Books

The Works of Arcangela Tarabotti

Arcangela Tarabotti wrote seven known texts and possibly several more now lost. Four were published in her lifetime — Paradiso monacale (1643), Antisatira (1644), Lettere familiari (1650, with the Lagrime), and Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini (1651). Her boldest works, Inferno monacale and Tirannia paterna, were too dangerous to print; the latter appeared abroad only after her death.

Note on availability: Tarabotti's books are seventeenth-century works, long out of their original print runs. They survive today through modern scholarly editions and translations. The list below describes each work and, where relevant, how it has come down to us.

1643Published

Paradiso monacale · Convent Paradise

Tarabotti's first published work and the centerpiece of her devotional writing — a treatise presenting the convent as a paradise on earth for women with a true religious calling. Lavishly printed in quarto with an elaborate engraved frontispiece and extensive encomiastic poems, it was dedicated to the powerful Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Federico Corner, her confessor. Beneath its pious surface it advances the argument running through all her work: the convent is a paradise for those who choose it freely, and a prison for those who do not. It opened with a letter of praise from her champion Loredano and earned her wide admiration.

DevotionalPrint debutDedicated to Federico Corner

1644Published

Antisatira · Antisatire

A witty, mordant reply to Contro 'l lusso donnesco, a satire on women's luxury and vanity by the Sienese academician Francesco Buoninsegni. Signed "D.A.T." (Donna Arcangela Tarabotti) and dedicated to Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere of Florence, it turned the tables on the male writer and raised the question of women's education. Though light in tone, it targeted male vanity in general — and alienated many of her former supporters, one of whom (Angelico Aprosio) accused her of plagiarism, insisting one pen could not have produced two such different books.

Satire / polemicQuerelle des femmes

1650Published

Lettere familiari e di complimento · Letters Familiar and Formal

A carefully crafted collection of letters, published to display the full range of her network and to let her control the narrative of her own life and writing. A remarkably bold assertion of agency from a cloistered nun, it also served as a blanket defense against her literary enemies. To offset its public nature she appended a short devotional work in praise of a departed convent sister — the Lagrime.

LettersSelf-portrait

1650Published

Le lagrime … per la morte di Regina Donati · Tears for Regina Donati

An elegy for a beloved convent sister, published and bound together with the Lettere by the Guerigli press. Unlike her polemics, the Tears steer clear of controversy: they paint Regina Donati as the archetype of the voluntary nun who freely embraced a religious calling. Framed by encomiastic poems from figures such as the librettist Giovan Francesco Busenello and Nicolò Crasso, the work offers an intimate portrait of both Regina and Arcangela herself. Its printer's device — ten roses in three rows — nods to the Donà dalle Rose family crest.

Devotional / elegyPublished with the Lettere

1651Published

Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini · Women Are of the Human Species

The last work published in her lifetime, under the pseudonym Galerana Barcitotti. A point-by-point rebuttal to an anonymous treatise (translated into Italian and printed in Venice) that argued, facetiously, that women were not human and had no souls. Here Tarabotti moved into theological argument to defend women — and Loredano himself may have been behind both the provocation and her reply.

Polemic / theologyAs "Galerana Barcitotti"

1654Posthumous

La semplicità ingannata · Paternal Tyranny (Tirannia paterna)

Her life's work and masterpiece: a systematic indictment of the biological, religious, and political "fathers" who conspired to cloister girls without consent, depriving them of God-given free will. Publishing it became the great crusade of her life, but it was rejected in Venice, Florence, Rome, and Paris as too anti-Catholic. It appeared only posthumously, printed in Leiden by the Elsevier press (under the false name "Gio. Sambix") in 1654, with the milder title and the pseudonym Galerana Baratotti. In 1661 it was condemned and placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.

PolemicPrinted in LeidenIndex of Forbidden Books, 1661

MSManuscript

Inferno monacale · Convent Hell

One of her earliest works and, in her editors' judgment, a fundamental text of the literature of protest. A semi-autobiographical exposé of how young girls were tricked into accepting the cloister — represented to them as an earthly paradise — only to discover a hell on earth from which there was no escape. She modeled it on Dante's Inferno and envisioned it as the first part of a Dantean trilogy for women (to be followed by a lost Purgatorio delle malmaritate and by Paradiso monacale). So dangerous she never tried to publish it, she called it a "son" she had to keep "hidden even from the eyes of Heaven." It survives in a single manuscript copy, first published in full in 1990.

Polemic (manuscript)Modeled on Dante"Hidden from Heaven"

A planned trilogy

Tarabotti conceived her works on the convent as a Dantean trilogy: Hell (Inferno monacale), Purgatory (Purgatorio delle malmaritate, on ill-married women — lost, if ever finished), and Paradise (Paradiso monacale). She also mentions other devotional works — The Paved Road to Heaven, Contemplations of the Loving Soul, and Convent Light — none of which survive.