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Gender and sexuality
 28 other titles

Survey works
 29 other titles

Legenda: Oxford, 2000
£45.00 ($70.00 US)  Paperback  546pp
With 41 illustrations
ISBN: 1-900755-09-2

This impressive collection of essays by British, North American and Italian scholars focuses on women’s contributions to the Italian Renaissance, in their most important historical, artistic, cultural, social, legal, literary and theatrical aspects. Previously unknown documents throw new light on early feminist thought, as well as on the lives of women rulers, artists and nuns. The striking visual material which accompanies these essays helps to recreate the extraordinary milieu in which women operated between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy.

Letizia Panizza studied at Berkeley and the Warburg Institute, and now lectures in the Department of Italian at Royal Holloway College, University of London. She has published extensively on Italian Renaissance topics, notably on humanist thought and on women writers. She contributed to the Cambridge History of Italian Literature (1996) and is co-editor of the History of Women’s Writing in Italy (2000).

With the contributions:

Dilwyn Knox — Civility, courtesy and women in the Italian Renaissance
Evelyn S. Welch — Women as patrons and clients in the courts of Quattrocento Italy
Francine Daenens — Isabella Sforza: beyond the stereotype
Diego Zancani — Writing for women rulers in Quattrocento Italy: Antonio Cornazzano
Gabriella Zarri — Christian good manners: spiritual and monastic rules in the Quattro- and Cinquecento
Victoria Primhak — Benedictine communities in Venetian society: the convent of S. Zaccaria
Kate Lowe — History writing from within the convent in Cinquecento Italy: the nuns’ version
Francesca Medioli — To take or not to take the veil: selected Italian case histories, the Renaissance and after
Ruth Chavasse — The Virgin Mary: consoler, protector and social worker in Quattrocento miracle tales
Marina Graziosi — Women and criminal law: the notion of diminished responsibility in Prospero Farinaccio (1544-1618) and other Renaissance jurists
Christine Meek — Women between the law and social reality in early Renaissance Lucca
Brian Richardson — ‘Amore maritale’: advice on love and marriage in the second half of the Cinquecento
Jane Bridgeman — ‘Pagare le pompe’: why Quattrocento sumptuary laws did not work
Daniela De Bellis — Attacking sumptuary laws in Seicento Venice: Arcangela Tarabotti
Marta Ajmar — Exemplary women in Renaissance Italy: ambivalent models of behaviour?
Paola Tinagli — Womanly virtues in Quattrocento Florentine marriage furnishings
Sara F. Matthews Grieco — Persuasive pictures: didactic prints and the construction of the social identity of women in sixteenth-century Italy
Richard Andrews — Isabella Andreini and others: women on stage in the late Cinquecento
Maggie Günsberg — Gender deceptions: cross-dressing in Italian Renaissance comedy
Rosemary E. Bancroft-Marcus — Attitudes to women in the drama of Venetian Crete
Diana Robin — Humanism and feminism in Laura Cereta’s public letters
Virginia Cox — Seen but not heard: the role of women speakers in Cinquecento literary dialogue
Pamela J. Benson — Transformations of the ‘buona Gualdrada’ legend from Boccaccio to Vasari: a study in the politics of Florentine narrative
Judy Rawson — Marrying for love: society in the Quattrocento novella
Conor Fahy — Women and Italian Cinquecento literary academies
Giovanni Aquilecchia — Aretino’s Sei giornate: literary parody and social reality
Adriana Chemello — The rhetoric of eulogy in Lucrezia Marinella’s La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne
Giovanna Rabitti — Vittoria Colonna as role model for Cinquecento women poets
Nadia Cannata Salamone — Women and the making of the Italian literary canon