Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 » (New Edition)

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 Tasso and coeditor of The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval and Renaissance Traditions. 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.

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.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     xi
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     17
The "Learned Lady" as Signifier in Humanistic Culture     28
Renaissance Particularism and the "Learned Lady"     34
Translation (1490-1550)     37
Women, the Courts, and the Vernacular in the Early Sixteenth Century     38
Sappho Surfaces: The First Female Vernacular Poets     45
Bembo, Petrarchism, and the Reform of Italian Literature     53
"So Dear to Apollo": Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna after 1530     64
Founding Mothers, First Ladies: Gambara and Colonna as Models and Icons     76
Diffusion (1540-1560)     80
Manuscript and Print in the "Age of the Council of Trent"     80
Virtu Rewarded: The Contexts of Women's Writing     91
Women Writers and Their Uses: Case Studies     99
Literary Trajectories: Continuity and Change     108
Women Writers and the Paradox of the Pedestal     118
Intermezzo (1560-1580)     121
Affirmation (1580-1620)     131
Women's Writing in the Age of theCounter-Reformation     131
Chivalry Undimmed: The Contexts of Women's Writing     138
A Literature of Their Own? Writing, Ownership, Assertion     149
The Twilight of Gallantry     163
Backlash (1590-1650)     166
The Rebirth of Misogyny in Seicento Italy     166
Misogyny and the Woman Writer: The Redomestication of Female Virtu     195
Women's Writing in Seicento Italy: Decline and Fall     204
Coda     228
Published Writings by Italian Women, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries     235
Dedications of Published Works by Women     247
Notes     255
Bibliography     377
Index     447