Gendering the Renaissance

DANIEL RICH is University Professor of Public Policy in the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration emeritus at the University of Delaware in Newark. From 2001-2009, Dr. Rich served as University Provost, from 1996-2001, as founding dean of the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy, and from 1991-1996, as dean of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. His publications include thirteen books and edited volumes, and more than 100 articles, monographs, and professional papers.

Gendering the Renaissance Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

EDITED BY MEREDITH K. RAY AND LYNN LARA WESTWATER

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.

304 pp 3 color and 10 b/w images

6.125 x 9.25

978-1-64453-304-8 paper $44.95S

978-1-64453-305-5 cloth $120.00SU

April 2023

Renaissance Studies

Women’s Studies

MEREDITH K. RAY is Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware in Newark. Her books include Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (2016), Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (2015), and Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (2009).

LYNN LARA WESTWATER is Professor of Italian at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her books include Sarra Copia Sulam: A Salonnière and the Press in Counter-Reformation Venice (2020). The Early Modern Exchange

Ordering Customs Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice

KATHRYN TAYLOR

Ordering Customs explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. Venice was at the center of both these developments. The book traces the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic writing that served as the basis for defining religious and cultural difference in new ways. Taylor draws on a trove of unpublished sources—diplomatic correspondence, court records, diaries, and inventories—to show that the study of customs, rituals, and ways of life not only became central in how Venetians sought to apprehend other peoples, but also had a very real impact at the level of policy, shaping how the Venetian state governed minority populations in the city and its empire. In contrast with the familiar image of ethnography as the product of overseas imperial and missionary encounters, this book points to a more complicated set of origins.

KATHRYN TAYLOR is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Taylor specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Italy and the Mediterranean, with a focus on the history of cultural mediation, ethnography, and religious conversion. Their articles have appeared in History of European Ideas, Sixteenth Century Journal, and Journal of Early Modern History

The Early Modern Exchange