Writing gender in women's letter collections of the Italian Renaissance

"Following the enormous success of the publication of Pietro Aretino's first volume of vernacular letters in 1538, dozens of writers throughout Europe rushed to publish their own collections of correspondence, using them as a vehicle for self-presentation, self-promotion, social critique, and religious dissent. Among these letter writers were a number of women, who brought to the genre a wide range of female experience. In this study, Meredith K.^ Ray looks at women's letter collections - including those of the erudite noblewoman Lucrezia Gonzaga (1552), the famed courtesan Veronica Franco (1580), the renowned commedia dell'arte actress Isabella Andreini (1607), and the fiery nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1650) - and how they addressed issues from marriage and motherhood to female virtue and women's social roles, from women's education to the challenges of being a woman writer." "The widespread interest in women's letters during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suggests a deep curiosity among readers about female experience as well as an openness to the genre that belies the cautionary restraint so often advocated in the prescriptive literature aimed at women during the Renaissance period.^ So marked was the audience for women's epistolary texts that even some male writers - grasping the genre's potential as both a commercial and a literary endeavour - published letters under women's names, as in Ortensio Lando's anthology of 'women's' letters (1548), also studied here. Placing these works in literary, cultural, and historical context, this study examines epistolary representations of women in early modern Italy - both authentic (written by women) and impersonated (male-authored) - the dynamics and goals of which have never been fully examined or addressed. It argues that all such letter collections were a studied performance of pervasive ideas about gender as well as genre, a form of self-fashioning that variously reflected, manipulated, and subverted cultural and literary conventions regarding femininity and masculinity."--Jacket.