Laura Cereta

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Laura Cereta

Humanist and Feminist Writers in 1488 - 1492

Born September 1469

Died 1499 (aged 30)

Burial Brescia, Italy

Spouse Pietra serena

House Brescia, Italy

Father Silvestro Cereto

Mother Veronica di Leno

 Laura Cereta (September 1469 – 1499), was one of the great female humanist and feminist writers
of fifteenth-century Italy. Cereta was the first to put women’s issues and her friendships with women
front and center in her work. Cereta was one of the best scholars in Brescia, Verona, and Venice in
1488-92, known for her writing in the form of letters to other intellectuals.[1] Her letters contained her
personal matters and childhood memories, and discussed themes such as women’s education, war,
and marriage.[2] Like the first great humanist Petrarch, Cereta claimed to seek fame and immortality
through her writing. It appeared that her letters were intended for a general audience.[3]

Contents

 1Life and career

 2Death
 3List of works
 4Notes
 5References
 6External links

Life and career[edit]

Cereta was born in September 1469 in Brescia to a high-class family. She was a sickly child who
suffered from sleeplessness.[4] She was the first-born of six children. She had three brothers, Ippolito,
Daniel and Basilio and two sisters, Deodata, and Diana. Her family was very popular in Italy due to
her father's status. Silvestro Cereto was an attorney and a king's magistrate and her
mother, Veronica di Leno, a famous businessperson. Since, her father and Cereta believed in
education, at age of seven her father sent her to the convent.[5] There she devoted her life to
intellectual pursuits and began her academics; she learned religious principles, reading, writing, and
Latin with the prioress. The prioress had a big influence in Cereta's life as her teacher, and mentor.
The prioress taught Cereta to use late night to predawn hours while everyone else slept to
embroider, write, and study. At the age of seven, her teacher guided her courses in Latin grammar.
She also taught her how to draw pictures utilizing a needle, which she practiced herself day and
night. After two years at the convent, her father requested that Cereta come home to take care her
siblings at the age of nine. After a few months at home, she went back to the convent for more
schooling. At the age of twelve, her father summoned her again to come home to take on various
household responsibilities. Among them, supervising her brothers’ education and serving as her
father’s secretary. It is likely that her father guided her post-elementary studies.[5] At this time, Cereta
showed great interest in mathematics, astrology, agriculture, and her favorite subject, moral
philosophy.[5]
In 1484, Cereta got married at a young age of fifteen to Pietro Serina. Serina was a business
merchant from Venice, yet had the same interests in academia. Difficulties between the two
emerged in their marriage. In her letters to him, she wrote “You charge me with laziness and attack
me for my long silence as though I were a defendant in court. You act as if I were the sort of person
who would write to strangers and only neglect you, as though I were forgetful of you when in fact I
accord you a place of honor above that of other learned men.” [6] Despite the arguments, for Cereta,
this was one of the happiest moments in her lifetime. In her letters, she imagined an ideal marriage
as a partnership overseen by mutual honor, respect, honesty, and love. Cereta never regarded one’s
marriage as a kind of friendship, nor did she ever directly call her husband a friend. Nonetheless, in
her letters, the languages of marriage and friendship were clearly delineated, focusing the readers’
attention upon the reciprocal relations like mutual love, communication. She often focused the
readers’ attention on mutual relations such as love, communication and responsibility that manage
both spousal and friendship.[6] After eighteen months of marriage, her husband died due to a plague.
The two had no children and never remarried. Cereta finally recovered her spirits two years after the
death of her husband and began immersing herself more deeply in her literary studies and works.
She continued writing her letters to a close circle of family and friends, discussing personal concerns
such as her difficult relationships with her mother and her husband. These letters also provided a
detailed description of an early modern woman’s private experiences. Taken together, these letters
are evidences of an individual woman and to her persistent feminist concerns. She defended the
concept of educating women and objected the abuse of married women. Furthermore, in her public
lectures and essays, Cereta explored the history of women's contributions to the intellectual and
political life of Europe. She argued against the slavery of women in marriage and for the rights of
women to higher education, the same issues that would occupy feminist thinkers in later
centuries.[7] Because of these themes, scholars such as Diana Robin consider her an early feminist.
Throughout this time, she faced many critics, both male and female, who were jealous of her
accomplishments and criticized her works. The two principal charges brought against her were that a
woman should not receive an education and that her works were plagiarized, with her father writing
them for her. She turned against her critics with aggressiveness. In response to one of her critics,
Bibulus Sepromius, Laura said:
MY EARS ARE WEARIED BY YOUR CARPING. YOU brashly and publicly not merely wonder but
indeed lament that I am said to possess as fine a mind as nature ever bestowed upon the most
learned man. You seem to think that so learned a woman has scarcely before been seen in the
world. You are wrong on both counts, Sempronius, and have dearly strayed from the path of truth
and disseminate falsehood…You pretend to admire me as a female prodigy, but there lurks sugared
deceit in your adulation. You :wait perpetually in ambush to entrap my lovely sex, and overcome by
your hatred seek to trample me underfoot and dash me to the earth.[8]

In 1488, Cereta assembled 82 of her letters into a volume. The volume was based on the Petrarchan
model called “Epistolae Familiares” and written with a burlesque dialogue on the "death of an ass".
She dedicated it to her patron, Cardinal Ascanius Maria Sforza. Her works circulated widely in Italy
during the early modern era. However, this volume remained unpublished until the seventeenth
century. The manuscript circulated from 1488 to 1492 among humanists in Brescia, Verona, and
Venice.[5] It is suspected that she did this to seek legitimization as a writer. Six months after her
letters were published, her father died. After his death, she no longer felt inspired to write.[9]

Death[edit]
Laura Cereta died at the premature age of 30. Her cause of death is unknown. None of her writings
from the late years of her life survived. She was honored with a public funeral and festivities in
Brescia, and this was uncommon for many women.[5] She is remembered as a great woman who laid
the groundwork for many feminist and humanist writers after the Renaissance.

List of works[edit]
 "Critical Edition of the Unpublished Materials in the Cereta Corpus." Edited by Albert Rabil, Jr.
Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and
Studies, 1981, 111-175.
 Laura Cereta: Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Transcribed, translated, and edited
by Diana Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
 "Laura Cereta: Letter to Augustinus Aemilius, Curse against the Ornamentation of Women."
Translated and edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected
Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval
and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983, 77-80.
 "Laura Cereta to Bibulus Sempronius: Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women." Translated
and edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. in Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by
and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983, 81-84.
hu·man·ism\ˈhyü-mə-ˌni-zəm, ˈyü-\ isang kilusaang intelektwal noong renaisance na naniniwalang dapat
pagtuunan ng pansin ang klasikal na sibilisasyon ng greece at rome

noun

: a system of values and beliefs that is based on the idea that people are basically good and that
problems can be solved using reason instead of religion

fem·i·nism\ˈfe-mə-ˌni-zəm\ kilusan ng mga babae

noun

: the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities

: organized activity in support of women's rights and interest

splague\ˈplāg\ isang nakamamatay na sakit

noun

: a large number of harmful or annoying things

: a disease that causes death and that spreads quickly to a large number of people