Moral Combat

Moral Combat explores dozens of primary texts to ask why women’s militarism became one of the central discourses of sixteenth-century Italy.

Gerry Milligan is an associate professor at the College of Staten Island-CUNY.

"Milligan offers a very detailed, well-documented, and illuminating study on gender and war in Renaissance Italy, and brilliantly illustrates how the proliferation of textual representations of warrior women impacted the culture, society, and moral norms of that age."

Victoria G. Fanti, John Hopkins University:

"Milligan’s rich and dynamic investigation forges new intellectual approaches and offers important new insights to the study of women, gender, and war in the Italian Renaissance."

Konrad Eisenbichler, Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto:

"Moral Combat is a very important piece of scholarship that sheds new light on the early modern Italian imaginary of women in war and thus opens new interpretive venues for early modern Italian literature."

George McClure, Department of History, University of Alabama:

"This is a very rich, layered book in its range of sources, its historical scope, and its synthesis of the considerable secondary literature on the subject. Moral Combat offers a persuasive blend of male and female voices from such sources as Catherine of Siena’s letters, Laura Terracina’s poetic discourse on the Orlando furioso, and Chiara Matraini’s ‘Oration in Praise of War,’ which, as Milligan argues, was probably the first such work written by a woman.