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Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652) was a Venetian Benedictine nun and writer, widely regarded as the most radical feminist voice of early modern Italy. Forced into the convent of Sant'Anna in Castello as a young woman, she wrote a series of works protesting forced monachization and defending women.

She was born Elena Cassandra Tarabotti in Venice in 1604 and took the religious name Arcangela when she was clothed as a nun in 1620. She also published under the pseudonyms Galerana Baratotti and Galerana Barcitotti, and signed her Antisatira "D.A.T." (Donna Arcangela Tarabotti).

She was born in Venice in February 1604 and died there in 1652, aged forty-eight. She spent almost her entire life in the Benedictine convent of Sant'Anna in Castello, at the eastern edge of the city.

She wrote seven known works. Four were published in her lifetime: Paradiso monacale (Convent Paradise, 1643), Antisatira (1644), Lettere familiari e di complimento (1650, published with her elegy Le lagrime), and Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini (1651). Her manuscript Inferno monacale (Convent Hell) and her masterpiece Tirannia paterna — printed posthumously in 1654 as La semplicità ingannata — were too controversial to publish in her lifetime.

Her family placed her in a convent for economic and social reasons, not religious ones. As the eldest of many daughters, she was cloistered so the family could save on the enormous marriage dowries of the time. A congenital limp, which her family judged to lessen her marriage prospects, made the decision seem more obvious to them. Her father paid a spiritual dowry of 1,200 ducats.

It was the widespread practice in seventeenth-century Venice of placing women in convents against their will for economic and political reasons — chiefly to avoid costly marriage dowries and to limit the growth of the patriciate. After the Council of Trent imposed strict enclosure, an unwilling nun could never leave the convent, making it, in Tarabotti's words, a prison and a "hell of the living."

Tarabotti attacked the men, institutions, and economics that subjugated women. She defended women's free will, their right to education, and their fundamental equality, engaging directly in the querelle des femmes. Her work Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini even rebutted a treatise claiming women were not human and had no souls.

Her masterpiece La semplicità ingannata (Paternal Tyranny), printed abroad in Leiden in 1654 after her death, condemned the Church and the Venetian state for perpetuating forced monachization. In 1661 it was condemned and placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, its author castigated for circulating "Lutheran" ideas.

Sant'Anna in Castello was a Benedictine convent at the eastern edge of Venice, founded in the early thirteenth century and home to Benedictine nuns from 1305. Tarabotti lived there for almost her whole life. In her time it housed around thirty-six choir nuns, and a new church was under construction there from 1634 to 1659.