ABSTRACT
In her late sixteenth-century dialogue, The Worth of Women, the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte captured a central dilemma of Renaissance motherhood in an evocative hypothetical question. In the midst of grave difficulty, a mother has the power to save only her husband, or her son, or her father. She must choose between them. As the fictional interlocutor framed the dilemma: “[W]hose life should I most value – he who gave me life, he who joined himself to me in marriage, or he to whom I gave birth?” While the women had inconclusively debated the relative worth of difficult husbands and disloyal sons, unanimity greeted the following solution to the gruesome riddle:
If you are a loving mother, you must rescue your dear son from the cruel enemy ranks, for, if you choose to give life to your husband or your aged father, you are endangering your own life. A mother’s love is instinctive, natural love, while a woman’s love for her father contains an element of duty, that for her husband, an element of principle. And, by as much as love outweighs duty and principle, so the bond of maternity outweighs those of marriage or filial obligation.
The enthusiasm for this solution among Fonte’s fictional conversationalists is unique in the text. Like many Renaissance dialogues, The Worth of Women does not often steer the reader to a clear conclusion, especially regarding women’s relationships. But here the unanimous remedy for the divided loyalties of womanhood privileged an instinctive bond over relationships of obligation. The contrast between the natural goodness of a mother’s love and the shortcomings of the social order would become a commonplace in the early modern world, an enduring ideological configuration of womanhood embedded in European modernity. 1