One of the first pastoral dramas published by an Italian woman, Flori is Maddalena Campiglia's most substantial surviving literary work and one of the earliest known examples of secular dramatic writing by a woman in Europe. Although acclaimed in her day, Campiglia (1553-95) has not benefited from the recent wave of scholarship that has done much to enhance the visibility and reputation of contemporaries such as Isabella Andreini, Moderata Fonte, and Veronica Franco. As this bilingual, first-ever critical edition of Flori illustrates, this neglect is decidedly unwarranted. Flori is a work of...

Gender equality and the responsibility of husbands and fathers: issues that loom large today had currency in Renaissance Venice as well, as evidenced by the publication in 1600 of The Worth of Women by Moderata Fonte.

Moderata Fonte was the pseudonym of Modesta Pozzo (1555-92), a Venetian woman who was something of an anomaly. Neither cloistered in a convent nor as liberated from prevailing codes of decorum as a courtesan might be, Pozzo was a respectable, married mother who produced literature in genres that were commonly considered "masculine"--the chivalric romance and the...

This multi-authored volume, by an authoritative team of international scholars, examines the transmission of Ciceronian rhetoric in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, concentrating on the fortunes, in particular, of the two dominant classical rhetorical textbooks of the time, Cicero's early De inventione, and the contemporary 'pseudo-Ciceronian' Rhetorica ad Herennium. The volume is unprecedented in range and depth as a presentation of the place of classical rhetoric in medieval culture, and will serve to revise views of a period seen until recently as largely indifferent to...

This is a full-length study of the use of the dialogue form in Italy from the early sixteenth century until Galileo. Drawing on a wide range of sources, it examines the characteristics which determined the genre's unrivalled popularity in the period as a vehicle for polemic, debate, technical exposition and comic drama. More than simply an account of the development of an individual literary genre, however, the book is a contribution to the broader social and cultural history of the period. As representations of conversation, miniature dramas of persuasion, the dialogues of the Italian...

First inspired by Vaudes in around 1170, the Waldensians formed a religious dissent which survived into the sixteenth century. Respecting the Gospel to the letter, their rejection of oaths, falsehood, the death penalty, purgatory and the intercession of saints marginalized them in the society of the times. Their survival depended on their will to adapt. Organisation became necessary to withstand the pressures of time and space as their community extended across Europe (France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Bohemia, Poland). Preachers, called "barbes" in the diaspora's Romance wing, embodied...

Lost feminist classic from one of Renaissance Italy's most accomplished female writers