‘MEN ARE LIARS’ – REASON AS HEALER
AT HOSPITAL FOR CORRUPT WOMEN
PIRANI, Giovanni.
Le donne belle del secolo XVIII. Inferme nello spedale della voluttà visitate dalla ragione. Opera filosofico-critico-morale …
Rimini, Paolo Albertini, 1791.
8vo, pp. 140; woodcut vignette to title; sporadic light foxing, slight dampstaining to upper corners throughout and to last few leaves at head and foot, small inkstain to title, a few marks; otherwise a good copy, uncut, in later blue wrappers; spine soiled.
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Le donne belle del secolo XVIII. Inferme nello spedale della voluttà visitate dalla ragione. Opera filosofico-critico-morale …
Scarce first edition of this ‘libro bizarro’ printed in Rimini, in which the personification of Reason takes the narrator on an imaginary journey to a ‘hospital’ in order to heal young women corrupted by the decadence of the eighteenth century.
Whilst walking down the streets of Rimini in October 1790, the narrator is approached by Reason (in the guise of a haggard woman), who takes him along whilst she cures a host of belle inferme of their vanity and corruption, leaving behind only hazy memories of their former excesses. The hospital – suffused with the sickening aroma of perfumes and pomades – is guarded by Deception and operated by the sumptuously dressed handmaidens of Luxury (Vanity, Immodesty, and Fashion). Reason and the narrator engage in a series of quasi-Dantesque interviews with the women: one has filled her head with dancing lessons and comedies instead of arithmetic and astronomy, one devoted to the latest fashions, one overly preoccupied with earthly passions, etc.
The exchanges frequently turn heated: Reason is called ‘a hollow log, devoid of passion’ and in turn calls one group of women ‘slaves fond of your own prison, satisfied with the chains that bind you’, and others ‘simulacra of vanity and the ruin of republics’ (trans.).
Notably, Pirani states explicitly that whilst he condemns the corruption of the heart and mind rife amongst the belle inferme, his work is not a condemnation of women. Men are here identified as a significant cause of this corruption: Reason exclaims to an obstinate patient that ‘men are liars; they will deceive you only to betray you; and they then rejoice in their betrayal and laugh at your weakness’ (p. 72, trans.). Upon leaving the hospital, Reason and Prudence read aloud love letters written by men to the belle inferme before they had been cured (accompanied by numerous exclamations of ‘che pazzo!’, violent invectives, and, on one occasion, Reason tearing a letter in half).
We find four copies in Italy and two in the US, at UCLA and Kansas (Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History 2218); no copies traced in the UK.
