Having published a critical edition of Tarabotti’s Epistole familiari e di complimento, Meredith Ray and Lynn Westwater have here produced a definitive English translation of this corpus of 256 letters—clear, accurate, and a delight to read. The introduction sets the cultural and historical context, full identification of all the addressees, and meticulous notes on circumstances surrounding each letter. The correspondence involves an entire “Republic of Letters,” most of her correspondents above her social level—outstanding novelists of her day, a scandalous public figure executed for blasphemy, female aristocrats, the French ambassador whom she begs not to coerce his daughters (whom she had tutored) to enter the convent. To her fellow nuns in the cloister she wrote intimately. Altogether, compelling reading now available to an English-speaking public.

Letizia Panizza
Research Fellow in Renaissance Studies, Royal Holloway College, University of London

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. She argued that the patriarchal structures of family, church and state colluded to impede women’s access to education and basic social and economic freedoms.

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. Her publications, however, invited constant controversy, including frequent charges of plagiary and ceaseless hostility from male writers.

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.

MEREDITH K. RAY is associate professor of Italian at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2009).

LYNN LARA WESTWATER is assistant professor of Italian at The George Washington University. She has published extensively on women’s writing in early modern Venice. 

MEREDITH K. RAY and LYNN LARA WESTWATER are the co-editors of Arcangela Tarabotti: Lettere familiari e di complimento (Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005).

Series: 
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 20

ISBN: 
978-0-7727-2129-7 (online)
978-0-7727-2128-0 (print)

OCUL Access:
The online edition of this title is now available to Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) member institutions on the OCUL Scholars Portal Books platform.

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