Reviews
Exhaustive and insightful... This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies.
This is a definitive study and will surely remain so for many years to come.
Virginia Cox has written a magisterial study of the major trends in women's writing in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy... This is indeed an impressive volume and one which deserves to be read and studied. It will change the way we think about women's writing in early modern Italy.
X
This is not only an original and substantial contribution to the field of Italian Renaissance Literature, but it will be for years to come the indispensable reference work for anyone working on Italian women writers' contribution to the literary and cultural history of the period.
Virginia Cox's Women's Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 is the most substantive study written to date on the relations between Italian humanism and the emergence of the female intellectual. Cox's knowledge of the period is deep, her readings refreshingly independent. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and persuasive, this book sets a new benchmark for scholarship on early modern women's writings.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Origins (1400–1500)
1. The "Learned Lady" in Quattrocento Italy: An Emerging Cultural Type
2. The "Learned Lady" in Theory: Models of Gender Conduct and Their
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Origins (1400–1500)
1. The "Learned Lady" in Quattrocento Italy: An Emerging Cultural Type
2. The "Learned Lady" in Theory: Models of Gender Conduct and Their Contexts
3. The "Learned Lady" as Signifier in Humanistic Culture
4. Renaissance Particularism and the "Learned Lady"
Chapter Two: Translation (1490–1550)
1. Women, the Courts, and the Vernacular in the Early Sixteenth Century
2. Sappho Surfaces: The First Female Vernacular Poets
3. Bembo, Petrarchism, and the Reform of Italian Literature
4. "So Dear to Apollo": Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna after 1530
5. Founding Mothers, First Ladies: Gambara and Colonna as Models and Icons
Chapter 3: Diffusion (1540– 1560)
1. Manuscript and Print in the "Age of the Council of Trent"
2. Virtù Rewarded: The Contexts of Women's Writing
3. Women Writers and Their Uses: Case Studies
4. Literary Trajectories: Continuity and Change
5. Women Writers and the Paradox of the Pedestal
Chapter Four: Intermezzo (1560-1580)
Chapter Five: Affirmation (1580–1620)
1. Women's Writing in the Age of the Counter-Reformation
2. Chivalry Undimmed: The Contexts of Women's Writing
3. A Literature of Their Own? Writing, Ownership, Assertion
4. The Twilight of Gallantry
Chapter 6: Backlash (1590–1650)
1. The Rebirth of Misogyny in Seicento Italy
2. Misogyny and the Woman Writer: The Redomestication of Female Virtù
3. Women's Writing in Seicento Italy: Decline and Fall
Coda
Appendix A: Published Writings by Italian Women, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
Appendix B: Dedications of Published Works by Women
Notes
Bibliography
Index