A sunburst of light on a 'forest' of women, long darkly clouded by cliches of Counter-Reformation misogyny. With impeccable investigative skills Cox has discovered a New World, recounting its marvels in a panoramic network of more than 100 authors. Her prodigious scholarship brings a paradigm shift to Italian literary history. -- Victoria Kirkham, University of Pennsylvania
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Contexts
1. The Female Writer in Context: Opportunities, Attitudes,
Models
2. Women's Writing and the Counter-Reformation
3. Religious Writing in Post-Tridentine Italy: A Poetics of
Conversion
4. Secular Writing in Post-Tridentine Italy: The New Sensualism and
the Misogynist Turn
Chapter Two: Lyric Verse
1. Women's Lyric Output, 1580–1630
2. Pietosi avetti: Spiritual Lyric and the Female Poet
3. The Dwindling Muse: Female-Authored Secular Lyric in
Post-Tridentine Italy
Chapter Three: Drama
1. Drama for the Doge: Moderata Fonte's Le feste
2. Arcadian Adventures: Women Writers and Pastoral Drama
3. The Challenge of Tragedy: Valeria Miani's Celinda
Chapter Four: Sacred Narrative
1. Women Writers and the New Sacred Narrative
2. Refashioning the Gospels: New Testament Narrative in Moderata
Fonte and Francesca Turina
3. Hagiographic Epic: Lucrezia Marinella's Lives of Saints Columba
and Francis
4. Hagiographic Epic Remade: Marinella's Lives of Mary and Saint
Catherine of Siena
5. A Medicean Sacred Epic: Maddalena Salvetti's David
perseguitato
Chapter Five: Secular Narrative
1. Women Writers and the Literature of Chivalry
2. Ideology and History in Female-Authored Chivalric Epic
3. Gender, Arms, and Love in Female-Authored Chivalric Fiction
4. The Fortunes of Female-Authored Chivalric Fiction
5. Beyond Chivalry: Lucrezia Marinella's Experiments in
Mythological Epic and Pastoral Romance
Chapter Six: Discursive Prose
1. Output and Principal Trends
2. Authorizing Women: The Problem of Docere
3. Preachers in Print: Religious Institutio in Maddalena Campiglia
and Chiara Matraini
4. Proclaiming Women's Worth: Fonte, Marinella, and the Querelle
des femmes
Coda
Appendix: Italian Women Writers Active 1580-1635
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Virginia Cox is a professor of Italian at New York University, author of Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650, also published by Johns Hopkins, and The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo, and coeditor of The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition.
This is a worthy sequel to Cox's last book, full of little-studied literature, some of it completely new. Choice Highly recommended to all, offering new faces and new facts, even a new tone in female authors suffering in an age of misogyny. Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance An important contribution to a field about which too little is now written. -- Kathleen Olive Parergon To list the many literary discoveries of this book would be an impresa difficult even for the many guerriere of the Counter-Reformation, let alone for a reviewer constricted by space... astonishing research. -- Laura Giannetti Sixteenth Century Journal As Cox stresses, the religious literature of this period has, like that of women, been comprehensively neglected for far too long. -- Jane Everson Times Literary Supplement Such a wide-ranging and thoughtful book makes an impressive contribution to what is a lively and developing field, and will surely encourage further research on the complexities of women's writing in these particular decades in Italy and beyond. -- Clare Copeland Journal of Ecclesiastical History Building on her encyclopedic Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 (2008), Virginia Cox's latest monograph, The Prodigious Muse, continues to emphasize the depth and breadth of early modern Italian women's writing... The Prodigious Muse amply sustains its argument that understanding early modern women's writing requires assimilating the full range of authors and genres at play in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries -- Sarah Gwyneth Ross Journal of Modern History After the acclaimed Women's Writing in Italy 1450-1650, in which Virginia Cox offered a crucial critical overview of the phenomenon of Renaissance women writers, she now develops the most critically innovative section of her previous work with this important, intriguing, impressive, beautifully written, and comprehensive new book. The Prodigious Muse -- which implies in its title the variety, ambition, originality, and exceptionality of women's creativity of the period -- is the result of a huge amount of research that opens the way to a new perspective on late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century literature and culture, not only contributing to studies of women but also offering a new view of the history of Counter-Reformation politics and culture. The book is fascinating reading for those who want to learn more on the subject. It proposes a stimulating and well-documented new approach, offering important sources of information to those who work on Counter-Reformation literature and history, as well as on women's writing. -- Eleanora Carinci Catholic Historical Review
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