Representing Gender in Court

Abstract Giovanni Boccaccio’s lawyerly adultress Madonna Filippa (Decameron 6.7) invites reflection on his attitudes toward women’s bodily autonomy and participation in matters of law. Her character has generally been read as an impossible fiction, representing either a protofeminist fantasy or an ironic embodiment of misogyny. This article reconsiders her in the historical context of a handful of fourteenth- to fifteenth-century women jurists (Bettisia Gozzadini, Pola dei Mansi, Novella and Bettina d’Andrea, Miriam Spira-Luria, et al.) active in legal studia and yeshivas in Bologna, Padova, and Verona. Their historical tradition and iconography join literary representations of women at law (by Valerius Maximus, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan) to establish the female jurist as a cultural type. Madonna Filippa thus represents one possible response to a real cultural phenomenon. Whether we agree with the narrator Filostrato’s catastrophizing outlook on women’s participation in law is another story.