Abstract
This is a response to the paper “The fruit of knowledge: To bite or not to bite? Isotta Nogarola on Eve’s sin and its scholastic sources,” by Marcela Borelli, Valeria A. Buffon, and Natalia G. Jakubecki. It has two aims. The first is to show the importance of discussions of Eve in the querelle des femmes, and so to emphasize the importance of Borelli, Buffon and Jakubecki’s analysis of Nogarola’s account of Eve. A second aim is to highlight the philosophical rigour of Nogarola’s discussion of the culpability of Eve as demonstrated by Borelli, Buffon and Jakubecki, by contrasting it with attempts to exculpate Eve from responsibility that were made in pro-woman works written between the composition of Nogarola’s work (1451) and its publication (1563).
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Notes
- 1.
This and other translations from Hesiod are from Glenn W. Most’s edition and translation (2018).
- 2.
Sedley (2009, p. 256) points out that one significant difference between the story of Pandora in the Theogony and in Works and Days is that in the latter women are merely the conduit of evil into the world, whereas in the former women are themselves the embodiment of evil.
- 3.
Translations of the scriptures are taken from The New English Bible (1971).
- 4.
Goggio’s De laudibus mulierum exists only in one manuscript (British Library, MS ADD 17.415); although the title is in Latin, the text itself is in the vernacular. Lara Harwood-Ventura (2021) has transcribed, edited and translated the manuscript, and added an introduction and notes. Translations from Goggio’s text are by Harwood-Ventura. There is no modern edition of Domenichi’s La nobiltà delle donne; a searchable transcript of the Domenichi (1552) edition can be found on the website Querelle, at http://querelle.ca/presentation-la-nobilta-delle-donne/. Translations from Domenichi are my own.
- 5.
The source of this phrasing is likely to have been Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s extremely influential treatise, De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Foeminei Sexus (Antwerp, 1529). He wrote: “So then the blessing has been given because of woman, but the law because of man, and this was a law of wrath and curse; for it was to the man that the fruit of the tree had been prohibited, and not to the woman who had not yet been created. God wished her to be free from the beginning; it was therefore the man who committed the sin in eating, not the woman, the man who brought death, not the woman. And all of us have sinned in Adam, not in Eve, and we are infected with original sin not from our mother, who is a woman, but from our father, a man.” However, although Agrippa’s formulation was very influential, the argument did not originate with him but rather with Rodríguez del Padron’s Triunfo de las Donas (Triumph of Women) (1438–1441), and perhaps even earlier. Rodríguez may have been the source of this argument for Goggio as well. Agrippa’s De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Foeminei Sexus was first printed (no publisher cited) in Antwerp, 1529; there is a modern critical edition edited by Roland Antonioli and Charles Béné, with a French translation by Odette Sauvage (Agrippa, ed. & trans. 1990); and there is an English translation, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, edited and translated by A. Rabil Jr. (Agrippa, ed. & trans. 1996).
References
Primary Sources
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Goggio, B. (1487). De laudibus mulierum. Manuscript, British Library, MS ADD 17.415.
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Borelli, M., Buffon, V. A., & Jakubecki, N. G. (2021). The fruit of knowledge: To bite or not to bite? Isotta Nogarola on Eve’s sin and its scholastic sources. In I. Chouinard, Z. McConaughey, A. Medeiros Ramos, & R. Noël (Eds.), Women’s perspectives on ancient and medieval philosophy. Springer.
Sedley, D. (2009). Hesiod’s Theogony and Plato’s Timaeus. In G. R. Boys-Stones & J. H. Haubold (Eds.), Plato and Hesiod. Oxford University Press.
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Deslauriers, M. (2021). Why Eve Matters in the History of Feminist Arguments. In: Chouinard, I., McConaughey, Z., Medeiros Ramos, A., Noël, R. (eds) Women's Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73190-8_22
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