Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650

by Virginia Cox

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801888199
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	06/16/2008
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

Laura Giannetti

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.

From the Publisher

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.
—Laura Giannetti, University of Miami

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.
—Deanna Shemek, University of California, Santa Cruz

Deanna Shemek

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.

Editorial Reviews

Exhaustive and insightful . . . This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies.
—Elissa Weaver, Renaissance Quarterly

This is a definitive study and will surely remain so for many years to come.
—Choice

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.
—Stephen Kolsky , Modern Language Review

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From the Publisher

This is a definitive study and will surely remain so for many years to come.

Choice

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.

Modern Language Review - Stephen Kolsky

Exhaustive and insightful . . . This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies.

Renaissance Quarterly - Elissa Weaver

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.

— Stephen Kolsky

Modern Language Review

Exhaustive and insightful... This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies.

— Elissa Weaver

Renaissance Quarterly