The Life of Arcangela Tarabotti

Arcangela Tarabotti was born Elena Cassandra Tarabotti in Venice in February 1604 and died in 1652. As the eldest of many daughters in a well-to-do citizen family, she was placed as a girl in the Benedictine convent of Sant'Anna in Castello, took the habit in 1620, professed her vows in 1623, and was consecrated in 1629 — never by her own true will. She spent the rest of her life there, becoming the most outspoken feminist writer of her age.

A daughter among daughters

Elena Cassandra was born in the San Giuseppe parish, in the eastern reaches of the Castello district, to Stefano Tarabotti, a chemist, and Maria Cadena dei Tolentini. She was the family's first daughter, born after three sons. But daughter after daughter followed: in all, seven Tarabotti girls survived to adulthood alongside their brothers, and two-thirds of the surviving children were girls. Each new birth deepened her parents' worry: how could they situate so many daughters "decorously" without draining the family's wealth on marriage dowries?

The solution their society offered was the convent. Placing the eldest daughter behind convent walls was a typical choice among elite Venetian families — it bought time to save the enormous sums a respectable marriage required. In Arcangela's case the decision seemed, to her parents, all the more obvious: she had a congenital limp (which she said she inherited from her father) that they judged to dim her prospects on the marriage market. Her evident inclination to learning may also have pointed them toward the cloister. She never forgave them — especially her father — for the choice.

Into Sant'Anna

Tarabotti herself said she was eleven when she entered Sant'Anna; convent documents suggest she was about thirteen, around 1617. Girls often lived in the convent for years before taking the veil, as boarders known as educande or putte a spese. She was clothed — taking the religious name Arcangela — in 1620, at about sixteen. She professed her solemn vows in 1623, and underwent the final rite of consecration in 1629, at twenty-five.

Her father paid a "spiritual dowry" of 1,200 ducats for her — far less than the tens of thousands a marriage could cost — plus a supplementary fee to exempt his daughter, because of her physical condition, from certain convent duties. That exemption, ironically, would later free her time for the writing that made her famous.

"Even if I spoke and acted in one way, my mind's intentions were quite different. I lived in this manner up until my consecration, a nun in name, but not in dress or behavior." — Convent Paradise, on her false profession

The unequal fate of sisters

What stung most, in Tarabotti's account, was the contrast with her sisters. The youngest two, Lorenzina and Innocenza, were married: Lorenzina in 1640 to the lawyer Giacomo Pighetti (later Tarabotti's own correspondent and a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti), and Innocenza in 1642 to the doctor Francesco Dario — whose marital dowry was three times Arcangela's spiritual one. Other sisters had unsettled destinies: Camilla, closest to her in age, died in 1644; Angela and Caterina lived at home until their mother's death in 1649, then as paid tenants with relatives, and finally entered convents themselves — Caterina at Sant'Anna, but only after Arcangela had died.

One sister's freedom clearly moved her: Caterina became a painter of note in the circle of Alessandro Varotari (il Padovanino). In her Semplicità ingannata, Tarabotti proudly held up this "young woman joined to me by the closest bond of blood" as living proof of women's creative genius — able to rival Apollo in music, Apelle in painting, and Minerva in the sciences.

A literary career from behind the grille

Tarabotti's true vocation was literary, not religious. Her brother-in-law Giacomo Pighetti recognized her talent and brought her to the attention of Giovan Francesco Loredano (1607–1661), the powerful animator of the Accademia degli Incogniti and a dominant figure in Venetian publishing. Loredano became her principal champion — a long, sometimes uneasy relationship. Though she could never leave the convent, she built an extraordinary network: diplomats, political figures, printers, and writers, some met at the convent parlor across its iron grille, others cultivated by letter. Her correspondents reached as far as Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere of Florence, and the northern humanist Ismaël Boulliau. French diplomats in Venice even sent their daughters to her for education.

In the 1630s she composed two fiery manuscripts against forced monachization — Inferno monacale and the work that became Tirannia paterna. But she made her public debut in 1643 with the more muted, devotional Paradiso monacale, which won her admirers. Her 1644 Antisatira then turned former supporters into enemies. She answered the fallout with her published Lettere (1650) and a theological defense of women (1651). She had learned to navigate three worlds — spoken academy culture, private manuscript circulation, and the dangerous power of print.

Death and afterlife

Tarabotti died in 1652 at the age of forty-eight. Two years later her masterpiece — the fierce Tirannia paterna — was finally printed abroad, in Leiden, under the milder title La semplicità ingannata and a pseudonym. In 1661 it was condemned and placed on the Index of Forbidden Books; her death had blunted the harm such a condemnation might have done her in life. A portrait of Tarabotti with a book in her hand hung in Loredano's study, among those of six other Italian women writers — a fitting image of how she wished to be remembered: not as a nun, but as an author.