Her Ideas & Arguments

Arcangela Tarabotti's central argument was that forcing women into convents against their will was a crime against both nature and God — one driven by men's greed and the Republic's reasons of state. Around this core she built a wide-ranging defense of women: their free will, their right to education, and their fundamental equality. She turned personal suffering into political analysis.

Against forced monachization

Tarabotti's great theme was monacazione forzata. To destine one daughter for the cloister while another is raised to marry — regardless of temperament or calling — she called an act of impossible paternal cruelty and a violation of God's will. Forced enclosure, she argued, produced not enclaves of spiritual paradise but communities of desperate women whose natural goodness slowly degraded into sin. Worst of all, unwilling nuns risked their immortal souls by professing vows they could not keep in their hearts. The Inferno of her title had a double meaning: the hell on earth of forced enclosure, and the everlasting hell it could lead to.

The defense of women

Tarabotti waded directly into the querelle des femmes — the running early modern debate over women's nature, capacities, and roles. Her Antisatira answered a male satire of female vanity; her Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini ("Women Are of the Human Species") rebutted a treatise claiming women were not human and had no souls, moving into theological argument to defend women's equal humanity. She held that women were not inferior but, if anything, superior — and that men's attacks on them only revealed men's own faults.

Free will

Running through all her work is an insistence on libero arbitrio — free will — as the most intrinsic of human attributes and a divine gift. Forced monachization was so grave a wrong precisely because it stripped women of the power to choose their own lives. Even willing nuns, she argued, struggled to renounce the human need for freedom; for the unwilling, it was impossible. Her devotional Convent Paradise and her polemics agree on this point: the convent is a paradise for those who choose it freely and a prison for those who do not.

Women and education

Tarabotti felt keenly the injustice of women's exclusion from learning. She lamented that she lacked "the light of letters," describing herself as a woman without formal grammar or schooling, who in spelling used "no rule other than the dictionary." Yet she read voraciously — Seneca, Ovid, Petrarch, Ariosto, Marino, and, though banned, Machiavelli — much of it smuggled into the convent or lent by her literary associates. She exposed the paradox by which men deprived women of an education and then judged them ignorant.

Dante as model

Dante was her "personal philosopher and theologian of liberty." She modeled her convent trilogy on the Divine Comedy, casting herself as the pilgrim-narrator journeying from desolation toward salvation, and studded her works with allusions to and citations of Dante — nowhere more than in Inferno monacale, where the convent becomes a living hell outfitted for women alone.

"It takes great stubbornness to publish, being that everyone wants to say his part, especially against us women, because men obstinately do not want to admit that women know how to write without their help." — Letter to the nun Guid'Ascania Orsi