Gendering the Renaissance

Meredith K. Ray is Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware. Her books include Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, and Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance. Her translations include Machiavelli: Political, Historical, and Literary Writings, co-edited with Mark Jurdjevic and, with Lynn Lara Westwater, Arcangela Tarabotti’s Letters Familiar and Formal and Convent Paradise. Lynn Lara Westwater is a professor of Italian at The George Washington University. Her books include Sarra Copia Sulam: A Salonnière and the Press in Counter-Reformation Venice; with Meredith K. Ray, critical editions of Arcangela Tarabotti’s Letters Familiar and Formal and Convent Paradise; and with Diana Robin, a critical edition of Ippolita Sforza’s writing titled Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples: Letters and Orations.  

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Beyond the Wall: Gender as Nexus
in Renaissance Italy 
Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater

Part I Gendering Genre

1 Widows, Lament, and Ottoman Anxieties in Renaissance Florence
Anna Wainwright

2 Unhappily Ever After: Moderata Fonte’s Fairy Tale
Suzanne Magnanini

3 Amerigo Vespucci and African Amazons: Reinventing Italian
Exploration in Baroque Epic Poetry
Nathalie Hester

Part II Gendering Identities

4 The Princess Nun: The Familiar Letters of Suor Eleonora d’Este
(1515–1575), Daughter of Lucrezia Borgia
Gabriella Zarri (translated by Giuseppe Bruno-Chomin)

5 A Christian Romance for Married Women: Marriage, Female
Spirituality, and the Pursuit of Saintliness in Antonia Pulci’s
Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma
Emanuela Zanotti Carney

6 Maestre Pie Venerini and Filippini: Instituting Public Education 
for Women in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Lazio
Jennifer Haraguchi

Part III Gendering Sanctity

7 The State of Grace in the Libro del Cortegiano
Michael Sherberg

8 Singing Women, Saint Cecilia, and Self-Fashioning
in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Courtney Quaintance

9 “Polemics That Might Seem Spiteful in Heaven”: Female
Spiritual Authority in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paradiso Monacale
Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater

Bibliography
Contributors
Index