Women and Novels: Educating the Female Public in the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

This chapter addresses efforts to govern the female public in the Age of Enlightenment, bringing to light the difficult relationship between Catholicism and women’s reading in the Italian context. The aim is to study the strategies Catholic moralists adopted in Italy to regulate the emerging female audience in a century characterised by important changes, particularly in terms of secularisation. The first part analyses the reasons that led ecclesiastical hierarchies, censors and moralists to condemn novels. The novel, deemed capable of reaching a vast public—especially women and so-called “incautious” readers—was increasingly viewed as one of the instruments of the Enlightenment and, as such, a vehicle for spreading irreligion. The second part examines the origins and use of the antiphilosophical novel as a way of educating women. I take as a case study Emirena by Benvenuto Robbio di san Raffaele (1735–1794) and place it in the wider European context to show the international breadth of the pedagogy of “good books” and reading that dated back to the age of Enlightenment and continued in the nineteenth century.