Resources
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Letters Familiar and Formal
Venetian writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652) was compelled like thousands of her contemporaries to become a nun against her will and to live forever enclosed in a tightly controlled convent—a practical imprisonment. Tarabotti spent her life protesting the practice of forcing girls into convents, which she persuasively linked to other wrongs against women.
Tarabotti's fearless defenses of women and attacks on a society structured to disempower them struck a chord in Venice, where she achieved significant renown by putting her ideas into print.
Tarabotti used her 1650 Letters—here published in translation for the first time—to defend and build her literary reputation while she also documented rough-and-tumble literary society in early modern Venice and material existence in an early modern convent. The Letters flaunted the writer's accomplishments, humiliated her critics, and advertised her powerful network of intellectual and political allies throughout Northern Italy and into France.
The Letters eloquently document, relationship by relationship and text by text, how Tarabotti established herself as one of the most forceful proponents for women's dignity and self determination in early modern Europe.
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The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women's Book of Courtly Poetry
This is the first printed edition of a manuscript collection of verse whose importance for an understanding of the culture of Henry VIII's court and women's central role in the exchange and enjoyment of poetry cannot be over-estimated. The manuscript was owned and used by, among others, Lady Margaret Douglas; the Duchess of Richmond; and Mary Shelton. These women not only collected a unique anthology of the most fashionable poems of the period, but also contributed verses, occasionally of their own composition.
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Journeys of a Mystic Soul in Poetry and Prose
This edition, which offers a bilingual selection of poetry and selected prose translated into English by the nun-author Cecilia del Nacimiento (1570–1646), increases contemporary scholars' access to, and therefore understanding of, the Spanish early modern religious and intellectual milieu. A significant, rarely-studied mystic and poet, and member of the Discalced Carmelite Order in the years after St. Teresa of Avila's death, Cecilia del Nacimiento exemplifies the range of possibilities used by women writers who worked within the conventions of hegemonic discourses, while creating a unique literary voice.
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English Women Staging Islam, 1696-1707
Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix were among the groundbreaking "female wits," who debuted their original plays for the public stage in 1695–96. Two of these plays contain explicitly Islamicate themes. Manley's The Royal Mischief expands on The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia (1686), and Pix's Ibrahim draws on Rycaut's History of the Turkish Empire (1687). Continuing this interest, Manley's Almyna (1706–7) responds to the newly translated Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704–17), and Pix's The Conquest of Spain (1705) engages the history of Islamic Spain recounted in The Life of the Most Illustrious Monarch Almanzor (1693). These plays have been modernized and annotated in this edition, most for the first time.
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Letters to Francesco Datini
The letters of Margherita Datini to her husband, Francesco di Marco Datini (the subject of Iris Origo's popular biography, The Merchant of Prato), are here translated into English for the first time as a complete collection. They provide a fascinating portrait of urban life in late-medieval Tuscany and give us entrée to the couple's loving but volatile relationship.
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Exhortations to Women and to Others if They Please
For her last published volume, Lucrezia Marinella (1571?-1653) summons all her erudition and persuasive skill for a discussion of issues ranging from women's behavior to childrearing to the virtues necessary for orderly civic life. The author's bleak portrayal of an educated woman's life, together with her praise of traditional female virtues, is emblematic of the negative attitudes towards women's creativity and learning that had become prominent in seventeenth-century Italian culture.
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The Writings of an English Sappho
This edition of the writings of Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell (1540-1609) unites in one volume the varied corpus of a prolific early modern woman writer, including her unpublished correspondence, manuscript poems, monumental inscriptions and elegies, courtroom appearances, and ceremonial performances, as well as her printed translation, A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and Learned Man. In these formidable writings, women's erudition is defended as an inalienable birthright and a defining feature of femininity.
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No Good without Reward: Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition
This volume presents in English the selected works of Liubov Krichevskaya (1800–1841?), arguably the first professional woman of letters in Ukraine. At times hopeful, at other times despairing, her literary works, written in Russian, explore the theme of woman's agency in contemporary society and include dramas, novellas, lyric poetry and an epistolary novel.
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The Chronicle of Le Murate
The Chronicle of Le Murate, completed by Sister Giustina Niccolini in 1598, is one of a small number of surviving documents that presents a nun's own interpretation and synthesis of historical events. It recounts the roughly two hundred–year history of Florence's largest convent, which attracted boarders, nuns and patrons from Italy's elite families. The manuscript provides a rare view of life behind the enclosure walls and of nuns' interaction with the world outside.
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In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-century Italy: Literary and Social Contexts for Women's Writing
This excellent collection of essays and texts surveys the culture and intellectual context of early modern Italy in order to render more intelligible the writing of Italian women.
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Leibniz and the Two Sophies: the Philosophical Correspondence
A critical edition of the philosophical correspondence between the seventeenth–century philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and his two royal patronesses, Electress Sophie of Hanover and her daughter, Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia. This is the first English translation of all the philosophically important material from the two correspondences.
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Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth–Century French Women Writers
In late seventeenth-century France, the conte de feés, or fairy tale, became a fashionable new genre. It was sophisticated and ironic women who not only inaugurated the vogue but also produced sixty–eight of the one hundred twelve tales published 1690–1709. These conteuses experimented with various forms of fiction and celebrated women's writing, all the while criticizing the oppression of marriage and the social strictures placed upon women. This collection presents eight fairy tales (most never before translated into English) by the most prominent women authors.
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Celinda, A Tragedy: A Bilingual Edition
Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611), the only female–authored secular tragedy of early modern Italy, is here made available for the first time in a modern edition. Miani's tale of the doomed love of the Lydian princess Celinda for the cross–dressed Persian prince Autilio/Lucinia offers a striking example of the explorative attitude to gender identity that is such a marked characteristic of Italian drama in this period.
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Saints' Lives and Bible Stories for the Stage: A Bilingual Edition
This fresh translation of five plays securely authored by Antonia Pulci—one of the first published women writers in Renaissance Florence—reveals this gifted dramatist at her finest.
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Complete Poems: A Bilingual Edition
This new bilingual edition of Du Guillet's poems includes a richly detailed and up-to-date introduction and a translation that follows the original rhymes—a daunting undertaking performed with accuracy, humor and verve.
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Dramatizing Dido, Circe, and Griselda
One of the most acclaimed French poets from the turn of the eighteenth century and one of the rare women of the time to achieve recognition at court, Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Sainctonge was France's first female librettist. This volume provides the most in-depth biography of her ever published, but also the first appearance of any of her work in English.
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The True Medicine
One of the first printed medical texts to be attributed to a female author, The True Medicine (1587) is radically innovative in its rejection of contemporary medical theory for a more pro-feminist physiology and cosmology.
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Two Women of the Great Schism: The Revelations of Constance de Rabastens by Raymond de Sabanac and Life of the Blessed Ursulina of Parma by Simone Zanacchi
The Great Schism (1378–1417) divided Western Christendom into two groups: those who recognized a pope in Rome and those who recognized one in Avignon. It was a crisis of authority that brought with it spiritual anxiety and political uproar. This volume brings to life the extraordinary spiritual and political engagement of two late medieval women who refused to be passive bystanders as rival papal factions tore Christendom apart.
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Love in the Mirror: A Bilingual Edition
Love in the Mirror tells the unforgettable and path–breaking story of a passionate love affair between two women in early modern Florence.
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Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns
Five nuns set out in the early 1700s from their cloistered convent in Madrid, Spain, to travel halfway around the world to Lima, Peru. The journey lasted three years -- an odyssey not all of them would complete.
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Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture
The aim of this book is to encapsulate the potential that digital technologies pose for Medieval Material Culture, providing examples of leading projects worldwide which are enabling new forms of research in this area. The text aims to provide a broad overview of the tools now used by historians, including text encoding, digitization, and visualization, and juxtaposing this with core concerns from historians investigating particular research questions.
The third volume in the series, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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Electronic Publishing: Politics and Pragmatics
This book brings together a team of academics experienced in this new field to explore the practical aspects of electronic publication and reflect on the politics of the knowledge landscape that is emerging. Their accounts of such practical matters as Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and coding standards form part of a larger consideration of the new knowledge economy and how the humanities disciplines will fare in a world that increasingly trusts its cultural heritage to magnetism and laser optics rather than inks and paper.
The second volume in the series, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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New Technologies and Renaissance Studies
The first volume in the series, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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Gifts in Return: Essays in Honour of Charles Dempsey
This volume brings together new scholarship in Italian art and culture from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries first presented during April and May 2007 at two conferences celebrating Charles Dempsey on his retirement from teaching at The Johns Hopkins University.
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Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence
Peter Howard carefully reconstructs the concept of magnificence by tracing its development through Archbishop Antoninus's texts and his mendicant career in 1420s Florence.
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Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond
The articles in this volume provide an overview of the issues and complexities that informed marriage in the premodern West.
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Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe; Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd
This collection of essays shows the remarkable strides the study of gender has made in the decades since Barbara Todd helped reshape the field through her publications and teaching.
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Savonarola and Savonarolism
Savonarola and Savonarolism retraces the history of the reformer's controversial Florentine period and examines his political, religious, and cultural legacy throughout the sixteenth century in Florence and beyond.
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Through a close reading of rarely studied materials, Sergius Kodera examines the contested position of the body in Renaissance philosophy, showing how abstract metaphysical ideas evolved in tandem with the creation of new metaphors that shaped the understanding of early modern political, cultural, and scientific practices.
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Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain
The idea that masculinity has a history is fairly recent. This collection opens new paths in literary and theatre studies by addressing not only how literary texts represented masculinity but how different representational strategies in such texts produce masculinity.
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Faith & Fantasy in the Renaissance
These essays explore the intersection between religion and the creative forces of the individuals who wrote about sacred matters, practised their religion, or fashioned religious themes in their artwork.
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Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture
Acknowledging new direction in scholarship, this volume seeks to trace the plurality and complexity of memory's cultural work throughout the English and Continental Renaissance.
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Renaissance Medievalisms
The articles in this collection seek to contribute to the ongoing debate on the Renaissance and further our understanding of this brilliant period in European history and culture.
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Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
This collection of fifteen essays examines the literary influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century.
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Christian Magistrate and Territorial Church: Johannes Brenz and the German Reformation
Johannes Brenz affected church life and shaped the Reformation in German-speaking countries well into the 1560s.
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Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi (2nd ed.)
In Florence, in the summer of 1501, a man named Antonio Rinaldeschi was arrested and hanged after throwing horse dung at an outdoor painting of the Virgin Mary. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence unveils a series of newly discovered sources concerning this striking episode.
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The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150-1650
Few scholars have focused on post-pubescent youth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The seventeen essays in this volume seek to redress this imbalance by offering a sampling of the research currently underway in this field and of the various questions and methodologies that could be useful in the study of teenagers in the 13th-17th centuries.
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