Domenico Bruni da Pistoia

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An elegant writer and learned jurisconsult, Domenico Bruni from Pistoia flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century. Bruni was a priest. At first he was Vicar General of his illustrious fellow citizen Monsignor Benedetto Conversini, Bishop of Bertinoro. Later, under Paul III, he held the office of praetor of Cesena. Despite the nature of his employment and the arid occupations by which he was surrounded, for pleasure he devoted himself to writing the work "Defenses of women, in which their defenses are contained, from the calumnies given to him for writers, and at the same time the praises of those "(Milan, 1549, and Florence, 1552), object of our study. Contrary to the sixteenth-century sexist polemics, the work claims a decidedly positive role for the "fair sex". Some attribute to Bruni the authorship of Lodovico Domenichi's work entitled "The Nobility of Women", printed in Venice in 1549, the latter would have appropriated it.