Convivi femminili. Tra rappresentazione e demonizzazione

Abstract

The essay explores forms of “female conviviality” between representation and demonization, tracing the semantic and social trajectory of gossip from its Old English godsibb —a baptismal bond of spiritual kinship— to its modern reduction as malicious chatter. By reconstructing practices and rituals (gossips’ feasts, lying-in, churching), it shows how female networks once provided para-kin solidarity with community recognition and agency, later reframed through disciplinary stigma. Within this frame lies the Querelle des femmes: from the Roman de la Rose to Christine de Pizan’s rejoinders, the debate turns the “woman question” into a public, political struggle over reputation. Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames (1441–1442) counters misogynistic rhetoric through a probative chain of exempla, yet also hosts early depictions of witchcraft, revealing the poem’s ambivalence between defense and suspicion. The Evangiles des Quenouilles —circulated in multiple fifteenth-century versions— braid orality and writing, wavering between ethnographic document and misogynistic satire. Finally, following Robin Briggs, the essay examines early modern village women’s networks: reciprocity, oral memory, and gossip build and transmit reputations that, when gathered by male institutions, fuel witchcraft accusations, with long-term effects and inherited stigma. Overall, the essay links linguistic change, literary controversy, and social practice to explain how women’s convivial spaces were reimagined as sites of disorder and, ultimately, demonized.