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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