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Between c.1350 and c.1650, Italian urban societies saw much debate on women's nature, roles, education, and behavior. Using a broad range of material, most newly translated, this book illuminates the ideals and realities informing the lives of women within the context of civic and courtly culture in Renaissance Italy. The text is divided into three sections: contemporary views on the nature of women, and ethical and aesthetic ideals seen as suitable to them; life cycles from birth to death, punctuated by the rites of passage of betrothal, marriage and widowhood; women's roles in the convent, the court, the workplace, and in cultural life.
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.
"For the common reader as well as the professional one, Victoria de Grazia opens doors and sheds new light on a fascinating subject."—Mary Gordon, author of The Other Side
"Dramatic, heartbreaking and sweeping in scope." —Wall Street Journal The acclaimed author of A Train in Winter returns with the "moving finale" (The Economist) of her Resistance Quartet—the powerful and inspiring true story of the women of the partisan resistance who fought against Italy’s fascist regime during World War II. In the late summer of 1943, when Italy broke with the Germans and joined the Allies after suffering catastrophic military losses, an Italian Resistance was born. Four young Piedmontese women—Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca—living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made this partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women—like this brave quartet—who swelled its ranks. The bloody civil war that ensued pitted neighbor against neighbor, and revealed the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together into a coherent fighting force. But the death rattle of Mussolini’s two decades of Fascist rule—with its corruption, greed, and anti-Semitism—was unrelentingly violent and brutal. Drawing on a rich cache of previously untranslated sources, prize-winning historian Caroline Moorehead illuminates the experiences of Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca to tell the little-known story of the women of the Italian partisan movement fighting for freedom against fascism in all its forms, while Europe collapsed in smoldering ruins around them.
Studies of the city, and of women's experiences of the city, have focused primarily on modern times, especially as modernism was defined in large part by urban life. Italy, however, has a long history of urban-centered culture, and women have been a vocal part of that culture since the Renaissance. This volume, therefore, looks at the art and literature of both earlier and more modern periods to investigate the meanings of the city for Italian women, the intensely gendered meanings (for both sexes) of those city spaces that excluded women, and the conditions that permitted a limited permeability of gendered boundaries. Two aspects to the combination of "women" and "city" are salient to these investigations. One involves their metaphorical relationship. Urbs, citta, ville -- the words for city tend to be grammatically feminine, and a long tradition of representation associates the city. with a woman. Women, especially writers, could exploit, modify, or resist the prevailing uses of such metaphors. The second aspect of connection involves social realities. What was or is the relation of the (female) city with the real women who inhabit it? What kind of site has it provided for women seeking a satisfying life for themselves? How has art and literature, by men and by women, represented the relationship of female persons or characters to urban spaces?
The book examines the experiences of Black women in Italy from the 1970s to the 1990s. Although Italy is still perceived as a recent immigration country, the book demonstrates how Black women were among the first groups of new migrants to the country. Black women migrating to Italy were employed almost exclusively as live-in domestic workers and detailed attention is paid to the history and political organization of this sector. Unlike much published work in Italian, this book adopts an integrated form of analysis where gender, ethnicity and class are seen to be interconnected constructs. The book also situates Black women within the framework of the national constituency of gender. This approach challenges the ideology surrounding the Italian family and demonstrates that while live-in domestic work created specific forms of social marginality for Black women, it paradoxically allowed Italian women to express their new social identities within and outside the family. The book concludes that Italian women have largely failed in their attempts to transform the division of labour within the home and that the decision to employ other (migrant) women to fulfill household tasks is a trend which sits uneasily within the framework of an inclusive feminist project for women.
The first comprehensive guide to women's promotion and use of textual culture, in manuscript and print, in Renaissance Italy.
This volume brings together specialists from a variety of disciplines to develop a deeper understanding of the social, political, and cultural history of women in Italy in the years 1946-1960. Despite being a time when women and the family were at the center of national debates, and when society changed considerably, the fifteen years following the Second World War have tended to be overlooked or subsumed into discussions of other periods. By focusing on the experience of women and by broadening the frame of reference to include subjects and sources often ignored, or only alluded to, by traditional analyses, the essays in this volume break new ground and provide a corrective to previous interpretive models.
Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, women assumed public roles of unprecedented prominence in Italian religious culture. Legally subordinated, politically excluded, socially limited, and ideologically disdained, women's active participation in religious life offered them access to power in all its forms. These essays explore the involvement of women in religious life throughout northern and central Italy and trace the evolution of communities of pious women as they tried to achieve their devotional goals despite the strictures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contributors examine relations between holy women, their devout followers, and society at large. Including contributions from leading figures in a new generation of Italian historians of religion, this book shows how women were able to carve out broad areas of influence by carefully exploiting the institutional church and by astutely manipulating religious percepts.