Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8819-9
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 496 Seiten, Format (B × H): 166 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 835 g

Winner, 2009 Best Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern WomenWinner, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers

This is the first comprehensive study of the remarkably rich tradition of women’s writing that flourished in Italy between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Virginia Cox documents this tradition and both explains its character and scope and offers a new hypothesis on the reasons for its emergence and decline.

Cox combines fresh scholarship with a revisionist argument that overturns existing historical paradigms for the chronology of early modern Italian women’s writing and questions the historiographical commonplace that the tradition was brought to an end by the Counter Reformation. Using a comparative analysis of women's activities as artists, musicians, composers, and actresses, Cox locates women's writing in its broader contexts and considers how gender reflects and reinvents conventional narratives of literary change.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cox, Virginia

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Italienische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Cox, Virginia
Virginia Cox is a professor of Italian and director of graduate studies at New York University. She is author of The Prodigious Muse: Women's Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy and Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, both published by Johns Hopkins.

Virginia Cox is a professor of Italian at New York University and author of The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo and coeditor of The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition. She is also editor and translator of Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, and coeditor and translator of Maddalena Campiglia, Flori, A Pastoral Drama.