Resumen de "Ma e in latino nulla? Qualcosa sì, ma tanto poco, che paja un nulla": Donne e latino in Italia fra Sette e Ottocento
On 11 February 2013, ANSA journalist Giovanna Chirri listened to the Pope's resignation speech given in Latin. She quickly tweeted he would leave the pontificate from 28 February. The news hit the headlines worldwide, and Chirri was later publicly congratulated by fellow journalists across the globe for her scoop, not least because, of all the colleagues (men) in the room, Chirri was the only one to understand in full the Pope's words. If we go back in time, things would have been quite different for Chirri: for centuries, Latin was deemed unsuitable for women. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the history of linguistic thought and the history of women, this article examines the ideas about women's use of Latin in Italy between the eighteenth century and the post-Unification period. Long-standing prejudices by theorists and moralists on women and Latin meant the female sex was excluded from coming into contact with the language and the literary heritage of the ancient times. For the majority of women, knowledge of Latin was beyond their reach. It was only after the country's Unification (1861), when women first had access to a state educational system and to secondary schools, that their exclusion from Latin really started to come to an end, thus paving the way for Giovanna Chirri's scoop more than a hundred years later.
