On Famous Women and the Androgyne

Abstract

The literary works considered in the previous chapter made explicit use of the androgyne for a variety of ends, charting the course of its reception and demonstrating its breadth and power. Implicit expressions of the plenitude of the androgyne are also a means of justifying a woman’s choice to act in ways that might otherwise be transgressive. These can be found at work in the many compendia of brief biographies of famous women, which, following in the wake of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, became a popular genre in the first few decades of the sixteenth century. Starting with Boccaccio, the genre makes claims to provide historical portraits of real women as well as providing moral lessons. Once again, the hierarchal implications of gender color the effects of this. While the ideal male prince was expected to perform functions gendered female, that is to protect and nurture his subjects, biological females, even sovereign queens, might require justification when they ventured beyond the borders of chastity, silence, and obedience that denote a virtuous woman’s behavior; functional gender and androgyne descriptions provide such justifications. As we will see, these biographies regularly show women displaying virtuous behaviors gendered male, described in language largely reserved for men, unwittingly continuing the tradition of Greek tragedy noted in chapter 2. This allows a substantive change in horizon of possibilities, all the more interesting to observe in the context of the exemplarity inherent in collections of brief lives of exceptional people, a genre, moreover, paradoxically marked by a distrust of women that on occasion rose to outright misogyny.