The Women of Corsica

By Julia Gasper

The women of Corsica are as remarkable and extraordinary as everything else about this unique Mediterranean island. Through centuries of fierce struggle it has bred women who are tough, brave, resourceful and redoubtable, passing on a culture that has often been materially poor but spiritually rich. Here they are, wives and warriors, saints and schemers, rulers and village girls, poets, painters, patriots and bandits. Anyone who visits the island and is interested in learning more about its women will find this a useful little handbook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244989019

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The Women of Corsica

The Women of Corsica

by

Julia Gasper.

Copyright.

This book is ©Julia Gasper 2018

ISBN: 978-0-244-98901-9

Cover picture shows a shepherdess of Venzolasca photographed some time before 1900. Collection J.Moretti, Corte (Corse). Circulée années 1900. From BNF.

About the Author.

Julia Gasper is the author of Theodore von Neuhoff. King of Corsica (2012), The Marquis d’Argens: A Philosophical Life (2014) and Elizabeth Craven, Writer, Feminist and European (2017).

INTRODUCTION

Every year thousands of visitors come to Corsica to enjoy the wonderful landscape and Mediterranean coasts. They use guide-books that tell them a little about the history of the island, a history that seems to consist entirely of men. Admittedly, Napoleon is a hard act to follow, but even when we have learned a little bit about that Colossus, surely there is also curiosity about the women of this extraordinary and unique island. Corsica has produced many remarkable women as well as men. Life on Corsica has never been easy and the women of this island have had to be tough, daring, determined and sometimes fierce. In most countries, poets praise women for being beautiful and virtuous, but in how many countries do they eulogize women for being strong, brave and warlike?

The Corsican poet Salvatore Viale celebrated martial women in his poem Dionomachia:

Coll'archibugio in mano, e in sen lo stile

Donne vedeansi valorose e ardite -

Che abito assunto al par che alma virile

San le maschie emular Vergini scite.

[With musket in one hand, dagger in the other,

Women show a valorous and impassioned face.

In warrior garb and with a manly soul

Maidens know how to emulate the Scythian women.]

He did so because for generations, Corsican women had been accustomed to fighting alongside their menfolk against the many conquerors and foreign overlords who tried to subjugate the island.

Bergere de Venzolasca with hip flask.jpg

Woman of Venzolasca, late 19th century

The Egyptian historian Isidorus writing in the 2nd century AD claimed that Corsica was discovered by a woman of Liguria, Corsa Bubula, from whom the island took its name. According to legend, she had found it by following, in a small boat, a runaway cow that swam there daily from the mainland to enjoy the superior pastures on Corsica’s green mountains. This is a pleasing story, because it places women right at the cntre of Corsican history. And what a woman! Explorer, sea-farer and pioneer, Corsa Bubula can be regarded as the godmother of Corsica.[1]

Corsica itself is a runaway. Ten thousand years ago, a restless limb of the Maritime Alps broke loose and swam south, in search of warmer climes and adventure. She certainly found them both. Corsica now basks in the Ligurian Sea between Spain and Italy, green and glowing, always feral and untameable. The ancient Greeks called her Calliste, the beautiful one. But they were well aware that the inhabitants were fierce and proud, never subdued by any of the successive empires that claimed nominal control of the Mediterranean region. Even the Romans, the last and greatest empire of the Iron Age, never penetrated further than the coastal areas and they had to put down frequent rebellions. And in Corsica today there is a flourishing independence movement that can claim a long tradition behind it.

Corsica does not look huge on the map, but being so mountainous, it is bigger than it looks. If these steep and rugged peaks were put on an ironing board and smoothed out, the area of the island would be several times greater. So it is true to say that Corsica is not so much a small country, as a big country in a small space. Even nowadays, when a traveller may drive across it in half a day, the landscape intimidates with its grandeur. The island contains so many distinct micro-regions, each with its own history, vegetation and identity, that it is certainly a country rather than a mere province. Every little town and village has a reputation and a special name for its inhabitants. In fact, when we consider how many unique species it has of birds, butterflies, flowers and marine life, it appears that Corsica is a continent.

Old map Corsica.jpg

Corsica’s earliest known inhabitant is a woman: a female skeleton, known as the Lady of Bonifacio found in the region of Alta Rocca, dated 6,570 BC, towards the end of the Old Stone Age. The remains are those of a woman of about thirty-five years old. She was buried in a specially built stone tomb, and laid out respectfully with a number of her possessions around her. This woman must have been a chieftain, a priestess, or some combination of the two. So it is not fanciful to deduce that this culture was one in which women held a high status, and were venerated at least as much as men. The stone-age inhabitants of the island must already have acquired some notion of the survival of the spirit, hence the importance of ceremonial burial and the inclusion of items the dead person might need in the after-life. In later eras, the evidence shows that a more male-dominated society emerged, ruled by warriors who were revered as heroes before and after death. But in the Iron Age, the status of women in Corsica was still very high, compared to what it was in the Roman culture. Another female skeleton dated between 700 and 50 B.C, exhumed in Capula in Alta Rocca, was given a ceremonial burial comparable to that of the Lady of Bonifacio. The tomb contains many valuable artefacts - bracelets, rings, chains and even pearl necklaces.

The women of Corsica have always retained some vestiges of their ancient position of power in the pagan, occult dimension of their society. This is no fantasy of a twentieth-century feminist goddess-cult. It is a well-attested and researched fact. In the Corsican language, Death is represented by a female figure, La Falcina – She Who Carries a Scythe. The Christian religion is only one layer of the complex Corsican culture, and beneath it other and older traditions have never been extinguished. Exactly how old they are is hard to establish but they must be prehistoric, and very likely go back to the times of the Lady of Bonifacio. This means that Corsican women have during the past few millennia had a very ambivalent and contradictory status. In law they were regarded as subordinates in the family and breeders of children, yet they could at the same time be revered as mystics, healers, and privileged speakers, acting like priestesses at the all-important funeral rituals, and deeply involved in the terrible tradition of the vendetta.

When the German traveller Ferdinand Gregorovius visited Corsica in 1852, he became ill at Bastia and suffered from a violent headache. His landlady advised him to see, not a doctor, but the local wise woman, who would cure him by saying her orazion over him. This pagan ritual had survived thousands of years of domination by the Romans and the Christians.

Signadori is the Corsican name for these healers. They employed secret incantations and prayers to lift curses, jinxes and the Evil Eye, which was believed to cause almost every illness. The name means someone who makes a sign, e.g. that of the cross. Until very recently there were still signadori practising in Corsica and most of them were women. Their prayers were long kept secret and were supposed to be learned by heart and passed on only to new practitioners of the art, never revealed to the laity, still less to outsiders. Some of them have now been written down, and they consist of a mixture of Christian and pagan words strung together into verse, usually ending in a command for the disease, or the Evil Eye, to depart and never return. Jesus, Mary and various saints could be invoked.

Corsica group of women and girls.jpg

Village women c.1870

At Matra, near Ampriani, a nineteenth-century traveller witnessed how a signadore treated a little boy aged about fifteen months. His ailment was defined as being struck with the evil eye. The signadore examined the child and looked into his mouth, pronouncing mysterious words of unknown meaning. She lit an iron lantern, and told the mother to pour some water into a clean white plate. Then she made the sign of the cross three times, saying between each sign a Christian prayer in a low voice. She proceeded to take a few drops of oil from the lamp and drop them into the water, scrutinized them to see what shape they took, and finally pronounced that the evil had been dispelled.[2] In most other parts of Europe, a woman who did this would be denounced or burnt as a witch, but in Corsica she was respected and even revered. Doubtless there was a lot of commonsense childcare lore passed on from woman to woman through these networks, which ensured the survival of many an infant.

These women had an extraordinary boldness to set themselves up as ministers and healers against the tradition of the Christian church, which sternly excluded them from any such status or opportunity and, as far as the Catholic branch is concerned, still does. And it is a fact that there were qualified women doctors working in Corsica as early as the seventeenth-century, before they appeared in any other part of Europe.[3]

Another notable tradition in Corsica is the role of women as voceratrici. The word, meaning one who speaks or sings, designates women who publicly mourned, sang laments for the dead and made funeral orations stirring up revenge if somebody had met a violent end – as they commonly did. Women traditionally presided at funerals, and had the privilege of improvising words and music for the occasion. While men in Corsica also composed and sang songs for various occasions, the role of the voceratrice was exclusively female, and had something in common with that of a priestess. Most neighbourhoods had, until recently, women who were skilled in this sort of impromptu performance. It was a tradition fundamentally at odds with the Catholic culture, which exhorts women to be silent or, at best, to repeat the words and ideas dictated to them by men in authority. The revenge element is also blatantly unchristian. Girls would practice as voceratrici from childhood and those who had a talent for it performed their social role without any further need for appointment or approval by a male-dominated institution.

In ancient Greek and Roman times similar phenomena were found throughout the Mediterranean world. The Romans had their nenia, a lament or dirge, which would be improvised at a funeral, accompanied by musical instruments. They also had the term lessus, a mournful cry. In Greek there is the term miriologu, meaning an improvised lament. The heroes of the Iliad mourned in histrionic style for their departed friends. Comparable practices survived long in Sardinia and India. So in this respect, it may be that Corsica is not unique but atavistic, preserving such customs until very recent times and revering women for practising them.

If somebody died a natural death, the women in the funeral procession would sing a Scirrata, a wailing lament. If the deceased had been murdered, they would perform instead a gridata or howling, and the voceratrice would shriek for vengeance. The impromptu dirges in verse, sung by the voceratrice at funerals, and addressed to the dead person, amazed foreign visitors from countries where women were not regarded as able to write poetry. She improvises like a Miriam or a Sappho, verses of the most surpassing grace, and full of the boldest images, wrote Gregorovius.[4] Not all of the performances were entirely extempore. The English classical scholar and etymologist, John Warren Barry, who visited Corsica in 1893, observed that in Ajaccio the voceratrice was a professional, who would visit the house of the deceased before the funeral and ask for information which she then used to prepare an appropriate song. The song was practiced in advance. It may be that in the villages where only close relatives went to a funeral, extemporization was still practised. So women’s creativity was acknowledged, cultivated and valued, indeed revered.[5] With that creativity went a deep-rooted dignity and power in their culture.

It was customary to give voceratrici some reward or payment for their services, which did not mean they were hired or that their mourning was motivated by the wish for money. It was more like a tribute. Luckily for us some of the words of the voceratrici were written down. Each singer had her own particular tune or tunes, and while none has ever been recorded on tape, some of them have been reconstructed from the memories of those who witnessed them. [6]

When a voceratrice used her impassioned singing to urge revenge, she was breaking the law, yet here again we have a conflict between officialdom and tradition. The role of women in the vendetta has always been a crucial one. Women had a duty to make the men of their family swear revenge for any murdered or injured relatives, and this custom was known as the rimbecco. In some cases, the oath was taken in a church, thus yoking together pagan and Christian with fearless inconsistency. In 1581, the Genoese rulers of Corsica passed a law threatening tongue-piercing for anybody who was found practising the rimbecco, and it was outlawed again, with less barbaric penalties, under King Theodore in 1736, but despite all such attempts the tradition persisted.[7] A