is hers.

The expected subordination of women to male family members is another issue that Pulci treats. The power of brothers over sisters appears in St. Anthony the Abbot. In one of a number of striking anachronisms that cause early Christian Egypt and fifteenth-century Florence to coalesce in this play, Anthony convinces his sister that she should enter the convent of the Murate in Florence--the reverse of Pulci's personal situation since she had to convince her brother that she preferred the religious life. The allusion to the Murate also serves to identify the play with the Pulci family; Bernardo is credited with a poem of 206 octaves on the passion of Christ, addressed, together with a letter, to Sister Annalena de' Tanini in that convent.⁽⁶⁾

St. Anthony overcomes his sister's initial objections with sweet and pious reasons, and eventually she willingly, if rather abruptly, accedes. More interestingly, during Anthony's temptations, a demon accuses him of having forced her into the convent instead of fulfilling his brotherly responsibility of finding her a husband, and the devil imagines that, unhappy there but with no prospect of marriage, she returns to secular life where, forced into prostitution in order to survive, she loses her soul.

This scenario--a choice between convent or brothel--was all too possible for unmarried women in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Florence. Women required substantial dowries to marry, and even well-to-do Florentine families often could not muster the resources to assure appropriate matches for all their daughters. Despite efforts by the community to address this problem, like establishing a bank, the monte di dote, where money could accumulate to provide dowries, many young women found themselves destined from birth to the certain prospect of the religious life or, failing that, to the life of the courtesan. Beatrice del Sera, a nun writing in the sixteenth century, expresses the regret that nuns feel at their involuntary withdrawal from the world--a regret that her editor, Elissa Weaver, convincingly finds autobiographical.⁽⁷⁾ Unlike del Sera, of course, Pulci voluntarily chose the convent, and in drama as in life, she displayed her interest in communities of women.

Three sorts of female communities appear in her plays, the convent, the brothel, and the seraglio. Convents figure prominently in St. Guglielma and in St. Theodora. In the former, Guglielma finds refuge with a community of nuns when, though she is thought to have been executed, she has fled Hungary. She lives happily in the community as a lay sister until she is restored to her husband and becomes the means for a general familial reconciliation. While dwelling in seclusion and disguise, Guglielma acquires a reputation for abilities consonant with the healing and counselling occupations that claimed the attention of many of the religious women of Italy who lived independently as pinzochere (uncloistered women who had donned the habit and committed themselves to a religious life without taking vows)--about whom more will follow.

St. Theodora, whose heroine, like St. Domitilla, also lives as a kind of pinzochera--in her case as a virgin dedicated to Christ and dwelling in her own home--opens with a playlet within a play in which two fledgling nuns threaten to refuse to act in the evening's performance because they feel they have been denied access to the most desirable costumes. The sweet reason and kindness with which their superiors help them perceive their mistake and soothe their ruffled feathers contrasts markedly with a later scene set in a brothel. There two prostitutes, played by the same two sisters, accuse each other of thievery and worse, insult one another grossly, and achieve a rapprochement only under the threat of one to kill and eat the hen of the other. The scenes from the seraglio in Rosana reveal an indolent obsession among the denizens of the harem with clothes and with pleasing men. Domitilla, Guglielma, Rosana and Theodora all become the objects of unwelcome masculine attentions--a concern of women throughout history.

In St. Domitilla, the protagonist, a niece of Domitian, the Roman emperor, is dissuaded from marriage and persuaded to assume the habit by her Christian servants. (She chooses, as does Theodora, and as Pulci apparently did between 1487 and 1500, to dwell in the familial home even though she has assumed the veil.) Again, all the usual arguments of the writers of hagiography appear, and Domitilla, who has been happily looking forward to her marriage, has been resisting them. Then, her servants switch their tactics and begin describing the instability of husbandly affections, and the dangers of a husband's groundless jealousy. This theme Pulci treats most feelingly, moving it from the level of priestly harangue to womanly concern. It is just these arguments treating jealousy that Domitilla finds most telling:

"My mother suffered, as I well recall,

So many torments throughout all her life

Because of her husband's jealousy alone,

Bore very great distress; and if I were

To think that I would follow such a path,

The garments of the world I'd never don,

Though I don't think my spouse, Aurelian,

Would act like this because he is so kind."

(St. Domitilla, lines 153-160)

The prospective behavior of husbands once they have acquired power over their wives was a perennial concern of early European women for whom divorce was rarely if ever an option. Conceivably Antonia Pulci--whose own father had on one occasion, at least, ill-treated her mother with his infidelity--appeals here to her own experience in putting such a sentiment into the mouth of her heroine. Similarly in St. Francis, Francis's mother is the object of her husband's scorn and verbal abuse, and the dialogue that Pulci assigns to the mother makes clear that her emotional investment is principally in her child--not in her jealous and abusive husband.

"Sweet son, I feel surpassing sorrow that

I see you being punished in this way,

Your father's action grieves me greatly for,

Because of you, I feel life drain away.

You know, indeed, I have no one but you,

And so I am resolved to set you free."

(St. Francis, lines 153-58)

St. Theodora, and Rosana are less securely attributable to Antonia Pulci than are the other plays. Yet among the arguments that suggest they may be, or that they are very likely to be, hers is the appearance in them of precisely the sorts of womanly concerns that occupied Pulci's attention in the plays of certain attribution. In the first part of "Rosana," particularly, Queen Rosana's distress at her childlessness, though not an uncommon literary issue and certainly a frequent concern for women, nevertheless parallels Pulci's personal situation. That fact together with "Rosana's" treatment of other issues that interest Pulci, like conversion to Christianity and amity between spouses, move me to include the play in her canon.

Steadfast freedom from misogyny, committed female characters of heroic energy, great intelligence, unshakable though credible virtue, and situations reflecting womanly concerns--these contribute to "the other voice"--the voice of an emergent, European female consciousness as it manifests itself in Antonia Pulci's plays.

Albion College

Albion, Michigan

February 9, 1998

1. 1. See especially, The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. and ed. by E. Allison Peers (Garden City, N. Y.: Image Books, 1960. See also St. Teresa of Avila, Moredas (The Interior Castle), trans. by Kiernan Cavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (New York: Paulist Press), c. 1979. A considerable portion of this paper appears in the introduction to my translation and edition of Pulci's plays: Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1996.

2. In the last twenty years, the works of christine De Pizan have become widely available. See her Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty, Medium Aevum Monographs, n.s. 9 (Oxford; Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977); The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982L); and The Treasure of the City of laides, or the Book of the Three Virtues, trans. Sarah Lawson (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

3. 3. Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, vol. 5 (Florence: Pietro Gaetano Viviani, 1757) 249.

4. Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 82-83.

5. 5. Mary D. Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi, The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 187. Deutero-canonical writings are those preserved as scriptural by the Roman-catholic dispensation but considered apochryphal by protestants. In the version of the scriptures that Antonia Pulci would have known, the story occurs in the book of Daniel. For the story of "Susanna and the Judgement of Daniel," see, The New Jerusalem Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1966) 1447-49.

6. Francesco Flamini, La lirica toscana del rinascimento anteriore ai tempi del Magnifico (Pisa: T. Nistri, 1891) 244.

7. 7. See Elissa Weaver, ed., introduction to Amor di Virtù: Commedia in cinque atti, by Beatrice del Sera, Classici Italiani Minori vol. 17 (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1990) 46-50.