Jeanne de Jussie (1503 61) experienced the Protestant Reformation from within the walls of the Convent of Saint Clare in Geneva. In her impassioned and engaging Short Chronicle, she offers a singular account of the Reformation, reporting not only on the larger clashes between Protestants and Catholics but also on events in her convent devious city councilmen who lied to trusting nuns, lecherous soldiers who tried to kiss them, and iconoclastic intruders who smashed statues and burned paintings. Throughout her tale, Jussie highlights women s roles on both sides of the conflict, from the...

Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labe (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labe played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, "Complete Poetry and Prose" also features the only translations of Labe's sonnets to follow the exacting...

Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, "Zayde" is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel.
"Zayde" unfolds during the long medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; Madame de Lafayette (1634-93) takes the reader on a Mediterranean tour typical of classical and seventeenth-century romances from Catalonia to Cyprus and back again with battles, prophecies, and shipwrecks dotting the crisscrossed paths of the book...

The memoirs of Hortense (1646-1699) and of Marie (1639-1715) Mancini, nieces of the powerful Cardinal Mazarin and members of the court of Louis XIV, represent the earliest examples in France of memoirs published by women under their own names during their lifetimes. Both unhappily married-Marie had also fled the aftermath of her failed affair with the king-the sisters chose to leave their husbands for life on the road, a life quite rare for women of their day.
Through their writings, the Mancinis sought to rehabilitate their reputations and reclaim the right to define their public images...

Chiara Matraini (1515-1604?) was a member of the great flowering of poetic imitators and innovators in the Italian literary heritage begun by Petrarch, cultivated later by the lyric poet Pietro Bembo, and supplanted by the epic poet Torquato Tasso. Though without formal training, Matraini excelled in a number of literary genres popular at the time-poetry, religious meditation, discourse, and dialogue. In her midlife, she published a collection of erotic love poetry, but later in life her work shifted toward a search for spiritual salvation. Near the end of her life, she published a new poetry...

These works by Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni offer an intimate portrait of the women who inhabited the Venetian convent of Corpus Domini, where they shared a religious life bounded physically by the convent wall and organized temporally by the rhythms of work and worship. At the same time, they show how this cloistered community vibrated with news of the great ecclesiastical events of the day, such as the Great Western Schism and the Council of Constance.
While the chronicle recounts the history of the nuns' collective life, the necrology provides highly individualized biographies of...

Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520-87) and Catherine (1542-87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres."" The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in "From Mother and Daughter" are selections from their celebrated oeuvre, suffused with an engaging and...

The first historical heroic epic authored by a woman, "Scanderbeide" recounts the exploits of fifteenth-century Albanian warrior-prince George Scanderbeg and his war of resistance against the Ottoman sultanate. Filled with scenes of intense and suspenseful battles contrasted with romantic episodes, "Scanderbeide" combines the action and fantasy characteristic of the genre with analysis of its characters motivations. In selecting a military campaign as her material and epic poetry as her medium, Margherita Sarrocchi (1560? 1617) not only engages in the masculine subjects of political conflict...

"From meetings and conversation with men, love affairs arise. In the midst of pleasures, banquets, dances, laughter, and self-indulgence, Venus and her son Cupid reign supreme. . . . Poor young girl, if you emerge from these encounters a captive prey How much better it would have been to remain at home or to have broken a leg of the body rather than of the mind " So wrote the sixteenth-century Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives in a famous work dedicated to Henry VIII's daughter, Princess Mary, but intended for a wider audience interested in the education of women.
Praised by Erasmus and...