Cereta, Laura (1469–1499)

Renaissance author, humanist, and feminist. Born in Brescia, the eldest child of a noble family, Cereta was given the excellent education and tutoring that was usually offered only to sons. She spent much of her youth in a convent, where she learned Latin and Greek and made a study of the ancient writers Cicero, Virgil, and Pliny. She returned home at the age of eleven and began the study of mathematics and science with her father. Married to a merchant at the age of fifteen, she carried on her studies and her correspondences with scholars and writers from her new home in Venice. After the death of her husband from the plague, she devoted herself completely to the writing of letters, essays, and speeches, and also gave public readings of her essays. She may have also won an appointment as a professor of philosophy at the University of Padua. In 1488, she boldly defied convention by circulating a collection of her letters under the title of Epistolae Familiares. These letters had been sent to friends and acquaintances; they covered the topics of women's rights and social position, the institution of marriage, the right of women to an education, and women's political ability and their attainments as artists. She criticized the institutions of marriage and housekeeping as stultifying and condemned women's predilection for jewelry, fine dress, and cosmetics. She was roundly criticized for presuming to be the equal of men in intellectual ability, however, and after the Epistolae Familiares ceased trying to circulate her works. Her interest in overcoming social barriers to women in the field of education and scholarship laid the groundwork for the more widely published feminist writing after the Renaissance.