Just do better
A tongue-lashing from a teenage student in the 15th century remains relevant today. Meet Laura Cereta of Brescia, Italy.
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
Elevating opinion over fact has created chasms within the US culture that may be unbridgeable. Multiple polls have found TikTok to be the primary source of news for Gen Z, and a growing source for all age groups. In an age when TL;DR1 is a feature, not a bug, headlines perform the heavy lifting that stories once performed to inform the reading public—and headlines regularly bear the imprint of opinion. Traditional news organizations intermix reporting with analysis, which poses as news by cloaking itself in statistical data.2 Newspaper home pages commonly feature several opinion pieces to lure the reader to the opinion page, where one can receive news filtered by a mind that’s paid to cater to a specific target audience. When we think we’re talking about news, we’re usually talking about opinion. It’s a lazy way to have our understanding shaped on the most important issues of the day.
Journalist Mark Jacob recently made the argument, in a discussion on journalism with Jen Rubin of the Washington Post, that the news industry’s primary mission is to inform the public. To that end, facts matter more than opinion. Jacob and Rubin were exploring how far their industry has strayed from its mission, in its pursuit of engagement and entertainment.
The inherent problem is that nuance and chaos are ordering principles as much as dichotomies like truth and falsehood. Any policy, for instance, must account for facts that are divergent and contrary; it must anticipate random as well as intentional challenges. No single news consumer can possibly master the details necessary to make an informed opinion on every policy suggestion. We need experts who can provide informed advice.
Once you open the door to opinion, its informational value becomes arguable. Over time, the opinion of any ‘influencer’ online or in real life appears to be as valid, and often more entertaining, than the opinions of true experts. When news organizations fail to act as gatekeepers, bowing to supposed customer demand, opinion pages are strewn with fact-free opinions. And over time, citizens get their news from the people they follow on social media and streaming platforms. From opinion-makers, not experts nor news reporters. This process de-emphasizes the value of factual reportage, and short circuits the mission that’s critical to democracy: informing the public.
With these thoughts in mind, I turned to think about a woman who wrote using the means available to her in the 1480s. She wrote about humanism, which led her to write about feminist topics, although feminism wasn’t a concept at the time. Because she was smart, attractive, outspoken, young, and newly widowed, she was widely attacked for her writing.
I could think about her in the context of patriarchy, and I could think of how her nuanced positions on religion flouted the prevailing Catholic dogma (which, fundamentally, was an extension of patriarchy). I could also think of her writing as an example of advocacy for truth in the face of self-serving opinion. We can learn something from a 16 year old girl who lived in the 15th century.
Laura Cereta
Born in 1469, Laura Cereta was the first Italian writer to center women in her work. In her letters to other intellectuals of the day, she copied the example of Petrarch (one of the earliest humanists), writing seemingly personal letters so that they could be published to a wider audience.
Cereta was born to wealthy and influential parents who sent her to a convent at age seven to commence her education. She suffered from sleeplessness as a child, which the convent’s prioress advised her to put to good use. Rather than spend the late night and early morning hours tossing and turning, young Laura was encouraged to work: embroidery, writing, and studying. Her diligence paid off handsomely. After only two years, when she was nine, her father called her home to take care of her younger siblings. Within months she returned to the convent and renewed her studies, which ended formally when she was 12 and summoned home again. Her home duties were to tutor her brothers and serve as secretary to her father, a lawyer and king’s magistrate. Her primary interests were math, agriculture, and especially, moral philosophy.
At age 15 she was married to Pietro Serina, a merchant of Venice. It was not an easy marriage for her, evidenced by her letters to her husband in which she argued forcefully against his treatment of her. What she wanted from marriage was a partnership founded on respect, honesty, and love. Her marriage lasted only 18 months, when her husband died of the plague. They had no children and she didn’t remarry. She later credited this time in her life, in which she married and was widowed, as one of her happiest.
Having been widowed, Cereta entered a two-year period of her life in which she wrote letters, intending them for later publication. Between the ages of 16 and 18, she wrote 82 letters that she had bound in 1488 as a single volume. Six months later, her father died. She lost the will to write, at least for public view. She died a young woman of 29, in 1499.
Although her works circulated widely in Italy among the humanist community, her volume of letters would remain unpublished until 1640.
Three letters
Laura Cereta wrote her published letters in Latin, which suggests that her intention was scholarly writing, formatted into the epistolary style, similar to Petrarch’s example.
The three letters below are to people otherwise unknown. They could be entirely fictitious, since their names contain common epithets in Latin, like drunkard or slut. The letters appear to be replies to criticisms sent her by letter. She could have written them to reply directly to critics while protecting herself from libel by masking the critic, or she could have penned the letters without a prompt, simply to address ideas that she wanted to confront logically and artfully.
Whether the recipients were actual correspondents or not, the letters demonstrate a wisdom not usually found in one so young, and an art that’s spectacularly fresh, even to modern readers.3
Although we don’t know the identities of the people being addressed in her letters, we do know she was reviled by critics, male and female, and charged with plagiarism: one popular theory was that her father, the magistrate, wrote them.4 Indeed, one disbelieving man went to the trouble of sending his wife to confirm that Cereta was indeed female.5
Cereta didn’t shy from confronting her critics as adversaries. Although clearly wanting to acquire intellectual fame, she had the confidence to demonstrate her intellect rather than seek approval. Her responses could only have stoked the flames of criticism. In her text, she appears fearless.
I’m unsure how to interpret the fact that she ceased writing for public consumption after the death of her father. It’s possible that she found his substantive support necessary for her work. She complained, after the death of her husband, of being poor, so it’s possible she was writing for income, and if she inherited from her father she may not have needed whatever money her writing produced. She could have tired of making herself a public target. Since she’d accomplished her goal to produce a volume, she might have decided to abandon that project. It’s also possible that the loss of her father was too much to bear in a life in which she took little joy except from study and writing. Whatever her motivations, we’re left with the life story of an illuminating flame that endured but an instant.
Letter One: To Augustinus Aemilius, “Curse Against the Ornamentation of Women” 12 February 1487
Cereta wrote this letter after moving to a country house and soon after the death of her husband. She was 17 years old.
“[…] the fatal house which awaited me for marriage admitted me to lamentation. Thus one, and that an abominable year, saw me a girl, bride, widow, and pauper.”
The correspondent is a man who has overly praised her, a fact that she takes great exception to. “I fear that your lofty opinion of me may spring from some other source than a carefully balanced judgement,” she begins. She admonishes him to think of her as a homely woman lacking adornment or makeup.
She contrasts herself with women who invest their time in attracting men, saying that she spends her time in study and in writing. She casts women’s efforts to beautify themselves as shameful: “we should seek the adornment of honor, not vulgar display, and we should pursue this life mindful of our mortality.”
She challenges Augustine: “I wish you pay no attention to my age and at least my sex.”
For [woman’s] nature is not immune to sin; nature produced our mother [Eve], not from earth or rock, but from Adam’s humanity. To be human is, however, to incline sometimes to good, but sometimes to pleasure. We are quite an imperfect animal….
Jane Anger,6 writing a century later, picks up on Cereta’s point that while man was created from base elements (mud, rock), woman was created from a divine creation, man himself. God improved on the male design to make a superior being, in Anger’s view. Cereta here makes a different point. A woman’s flaws must be accepted for two reasons: not only is her design God-given, but she derives from man—how can we expect perfection when the mold is obviously flawed (“We are quite an imperfect animal”)?
Cereta is writing, ostensibly, to a man who’s sent her fawning missives soon after the death of her husband. Her family has money, although she does not,7 and she’s well-known for her beauty and accomplishments. Her letter back to him appears motivated to rebuff his advances: think of me as a drab scholar, she chides.
From here, she appears to veer off onto a rant against other women’s vanity and shameful efforts to attract men. These behaviors are the opposite of what the Church has said women should be: chaste and virtuous. She appears to be arguing that what Augustine expects of her is the vanity she details in other women, and she places herself in opposition to that.
And yet, she stops short of condemning women’s vanity, refusing to throw her gender under the bus. We are imperfect. Don’t expect me to subvert my own interests to yours. She finishes by saying: be better. Don’t “be taken by the snare of this carefully arranged elegance. For where there is greater wisdom, there lies greater guilt.”
Basically, she’s saying: now you know. What you do is on you.
Letter Two: To Bibulus Sempronius, “Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women” 13 January 1488
This correspondent’s name seems obviously contrived, since it translates loosely as ‘Always Drunk.’ We can expect this letter to be much, much nastier than the last. And so it begins with:
“My ears are wearied by your carping.”
Sempronius has lobbed the charge that Cereta is neither a woman nor learned, based on his faulty logic that women cannot be well-educated. She ripostes:
“I agree that you should be grieved; indeed you should be ashamed, for you have ceased to be a living man, but have become an animated stone; having rejected the studies which make men wise, you rot in torpid leisure. Not nature but your own soul has betrayed you, deserting virtue for the easy path of sin.”
She notes that he’s approached her with false praise (“there lurks sugared deceit in your adulation”), which she reads accurately as an attempt to put her down. “It is a crafty ploy, but only a low and vulgar mind would think to halt Medusa with honey.” In overly praising her, Sempronius has disclosed his contempt for women.
Cereta contemplates how to respond to a troll, and her reasoning remains current today. She could be silent, in hopes that not feeding his interest would make him go away. But he’s attacked all women, and she cannot stand down in face of that.
“With just cause I am moved to demonstrate how great a reputation for learning and virtue women have won by their inborn excellence, manifested in every age as knowledge, the [purveyor] of honor.”
In this section of the letter, she enumerates women through the ages whose intellectual power contributed to worldwide knowledge and the development of modern society. She starts with Sabba of Ethiopia, “her heart imbued with divine power, [who] solved the prophetic mysteries of the Egyptian Salomon.” She details a long list of women who played integral parts in Western civilization. She makes the point that history wrote out the contributions of these women, preferring to praise instead only the men of their time: for instance we know Cicero, but do we know his daughter Tulliola, who was as learned as he?
“All of history is full of these examples. Thus your nasty words are refuted by these arguments, which compel you to concede that nature imparts equally to all the same freedom to learn.”
Having laid the foundation that educated women have been a part of civilization from its outset, she turns to the question of whether they are exceptions or the norm. She notes that it’s clear that women “have been able by nature to be exceptional, but have chosen lesser goals.” That is: the nature of woman includes intellectual capacity: what individual women do with that capacity is a choice.
“For knowledge is not given as a gift, but [is gained] with diligence.”
Individuals have differing interests, and we all have a finite amount of time to invest in those interests. Some women will spend their time on fashion and beauty, and Cereta makes clear that’s not her choice. Study requires discipline, and it’s hard work. Not every woman, nor every man, will want to take on the scholarship required to become learned. Everyone has the capacity to learn, but only some will choose to do the work.
Women who want to learn must overcome more hurdles than men, who create those hurdles.
“[But] where we [women] should be forceful we are [too often] devious; where we should be confident we are insecure. [Even worse], we are content with our condition.”
Because of men like Sempronius who chastise women who attempt to participate in scholarly life, women lose confidence in their efforts. They become fearful. They sublimate their desires to accept the status quo, as defined by men.
“How nauseating to see strong men pursue a weakling at bay. Hold on! Does my name alone terrify you? As I am not a barbarian in intellect and do not fight like one, what fear drives you?”
Cereta winds up to deliver the final punches:
“Who, do you think, will be surprised, Bibulus, if the stricken heart of an angry girl, whom your mindless scorn has painfully wounded, will after this more violently assault your bitter words? Do you suppose, 0 most contemptible man on earth, that I think myself sprung [like Athena] from the head of Jove? I am a school girl, possessed of the sleeping embers of an ordinary mind. Indeed I am too hurt, and my mind, offended, too swayed by passions, sighs, tormenting itself, conscious of the obligation to defend my sex. For absolutely everything— that which is within us and that which is without —is made weak by association with my sex.”
Her argument comes down to this marvelous insight: the fact that a man finds her intellect exceptional is an admission that he thinks all women are stupid. She insists that no, she has an ordinary intellect, common to all human beings by nature. She’s merely chosen to take on the hard work of study. He, on the other hand, acts like a beast who preys on women. By nature, he could be intelligent too, but he’s made the lazy choice to prey on women. In doing so, he denies his nature, and his God.
“And I shall endeavor, by avenging arms, to sweep away the abusive infamies of noisemakers with which some disreputable and impudent men furiously, violently, and nastily rave against a woman and a republic worthy of reverence.”
Letter Three: To Lucilia Vernacula, “Against Women Who Disparage Learned Women” 1 November 1487
A woman answering to the name “Lucilia Vernacula” hasn’t been found, and this name could also be contrived. According to her name, we expect her to be a common woman, and the name Vernacula has been used to denote a common slave, hussy, or slut.
Having argued with passion to defend women against men’s critiques, Cereta plumbs the depths of her anger for women who turn against other women. She launches into it with her first words:
“I THOUGHT THEIR TONGUES should have been fine-sliced and their hearts hacked to pieces—those men whose perverted minds and inconceivable hostility [fueled by] vulgar envy so flamed that they deny, stupidly ranting, that women are able to attain eloquence in Latin. [But] I might have forgiven those pathetic men, doomed to rascality, whose patent insanity I lash with unleashed tongue. But I cannot bear the babbling and chattering women, glowing with drunkenness and wine, whose impudent words harm not only our sex but even more themselves.”
The correspondent is a woman who’s criticized Cereta for her education and writing. This type exists today: women who try to take down other women in public, to enhance their own positions with men. We see these women, horrifyingly, in positions of political power, but examples abound. If you’re a woman, you’ve run into them at work and in your social circles. When I was young, Phyllis Schlafly pushed this agenda for fame and fortune. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” personified them as the Aunts and the Commanders’ wives who betrayed the humanity of fellow women to pursue their own advantages. So, if it helps, think of Lucilia Vernacula as Aunt Lydia.
Again, Cereta considers just ignoring the criticism, but decides that silence invokes complicity. She belittles these women mercilessly. They, not she, should shut their traps:
“Nor should anyone fault me for impatience, since even dogs are permitted to claw at pesty flies, and an infected cow must always be isolated from the healthy flock, for the best is often injured by the worst. Who would believe that a [sturdy] tree could be destroyed by tiny ants? Let them fall silent, then, these insolent little women, to whom every norm of decency is foreign; inflamed with hatred, they would noisily chew up others, [except that] mute, they are themselves chewed up within. Their inactivity of mind maddens these raving women, or rather Megaeras, who cannot bear even to hear the name of a learned woman. These are the mushy faces who, in their vehemence, now spit tedious nothings from their tight little mouths, now to the horror of those looking on spew from their lips thunderous trifles.”
Cereta makes the argument we saw in the previous letter, that it’s a choice to invest time in scholarship and writing. Everyone has the capacity to learn. Her critics too could decide to apply themselves to acquire skill. To do so is virtuous: since nature has given everyone the capacity, electing to develop that capacity is a virtue.
She signs off with this:
“Virtue only is acquired by ourselves alone; nor can those women ascend to serious knowledge who, soiled by the filth of pleasures, languidly rot in sloth. For those women the path to true knowledge is plain who see that there is certain honor in exertion, labor and wakefulness. Farewell.”
You can hear the [mic drop] centuries away. Laura Cereta is DONE with these women, as she kicks the anti-woke crowd to the curb.
Do Better
Despite having been educated in a convent, mentored by a prioress, and woven religious themes throughout her work, Cereta promoted a philosophy that subverted Catholicism. She advocates for humanism rather than divine ordination, stipulating that nature provides every human with the same capacity for good or evil, along with the power to choose what to make of his or her natural-born assets. Cereta argues that humanism is also what we’d call feminism: women are equal to men. Not every humanist, of course, was feminist: humanists can be found amongst early Greek philosophers, and they didn’t distinguish themselves by promoting women’s equality. The fact that Laura Cereta centers her philosophy on women’s equality and agency is therefore a significant contribution to human knowledge.
A common theme in her arguments against her critics is simply: do better. It’s facile to tear others down for your own advantage, and to lodge lazy complaints about people you want to exert power over. Much harder is to construct a rational argument to discover a truth, and to expend the time required of scholarship to master and understand the facts.
Reading these letters from a young woman, still in her teens, confronting the willful ignorance and malicious attacks of people older than her in a time before “The New World” that Columbus ‘discovered,’ I find both uplifting and dispiriting. Her writing stands as evidence that her primary tenet is true: the capacity for intellectual achievement exists in human nature, and always has. And yet, I’m dismayed by how little progress has been made in the more than 500 years that have elapsed since she wrote the letters. Women are still being criticized for not living lives subservient to men. Appallingly, the idea has even taken center stage in a presidential campaign in the US, despite—and likely in backlash to—women graduating from college in higher numbers than men.
I began this essay thinking about how modern news organizations prioritize opinion over fact-finding, and the resulting degradation of public information. Cereta certainly had a strong and acknowledged point of view; she was no impartial journalist. What I find instructive is that she countered fact-free critical opinion with rational arguments. She didn’t stipulate that she should be believed because of her connections, or her credentials, or her extensive number of followers. She didn’t play up her looks to entice men to agree with her. In fact, her arguments didn’t depend on belief at all: the point of her argument was to change how her reader thought about women’s education and the inherent value of her gender. She didn’t want a leap of faith: she wanted the reader to follow her logic.
More of this, please.
Ellie’s Corner
A pheasant had wandered through the back yard and Dave snapped Ellie stalking it. Not to worry about the pheasant; Ellie’s a herder, not a hunter. The pheasant was blissfully unaware.
Thanks for reading,
Too long, didn’t read.
Mark Twain’s three kinds of lies—“lies, damned lies, and statistics” may be echoing in your head right now.
I studied Latin in college, and discovered to my delight that Latin is much more than its modern reputation. Since the language lingers on in law and the Vatican, Latin has a reputation for being overly formal, stuffy, pedantic. However, the people writing during the Roman empire were expressing themselves naturally. They wrote elegiacally (Virgil), politically (Cicero), lyrically (Ovid), and bawdily (Catullus). I always thought it was a miss to start students off with the martial stuff, rather than entice them with the mordantly funny and sometimes obscene Catullus, who had the humor of a randy teenager. When we students translated an original text into our native English, we imbued it with our sense of it. So, it’s little wonder that a 15th C writer’s Latin, once translated by a modern English speaker, would seem so familiar. Thank translators everywhere for maintaining literary heritages!
For readers of this series, you’ll recognize this is ‘the same old tired playbook’ for criticizing early women writers. It was always an unknown man who wrote memorably, never the woman who signed her name to it.
She complains of being poor after her husband died.
Great quote! Neither Senator Warren, or Rep. Nancy Pelosi could have encapsulated it better….“My ears are wearied by your carping.” Thank you for yet another fascinating learning experience!