Announcement: Meet Tullia d’Aragona, our newest philosopher!

Meet Tullia d’Aragona, the newest philosopher on Project Vox!

Tullia d’Aragona was a sixteenth-century poet, philosopher, and cortegiana honesta [honorable courtesan], a courtesan recognized and praised for her intellectual abilities. Born in Rome around the turn of the sixteenth century, she traveled to intellectual centers throughout the Italian peninsula, where she gained the favor of powerful figures who helped advance her work to publication. Through her Rime (1547), a published collection of correspondence poetry; her philosophical Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (1547); and her epic poem Il Meschino detto Il Guerrino (1560, posthumously) d’Aragona was able to advance her own self-representation as well as the possibility of reciprocity and mutual respect in relationships between men and women. With the publication of her Dialogue on the Infinity of Love she became the first woman to enter the debate on the ethics of love and she drew upon multiple philosophical traditions and vocabularies to argue for parity between women and men.

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