Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy PDF Download

Author: Alexandra Coller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134780176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Sixteenth-century Italy witnessed the rebirth of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the pastoral mode. Traditionally, we think of comedy and tragedy as remakes? of ancient models, and tragicomedy alone as the invention of the moderns. Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy suggests that all three genres were, in fact, remarkably new, if dramatists’ intriguingly sympathetic portrayals of and sustained investment in women as vibrant and dynamic characters of the early modern stage are taken into account. This study examines the role of rhetoric and gender in early modern Italian drama, in itself and in order to explore its complex interrelationship with the rise of women writers and the role women played in Italian culture and society, while at the same time demonstrating just how closely intertwined history, culture, and dramatic writing are. Author Alexandra Coller focuses on the scripted/erudite plays of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, which, she argues, are indispensable for a balanced view of the history of drama and its place within contemporary literary and women’s studies. As this book reveals, the ascendancy of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the vernacular seems to have been not only inextricably linked to but also dependent on the rise of women as prominent stage characters and, eventually, as authors in their own right.

Author: Alexandra Coller
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134780109
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy -- PART I: Women as Protagonists in Male-Authored Drama: Comedy and tragedy -- 1 Fathers, Daughters, Crossdressing, and Names: Women, Rhetoric, and Education in Commedia Erudita -- Coda: "Margherita Costa's Li buffoni (1641): The First (Extant) Female-Authored Scripted Comedy"--2 Fashioning a Genealogy: The Rhetoric of Friendship and Female Virtue in Italian Renaissance tragedy -- Coda: Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611) among Fin de Siècle Italian Tragedies -- PART II: Women as Authors/Women as Protagonists: Pastoral Tragicomedy -- 3 Women Writers and the Canon: Satyr Scenes and Female-Authored Pastoral Drama -- 4 Isabetta Coreglia's Dori (1634): Writing Pastoral Drama Against the Backdrop of the Male Canon and an Incipient Female-Authored Tradition -- 5 Isabetta Coreglia's Erindo il fido (1650) and Isabella Andreini's Mirtilla (1588): Using a Female-Authored Classic as Paradigm -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index

Author: Virginia Cox
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801888190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
Winner, 2009 Best Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern WomenWinner, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers This is the first comprehensive study of the remarkably rich tradition of women’s writing that flourished in Italy between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Virginia Cox documents this tradition and both explains its character and scope and offers a new hypothesis on the reasons for its emergence and decline. Cox combines fresh scholarship with a revisionist argument that overturns existing historical paradigms for the chronology of early modern Italian women’s writing and questions the historiographical commonplace that the tradition was brought to an end by the Counter Reformation. Using a comparative analysis of women's activities as artists, musicians, composers, and actresses, Cox locates women's writing in its broader contexts and considers how gender reflects and reinvents conventional narratives of literary change.

Author: Adelina Modesti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351778110
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book examines the sociocultural networks between the courts of early modern Italy and Europe, focusing on the Florentine Medici court, and the cultural patronage and international gendered networks developed by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere. Adelina Modesti uses Grand Duchess Vittoria as an exemplar of pan-European 'matronage' and proposes a new matrilineal model of patronage in the early modern period, one in which women become not only the mediators but also the architects of public taste and the transmitters of cultural capital. The book will be the first comprehensive monographic study of this important cultural figure. This study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, Renaissance studies and seventeenth-century Italy.

Author: Virginia Cox
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800084307
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
Leonora Bernardi (1559-1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first ever study of Bernardi’s life, and modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscript. Her writings appear in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, critical essays and contributions by Eric Nicholson, Eugenio Refini and Davide Daolmi. Based on new archival research, the substantial opening section reconstructs Bernardi’s unusually colourful life. Bernardi’s works reveal her connections with some of the most pioneering poets, dramatists and musicians of the day, including her mentor Angelo Grillo and the first opera librettist Ottavio Rinuccini. The second major section presents her pastoral tragicomedy Clorilli, one of the earliest secular dramatic works by a woman. It was apparently performed in the early 1590s at a Medici villa near Florence, before Grandduke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, and his consort Christine of Lorraine, but now exists in an enigmatic Venetian manuscript. The third section presents Bernardi’s secular and religious verse, which engaged with new trends in lyric and poetry for music, and was set by various key composers across Italy.

Author: Virginia Cox
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421400324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
In her award-winning, critically acclaimed Women's Writing in Italy, 1400--1650, Virginia Cox chronicles the history of women writers in early modern Italy -- who 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 women's literary output. A widespread critical notion sees Italian women's writing as a phenomenon specific to the peculiar literary environment of the mid-sixteenth century, and most scholars assume that a reactionary movement such as the Counter-Reformation was unlikely to spur its development. Cox argues otherwise, showing that women's writing flourished in the period following 1560, 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 Fonte's and Marinella's 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 male-authored literature of the period, often surprisingly affirmative in its attitudes toward women, Cox reveals a new and provocative vision of the Italian Counter-Reformation as a period far less uniformly repressive of women than is commonly assumed. Praise for Women's Writing in Italy, 1400--1650 "Exhaustive and insightful... This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies." -- Renaissance Quarterly "This is a definitive study and will surely remain so for many years to come." -- Choice "Virginia Cox has written a magisterial study of the major trends in women's writing in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy... This is indeed an impressive volume and one which deserves to be read and studied. It will change the way we think about women's writing in early modern Italy." -- Modern Language Review

Author: Howard Tzvi Adelman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351168061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book examines the role of women in Jewish family negotiations, using the setting of Italy from the end of the Renaissance to the Baroque. In ghettos at night and under the scrutiny of inquisitions, Jews flourished. Life and learning were enriched by Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, transalpine Europe, west and east, and Catholic neighbors. Rabbinic discourse represented conflicting customs in family formation and dissolution, especially at moments of crisis for women: forced betrothal; physical, mental and financial abuse; polygamy, and abandonment. In this book, case studies illustrate the ambiguity, drama, and danger to which women were exposed, as well as opportunities to make their voices heard and to extricate themselves from situations by forcing a divorce, collecting or seizing assets, and going to Catholic notaries to bequeath their assets outside traditional inheritance, often to other women. Despite intrusion by rabbis, their ability for coercion was limited, and their threats of punishments reflected the rhetoric of weakness rather than realistic options for implementation. The focus of this text is not what the law says, but rather how it enabled individual Jews, especially women, to speak and to act.

Author: Lisa Sampson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351195611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
"Emerging in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, pastoral drama is one of the most characteristic genres of its time. Sampson traces its uneven development into the following century by exploring masterpieces by Tasso and Guarini, and many lesser known works, some by women writers. She examines the treatment of key themes of love, the Golden Age, and Nature and Art against the background of the textual and stage production of the plays. An investigation of critical writings associated with the genre further reveals its significance to the contemporary literary scene, by stimulating 'modernizing' attitudes towards the canon, as well as new enquiries into the function and possibilities of art."

Author: DS Mayfield
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110484668
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Proving fruitful in various applications throughout its two millennia of predominance, the rhetorical téchne appears to have entertained a particularly symbiotic interrelation with drama. With contributions from (among others) a Classicist, historical, linguistic, musicological, operatic, cultural and literary studies perspective, this publication offers interdisciplinary assessments of specific reciprocities between the system of rhetoric and dramatic works: tracing the longue durée of this nexus—highlighting its Ancient foundations, its various Early Modern formations, as well as certain configurations enduring to this day—enables describing shifting degrees of rhetoricity; approaching it from an interdisciplinary viewpoint facilitates focusing on the often sidelined rhetorical phenomena located beyond the textual plane, specifically memoria and actio; tackling this interchange from various viewpoints and with diverse emphases, a long-lasting and highly prolific cross-fertilization between drama and rhetoric is rendered visible. In tendering a balanced panorama of both detailed case studies and descriptive overviews, this volume also points toward terrain yet to be charted in the scholarship to come. The volume was prepared in co-operation with the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet).

Author: Deanna Shemek
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822321675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The issue of a woman's place--and the possibility that she might stray from it--was one of early modern Italy's most persistent social concerns. Deanna Shemek presents the problem of wayward feminine behavior as it was perceived to threaten male identity and social order in the artistic and intellectual climate of the Italian Renaissance. LADIES ERRANT will interest scholars in Italian studies, women's studies, and European culture. 8 photos.