Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy (The Early Modern Exchange)

By: Suzanne Magnanini and Courtney Quaintance and Michael Sherberg and Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater and Nathalie Hester and Anna Wainwright and Gabriella Zarri and Emanuela Zanotti Carney and Jennifer Haraguchi

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.