Five days ago, I was in Oxford talking about Fate/Grand Order. Today I am back, this time at Corpus Christi College, ready to make amends and raise my spirit heavenwards — puro e disposto a salire a le stelle, as one says in the best Italian.
No gacha, no technology, no modernity. Today: Saint Justina, the Venetian myth, and the genealogy of female excellence. I shall now return to prayer.
Back home, or
into the footnotes?
The Event
- Conference
- Clio Reframed: Women Writing History, 1500-1750
- Hosted by
- * Corpus Christi College, Oxford;
- Where & when
- Corpus Christi College — 18-19 June, 2026
- Official Links
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* Conference
* Conference
Research summary - Founding Mothers: Saint Justina, Venetian Myth, and the Genealogy of Female Excellence
In seventeenth-century Venice, Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) uses the lives of female saints to claim a place for women in history and public life. I read The Life of the Virgin Mary (1602) and The Holocaust of Love of the Virgin Saint Justina (1648) as deliberate acts of history-writing by and about women. Usually classified as devotional literature, these works encourage religious faith while also making a public argument about women’s historical and political authority. Drawing on early Christian writings, Church chronicles, and local civic histories, Marinella presents female saints as models of holiness, civic virtue, and intellectual achievement. Their lives form a lineage of female excellence that challenges recurring assumptions in the Querelle des femmes, the long-running debate about women’s abilities and place in society.
Saint Justina is especially revealing. As Padua’s patron saint and a central figure in Venice’s founding myth, she connects sacred history with the Venetian Republic’s political identity. Through Marinella’s retelling, Justina becomes a figure through whom women’s authority can enter public memory. This project also depends on the conditions in which Marinella writes: Venice’s thriving publishing market offers women opportunities to circulate their work that are less available elsewhere on the Italian peninsula, helping a woman’s account of the past reach a wider public.
A brief comparison with Arcangela Tarabotti reveals a complementary strategy. Where Marinella builds a lineage through female saints, Tarabotti challenges accepted accounts of women’s lives through her writing about women forced into convents. Read together, these authors show how genres often treated as secondary – saints’ lives and outspoken testimony – can become powerful ways to reclaim women’s place in history. Their work contests both what counts as history and who has the authority to write it.