Male Virtue, Female Virtue in Marulić\u27s De Institutione

The interpretative tool that the application of the concept of gender (as trans-historical world-view construct based on the binary opposition of the sexes) has bequeathed to the humanities has in the last decades proved to be fruitful in the study of religious literature as well, giving rise to a body of texts that follow the history of Christian doctrine (dealing mainly with the Bible and patristic and scholastic works) from this point of view, interrogating the axiomatically premised universal inspiration of its ontological and ethical premises, in which it has often turned out to be gender- conditioned. This paper investigates the composition of Marulić’s De institutione in the segment of it that is covered and revealed by the vision outlined. Although Christian virtue as both concept and religious cornerstone is certainly heteronomous to the opposition male gender/female gender, the different ratios of male and female exempla for given virtues, the different structural place that the alter sexus occupies in the illustration of individual virtues (mixed with the male examples, placed after the male examples, and, only in two cases, which refer to the preservation of moral purity and martyrdom, treated in a separate chapter), as well as the particular rhetorical approach to the female examples (which is most clearly manifested in the transitional formulae) provide adequate inducement to and justification of the study of this work of Marulić from the perspective of gender. To the necessary final question of whether in the world of Palaestra christianarum virtutum both genders are subject to precisely the same hierarchy of values, the answer is, after the analysis of the discursive treatment of the female figures present in it, negative, the work itself appearing as one more instance of a Weltanschauung that, as far as the male-female opposition is concerned, reposes upon the logical postulate of genus proximum - differentia specifica. The relation of the textual syntax of the De institutione to its intention and purpose shows, with respect to the sex/gender theme, fissures at the sites at which the secular and the historical disintegrate the concept of virtue by which they should, on the contrary, in the Christian doctrinal framework in which Marulić wishes to create, be unconditionally transcended