For nearly a decade at the height of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, the Jewish poet and polemicist Sarra Copia Sulam (ca. 1592-1641) hosted a literary salon at her house in the Venetian ghetto, providing one of the most public and enduring forums for Jewish-Christian interaction in early modern Venice. Though Copia Sulam built a powerful intellectual network, published a popular work on the immortality of the soul, and gained fame for her erudition, her literary career foundered under the weight of slanderous charges against her sexual, professional, and religious integrity.

This first biography of Copia Sulam examines the explosive relationship between gender, religion, and the press in seventeenth-century Venice through a study of the salonniere's literary career. The backdrop to this inquiry is Venice's tumultuous religious, cultural, and political climate and the competitive world of its presses, where men and women, Christians and Jews, alternately collaborated and clashed as they sought to gain a foothold in Europe's most prestigious publishing capital.

About the Author
Lynn Lara Westwater is an associate professor of Italian in the Department of Romance, German and Slavic Languages and Literatures at The George Washington University.

Reviews

"This is an important contribution to early modern studies that sheds light on a Jewish woman actively engaged in the literary and publishing world of seventeenth-century Venice."

-- Erith Jaffe-Berg, University of California, Riverside * Early Modern Women *


Awards
Commended for 2021 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Book Prize in Renaissance Venetian Studies The Renaissance Society of America 2021 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781487505837
Author Lynn Lara Westwater
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint University of Toronto Press
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Weight(grams) 710g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 165mm * 32mm