It’s a question often asked – to choose between marriage and a career. A letter from the fifteenth-century gives the response from one woman to another.
Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558) was perhaps the greatest female intellectual in medieval Venice – she was well-known for delivering public orations in her city, and was even offered a position in the Spanish court (however the Venetian Doge ordered her not to accept it). Her fame caught the attention of Alessandra Scala, the daughter of a Florentine chancellor. Although she was only sixteen years old, Alessandra was getting noticed for her poetry and scholarship in Greek.
The two began writing to each other, and Alessandra seemingly asks Cassandra for her advice. Here is the latter’s response, written on January 18, 1492:
From your very elegant letter I saw clearly that you did not judge ours to be a commonplace friendship (a judgment which gave me great pleasure), since you wanted only for me to know everything about you, but also to advise you on these same matters.
And so, my Alessandra, you are uncertain whether to dedicate yourself to the Muses of to a Man? On this matter I think you must choose that to which nature made you more disposed. For Plato maintains that any advice which is received is received according to the readiness of the receiver. For this reason, it will be very easy for you to make that choice, whereas no violently imposed decision lasts forever.
Two years later Alessandra would marry Michele Marullo, a Greek poet. Cassandra herself would also get married in the year 1500, but after her husband died in 1520 she remained in Venice, working a director of an orphanage. Her last public speech was given just two years before her death at the age of 93.
This letter, and over fifty others, can be found in Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650, edited and translated by Lisa Kaborycha (Oxford University Press, 2016)