Women in Croatian Literary Culture, 16th to 18th Centuries

Abstract

As elsewhere, female figures appear in Croatian medieval culture simply as objects, passive beings, secondary characters in a literary text, depicted far more often negatively than positively. When the spirit of the Renaissance, with its Neo-Platonic ideas, reached the Adriatic shore of the Croatian lands, women began to be looked on in a new light and the voices of the first women in Croatian culture and literature began to be heard. So, for example, Nikola GučetiŽ (1549–1610), philosopher, statesman, politician and teacher, a Neo-Platonist in his philosophical convictions, wrote in praise of the women of Dubrovnik and woman altogether. GučetiŽ’s wife, Mara (née Gundulić), an educated and learned woman, also wrote about her conception of women. Her defence of the female sex, women’s intellect and sensitivity, is the first record of a woman’s voice in Croatian culture. In the introduction to her husband Nikola GučetiŽ’s philosophical work, Discorsi sopra la Metheora d’Aristotele (1584), she contrasts her own views to male remarks about the female sex:

However, if they were to be less personal and to judge reasonably, they would see that our sex is just as perfect as the male sex in its kind, so that it is absolutely impossible to say that one is more worthy than the other. And if it were possible to say such a thing, I hold that the greater praise would have to fall to women in order to stop the mouths of their attackers and open the eyes of their reason, for physical beauty is clear proof of the beauty of the soul.