Get Hold Of The Prodigious Muse: Women's Writing In Counter-Reformation Italy Imagined By Virginia Cox Available As Readable Copy

this book underlined it heavily, and it is going to be one of the major sources for my dissertation on women Latin poets of theth century! In her awardwinning, critically acclaimed Womens Writing in Italy,, Virginia Cox chronicles the history of women writers in early modern Italywho they were, what they wrote, where they fit in society, and how their status changed during this period.
In this book, Cox examines more closely one particular moment in this history, in many ways the most remarkable for the richness and range of womens literary output.


A widespread critical notion sees Italian womens writing as

a phenomenon specific to the peculiar literary environment of the midsixteenth century, and most scholars assume that a reactionary movement such as the CounterReformation was unlikely to spur its development.
Cox argues otherwise, showing that womens writing flourished in the period following, reaching beyond the customary "feminine" genres of lyric, poetry, and letters to experiment with pastoral drama, chivalric romance, tragedy, and epic.
There were few widely practiced genres in this eclectic phase of Italian literature to which women did not turn their hand,

Organized by genre, and including translations of all excerpts from primary texts, this comprehensive and engaging volume provides students and scholars with an invaluable resource as interest in these exceptional writers grows.
In addition to familiar, secular works by authors such as Isabella Andreini, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella, Cox also discusses important writings that have largely escaped critical interest, including Fontes and Marinellas vivid religious narratives, an unfinished Amazonian epic by Maddalena Salvetti, and the startlingly fresh autobiographical lyrics of Francesca Turina Bufalini.


Juxtaposing religious and secular writings by women and tracing their relationship to the maleauthored literature of the period, often surprisingly affirmative in its attitudes toward women, Cox reveals a new and provocative vision of the Italian CounterReformation as a period far less uniformly repressive of women than is commonly assumed.
Virginia Cox was born in England and educated at Cambridge University, where she received her PhD in Italian literature in, She taught at the universities of Edinburgh, UCL, and Cambridge before moving to the Department of Italian Studies at New York University in, Her fields of specialism are Italian Renaissance literature and intellectual history and the history of rhetoric, She lives in New York and London, .