I ragionamenti di Lodovico Dolce sulla Institution della vergine

Abstract

Lodovico Dolce (1508/1510-1568), a great humanist and scholar of the sixteenth century, was a multifaceted and multidimensional figure, a prolific writer with a restless and curious spirit, among the intellectuals who participated in the Querelle des Femmes during the Renaissance period. It is in this context that his treatise Dialogo di M. Lodovico Dolce della institution delle donne secondo li tre stati, che cadono nella vita humana is placed. The Dialogo is made up of three books, each of which presents his reasoning and rules of behaviour he proposes for the three phases of women’s life, namely virgins, married women and widows. The aim of our intervention is to examine and highlight Dolce’s arguments on the institution della vergine set out in the first book of the dialogue, as well as to present the female profile proposed by the author and the virtues that a young and single woman must have in sixteenth-century society.