Letizia Panizza, who has died following a protracted period of ill health, was a distinguished scholar of Italian Renaissance philosophy and culture, who contributed important research on the reception of Stoicism in the Renaissance, on Libertine philosophy, and on Italian women philosophers of the Renaissance. Associated with BSHP from its early days. Letizia contributed to the society’s activities as a keynote speaker at the first BSHP conference on Women and the History of Philosophy (1992), and by organising the BSHP conference on "Libertines and Libertinism" in 1999—both conferences were on themes strongly associated with areas of philosophy closest to her heart.
She was born in Liverpool in 1936. Her mother was of Italian-Irish-English descent and her Italian father was attached to the Italian Consular Service. She was brought up by her grandparents until after WWII, when she was re-united with her parents in Boston, moving as her father’s postings took the family, to Mexico, then San Francisco. She studied for a BA in philosophy at the Catholic San Francisco College for Women, followed by an MA in Italian Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She subsequently enrolled as a mature student to study for a PhD at the Warburg Institute, University of London, which is where we first met. At that time the Warburg was graced by such luminaries as D.P. Walker (Letizia’s research supervisor), Charles B. Schmitt, Frances Yates and Ernst Gombrich (then Director of the Institute). Their collective wisdom and the very un-British inter-disciplinarity of the Institute were formative not just for focusing her interest on the Renaissance, but for the approach which she took to the history of philosophy. Letizia pursued her interests while teaching in Italian studies departments, at the University of Kent, and then at Bedford College University of London, which was later absorbed into Royal Holloway College, where she remained for the rest of her teaching career.
Renaissance philosophy is something of a minority interest in the English-speaking world, unlike Italy. To undertake, as Letizia did, a doctoral study of the supposed correspondence of Seneca with the Apostle Paul, might appear particularly niche. However, this opened the way to important new perspectives on the reception of Seneca in the Renaissance, and led to a rich vein of research on a wide range of Renaissance humanists (from famous names like Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, to many unfamiliar ones such as Ferrante Pallavicino and Ermolao Barbaro). In a series of innovative articles she showed they were serious thinkers – contrary to the received view of humanists as mere scholars. Furthermore, for a period traditionally regarded as a highpoint of Greek and Latin scholarship, she recognised the importance of the vernacular in Italian intellectual life of the period—as she quickly realised, vernacular translations, such as those by the Aristotelian, Alessandro Piccolomini were particularly important for women’s access to philosophy.
With her extensive knowledge of classical texts and culture, and her knowledge languages, Letizia’s approach to the history of philosophy was well-adapted to Renaissance ways of doing philosophy. But in many ways her approach anticipated the new directions currently being explored in mainstream history of philosophy. Long before current efforts to expand the canon—she worked on figures not conventionally regarded as philosophers—from the aforementioned humanists to women (notably Arcangela Tarabotti), and figures disregarded as minor (e.g. Alessandro Piccolomini). Her recognition of the importance of different genres as the medium of philosophical discussion is reflected in the special issue on ‘Philosophical and Scientific Poetry in the Renaissance’ which she edited for Renaissance Studies in 1991. Parody and Satire were something of a forte, as evidenced in the collection of essays Lucian of Samosata, vivus et redivivus, which she edited with Christopher Ligota (2007). Her detailed attention to textuality and her thorough knowledge of Renaissance rhetoric enabled her to unpick the strategies used by heterodox thinkers for expressing controversial, even subversive, ideas.
Letizia’s approach to the history of philosophy was central to her pioneering work on the recovery the philosophy of Renaissance Italian women. A major early initiative of hers was the conference which she organised in 1994 on ‘Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society’ (published in 2000 with that title). This led to collaborations with literary scholars like Virignia Cox and Sharon Wood opening up the neglected field of Italian women’s writing. Her own work on Tullia d’Aragona, Lucrezia Marinella, Sarra Copia Sulam and especially Arcangela Tarabotti, has laid the ground for the work of recovery currently ongoing. Her translations of Tarabotti (Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini, 1991, and La tirannia paterna, 2004), together with her introduction to Anne Dunhill’s translation of Marinella’s Nobility and Excellence of Women (1999), have been instrumental in making their thought known and understood beyond the Italian context.
For all its seriousness Letizia’s scholarship has a light-hearted aspect—glimpsed in titles of articles (“Stoic psychotherapy”, “Platonic Love on the Rocks”), and captured in the title of volume of studies in her honour, edited by Stephen Clucas and Simone Testa : Liberty, Irreverence, and the Place of Women in Early Modern Italian Culture (Springer, 2025). This spirit of “serio ludere” had deep personal roots. Everyone who knew her personally will testify to the warmth of her personality, her generosity of spirit and her many acts of individual kindness. We have all her enjoyed her hospitality, her conversation, and last but not least, her sense of humour. The humanistic phrase, “serio ludere”, is an appropriate motto both for Letizia herself and for her legacy of enlightening scholarship.
Sarah Hutton (July 2025)
