ABSTRACT
Elena Cassandra Tarabotti, born in Venice in 1604, became Sister Arcangela in the Benedictine convent of St. Anna, where she took the veil in 1620 and shortly afterwards, it is not known exactly when, took her final vows. She did not have a religious vocation and all of her life protested her confinement and that of other of women through her writing, much of which was published and known to a large community, even beyond the city of Venice. Her works are critical of family and state politics, which protected wealth and nobility by relegating potentially expensive daughters to a life of imprisonment and by denying them as well a good education. She exposed the hypocrisy of the fierce contemporary criticism of female vanity, pointing out that men were just as vain and suggesting that their concern was not so much for the virtue of their wives and daughters as for their money, which they would more readily spend on themselves and on the prostitutes with which they liberally associated. She argued for the merit of women and their right to attend to their beauty and adornment, one of the few areas of their lives in their control. Tarabotti wrote forcefully and convincingly, despite her lack of adequate formal training, and she unnerved her critics to the point that they mercilessly attacked her for the least evidence of literary shortcomings, indeed criticized her for typographical errors in a published work. She always responded promptly and fearlessly and seems to have had support and sympathy from many noblewomen and not a few erudite men.
