Description
This is the first comprehensive study of the remarkably rich tradition of women's writing that flourished in Italy between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Virginia Cox documents this tradition and both explains its character and scope and offers a new hypothesis on the reasons for its emergence and decline. Cox combines fresh scholarship with a revisionist argument that overturns existing historical paradigms for the chronology of early modern Italian women's writing and questions the historiographical commonplace that the tradition was brought to an end by the Counter Reformation. Using a comparative analysis of women's activities as artists, musicians, composers, and actresses, Cox locates women's writing in its broader contexts and considers how gender reflects and reinvents conventional narratives of literary change.
This is not only an original and substantial contribution to the field of Italian Renaissance Literature, but it will be for years to come the indispensable reference work for anyone working on Italian women writers' contribution to the literary and cultural history of the period. -- Laura Giannetti, University of Miami Virginia Cox's Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 is the most substantive study written to date on the relations between Italian humanism and the emergence of the female intellectual. Cox's knowledge of the period is deep, her readings refreshingly independent. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and persuasive, this book sets a new benchmark for scholarship on early modern women's writings. -- Deanna Shemek, University of California, Santa Cruz
About the Author
Virginia Cox is a professor of Italian at New York University and author of The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo and coeditor of The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition. She is also editor and translator of Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, and coeditor and translator of Maddalena Campiglia, Flori, A Pastoral Drama.
Reviews
Exhaustive and insightful... This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies. -- Elissa Weaver Renaissance Quarterly 2009 This is a definitive study and will surely remain so for many years to come. Choice 2009 Virginia Cox has written a magisterial study of the major trends in women's writing in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy... This is indeed an impressive volume and one which deserves to be read and studied. It will change the way we think about women's writing in early modern Italy. -- Stephen Kolsky Modern Language Review 2010
Awards
Winner of PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics 2008 (United States).
Book Information
ISBN 9780801888199
Author Virginia Cox
Format Hardback
Page Count 496
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 816g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 32mm
This is not only an original and substantial contribution to the field of Italian Renaissance Literature, but it will be for years to come the indispensable reference work for anyone working on Italian women writers' contribution to the literary and cultural history of the period. -- Laura Giannetti, University of Miami Virginia Cox's Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 is the most substantive study written to date on the relations between Italian humanism and the emergence of the female intellectual. Cox's knowledge of the period is deep, her readings refreshingly independent. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and persuasive, this book sets a new benchmark for scholarship on early modern women's writings. -- Deanna Shemek, University of California, Santa Cruz
About the Author
Virginia Cox is a professor of Italian at New York University and author of The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo and coeditor of The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition. She is also editor and translator of Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, and coeditor and translator of Maddalena Campiglia, Flori, A Pastoral Drama.
Reviews
Exhaustive and insightful... This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies. -- Elissa Weaver Renaissance Quarterly 2009 This is a definitive study and will surely remain so for many years to come. Choice 2009 Virginia Cox has written a magisterial study of the major trends in women's writing in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy... This is indeed an impressive volume and one which deserves to be read and studied. It will change the way we think about women's writing in early modern Italy. -- Stephen Kolsky Modern Language Review 2010
Awards
Winner of PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics 2008 (United States).
Book Information
ISBN 9780801888199
Author Virginia Cox
Format Hardback
Page Count 496
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 816g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 32mm
