Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women

ISBN-13: 9780521550826 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 322 str.

Elissa B. Weaver

Opis

This study shows how theater was an important feature of convent life from the early fifteenth century, probably in all of Catholic Europe and its colonies. For this study, mainly devoted to Tuscany, the author has found an extensive corpus of theatrical works of convent provenance, which argues for the widespread practice of theater in the convents. She traces its chief characteristics--what the nuns' own writings tell us about their literacy and that of their audiences, and how their lives and work intersect with secular society and literary culture.

Recenzje

'Weaver's book restores to an unself-consciously masculinist literary history both a vivid sense of theatrical practice as intrinsic to the community life of monastic women, and a sharply focused understanding of how monastic women playwrights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented their own and laywomen's experiences of a gendered world.' Journal of Early Music History

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Notes on texts and translations; Introduction; 1. Renaissance culture in Italian convents, 1450–1650; 2. The convent theatre tradition; 3. Plays and playwrights: the earliest examples; 4. Spiritual comedies in the convents; 5. From manuscript to print, from the convent to the world; 6. Beyond Tuscany; Conclusion; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.