The Other Renaissance. Women Writers of Early Modern Italy

Mini Spring Seminar by Laura Benedetti

“Did women have a Renaissance?” Joan Kelly bluntly asked in 1977, only to answer in the negative: “there was no ‘renaissance’ for women, at least not during the Renaissance.” The extraordinary amount of scholarship conducted in the last forty years, however, allows us to provide a more nuanced answer. While women’s status did not improve dramatically during the Renaissance, it is now clear that many factors—from the development of the printing press to the rediscovery of Plato—led to a more positive view of their role in society and of their very nature. One particularly fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is the unprecedented emergence of women writers, a distinctive feature of Italian literature for almost two hundred years, from the late 1400s to the mid-1600s. After introducing the main protagonists of this remarkable period, this mini-seminar focuses on the long life and emblematic parable of Lucrezia Marinella (1571? – 1653), from the bellicose pronouncements of The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men to the disenchanted outlook of her last work, Exhortations to Women and to Others if They Please.

For those who plan to attend the seminar, ,in preparation, please note the following:

Essential Bibliography

Benedetti, Laura, ed. Lucrezia Marinella, Exhortations to Women and to Others if They Please. Toronto: Center for Renaissance and Reformation, 2012.

Cox, Virginia. Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

_____. “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly 3 (1995), 513–81.

Weaver, Elissa, ed.  Arcangela Tarabotti. A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice. Ravenna: Longo, 2006.