This is not only an original and substantial contribution to the field of Italian Renaissance Literature, but it will be for years to come the indispensable reference work for anyone working on Italian women writers' contribution to the literary and cultural history of the period. -- Laura Giannetti, University of Miami Virginia Cox's Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 is the most substantive study written to date on the relations between Italian humanism and the emergence of the female intellectual. Cox's knowledge of the period is deep, her readings refreshingly independent. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and persuasive, this book sets a new benchmark for scholarship on early modern women's writings. -- Deanna Shemek, University of California, Santa Cruz

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.