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Department of History

Term 1 Week 8: Women Writers

Seminar Questions

  • What kind of women became authors in this period and what did they write about?
  • How did women writers make use of print as opposed to other forms of publication?

Essential Reading

  • Courtney Quaintance, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice (Toronto, 2015), chap. 5: "Women Writers Between Men".
  • Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), especially Chapter 1: The Making of a Renaissance Publishing Phenomenon.
  • Selections from Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal (Chicago, 1998) (RP).
Further Reading
  • Diana Robin, "Courtesans, Celebrity, and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: Tullia d'Aragona, Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco", in Italian women and the city: essays, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini (Madison, 2003).
  • Margaret Rosenthal, "Veronica Franco's Terze rime: the Venetian Courtesan's Defense", Renaissance Quarterly 42:2 (1989): 227-257
  • Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 (Baltimore, 2008), especially Chapter 3.
  • Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham (eds), Strong voices, weak history: early women writers & canons in England, France & Italy (Ann Arbor, 2005).
  • Diana Robin, Publishing Women. Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago, 2007).
  • Laura Anna Stortoni (ed.), Women poets of the Italian Renaissance: courtly ladies and courtesans, translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New York, 1997).
  • E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (eds), Creative women in medieval and early modern Italy: a religious and artistic renaissance (Philadelphia, 1994).
  • Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women's Writing in Counter Reformation Italy. Baltimore, 2011.
  • Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge, 1992).
  • Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, 2010), esp. chapters 8 and 9.
  • Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992).
  • Letizia Panizza, Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society (Oxford, 2000).

Web Resources