Ladies in Latin

Jane Stevenson on a search for women's writing that took her from Cumbria to the Vatican library

For the past 10 years, I have been working on a book on women who wrote in Latin. Since the received opinion is that they didn't, I have had to go and look for the evidence, a process which gradually turned into an odyssey around Europe. Latin is important: before the 18th century, anyone who did not read it was a second-class citizen in the republic of letters. Therefore to assume that women never used Latin is to assume that all women were marginalised and disempowered. "But what if they weren't?" is a question with some far-reaching implications.

The answer has turned out to be that throughout the Latin-using world, from the Renaissance onwards, a minority of women did in fact write Latin. So very few women published in Latin that those who did are seen as monstrous exceptions. This is not the case; but the evidence for the existence of learned ladies of the European past is not easy to find.

Whatever the sexual politics of setting pen to paper, society has on the whole been behind the principle that women should love their husbands, and that grieving widows were entitled to say so. Thus everywhere that my partner and I have gone, we have checked out old churches. For instance, we were driving through the secretive, unvisited Cumbria that lies north of the Lake District, which I was researching for a novel. Half-way down a plunging single-track road, we saw a sign pointing to "St Mary's Church" and turned off to look for it. It turned out to be a small, grey structure surrounded by fields, built to serve a community which, apart from the church itself and a couple of farms, appears no longer to exist. Rather surprisingly, the building was open, though completely empty, and in its barn-like interior, I found a single monument, a massive affair with blocky lettering that had a Latin poem on it. And written vertically, in a spare few inches was the legend, "Per me, A.D., uxor" -- "By me, Anne Denton [as a bit of work in the Cumbrian record office told me the next day], his wife".

Turning to the world of books, it was clear that the place where I would have to begin was the memory-palace of European civilisation, the Biblioteca Apostolica in the Vatican. Beyond any reasonable challenge, this is the greatest library in the world, but it is also an intensely strange place in which to work, especially if you are a woman. Its library card is the only such which doubles as a passport. You have to show it to the tall, gun-toting blond in a uniform designed by Michelangelo who guards the dusty Porto Santa Anna, and he scrutinises it with care before he will let you in.

Going inside the Vatican feels a bit like entering a high-security prison. The main structure, four cliff-like walls of dun-coloured stone, is built round a bleak quadrangle and pierced by an archway: the blank rows of windows stare down at a fountain basin which looks as if it has never in living memory been filled with water. The Vatican City is also the biggest men's club in the world, a place where it is made clear by every nuance of its inhabitants' body-language that to be female is to be both peculiar and negligible. It was therefore a very odd place to be looking for women, a joke that I never attempted to share with anyone within its sacred portals.

This is the Pope's private collection, and it is a classicist's heaven. There are two fifth-century manuscripts of Virgil in the entire world, and both are in the Apostolica. It is also, ironically, the greatest Protestant library there is, because after the Catholics won the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the Palatine library in Heidelberg was looted. But the reason why it is the ultimate place to chase women is that the Catholic church is also, as Protestants sometimes like to say, the Church of Italy. Thus the doings of Italian noble families have always been a subject of intense interest: in each generation, almost all have sent a son or two into the church and surplus daughters to the more prestigious convents. And moreover, since the invention of printing, memorial booklets, epithalamia, celebrations of canonisation, together with collections of verses, have poured from Italian presses. These little productions of the day are absolutely classic locations for Latin writing by women.

One such author, Febronia Pannolini, was a sister of the order of St Dominic in the monastery of St Agnes in Bologna, a member of an old-established family and a bluestocking. She contributed some well-mannered Latin verse to two books, printed in 1600 and 1601. Similarly in Perugia, the death of a local notable in 1643 prompted a memorial volume; and so the father of the local learned lady, Gironda Cerrini, who was then 17, was asked if "our Sappho" would oblige with an elegy. This she did, and it was duly printed.

These harmless volumes, and many others like them, were of real interest in their immediate context and of little or none beyond it. They have thus been extraordinarily vulnerable to what Pope (in The Dunciad) called "the martyrdom of jakes and fire". Without the protection of a great library, books tend to become waste paper.

Italy more generally has been an extremely rich hunting-ground. Places as modest as Salò or Rovigo had academies, meeting-places for local intellectuals, from the 17th century. They took a certain pride in having a local poetess who was generally invited to join them: Gironda Cerrini was a member of the Perugian Accademia di' Virtuosi, while the Sappho of Salò was a lady called Diamante Medaglia Faini. By and large - though some survive to this day - local academies kept going into the 19th century, but at some point their premises became town libraries. Wherever possible, I stopped in small towns and visited a series of more or less pompous buildings with crumbling stucco and painted ceilings. Sometimes I found there a typewritten list, or I was shown a set of mahogany boxes filled with slips written in curly 18th-century handwriting.

One develops a peculiar filtration technique in this sort of work; the eye learns to skid rapidly down the page, ignoring everything but first names - Giovanni, Pietro, Tommaso, Francesco, then bang: a Magdalena or a Giovanna brings it screeching to a halt. All this checking had to be done at frantic speed, since in such places it is very unusual for the staff to be prepared to fetch anything after midday. Generally, the best I could do was to end up with a handful of "possibles" and leave them with someone for the next day, and wander out into the sunshine looking for ice-cream and something to drink.

· A longer version of this article will appear in PN Review. Jane Stevenson's book Women Latin Poets is published by OUP (£85). Her collection of three novellas, Good Women, is published by Cape this month (£16.99). To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.