Laura Cereta is unique among Quattrocento female humanists in directly addressing the position of women as wives and as friends in her substantial corpus of erudite Latin epistolary prose. Questioning the ideals that governed intellectual, social, and personal expectations of matrimony, Cereta's letters reflect her self-consciously double status as humanist and spouse. Her fierce critique of marriage as a site of female oppression and complicity implies an alternative that requires of humanists, husbands, and wives a radical rethinking of marriage in terms of friendship, as well as of the very project of humanist epistolarity.

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During the 1470s, a Franciscan preacher named Cherubino composed a short treatise in nine parts entitled Regola della vita matrimoniale (Rule for Married Life), which describes in detail the mutual obligations of an ideal married couple. In this didactic work, Cherubino echoes the vocabulary of early Quattrocento writers who employed the concepts of friendship and companionship as framing devices for their discussions of the conjugal state. What is noteworthy in Cherubino's approach to this common theme, however, is his conflation of friends and spouses in the midst of an explication of the conjugal debt (sexual intercourse between husband and wife). Informed by recent work on marriage, sex and friendship as well as research into homosocial, homoerotic and homosexual relationships during the Italian Renaissance, this article explores the slippage between sinless marriage, friendship and procreation; and sinful marriage, enmity and sodomy in Cherubino's Regola and within the broad context of early fifteenth-century perspectives on the conjugal state.

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