"Ground-breaking", "revolutionary" and "astonshingly erudite" are the sorts of labels all too often used in book reviews - and even more often in press releases - which leaves me without adequate words to describe Jane Stevenson's Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Only a decade ago, so distinguished a feminist historian as Gerda Lerner was saying there were no more than 300 learned women up until 1700 in the entire Christian era, suggesting an almost total exclusion from the central language of scholarship through that great arc of history. Stevenson, however, multiplies that figure by at least a factor of ten, and suggests many avenues of research by which it might be further increased.
But this is more than a charting of new, fascinating women from history, as important as that is. By finding these women, bringing them together and exploring their lives, Stevenson is forcing a rethink about the basic position of women over 1,880 years - in the societies of ancient Rome, in the medieval and later nunnery, and of the social role of the city's "showpiece educated woman" across a wide swathe of early modern Europe. Every scholar interested in women in any of these periods should, I'd suggest, read this book shed new lights, from different angles, on their period.
But, I can hear potential readers say Latin poetry, particularly neo-Latin poetry, is deadly dull stuff. Do I have to?
Well while it is true that some of the verses are paens to dull princes, dutiful religious professions or formulaic odes to nature, there's plenty of genuinely good poetry here. (Sensibly always provided in translation as well as the original.)
Just listen to the astonishing Martha Marchina, the daughter of a Neapolitan soap-boiler living in Rome, whose precocious talent was recognised when her brothers, left under her care after their mother died, made astonishing progress in school. But one of the boys - none of whom wrote verses themselves - was mocking the quality of her verse. She responded:
You appear to be a straitlaced fellow, and too severe,
My brother, since none of my verses ever please you.
This one is silly, you say, this is harsh, the other is wordy,
This is flat, these are tumid, this one has a hole in it, those others collapse --
You criticize innumerable faults in my verses -
And yet it is I who compose the no-good poems, you compose none. (p. 310-11
(She remained single, living at home with her father, acquiring a cardinal as a patron, and published a collection of letters and verse that was dedicated to Christina, ex-queen of Sweden.)
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