Camilla Bonfiglio with Carlotta Moro
Welcome to the Impossible Salon, a podcast from the research project ‘Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,’ based at the University of Exeter.
In this episode, host Helene von Tabouillot speaks with Carlotta Moro, postdoc on the Cultures of Philosophy project, about the 17th-century Sicilian writer Camilla Bonfiglio and her treatise Book in Praise of Women and on the Cruelty of Men. We discuss the arguments and imagery employed by Bonfiglio, through which she suggests that women are superior to men in a myriad of ways, as well as the intellectual milieu in which Bonfiglio was situated.
Camilla Bonfiglio’s Book in Praise of Women and on the Cruelty of Men (ca.1602-1619), edited and translated by Carlotta Moro, is forthcoming within the series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” published by Iter Press (pending peer review).
This episode was recorded in October 2025.
This podcast is supported by the European Research Council-selected Starting Grant, ‘Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number EP/Y006372/1].
Guest: Carlotta Moro
Host: Helene von Tabouillot
Music: Leonora Duarte: Simfonia no. 7. Conducted and performed by Korneel Bernolet. Thanks to Bernolet for the kind permission to use his rendition.
Francesca Caccini: Maria dolce Maria. Performed by Capella di Santa Maria degli Angiolini. Thanks to Brilliant Classics for the kind permission to use this rendition.
Graphic design (logo): Nynne Oline B. Bennicke.
Painting (logo): Anna Maria van Schurman, self-portrait as Pudicitia (1633), used with the kind permission of Museum Martena, Franeker, The Netherlands.
Suggested reading:
-Cox, Virginia. 2011. The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
-Cox, Virginia. 2016. ‘Members, Muses, Mascots: Women and Italian Academies’. In The Italian Academies 1525-1700, edited by Jane E. Everson, Denis Reidy, and Lisa Sampson. Routledge.
-Fonte, Moderata. 1997. The Worth of Women. Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men. Translated by Virginia Cox. The University of Chicago Press.
-Marinella, Lucrezia. 1999. The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men. Edited and translated by Letizia Panizza and Anne Dunhill. The University of Chicago Press.
-McClure, George W. 2013. ‘The Birth of the Assicurate: Italy’s First Female Academy (1654-1704)’. In Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy. University of Toronto Press.
-Tarabotti, Arcangela. 2004. Paternal Tyranny. Edited and translated by Letizia Panizza. The University of Chicago Press.