Introduction
In 1551, the king’s printer Thomas Berthelet (d. 1555) issued what was the climax of a series of works interrogating the intellectual and social status of contemporary women. The small, duodecimo volume was entitled An argument wherin the apparaile of women is both reproued and defended. Footnote 1 The Argument consists of a translation by the “scholar, administrator, and alleged traitor” William Thomas (d. 1554) of a succinct, self-contained narrative from book 34 of Livy’s (59 BCE–17 CE) history of Rome, the Ab Urbe Condita (From the foundation of the city).Footnote 2 The episode features two speeches delivered in the wake of Rome’s most recent conflict with Carthage, both of which debate the possible repeal of a law named the Lex Oppia.Footnote 3 The Lex Oppia was an emergency measure originally passed in 215 BCE at the height of the Second Punic War. It proscribed any woman from owning over half an ounce of gold or dressing in clothes dyed with multiple colors. It also forbade women to ride in a carriage within the walls of Rome or to travel over a mile beyond the city limits, with the exception of religious festivals.Footnote 4 Though Livy does not explicitly say so, he implies that the excess gold was surrendered to the state to help with the war effort.Footnote 5 Twenty years after the Oppian Law was passed, the women of Rome took to the streets to demand its repeal. Responding to these very public demonstrations, Marcus Porcius Cato, consul and vehement conservative, motions in a speech before the senate that the law be kept.Footnote 6 He berates the men of Rome for failing to keep their wives in check, reminding them that Roman legislation has historically imposed limits on women’s behavior and independence.Footnote 7
The most enduring message of Cato’s speech, however, is his suggestion that the Lex Oppia had originally been passed to curb female excess.Footnote 8 This interpretation of the law (which is, as the tribune Lucius Valerius flags in his rebuttal, historically inaccurate) became the definitive way of reading the episode during the sixteenth century. In fact, it remained unchallenged until the appearance of William Thomas’s Argument. Valerius replies to Cato with his own speech, stating that there is nothing intrinsically novel about the women’s protests. Women have, he explains, from the earliest moments of Roman history played an active role in the affairs of state.Footnote 9 Exploring the law’s origins, Valerius notes that the Lex Oppia was the product of very specific, wartime desiderata that are no longer in play. It was never intended, he insists, as a measure to restrain women’s alleged excess. Valerius goes on to argue that since women enjoy none of the privileges typically afforded to male citizens, they should at least be granted this meager, expressive outlet.Footnote 10
By translating this particular episode, Thomas privileged a brief moment in a text that Livy’s first editor in print described as “an ocean untouched and untried.”Footnote 11 By locating the Argument within a wider context of works that were examining the social and educative roles of contemporary women, Thomas’s Argument emerges as a bold and hitherto-unremarked intervention in the English querelle des femmes.Footnote 12 Thomas appealed to an earlier, Italian reading of the Lex Oppia episode that exploited Valerius’s speech for its arguments in praise of womankind, thereby teasing out a distinctly pro-female voice from Livy that, in England at least, had previously gone unheard.
Traditionally, William Thomas has provoked interest as one of the first humanists to introduce Machiavelli into the English literary and political milieu.Footnote 13 Having acquired gambling debts and stolen from his employer, Sir Anthony Browne (ca. 1500–48), Thomas fled to Italy in 1545. Initially imprisoned at Venice, he was eventually released and spent the next three years familiarizing himself with the Italian language and literature.Footnote 14 Thomas returned to England in 1548, and by 1552 he had been appointed as clerk to the Privy Council under Edward VI. Following Edward’s death, Thomas was implicated in the Wyatt rebellion. By 20 February 1554, he had been incarcerated at the Tower of London and was subsequently convicted of treason. On 18 May, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered.Footnote 15
The first studies of Thomas explored how his years in Italy helped to shape his later role as clerk of the Privy Council and as an “informal royal tutor” to Edward VI.Footnote 16 Thomas wrote eighty-five topics of statecraft for the young Edward along with the Discourses, which, as Peter Donaldson notes, derived much of their material from Machiavelli.Footnote 17 It was not until Arvid Carlson’s article of 1993 that the Argument itself received any critical attention. Christine Fauré refers briefly to Thomas’s translation in her chapter on women and republicanism, but her comments are for the most part inspired by Carlson.Footnote 18 Cathy Shrank has provided an extremely detailed account of Thomas’s life and writings, but is primarily interested in the Italian elements of his literary output, and the Argument is mentioned only in passing.Footnote 19 Most recently, Jonathon Woolfson has produced a chapter on the travels of Thomas Hoby and William Thomas through Italy. Again, Thomas’s classical learning is played down and the pair are described as “not entirely averse to Latin and Greek scholarship.”Footnote 20 Carlson’s article is, then, the most detailed analysis of the Argument to date. For Carlson, Thomas’s translation, emerging as it did during the most recent program of numismatic reform, “is a cleverly done propaganda piece to urge the surrender of the old debased coins for the new issue of October 1551.”Footnote 21 There is, it is true, a curt nod to “the baseness of our coyne” in the preface.Footnote 22 But the rest of that preface and indeed the work as a whole are concerned with countering popular trends in misogynist thought. Thomas’s translation was not a subtle swipe at Tudor economic policy but an attempt to harness Livy as a pro-female authority in the debate over women.
Despite the critical underplaying of Thomas’s classical learning, the Argument was engaged in a complex network of relationships not only with ancient texts, but with contemporary humanist works that shared a strong classical bent. The most important of these, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, provided the basic material for Thomas’s translation. Livy wrote the History of Rome, as it is usually known in English, as a year-by-year account of Roman history from the city’s foundation. Of a total of 142 books, however, only thirty-four survive today. In the first half of the sixteenth century, no fewer than seventy-six editions of Livy’s history were printed across Europe.Footnote 23 The history was also reworked multiple times into Italian, German, Spanish, and English. Between 1500 and 1550, at least thirty-two editions of the vernacular Livy appeared in print.Footnote 24
Livy furnished the prose authors of early Tudor England with a treasure trove of historical, moral, and political exempla, which could be easily reworked to flesh out a given argument. Livy was thus exploited by Catholic and Protestant authors alike, though to radically different ends.Footnote 25 Livy’s sixteenth-century readers also saw the history as a useful pedagogical tool. The diplomat and scholar Thomas Elyot (ca. 1490–1546) in The Governour (1537), a treatise on statecraft that, like Thomas’s Argument, was also printed by Thomas Berthelet, appeals to Livy as a key author in the education of the next generation of politicians.Footnote 26 This was then the reputation that Livy enjoyed when Thomas came to write the Argument.
Thomas’s focus on the Lex Oppia was informed by an earlier, Italian preoccupation with the episode that developed during the Quattrocento. Time and time again, Livy had been yoked by Italian humanists to debates over female apparel. In around 1453, the noblewoman Nicolosa Sanuti (fl. 1453) composed a petition that demanded the repeal of a sumptuary law introduced at Bologna. The petition not only cited the Lex Oppia, but reworked Valerius’s speech in praise of women. Sanuti’s treatise prompted a positive response from the humanist educator Gaurino Veronese (1374–1460). In an epistle arguing for greater freedoms of female apparel, he borrowed extensively from the Lex Oppia passage. Then in 1467, three orations composed in Viterbo, and saturated with allusions to the Oppian Law, mined Livy for material in a dispute over women’s apparel. This was only the beginning of a struggle, which would last well into the sixteenth century, to claim Livy as an authority on either side of the Renaissance debate over women.
Thomas’s translation was also in dialogue with a number of contemporary works, most of which fell on either side of the English querelle des femmes. These included a number of texts printed by Thomas Berthelet that presented the education of women in a distinctly positive light. Margaret Roper’s (1505–44) translation of Erasmus’s commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, A deuoute treatise vpon the Pater noster (1526); Thomas Elyot’s The defence of good women (1540); and David Clapam’s (d. 1551) translation of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s (1486–1535) De Nobilitate et Praeecellentia Foeminei Sexus (On the glory and superiority of the female sex, 1542) all laid the conceptual groundwork for Thomas’s reworking of Livy.
Less sympathetic in its portrayal of women but of equal importance to the Argument was Juan Luis Vives’s (1492–1540) De Institutione Foeminae Christianae (On the education of a christian woman, 1524), which appeared in an English translation from Berthelet’s press in 1529.Footnote 27 This treatise on female education is of special importance to the Argument as it helped to establish an orthodox way of reading the Lex Oppia episode that thrived during the sixteenth century, namely one that read the law as a means of curbing women’s alleged extravagance. William Parfey’s intensely misogynistic Speculum Iuuenum (A mirror for young men, 1547) endorsed the same reading of Livy, against which Thomas would position himself in the Argument. Each of these texts, pro-female and misogynistic alike, can be seen to have prompted and textured Thomas’s translation.
Livy, The Lex Oppia, and Quattrocento Italy
The struggle to appropriate Livy in the debate over women began in Quattrocento Italy. From as early as 1453, Italian humanists were appealing to the Lex Oppia episode in literary disputes concerning female apparel. Though these texts presented themselves primarily as responses to contemporary sumptuary measures, they each engaged in a wider discussion of women’s intellectual and social worth. The Italian city-states produced no fewer than 83 sumptuary laws during the fifteenth century; these were followed by more than 160 in the sixteenth.Footnote 28 Much like the Lex Oppia, many of these laws were aimed exclusively at women.Footnote 29 In one such instance, Bessarion (1439–72), theologian and governor of Bologna, passed a sumptuary measure on 24 March 1453, demarcating what each class of Bolognese woman was permitted to wear in accordance with her rank. This inspired a petition devised by the noblewoman Nicolosa Sanuti and composed in Latin with the help of “a man of great preeminence and virtue” that demanded the law’s repeal.Footnote 30 The work is of special interest since it constitutes, as Catherine Kovesi Killerby observes, “arguably the first public defence of women in Italy conceived by a woman.”Footnote 31
Despite the petition’s explicit references to the Lex Oppia, almost nothing has been said of the strong intertextual relationship it develops with Livy.Footnote 32 In her initial address to Bessarion, Sanuti echoes Livy’s introduction to the Lex Oppia passage: “Yet perhaps you will marvel that I, a woman, discouraged neither by modesty nor by your authority, should now argue the case on behalf of women before your most righteous Lordship.”Footnote 33 The phrase “neither by modesty nor by your authority” echoes Livy’s description of the Roman women who could be dissuaded from their protest “neither by authority nor by modesty.”Footnote 34 With this nod to the Roman women’s demonstration, there is the suggestion that Sanuti will be drawing on the same daring exhibited by her (female) predecessors. Sanuti appeals to this sense of history repeating with her first explicit mention of the Lex Oppia: “A law has been brought against us once again, originally passed by Marcus Oppius, tribune of the plebs, when Quintus Fabius and Titus Sempronius were consuls, against the glory and worth of every Roman woman, and repealed twenty years later by Marcus Porcius Cato.”Footnote 35 By citing the Lex Oppia’s repeal, Sanuti implies that Bessarion’s law will meet a similar end. In what Giuseppe Lombardi refers to as a “rather gross error,” she apparently forgets that it was Cato who spoke so vehemently against the law’s repeal.Footnote 36 The same misidentification is made a few paragraphs later.Footnote 37 This slip, however, is no accident. The petition as a whole follows Livy’s account closely and actively quotes from the original. It also paraphrases sections from the history besides the Lex Oppia episode.Footnote 38 In short, Sanuti and her unnamed collaborator knew their Livy. With this deliberate misremembering, Sanuti recasts Cato, “a most solemn and stern man” and bastion of conservative morals, as a defender of female apparel.Footnote 39
Following the contours of Valerius’s speech, the petition demonstrates that the Oppian Law was a product of a very specific historical moment. Condensing Valerius’s argument, Sanuti explains that the law was implemented at the height of the Second Punic War, when Rome lacked allies, funds, and soldiery.Footnote 40 The observation with which the petition concludes — namely, that women, who are denied all civil and religious offices, triumphs, and the spoils of war, should at least be left their apparel — has again been inspired, in both content and phrasing, by Livy’s Valerius.Footnote 41 Sanuti also puts an emphasis on educated women, thereby anticipating one of the foremost themes in later querelle literature. Having singled out Sappho as an ancient model of female learning, she lists examples from living memory, including Battista da Montefeltro (ca. 1384–1447), for whom Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) wrote the De Studiis et Litteris (On studies and letters, 1424), a treatise on female education, and Costanza Varano (1426–47), “whose many letters, speeches and most elegant poems are yet still in people’s hands.”Footnote 42 The idea of affording women the same humanist education as enjoyed by their male compeers would resurface as a central theme in the pro-female works of the early Tudor querelle.
Sanuti’s petition was not received enthusiastically in all quarters, as is evinced by the correspondence between the canon regular, Matteo Bosso (1427/28–1502), and Guarino Veronese. Bosso complained that “the speech was on the lips and in the hands of everyone,” with some applauding it, and others (including himself) lamenting that women’s “liberty of ornamentation has been celebrated in letters in an injury to self-control and a risk to chastity.”Footnote 43 In fact, so disquieted was Bosso by the treatise that he composed his own response, the De Immoderato Mulierum Cultu Cohortatio (An exhortation on the immoderate apparel of women, ca. 1453).Footnote 44 Referring contemptuously to that “little book” (Bosso does not name Sanuti as its author), he too cites Rome’s legal precedent.Footnote 45 For Bosso, the most disturbing detail of the Lex Oppia narrative is the Roman women’s public demonstration: “You failed to mention, and indeed are ignorant of the fact that those women, after much shouting and after many quarrels, were inflamed with a kind of womanly madness and manic frenzy and laid siege to the house of the Brutii (who hindered the law’s abrogation) until the law was abolished, and that there was almost no help offered to the Brutii, because the Roman men did not perceive that women’s desire is forever slippery and insatiable.”Footnote 46 Bosso has added a distinctly negative gloss to Livy’s account of the women’s protests, dismissing them as “inflamed with a kind of womanly madness and manic frenzy.” By reaching out to a later account of the episode written by the heavily moralizing Valerius Maximus, he introduces the idea that the men of Rome failed to grasp the full (and, as he implies, negative) consequences of the law’s repeal.Footnote 47
Sanuti’s petition did, however, manage to win the sympathy of Bosso’s addressee, Guarino Veronese. In a letter written in the summer of 1456 and addressed to Sanuti’s lover, Sante Bentivoglio (1424–60, de facto ruler of Bologna), Veronese called for greater freedoms of female apparel. As with Sanuti, he borrows freely from Livy. The first half of the epistle summarizes the objections made by those “quasi Catos, more savage than severe,” gesturing to the consul’s proverbial reputation for conservative ethics, but more specifically to his role in the Lex Oppia episode.Footnote 48 Veronese reproduces several of the concerns that Livy puts in the mouth of Cato: the fear that women will usurp the authority of their husbands, that they are wandering abroad to illicit ends, that sumptuous apparel breeds undesirable competition between women, and that women are untamed animals requiring restraint all have their origins in Cato’s speech.Footnote 49
Veronese then counters these anxieties in a kind of prosopopoeia, adopting a female persona to speak on behalf of womankind. Reworking Valerius’s argument (also cited by Sanuti) that women, because they are denied public office, rely on apparel as a means of expressing their honor, Veronese transforms Valerius’s third-person observations into a first-person testimonial: “Elegance becomes us. Ornaments and apparel and grace are women’s endeavor and decorations. In these we pride ourselves, in these we take joy, through these we please ourselves, and with these we lighten weighty tasks.”Footnote 50 For Veronese as well as Sanuti, Livy functioned as a versatile source in the debate over female apparel.
The literary coteries of Bologna and Ferrara were not alone in their appropriation of the Lex Oppia. In the summer of 1467, three speeches were written in Viterbo in response to sumptuary measures passed by the city council.Footnote 51 The orations, two of which were written in defense of female apparel, the other against, are addressed to the papal governor of Viterbo, Niccolò Perotti (1429–80). According to the second oration, the city’s female populace has staged a protest, wherein they “not only dared . . . to approach the forum and the judge’s bench as a crowd, but, as if they wanted to seize hold of the state, consulted with the senate, interrogated the people and solicited votes.”Footnote 52 The event shares an uncanny resemblance to the protest described by Livy and it is difficult to determine in these speeches where historical record ends and rhetorical exaggeration begins.Footnote 53 Nevertheless, to an even greater extent than Sanuti and Veronese, the Viterbo orations reveal, as Giuseppe Lombardi notes, “an almost obsessive quotation of the Lex Oppia.”Footnote 54
The first speech, for example, uses two points made by Valerius — that women too should experience the benefits of peace and that women have made significant contributions to the state — to bracket a novel argument concerning a correlation between outlawing sumptuous apparel and homosexual intercourse.Footnote 55 Though ostensibly concerned with clothing, these speeches also comment on women’s social and moral worth in relation to their male counterparts. “Men should hold women in esteem,” the first speaker explains, “not think of them as beneath themselves as if they were property.”Footnote 56 The same speaker looks nostalgically to the ancient world for female participation in the political aspects of city life, recalling that “there was once a time when our sex was allowed to attend public consultations, when we were not completely restrained from the exercise of public affairs.”Footnote 57 The Lex Oppia was thus juxtaposed in the Viterbo orations with a wider discussion of women’s social and political potentials.
Beyond the Quattrocento, sumptuary measures continued to be applied in the Italian city-states. As Killerby notes, “it was not until the eighteenth century that sumptuary laws were finally abandoned as an integral part of governmental policy.”Footnote 58 Hand in hand with this legal and religious preoccupation with apparel, the Lex Oppia narrative remained a popular example in texts produced in Italy concerning women’s clothing.Footnote 59 Thomas probably became acquainted with this very specific use of Livy during his three-year sojourn in Italy (1545–48). Thomas’s Historie of Italie, printed by Berthelet in 1549, referred not only to the “riche apparaill” enjoyed by Italian women, but also to the ingenious methods by which they circumvented sumptuary laws.Footnote 60 He was also in Bologna when he learned of Henry’s death, the city that had witnessed the debate inspired by Sanuti’s petition and boasted the greatest number of sumptuary laws targeting women during the sixteenth century.Footnote 61 But Thomas’s choice of subject, while bearing the hallmarks of this Italian tradition, also complemented the interests of his printer, Thomas Berthelet.
Thomas Berthelet, Women Patrons, and Female-Centric Works
In an extract from Thomas’s translation, Valerius observes the severe, social limitations placed on the Roman matrona: “Thei haue no part, neither in magistrates, nor in priesthod, nor in triumphes, nor in armes, nor in guyftes, nor in the spoyles of warre. The onely glory of women is their clenlines, their ornamentes and apparayle: wherein thei reioyce and triumph. Which thynges our auncestours called the women’s worlde.”Footnote 62 In the Latin original, Livy plays on the homophony of “munditiae” (elegance) with “mundum muliebrem,” which suggests both “the articles a woman uses to beautify herself” and also, as Thomas puts it, “the women’s worlde.”Footnote 63 Valerius thereby suggests that the significance of a woman’s life can be reduced to her appearance. This section explores how Thomas’s translation complemented a wider trend for works, many of which were printed by Berthelet, discussing exactly what constituted “the women’s worlde.” In fact, Thomas Berthelet and his press became primary conduits for the contemporary debate over women’s social and educative potential.Footnote 64 Thomas’s Argument, printed toward the end of Berthelet’s career in 1551, can thus be understood as the culmination of a twenty-five-year program of female-centric works.
Thomas Berthelet owned a print shop on Fleet Street “at the signe of Lucrece.”Footnote 65 He began printing in September 1524 and by 22 February 1530 Berthelet had been appointed as the king’s printer.Footnote 66 In this capacity he was responsible for printing the laws and ordinances, but the role also gave him access to key literary figures and patrons within Henry’s court. His press was prolific; Thomas Olsen counts “more than 150 editions” produced by Berthelet between 1524 and 1555.Footnote 67 He also specialized in the printing of humanist works, issuing multiple translations of classical texts as well as several English-language versions of works by Erasmus.Footnote 68 Berthelet was responsible for printing another translation of Livy by Anthony Cope (1486/87–1551), which he issued first in 1544 and again in 1548.Footnote 69 Crucial to understanding the Argument, Berthelet performed a key role in the English reception of the Continental querelle des femmes.Footnote 70
For Marc Angenot, the querelle in France began with Christine de Pizan’s (1364–ca. 1430) Épistre au dieu d’amour (1399), written as a rebuttal to Jean de Meung’s (ca. 1240–1305) additions to the Roman de la Rose (1278).Footnote 71 In 1405, Christine de Pizan produced another pro-female work, La Cité des Dames (The city of women). Over a century later, in 1521, this was printed by Henry Pepwell (d. 1539/40) in an English translation.Footnote 72 Here in Brian Anslay’s (d. 1536) translation the work is presented as a response to “many dyuers men clerkes” who “haue ben and ben enclyned to say by mouthe / & in theyr treatyse and wrytynges, so many slaundres and blames of women and of theyr condycyons.”Footnote 73 Foreshadowing one of the strongest themes of the female-centric works printed by Berthelet, de Pizan calls for the equal education of both boys and girls. As Anslay translates it, there is no doubt “yf it were the custome to put the lytel maydens to the scole and that sewyngly were made to learn y[e] seyences as they do to the man chyldren / that they sholde lerne as parfytely / and they shoulde be as wel entred in to the subtyltes of al the artes and seyences as they be.”Footnote 74 Despite its origins in the work of a female author, both sides of the English querelle were dominated, in the first half of the sixteenth century at least, entirely by male voices. Nonetheless, through the material he printed, Berthelet provided a platform for (male) authors who were sympathetic to the idea of women’s intellectual and political emancipation.
As early as 1526, only two years into his printing career, Berthelet began issuing works that touched on female education. It was in this year that he printed a translation of Erasmus’s commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, “tourned in to englisshe,” as the title tells us, “by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of xix. yere of age.”Footnote 75 The “well lerned gentylwoman” was Margaret Roper (1505–44), daughter of Sir Thomas More (1478–1535).Footnote 76 In a prefatory epistle, Richard Hyrde (d. 1528) attempts to assuage apparently popular anxieties surrounding the education of women and more specifically “whether it shulde be expedyent and requisite or nat / a woman to haue lernyng in bokes of latyn and greke.”Footnote 77 Any such doubt, however, Hyrde attributes to ignorance and envy.Footnote 78
Some fourteen years later, in 1540, Berthelet printed The defence of good women by Sir Thomas Elyot, dedicated to Henry’s most recent consort, Anne of Cleves.Footnote 79 Here two speakers, Caninius and Candidus, debate “the estimation of womankind,” and are finally joined by Zenobia, Elyot’s ideal educated woman, who has pursued the liberal arts both for her own sake and for that of her children.Footnote 80 The Defence states that women are to be educated to rather conservative ends. As Zenobia explains, the study of philosophy helps women “to honour our husbandes nexte after god: which honour resteth in due obedie[n]ce.”Footnote 81 But Zenobia is also a ruler in her own right, who “hath had of our [Roman] host uictory twise,” and has displayed in this role all the “nobylitye vertue and courage” of her male counterparts.Footnote 82 At one moment, the Defence even suggests that women might actively and successfully participate in “ciuile policy.”Footnote 83
Two years later, in 1542, Berthelet printed David Clapam’s (d. 1551) A treatise of the nobilitie and excellencye of vvoman kynde, a translation of the De Nobilitate et Praeecellentia Foeminei Sexus (1529) by the German humanist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.Footnote 84 Composed in 1509 and printed in Antwerp by Michaël Hillen (ca. 1476–1558) in 1529, the De Nobilitate had already appeared in French and Italian translations.Footnote 85 Whether Agrippa’s work was intended as a sincere theological treatise or as a paradox has been the subject of some debate.Footnote 86 But as Marc van der Poel has shown, some of the more controversial arguments that feature in the De Nobilitate, especially its defense of Eve, complement the views expressed in Agrippa’s subsequent theological works.Footnote 87 The Treatise also addresses the education of women, observing that “were it not, that women in our tyme ar forbydden, to gyue theym to good lernyges, we shulde euen nowe, haue women more excelle[n]t in wyt and lernynge than menne.”Footnote 88 Agrippa’s De Nobilitate would continue to play an active role in the English querelle, and was translated a further three times in the seventeenth century.Footnote 89
Berthelet was printing works that had been prompted by some of the most influential women of the Tudor court. In 1529, he issued Richard Hyrde’s translation of Vives’s De Institutione Foeminae Christianae.Footnote 90 Vives, having arrived in England in March 1523, became the “friend and spiritual counsellor of Queen Katherine,” taking the role of tutor to Princess Mary.Footnote 91 Both the De Institutione and Hyrde’s translation thereof were dedicated to Katherine. Then in 1531, Berthelet printed an English translation by the French humanist Gentian Hervet of Erasmus’s De Immensa Dei Misericordia. This translation was instigated by the prominent landowner and patron Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury.Footnote 92 In 1544, Berthelet issued a volume of prayers collected and translated by one of the foremost literary patrons of the period, Katherine Parr (1512–48), entitled Prayers or medytacions wherin the mynde is styrred paciently to suffre all afflictions here.Footnote 93
William Thomas seems to have benefited from similar links to noblewomen of the Tudor court. In 1549 he dedicated The vanitee of this world, also printed by Berthelet, to “the right woorshipfull and my singular good Ladie, the Ladie Anne Herbert of Wilton.”Footnote 94 Thomas evidently saw Anne Herbert (ca. 1514–52), Katherine’s sister, as a potentially lucrative patron. In the preface, Thomas explains that he has chosen a specifically female dedicatee “because I haue found so muche negligence in man, that almost he deserueth not to be warned any more of his folie: therefore did I determine to dedicate my boke vnto a woman, to proue whether it maie take any roote in theim: to the entent that men ashamed, through the vertuouse examples of women, maie be prouoked therby to refourme theim selfes, which no kinde of admonicion can persuade theim to dooe.”Footnote 95 Thomas implies that though similar works have previously targeted male readers, this is the first to have been conceived with a specifically female audience in mind. Thomas is perhaps appealing here to an already established female readership, one that knew that Berthelet was a printer with women’s interests at heart.
Yet Berthelet was, after all, a commercial printer and saw no contradiction in printing alongside these works John Bourchier’s (ca. 1467–1533) The golden boke of Marcus Aurelius (1535), through which runs an aggressively misogynistic vein.Footnote 96 As with the pro-female works issued by Berthelet, The golden boke also weighs in on the education of young girls: “The Romayne matrones, if they wil noursihe their doughters wel, ought to kepe these rules. Whan they se, that they wold goo abrode, than breke their legges: and if they wold be gasing, than put out their eies: and if they wyll harke, stop theyr eares: if they wyl giue or take, cut of their handes: if they dare speke, sowe up their mouthes: and if they wyl ente[n]d any lyghtnes, bury them quicke.”Footnote 97 Nonetheless, the leading humanist figures of the Tudor court continued to approach Berthelet for the printing of treatises that endorsed a humanist education of women. Berthelet appears to have thus gained the reputation as the go-to printer for works exploring women’s educative potential. By the time Thomas’s translation was published in 1551, the output of Berthelet’s press had been interrogating “the women’s worlde” for a quarter of a century. The following sections explore the role the Argument was playing in this constellation of female-centric texts.
The Argument and The English Querelle
Thomas devised the Argument as a direct response to misogynistic literature emerging from the other side of the English querelle. Inspired by earlier Italian readings of the Lex Oppia episode, which had been sympathetic to the female cause, Thomas offered not only a rebuttal to antifemale tracts of the period, but also a corrective to what he saw as a fundamental misreading of the Latin original. Common to each of the female-centric works printed by Berthelet is an opposition fostered between us and them: between the enlightened author and his readers who appreciate the benefits of female education, and their opponents, the male chauvinists who take pleasure in railing against womankind. A very similar effect is at work in the material that prefaces the Argument. In the introduction entitled “The printer to the reader,” Berthelet includes an anecdote explaining the origins of the translation, a contextualization reminiscent of the Platonic dialogue. Berthelet was prompted to print the translation following a banquet he had recently attended “a litle before Shroftetide” and “in companie of dyuers gentle men and gentle women.”Footnote 98 There the conversation consisted “first of the baseness of our coyne, and afterwardes of excesse in apparayle (whiche are the common talkes of these daies).”Footnote 99 An unnamed gentleman among the company targets women in particular “for laiying out their heare, for wearying of verdingales, for bonne graces, for silkes, and .xx. other thynges.”Footnote 100
This scene is remarkably similar to that described in the preface of Elyot’s Defence of good women, also printed by Berthelet. There Elyot had spoken of “the vngentyll custome of many men, whiche do set theyr delyte in rebukynge of women.”Footnote 101 Elyot had apparently devised the Defence with the intention of arming his female readership for the very situation described by Thomas above: “Which thyng I of my nature abhorrynge, determyned . . . to prepare for th[em] a sufficient defence agaynst yl mouthed reporters.”Footnote 102 Berthelet similarly explains that he has printed the Argument “to stoppe their mouthes, that with raylyng on womens maners, seeme to procure theim selues a credite.”Footnote 103 Though Elyot offers the closest parallel chronologically, Guarino Veronese had described himself almost a century earlier as being prompted to women’s defense following an attack on female apparel, “the which to refute an eloquent battle-line must be drawn up.”Footnote 104 The misogynistic attacks referred to by Veronese, Berthelet, and Elyot would apparently remain a staple of dinnertime conversation in the seventeenth century.Footnote 105
The preface provides another clue that the Argument is to be read as a complement to Elyot’s Defence. The anonymous gentlewoman was apparently so impressed by Thomas’s account of the original speeches that she “desired maister Thomas of frendship, to sende theim translated vnto hir.”Footnote 106 The work becomes in this light an emancipation of humanist learning to a specifically female audience, a concept that again has an Italian precedent.Footnote 107 This translation, Berthelet insists, was never intended to reach the printing press: “And all be it, that he willed hir, to kepe it to hir selfe: yet she thinkyng it suche a matter for the honest defence of wom[e]n, as ought not to be hidden, hath intreated me, thus to sette it foorth, trustyng to pacify him wel enough, though he wold take it vnkindly.”Footnote 108 Beyond the platitudes of the modesty topos, there is a subtle nod to Elyot’s dialogue in the phrase “the honest defence of wom[e]n.”Footnote 109 It seems likely then that Berthelet saw the Argument as complementing the Defence of good women, which he himself had printed just over ten years before.
So too had the “excesse in apparayle,” which the gentleman of Berthelet’s preface attributes especially to women, become a staple target among the misogynistic ranks of the English querelle. Around a year before the Argument was published, Thomas Raynalde (fl. 1539–52) printed Charles Bansley’s A treatyse, shewing and declaring the pryde and abuse of women now a dayes. Here, amid other complaints, Bansley rails against sumptuous apparel in particular. The “Cytie of London” flaunts its “wycked fashyon,” “proude raymente,” and “garmentes gaye.”Footnote 110 With bawdy humour, he targets the most recent trends in female dress:
Downe for shame wyth these bot[t]el arste bummes,
and theyr trappynge [t]rinkets so uayne
A bounsinge packsadel for the deuyll to ride on,
to s[p]urre theym to sorowe and to payne.Footnote 111
Almost a decade earlier in 1541, The Schole House of Women had quipped that “The Pecocke is proudest, of his fayre tayle / And so be all women of theyr apparayle.”Footnote 112
But it was not only vernacular pamphlets that took an interest in berating female apparel. In 1547, William Parfey gathered a collection of passages in Latin, both ancient and ecclesiastical, that shared as their common theme an intense critique of the female sex.Footnote 113 The compendium, printed by John Herford, was tellingly entitled Speculum Iuuenum Uxores Impetuose Affectantiu[m] in quo Plurimos Feminarum Uiperinos Mores (quibus Extremam Trahuntur in Pernitiem) ex Omni Penè Genere Eruditorum Selectos (A mirror for young men who impulsively desire women in which a great many snakelike habits [by which they are dragged into utmost ruin] have been gathered from every type of learned man, 1547). The Speculum, written entirely in Latin, was evidently aimed at an educated and perhaps courtly readership.Footnote 114 The material on offer ranges from women’s supposed sexual incontinence to their loquacity. In one specific instance, however, Parfey targets female dress, quoting Saint Jerome’s complaint that “women’s most imperfect desire is always for clothes, always for gold. They display their pride on the outside with precious stones and trinkets.”Footnote 115 The association of women with extravagant clothing was then a recurring theme in works produced on the other side of the English querelle.
Thomas’s Tudor readers were also familiar with debates over apparel on a legislative level. Henry’s reign had seen the introduction of four sumptuary laws.Footnote 116 These acts of apparel, passed in 1510, 1514, 1515, and 1533, were ostensibly concerned with preventing debts incurred by excessive spending. They also functioned as a means of regulating outward displays of rank and privilege. Berthelet, in his capacity as the king’s printer, was responsible for committing such legislation to print. Toward the end of Henry’s reign, Berthelet began printing collections of the acts and statutes implemented under the monarch, including sumptuary measures. In one such instance, “An Acte Concernyng Reformation of Apparell Used Within This Realme” complained that “the great and costly array and apparell used within this realme, co[n]trary to good statutes thereof made, hath be the occasion of greate impouerysshyng of dyuers of the kynges subiectes, and prouoked many of them to robbe & to do extortion, & other vnlaufull dedes to mayntayne therby their costly arraye.”Footnote 117 The act then outlined what an individual could wear according to his rank. Unlike the Lex Oppia and its Italian analogs, however, the Henrician sumptuary laws did not target women in particular. In 1551, the same year in which the Argument appeared in print, Edward drew up an act of apparel based closely on his father’s precedents. Written in his own hand, the bill once again stated exactly what was to be worn and by whom in accordance to their rank and means.Footnote 118 Though the draft never made it to Parliament, it is not unreasonable to assume that Thomas (given his close links to the council and to the king himself) was aware of Edward’s plans to repeat his father’s legislation.
These questions of apparel aside, the Argument’s preface also presents itself as correcting a popular misreading of Livy. The unnamed gentleman, continuing his attack on female mores, appeals to the speech delivered by Cato against the repeal of the Lex Oppia: “after many sentence of scripture alleged, he fell into an oracion that Cato made against the insolence of women, and so handled the matter, that it seemed he had put all men to silence: in suche wise as for a good space, no man spake a woorde.”Footnote 119 The gentleman’s appeal to the classics seems to have convinced his audience. Fortunately, as Berthelet tells it, William Thomas is at hand to check the gentleman’s misappropriation of Livy. Anticipating the action of the speeches that follow, where two male citizens debate legislation exclusively affecting women, here a male speaker steps in to defend his female acquaintance: “This is much like the nonnes lesson, that whan she had found Omnia probate, tille she was great with child, could not finde, Quod bonum est tenete. For (under correction, quoth he) though ye have eloquently rehearsed Catos tale, yet haue you not tolde the occasion of the mattier, nor the ende that it come to.”Footnote 120 Just as scripture can be misinterpreted to ill ends (in this case, Saint Paul’s dictum regarding prophecies: “try them all, keep a hold of what is good”), so too can the classical text.Footnote 121 Intriguingly, the gentleman’s reading of Livy, with its focus on Cato’s speech at the expense of Valerius’s, is very much typical of the period.
Some twenty-seven years earlier, Vives had exploited the episode in much the same way in his De Institutione.Footnote 122 As seen above, Berthelet was responsible for printing its English translation by Richard Hyrde in 1529. Though Vives therein endorses the humanist education of young women, in terms of their moral and social qualities “he remains,” as Charles Fantazzi notes, “staunchly traditional, even fanatically so.”Footnote 123 In this light it is not surprising that he turns to Cato’s diatribe against female luxury. In the first book of the De Institutione, though Vives gives a curt nod to Valerius’s speech, his focus and sympathy are very much with Cato. As Richard Hyrde translates it, “But Marcus Cato / y[e] great wyse man / gaue cou[n]sayle contrary / with an oration full of wysdome: and .ii. Tribunes spake for them: whose folisshe and feble orations be rehersed in Liuie y[e] historiographer.”Footnote 124 Hyrde has omitted the assertion, which Vives makes in the Latin original, that Valerius’s speech was watered down to more readily capture popular interest: “the speech . . . was clearly toned down to better suit the ears of the foolish rabble than those of wise men.”Footnote 125 Vives thus implies, however disparagingly, that a woman’s right to wear what she desires is a populist issue.
As with Matteo Bosso, one of the most alarming aspects of the law’s repeal for Vives is its potential to encourage women to appear in public: “And whan they be trymmed and dekked / than desyre they to go forth a monge men / to shewe them selfe. And therin is the shippe wracke of chastite.”Footnote 126 The importance of the Lex Oppia for Vives rests therefore both in the control it might impose on a woman’s dress and on her personal conduct more generally. Citing an example from Plutarch’s Moralia, he notes that: “hit is a custome in Egypte / that women shulde wear no showes / bicause they shulde abide at home. Lykewise if thou take from women sylke / and cloth of gold / & syluer / precious stones / and gemmes / thou shalte the more easily kepe them at home.”Footnote 127 Vives’s interpretation of the law is grounded entirely in Cato’s assertion that the Lex Oppia was originally passed as a state-endorsed means of regulating female conduct. The logical conclusion of this view is to understand the women’s protests as a call for greater social freedoms. But Vives says nothing of these demonstrations, nor indeed of their success.
The idea of clothes as a visual expression of male authority and female subjugation prefaces the Instructio[n]’s second reference to the Lex Oppia. In the second book, again in a section entitled “Of Raymentes,” Vives states that “arayment in lyke wyse all other thynges ought to be referred unto the husbandes wyll.”Footnote 128 Vives channels specific examples from Cato’s speech, using the oration as a springboard into his own attack on female excess. In an apostrophe to womankind — “O proude and folysshe beastis / euen created unto uanite and pompe” — he turns to Cato for support: “as Cato sayth very wysely in the story of Liuius . . . the ryche women wolde haue that which none other shulde be able to come by. And on the other syde / the poure women / lest they shulde be dispised & naught set by / by y[a]t meanes they streyne them selfe aboue theyr power.”Footnote 129 Here Vives follows Cato’s argument closely. In Livy, Cato asks (as Thomas translates it), “will you Romaynes put this stryfe emongest your wiues? that the riche shall haue that, whiche other maie not? And that the poore (because they woulde not therfore be contempned) shall strayne them selfes aboue their powers?”Footnote 130 Following his paraphrase of Livy, Vives expresses his hope that “some lawe wolde be made / suche as y[e] lawe was in Rome called Oppius lawe / to brydle and measure womens costlynes.”Footnote 131 Cato in his speech had also described the law as a means of curbing female luxury: “the law Oppia was made to prohibite their [women’s] excesse.”Footnote 132 But Vives makes no mention of Valerius’s reply, most probably because Valerius’s argument pivots on the contention that the original passing of Lex Oppia had nothing to do with “measur[ing] womens costlynes” but was a response to very specific wartime desiderata.Footnote 133
This way of reading the episode, with a heavy emphasis on Cato’s speech at the expense of Valerius’s, became the norm in the first half of the sixteenth century. In 1532, the schoolmaster Leonard Cox (ca. 1495–1549) translated the opening of Cato’s speech for The art or crafte of rhetoryke, “the first rhetorical treatise to be published in the English language.”Footnote 134 In the section “Of the preamble,” Cox refers to “the oracioun that Porci[us] Chato made agaynst the sumptuousnes of the women of Rome.”Footnote 135 Cox then produces a vernacular translation of Cato’s own “preamble.” His allusion to the episode is brief, but it at least offers a clue as to how it was being read, namely as a harangue “agaynst the sumptuousnes of the women of Rome.”Footnote 136 Cox makes no mention, however, of Valerius’s retort. In the same year, Joachim Périon included both speeches in his collection of Livy’s orations, the T. Liuii Patauni Conciones (The speeches of Titus Livius of Padua, 1532). In his introduction, he identifies the main thrust of the episode as “against women’s excess.”Footnote 137
Then in 1547, only four years before the Argument was printed, William Parfey included extracts from Cato’s speech in the Speculum Iuuenum, the collection of intensely misogynist writings cited above. In a prefatory letter addressed to Parfey, Symon Thelvvalus advises his friend as to which works he might include. Having first suggested the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus (1448–1516), he immediately turns to Livy: “Nor indeed would it irk you to survey the speech made by M. Porcius Cato against the repeal of the Lex Oppia.”Footnote 138 Sure enough, in the main body of the text, sandwiched between passages cropped from Aristotle’s Politics and Euripides’s Medea, Parfey includes Cato’s speech against the repeal of the Oppian Law. Unsurprisingly, no mention is made of Valerius’s reply. In this light, then, Thomas’s Argument can be seen as functioning as a corrective to a continual misappropriation of Livy.
The material that prefaces the Argument asks the reader to think of Thomas’s translation both as a response to contemporary attacks on women and as a means of amending a popular misrepresentation of Livy. The following section takes a closer look at the speeches themselves and considers exactly how these, in English translation, managed to foster a self-conscious dialogue with comparable tracts emerging from either side of the English querelle.
The Speeches
Functioning as the climax to a series of female-centric works, Thomas’s translation includes one of the most extraordinary examples of women’s political influence to have been recorded in ancient history. The Lex Oppia episode shows the capacity for women to enter and exert influence in a political and, for the most part, exclusively male space. Historically, this makes it almost unique. As Bauman notes, the opportunities for the Roman matrona to participate on a political level in Rome were severely limited: “They were rigorously excluded from all official participation in public affairs, whether as voters, senators or magistrates; the only exception was priesthoods, to which they were admitted as Vestal Virgins and in a few other cases.”Footnote 139 As the legislative theorist Ulpian observes, writing in the early third century, “women are debarred from all public and civil offices.”Footnote 140 This chimes with the observation of Livy’s Valerius that “thei haue no part, neither in magistrates, nor in priesthod, nor in triumphes, nor in armes.”Footnote 141
The situation was much the same in early modern Europe, the legal matrix of which was largely based on the Roman model. Heinrich Agrippa, writing in the early sixteenth century, complained in the De Nobilitate of the legal pitfalls facing women of the present day. As David Clapam translated it, “all offyces belongynge to the common weale, be forbydden theym by the lawes. Nor it is not permitted to a woman, though she be very wise and prudent, to pleade a cause before a Juge. Furthermore, they be repelled in iurisdiction, in arbiterment, in adoption, in intercession, in procuration, or to be gardeyns or tutours, in causes testeme[n]tary and criminall.”Footnote 142
It is all the more remarkable, then, that Livy’s account, and Thomas’s translation thereof, presented women wielding political influence in a space from which they were normally excluded. Livy’s narrative had the matronae surround the Roman Forum itself. “The matrones, neither for feare of authoritee, nor for shame, nor yet for the commandement of theyr housbandes could bee kept in; but filled all the stretes of the citee, and kept the waies enteryng in to the high streete, entreatyng all men as thei passed: that seeyng theyr common wealth florisshed, and euery mans priuate good fortune daiely increased, they wolde be contented, that the matrons might also be restored vnto their auncient ornamentes.”Footnote 143 Here Thomas gives “high streete” for Livy’s “forum,” a translation that he reproduces throughout the Argument.Footnote 144 Though in its primary sense, forum suggests any public square in the center of a town, the forum Romanum functioned as a public meeting place and center of debate for issues affecting the state. Thus the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus spoke of “the forum in which they pass judgment and hold their assemblies and accomplish other political matters.”Footnote 145 It thus appeared in certain set phrases with a political resonance: forum attingere (to take part in public life); in forum deducere (to introduce a young man to public life).Footnote 146 The forum was also, as Mary Boatwright has explored, a space that was almost entirely occupied by male citizens. The very structures that dominated it, from the curia to the Fornix Fabianus, were made by men for men with an eye to the affairs of state.Footnote 147 The forum Romanum was therefore, with a few religious exceptions, a predominantly male space.
Yet in Livy’s version of events it is the presence of women here and on the streets of Rome that precipitate the law’s repeal. As Thomas puts it, “the next daie the nombres of women encreased abrode, and all in a flocke besette the dores of the Brutij, whiche were the Tribunes, that resisted the purpose of their Colleagues: and wolde not depart thense, til these Tribunes relented vnto theim. Whervpon there rested no more doubt, but that all the Tribes wolde abrogate the law. So that . XX . yeres after it was made, it was annulled.”Footnote 148 It is with these lines that the translation concludes. The work as a whole thereby ends with the matronae successfully exerting pressure on Rome’s political elite. But the Argument does not only offer a practical demonstration of women’s involvement in the political sphere. The speeches of Cato and Valerius directly address points being debated on both sides of the English querelle.
“Much adooe against women”: Cato’s Speech
As detailed above, William Parfey gathered together a collection of classical and ecclesiastical writings in his Speculum Iuuenum of 1547, which shared as their common theme the detraction of womankind. Among other sententiae, he quotes extracts from Cato’s speech that express anxieties similar to those surfacing in comparable misogynistic works of the early sixteenth century. Below, Parfey’s selections from Livy are compared with their subsequent translations by Thomas in the Argument.
Parfey has bracketed the Livy with two extracts from Greek authors, both in Latin translation. The first is taken from Aristotle’s Politics: “If a woman is articulate, it must not be attributed to valor but garrulity.”Footnote 149 Parfey implies in his paraphrase of the Greek that, should a woman usurp a male preserve, in this case rhetorical prowess, any achievement therein is to be viewed in a wholly negative light: her skill is to be dismissed as loquaciousness as opposed to virtus. Cato at the beginning of his speech speaks of the Roman matronae in similar terms. They have encroached upon a male privilege (in this instance, men’s “right and authority” as opposed to “eloquence”) and invaded a space typically preserved for the citizen male.Footnote 150 As Thomas puts it in his translation, “If euery one of you, O Romaynes, had determined to haue preserued the ryght and maiestie of a husbande ouer his owne wife, we shoulde now haue had lesse businesse with all these women together. But as our libertee, by our owne weaknesse is ouercome of the women in our owne houses: euen so here in the open stretes it is ouerthrowen and troden vnderfote.”Footnote 151 Livy associates libertas (for which Thomas here gives “libertee”) in the first pentad with the freedom Roman citizens enjoyed following the abolition of the Tarquinian monarchy.Footnote 152 The phrase “uicta libertas” (“conquered freedom”) is juxtaposed in the original with Cato’s description of a potential threat to the forum and thus cannot help but evoke those occupations of the city described in previous books.Footnote 153 In Livy, the opposition of domi (home) and foro (forum) suggests the spread of the protest from the private to political sphere. In Thomas, the phrases “our owne houses” and “the open stretes” still convey a spilling out into a public space, but perhaps lose the full political resonance of the original.Footnote 154
The second quotation with which Parfey has bracketed the extracts from Livy is taken from Euripides’s Medea: “A woman is afraid to look upon battle and the sword, but when the insult harms her marriage bed, there is no other mind more murderous.”Footnote 155 The sexual connotations of “marriage bed” (Parfey’s Latin gives “lectus” for Euripides’s “εὐνή”) need hardly be pressed. Tellingly, the sections from Cato’s speech juxtaposed with the examples above present women as untamable and sexually incontinent: “Give a free rein to their wild nature and to this untamed animal, and hope that they themselves will set a limit to their licence if you do not. This is the least of things imposed on women either by custom or law which they bear with a hostile heart. It is a liberty of all things, or rather a licence, if we want to speak the truth, that they desire.”Footnote 156 Thomas would reproduce this as, “Bridle (I saie) this arrogant sexe, and these vntameable beastes. For if ye doe not bridle theim now, neuer loke to bridle theim. This is the least thyng, that offendeth the women of all thynges, that by the customes or lawes they are burdened, but they desyre a libertee of all thynges, or rather to saie the trouth, a lasciuiousenesse.”Footnote 157 In his translation, Thomas teases out Cato’s implied opposition between male and female behavior with the deictic phrase “this arrogante sexe.” The Latin licentia (licence) carries erotic overtones, with the suggestion of sexual liberty. Thus Cicero uses the word alongside libido (lust) almost in hendiadys.Footnote 158 The English “lasciuiousenesse” was being used in much the same way. A decade after Thomas’s translation, the lawyer and coauthor of Gorboduc (1565), Thomas Norton (ca. 1531–84), equated the word with “wantonnesse” in his translation of Jean Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis (1536).Footnote 159 Though the adjective lascivious is common enough in literature of the period, the abstract noun is rare and Thomas’s “lasciuiousenesse” predates the Oxford English Dictionary’s first entry for the word by almost forty years.Footnote 160 Cato’s suggestion that it is the responsibility of husbands to curb the excessive behavior of their wives may have struck a biblical chord with the sixteenth-century reader, echoing the male authority of Saint Paul’s “the head of a woman is the man.”Footnote 161 So too the comparison of women to “untameable beastes” has parallels in the Judeo-Christian tradition. At another moment Parfey quotes a comparison drawn by Saint John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407) between “the evil woman” and lions and dragons.Footnote 162
The second of the Cato quotations included by Parfey expands on the idea that the matronae are demanding privileges that are the rightful preserve of their husbands: “If you allow them to snatch and wrench away every single law and ultimately to be made equal to their husbands, do you think you will be able to withstand them? As soon as they start to be your equals, they will be your superiors.”Footnote 163 For which Thomas would give, “Wherefore if ye now suffre your wyues to reproue lawes, and thus by one and one to wrest them out of your handes, and at length to make theim selfes equall unto their husbandes: thynke you than, ye shalbe hable to support them? For whan thei are become your felowes: foorthwith thei woll bee your betters.”Footnote 164 The unnerving prospect of a wife who usurps her husband’s role was, by 1551, a theme already familiar to English vernacular literature. Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400), for example, had touched on the anxiety, albeit comically, in the Canterbury Tales. By 1551, the Tales had appeared in three stand-alone editions and had been included in three separate collections of the complete works, one of which was released only a year before Thomas’s Argument. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Chaucer combines the anxieties outlined above alongside women’s alleged sexual insatiability. Tongue set firmly in cheek, Chaucer has the Wife of Bath rework Paul’s assertions of male dominance:
An husbonde wol I haue I wol not let
Which shalbe both my detour & my thral
And haue his tribulacion with all
Upon hys fleshe, while that I am his wyfe
I haue the power duryng al my lyfe
Upon his proper body, and nat he
Right thus the apostle tolde to me.Footnote 165
Though Chaucer employs a comic tone, he was evidently playing on a familiar anxiety, one that apparently spans the chronological divide between republican Rome and early modern England.
The third and final extract from Livy is taken from the end of Cato’s speech. It returns to the idea of women’s perceived “lasciuiousenesse.” Unable to secure funds for their lavish spending, some of the Roman matronae will turn to illicit means: “She who can buy at her own expense will buy; she who cannot will ask her husband. Wretched that husband, both he who has been persuaded and he who has not, when he sees that which he will not give, given by another man.”Footnote 166 Which Thomas would reproduce as, “She that can prouide of hir selfe, maie doe it, but she that can not, must craue of hir housebande. And happie shall that housebande be, that whether he be praied or not praied (if he geue not) shall see that geuen by an other, that he hath not geuen him selfe.”Footnote 167 Here Cato implies that, unable to secure funds from their husbands, the matronae will resort to adultery and prostitution. The idea that a wife might put pressure on her husband for material gain features elsewhere in the Speculum, in an epistle entitled “Hugo to a friend wishing to marry,” to the effect that “a woman shows favor in order to deceive, deceives to receive, loves what you have, but not what you are.”Footnote 168 As with the gentleman of Thomas’s preface, Parfey exploited Livy’s history for Cato’s speech and its condemnation of female excess while ignoring Valerius’s retort. By recovering Valerius’s speech, however, Thomas would offer a radically alternative perspective.
“Your doughters, your wiues, your sisters”: Valerius’s Speech
Though Cato’s oration furnished arguments for unreservedly misogynistic works, Valerius’s speech and Livy’s history provided material for tracts written in defense and praise of womankind. Valerius’s arguments regarding women’s positive contributions to the state, first harnessed by the sumptuary tracts of the Quattrocento, subsequently appeared in the pro-female treatises printed by Berthelet.
In contrast to the martial imagery employed by Cato, which casts the female protesters as an enemy invading the city, Valerius cites uniformly positive examples of women’s engagement in public life. He draws these examples, he explains, from Cato’s own history, the Origines (168–149 BCE). As Thomas translates it, “But for all that, what noueltee haue these wyues attempted in commyng by companies abrode to pursue their own cause? Came they neuer abrode before? I will turne ouer thyne owne bokes of Originalles against the, and see there, how often tymes thei haue done this, and all to the profyte of the common wealth.”Footnote 169 The reference Valerius makes to Cato’s history (now lost) is curtly dismissed by Briscoe as “clear anachronism. . . . The ancient evidence states quite unequivocally that Cato began the Origines in his old age.”Footnote 170 But there is something more subtle at work here. In a highly self-conscious move, Livy makes Valerius cite passages of Roman history that have already appeared in the Ab Urbe Condita. By glancing back to these moments, Livy draws attention to his own role in recording the positive contributions made by women to the Roman state:
And to beginne, first whan Romulus reigned, the Capitoll beyng already taken by the Sabines, and thei feightyng with baners displaied in the middest of the high strete: was not the battaile staied by the womens rennyng betweene both armies? And after the expulsion of kynges, whan the army of the Volsci were incamped within the fiue myles of this towne, under the leadyng of Marcus Coriolanus, did not the women turne backe that army, that els had destroied this citee? And whan this towne was taken by the frenche men, dyd not the matrones of theyr own free will, openly geue the golde, wherwith the citee was redeemed? Yea and (to passe ouer these antiquities) euen the last warres, whan most neede of money was, dyd not the widowes releeue the Treasoury with their owne money? And whan the new goddes were fet home to helpe vs in our great neede, went not the matrones to the sea syde, to receiue the mother of the goddes?Footnote 171
Each of the episodes to which Valerius refers had already featured in Livy’s history. The intercession of the Sabine women, Veturia’s appeal to Coriolanus, and the redemption of the city from the Gauls all appear in the first pentad.Footnote 172 Perhaps more pressing for Livy’s ancient readers were the events of recent history: the financial support administered to the treasury by the Roman widows was an event of the Second Punic War, as described in book 24, while the reception of the Idaean Mother appears in 29.Footnote 173
Intriguingly, each of these examples had been cited in the Quattrocento debate over female apparel.Footnote 174 They surfaced again in the English querelle. Elyot in The defence has Candidus refer to the intervention of the Sabine women and more specifically to “Hercinia the wyfe of Romulus, and more than a thousand of her companions . . . whiche in the rage of batayle ioyned between their husbandes and parentes, so reconciled theym, that with one consent they inhabited one citie, and lyued to gether in perpetuall vnitie.”Footnote 175 The legend of the Sabine women was not exclusive to Livy, and Elyot was probably also aware of Plutarch’s account in his Life of Romulus.Footnote 176 But whether Elyot was familiar with the legend through Livy or Plutarch (more likely he had consulted both), the fact remains that the legend was already being put to use by the pro-female authors of the English querelle.
Agrippa’s De Nobilitate, along with Clapam’s translation thereof, refers both to Veturia’s supplication of her son and to the intervention of the Sabine women. The episodes appear in the wake of Agrippa’s observation that (as Clapam phrases it in his translation) “we rede of many other moste noble women, whyche by theyr wonderfulle power and polycie, in most extremytie, and whan there was no hope of helpe looked for, recouered theyre countrey, and restored it to wealthe ageyne.”Footnote 177 On the next page, there follows a brief account of Veturia and Coriolanus: “Whanne Coriolanus with the Uolscians, had besieged Rome, & soo sharpely assayled it, that the Romaynes were not able to defende them selues agaynste hym: an auncient woman Ueturia his mother, soo handled the mattier, that she ouercame his rage and furye, and reconciled hym ageyn to the Romaynes.”Footnote 178 Though the episode had also been treated by Plutarch in the Life of Coriolanus, the identification of his mother here as “Ueturia” (as found in Livy) as opposed to “Volumnia” (as in Plutarch) suggests that Agrippa had the Livian account in mind. There follows on the next page a summary of the intervention made by the Sabine women: “whan the Capytoll was taken by the Sabynes, and that in the myddes of the market place, they foughte moste cruellye hande to hande, with the sodayne runnynge of the women betwene bothe the hostes, the battayle cessed.”Footnote 179 At least two of the historical exempla cited in Valerius’s speech had already made their way into the English querelle. This serves as another reminder that the Argument was complementing a wider collection of texts that put a firm emphasis on women’s educational development.
In the passage quoted above, Valerius lays out the ways in which the matronae have contributed positively to the public good. In the original, the noun publicum and adjective publicus appear four times in this section of the speech, along with two key symbols of the Roman state, the capitol and treasury. For Livy’s unequivocally positive phrase, “quidem semper bono publico” (“indeed always to the public good”), Thomas gives “all to the profyte of the common wealth.”Footnote 180 Lest the significance of “the Capitoll” is lost on the English reader, the glossary that suffixes the translation provides the following definition: “Capitoll, was the fortresse and chiefe place of Rome, where the Senate assembled in councell.”Footnote 181 Valerius then goes to some lengths to convey exactly how the law has fostered (yet further) inequality between the sexes. Touching on the law’s proscription of purple, he observes that: “All other degrees, and all men doe feele the amendement of our astate: our wyues onely shall not atteygne the fruite of our publike peace and prosperitee? we men weare purple embroidered, beyng magistrates and priestes: and our sonnes like wise weare gownes of purple garded: the like wherof is permitted unto the magistrates of our Colonies, and to our burgeses enfraunchesed: as here in Rome the basest sort of magistrates, euen the strete maisters, haue theyr gownes garded. and not the quycke onely haue this preheminence, but the dead also may be burnt in purple: and shall we keep the use thereof onely from our wiues? And beyng laufull for the that art a man, to haue purple in the couerynge of thy bed: wilt thou not suffre the mother of thy house to weare a garment thereof?”Footnote 182
The Latin original is densely packed with gendered language. Against “homines” (“men”), “uiri” (“husbands”), “liberi” (“children”), and “uiro” (“husband”), Livy sets “coniuges . . . nostras” (“our wives”), “feminis” (“women”), “matrem familiae” (“mistress of the household”), and “uxor” (“wife”). This comes through in Thomas’s translation, which gives “men” (twice), “sonnes,” and “man” weighed against “wyues” (twice) and “the mother of thy house.” Thomas’s English, making no grammatical distinction in terms of gender, loses the effect of Livy’s “uiui” (“living [men]”) and “mortui” (“dead [men]”), but the contrast between the sexes is still very much present. Valerius refers here to the fact that the sons of the Roman nobility were entitled to wear togae praetextae: “our sonnes like wise weare gownes of purple garded.” Thomas’s readers, inured to Henrician sumptuary legislation, would be familiar with purple as the preserve of royalty.Footnote 183 But as Elyot notes in his dictionary of 1538 (also printed by Berthelet), the toga praetexta was the preserve of highborn citizen males: “Praetexta, a longe garment myxte with purple silke, which was the vesture of noble mennes sonnes.”Footnote 184 Along with the bulla (a locket worn by children containing a charm), the praetexta functioned as a visual reminder of the inviolability of the magistrate and the young citizen male. As Florence Dupont remarks of purple as worn on the praetexta, “The important thing about purple was that . . . it marked out whoever wore it. It had no magical effect, yet it announced clearly that any attack on the person wearing it, be he magistrate or free-born child, was strictly forbidden.”Footnote 185 By actively mentioning their exclusion from such clothing, Valerius implies that women too should be able to adorn themselves in similar symbols of protection.
Valerius’s point that Rome’s female population should also enjoy “the fruite of our publike peace and prosperitee” may also have struck a chord with the English reader of 1551. In March 1550, a new peace had been struck with France.Footnote 186 In the following year, that is, in the same year that he set about translating Livy, Thomas was chosen as secretary for the embassy of William Par (Marquis of Northampton), who was sent to France to negotiate a marriage between Edward and Elizabeth, daughter of Henri II. This marriage would, it was hoped, solidify the recently established peace.Footnote 187 There is then for Thomas’s readership the implication that under new peacetime circumstances, both men and women should be able to express their worth on an aesthetic level from an equal footing.
Thomas himself was evidently inspired by Valerius’s demonstration of close historical analysis. In the detailed prefatory material that introduces the speeches, Berthelet includes “the letter sent by mayster Thomas to the gentle woman, with the translaciouns that she desyred.” Here Thomas undertakes a remarkably similar process of historical scrutiny, highlighting key moments in which the Roman people (much like Valerius’s matronae) helped the republic during the Carthaginian war.Footnote 188 He lays an emphasis on their selflessness, praising a period “wan almost euery man had rather perysshe priuately, than through his default the common wealth should susteine any preiudice. O, if we had no more but suche women now, as were than, I woulde thinke our worlde happie.”Footnote 189 At first glance, he seems to be indulging a moralizingly nostalgic view of the past, looking back to a golden age of virtue now lost. But Thomas’s desire — “O, if we had no more but suche women now, as were than” —takes on a very different tone in light of what his translation reveals about the women of Rome. Livy’s matronae can, when they feel that the quality of their lives is threatened, take to the streets to effect legislative change. Thomas’s complaint could thus be read as a call for a more politically engaged woman, one who is not afraid to exert influence in the public sphere.Footnote 190
In the context of the sixteenth-century, the Argument was unusual for its inclusion of Valerius’s speech. Following the pro-female tracts of the Quattrocento, Thomas exploited the oration for its praise of women’s successful interventions in Roman political life. By translating both speeches, Thomas redeemed the episode from a misogynistic reading popularized by Vives, showcasing the positive contributions women had made to the republic.
“I Haue Perfourmed My Promise” — Thomas’s Argument: Purpose and Result
The Argument merged the learning of a strikingly innovative humanist who throughout his lifetime had an eye to Continental literature and history, with the practical experience of one of the sixteenth century’s most prolific printers, Thomas Berthelet. As shown by a survey of his prints, Berthelet identified a market demand for material that examined exactly what constitutes “the women’s worlde.” These works, along with Thomas’s Argument, which appealed to a way of reading Livy established during the Quattrocento, effectively laid the foundations for the English reception of the Continental querelle des femmes.
It is commonly observed in feminist criticism of the twentieth century that the Western literary and legal traditions have been dominated by male voices.Footnote 191 Agrippa, in his treatise on female preeminence cited above, not only highlighted this fact, but imagined an alternative history written from a female perspective. As Clapam translates it, “If it had bene laufull for women to make lawes, too wryte histories, how gret tragedies (trow ye) wolde they haue writen of the inestimable malice of men, amo[n]g whom many ben murtherers, theues, rauishers of uyrgins, periurers, robbers, burners of houses, traytours.”Footnote 192 By translating the Lex Oppia episode in its entirety, however, Thomas took significant steps toward recovering the lost female perspective to which Agrippa refers.
Only one copy of the Argument remains extant. This might imply that the small duodecimo volume proved so popular that it was literally read to pieces. Equally, this might also suggest that the translation was not considered worth preserving, that the intellectual milieu into which it was received was less than enthusiastic toward its presentation of women and the potential political influence they might wield within the state. What is clear, however, is that Livy’s account of the Lex Oppia episode continued to be read as a harangue against female excess. In the year following the publication of Thomas’s Argument, the Tabula Concionum (Table of speeches), which prefaced Michael de Vascosan’s (d. 1576) enormous Paris edition of the Ab Urbe Condita, described the law as being “passed . . . against women’s extravagance.”Footnote 193 In 1555, the narrative made an appearance in another English translation of a work by Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, again to support the idea of men’s natural authority over women.Footnote 194 Jean de Marconville rehearsed Vives’s misogynistic reading of Livy in De la Bonte et Mauvaistie des Femmes (On the goodness and badness of women, 1562), which refers to “the Oppian Law against the affectation and excess of women’s clothing.”Footnote 195 In 1579, Marconville’s treatise was translated into English by John Alday as The praise and dispraise of women, thereby solidifying the Vives reading of Livy in England. But whatever the truth of the Argument’s initial reception, it was a clear intervention in the Renaissance debate over women.
