While Professor Rosenthal views herself as a literary historian of early-modern Italy, her research and teaching interests involve several disciplines beyond literature. Up through her second book (The Honest Courtesan, University of Chicago Press, 1998), the central issues raised in her scholarship were what women writers in the past produced in urban settings, and how they succeeded, despite considerable obstacles, in publishing and disseminating their works. Since 1999 her primary interest has shifted to the history and uses of clothing in early-modern Italy. In both her previous and present work she attempts to show the multiple ways in which social and cultural norms shape behavior and activity in the public arena. In The Honest Courtesan, she explored Veronica Franco’s various public appearances in Venice, including her poems, as interrelated examples of her negotiations with the political, ideological and cultural structures of her place and time. In her third book, The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Costume Book 1590/1598 (London: Thames and Hudson, November, 2008), coauthored and co-translated with Ann R. Jones, she explores the ways that clothing in the early modern period had the power to enforce manners and customs. Their book is the first English translation of Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo, the most ambitious example in the sixteenth century of a book of prints illustrating and commenting on the clothing worn by people throughout the world. Vecellio’s nearly 500 page book includes 415 woodcuts of clothing from Europe, Asia, and Africa and twenty-one from the New World.
