Remembering Laura Cereta: public and private lives of a humanist scholar

In her few brief years in the public eye Laura Cereta (1469-99) became a humanist of some renown in the developing humanist culture of Quattrocento Brescia, a town in northern Italy, but has been largely forgotten in the history of humanism. Many women who participated in this tradition of learning have been lost in its history, or have been disregarded as serious humanist thinkers and the literary merit of their texts has been neglected. Cereta is particularly significant as a proto-feminist thinker. Her awareness of the innate potential of women, which is demonstrated in her treatment of her female correspondents, and her advanced ideas regarding socioeconomic reform to encourage women’s full participation in all aspects of civic and public life. Cereta developed an array of techniques to deal with social and cultural mores regarding women and learning in the fifteenth century, and the aspects of her life experience that influenced the construction of her humanist literary persona. This paper examines the autobiographical elements of Cereta’s letter book (a collection of writings commonly collated by public humanist scholars) to explore both her determined construction of a public, civic persona, and her ultimate withdrawal from public life, and subsequent fading from historical attention