A defense of writing for women readers

A defense of writing for women readers is both a reply to the author’s critics and a declaration of the principles behind his work. Faced with objections to his attention to women, his age, his literary vocation, and the truth of his stories, he makes a compact anecdote do argumentative work: even a youth raised in isolation recognizes women’s appeal at first sight. The defense turns that recognition into an argument from nature, then concludes by reaffirming the author’s choice to write for women and continue the work he has begun.

The Charges and the Answer

The author presents his opponents as a varied company. Some accuse him of pleasing women too much and of taking too much pleasure in pleasing them; others claim that a man of his age should no longer discourse about women or seek their favor. Some advise him to remain with the Muses on Parnassus, while others say he ought to attend to earning his bread instead of pursuing trifles and feeding on wind. A further group challenges the stories themselves, alleging that events did not happen as he has related them. The defense thus answers not one complaint but a cluster of judgments about desire, age, literary work, livelihood, and credibility.

He describes these attacks as blusterings and backbitings that wound him while he battles in the service of his female readers. Yet he says he hears them with an untroubled mind. His decision to reply is strategic as well as personal: he has not yet completed even a third of his undertaking, and fears that leaving the criticisms unanswered could allow their numbers and confidence to grow until they might undo his work. He therefore offers a limited rejoinder rather than a full story, making the defense itself part of his effort to protect the larger project.

Filippo Balducci’s Incomplete Anecdote

To make his case, the author recalls Filippo Balducci, a man of modest birth who had been well provided for and was versed in matters appropriate to his condition. Filippo and his wife loved one another deeply and lived peacefully, each seeking to please the other. When she died, she left him their young son, about two years old. Grief at losing the companion he loved led Filippo to withdraw from worldly life and devote himself and the child to God.

Filippo gave away his possessions for the love of God and settled with his son in a small hut on Mount Asinajo. They lived on alms, fasted and prayed, and remained apart from ordinary worldly experience. Filippo carefully avoided discussing temporal things in the boy’s presence or allowing him to see them. Instead, he spoke of eternal life, God, and the saints, teaching him prayers. For years the son did not leave the hermitage or see anyone but his father.

When the young man accompanied Filippo to Florence, he saw a group of well-dressed young women coming from a wedding and asked what they were. To prevent the word women from awakening carnal appetite, Filippo called them Green geese and warned his son to look down because they were bad things. The warning could not control the son’s response. Having shown little interest in palaces, animals, money, or other things he had encountered, he immediately asked his father to take one of the young women home so he could feed her. He judged them more beautiful than the painted angels his father had sometimes shown him. Filippo refused, saying that his son did not know what they fed on, and recognized that nature was stronger than his ingenuity. The author explicitly leaves the anecdote incomplete, using that very incompleteness to distinguish it from the stories told by the company.

Desire, Women, and Literary Purpose

The anecdote supplies the defense’s central reasoning. The author openly admits that women please him and that he studies to please them. He asks his readers to consider not only the pleasures of physical intimacy, but also women’s manners, beauty, grace, and courtesy. If a youth raised in a cell, without other human company, could see women once and desire them, then the author’s own attraction is presented as no shameful eccentricity but as an expression of natural affection.

He makes the claim personal as well as general: he says that his body was created apt to love women and that he devoted his soul to them from childhood. Their eyes, words, and sighs, he argues, have power over him. The boy in the anecdote becomes a measure of how little instruction is needed for desire to arise: even one without worldly understanding responds to women’s beauty. The author dismisses those who reproach him as people who lack understanding of natural affection and neither love women nor wish to be loved by them.

Age, the Muses, and Literary Authority

To the charge that his age makes this subject improper, the author answers with a proverb about the leek: although its head is white, its tail remains green. More seriously, he refuses to consider it shameful, even at the furthest limit of life, to seek the favor of women whom Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri honored in their later years and whose approval Messer Cino da Pistoja valued in old age. He adds that histories could supply further examples of noble men who continued to seek women’s favor in maturity.

The recommendation that he stay with the Muses receives a qualified answer. He concedes that the advice is good, but observes that people cannot remain with the Muses forever, nor can the Muses remain with them. When separated from them, a man may take pleasure in seeing what resembles them. The Muses are women, he argues, and women, though they cannot equal the Muses, bear them a likeness. Women have also occasioned a thousand of his verses, whereas the Muses themselves never occasioned any; they helped him compose those verses, and may sometimes have accompanied him in his present writing. His defense therefore does not reject the Muses in favor of women so much as connect poetic inspiration to the women who have inspired his work.

Truth, Reputation, and Continuance

Against the charge that his stories misrepresent events, the author asks his critics to produce the originals. If those accounts contradict his, he says he will admit the objection is just and endeavor to correct himself; until evidence beyond words appears, he will keep to his own account. The reply places the burden on demonstrable comparison rather than unsupported accusation, without claiming that correction would be impossible.

He ends not by retreating from the undertaking but by resolving to continue it with God’s aid, the ladies’ support, and patience. His image is of dust stirred by a whirlwind: it may remain on the ground, or be lifted and deposited on the heads of ordinary people, kings, emperors, palaces, or towers, but cannot fall lower than the place from which it rose. The image turns hostile criticism into an uncertain force that may even elevate what it means to displace. He declares that he will apply himself to pleasing his readers more than ever, because resisting nature demands strength that is often useless and harmful to those who attempt it. Having defended his inclination and his work, he returns the ladies to the storytelling order already begun.