A conversation about graduation education and future trajectories!

The questions regarding the impact of the founding mothers and sisters of Italian language and literature remain often overlooked and unanswered: what are the marks left by women writers on other authors and how did they shape the history of Italian literature from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century? How were women writers referenced as authorities? Can this point to an intentional process of adoption and to an intellectual kinship? While some of these women authors explicitly refer to their models as sisters or mothers, others present themselves as such or describe their writings in terms of
generative power, thus inserting themselves in a web of imagined networks. This talk will focus on the concepts of literary maternity and sisterhood as the process of adopting women writers as models, and will examine two case studies on Caterina da Siena and on Gaspara Stampa and Luisa Bergalli.