Dante’s manly Latin for his womanly Italian
Dante, the man, allegedly penned the following in a letter to his patron Cangrande, another man. It’s that famous explanation of his (if he actually wrote it) of his Divine Commedy. Of course, he wrote the letter in prose, in Latin, to explain his epic poetry, in Italian.
And at one point, here’s what he writes to explain the language:
ad modum loquendi, remissus est modus et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et muliercule comunicant.
Some many years later, writing in Italian, in her own language, the woman Maria Adele Garavaglia translates his manly prosaic Latin for his womanly poetic Italian, as follows:
quanto all’espressione, viene impiegato un linguaggio misurato e umile, in quanto usa la lingua volgare in cui si esprimono le donnette.
And, likewise, perhaps as vulgaris and just as volgare and definitely vulgar, is the translation, ever womanly enough, in the English by Katharine Hilliard, which is humble and weak, as so:
If we consider its language, it is humble and weak, because it is the vulgar tongue, which women ever use.
BLT 
And the reason women didn’t read or write Latin was because men refused to teach them. That’s what made Latin so “manly,” I guess. Aargh!
Great comment, Kristen.
Before Latin, and men using it to exclude women, there was Greek. And then there was “enlightened” French, and then there was German, further “enlightened.” In each case, men rationalize that these are not for women.
For example, as philosopher Rae Langton suggests in her recent essay “The Disappearing Women,”
What do we remember of Beatrice Portinari?
What do we recall of her (of her speaking Latin to Dante in real life or of her speaking Italian to Dante in his Paradiso after the man Virgil has guided him through his Inferno and Purgatorio)?
But do muliercula and donnetta mean “woman”? There is certainly some other nuance there, missing in the English version. The dictionary defines donnetta as “pantywaist”, but I’m sure that’s an anachronism. Perhaps “common working girl” for muliercula” gives the meaning better.
Good question! And thank you for the dictionary definitions and added commentary. (There’s an OED reference making the Latin “women and children.”) Have you checked how various translators, attending to the discourse context, have rendered the Latin noun?
Peter,
The Oxford English Dictionary editors have this unattributed note (of etymology) for comedy; we cannot be sure who the translator is or even if the quotations within are actually to be understood as from the letter to Cangrande:
So we might “nuance” the meanings by looking at how dictionary editors compile and aggregate them from various contexts.
pantywaist
women and children
little woman
common working girl
Are these any less sexist?