The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 2, Winter 2019 | Page 41

es of Quattrocento Venice:
arola’s Humanist Career
7
Isotta became fluent in Latin, classical
philosophy, rhetoric, the Scriptures,
and theology. 18 It was highly unusual
for her mother to further her daughter’s
humanist education, since a mother’s
duty was to educate her daughters in domesticity,
but Virginia Cox posits that
Isotta’s mother may have continued her
daughter’s advancement in education
after her husband’s death to further ennoble
the family and to secure marriage
prospects for her daughter. 19 However,
Isotta had no intention of marrying and
made the conscious decision to follow
the career path of a humanist scholar
instead. 20 That made her even more of
an outcast in Veronese society.
Highly educated or learned women
of noble rank who were not married
had no place in society; they were not respected.
Once a woman reached sexual
maturity, she was expected to set aside
her intellectual pursuits and marry. If
a woman wanted to pursue academics
or humanist studies beyond adolescence
and forge a successful career out
of it, she had to have support from her
father or her husband. 21 Women who
did not marry and pursued humanist
studies were considered as “exceeding
their sex.” 22 As a result, unmarried
learned women were condemned and
dragged down by both men and women
in the upper and lower echelons of
their society. 23 Ross suggests that was
because “they counterargued centuries
of biblical and Aristotelian antiwoman
sentiment and the patriarchal structure
of Western society.” 24 By contrast, there
was little to no evidence that unmarried
learned women from dynastic families
met resistance. It was only the unmar-