Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Beyond the Wall: Gender as Nexus in Renaissance Italy 1
5. Part I Gendering Genre
6. 1 Widows, Lament, and Ottoman Anxieties in Renaissance Florence 23
7. 2 Unhappily Ever After: Moderata Fonte’s Fairy Tale 45
8. 3 Amerigo Vespucci and African Amazons: Reinventing Italian Exploration in Baroque Epic Poetry 69
9. Part II Gendering Identities
10. 4 The Princess Nun: The Familiar Letters of Suor Eleonora d’Este (1515–1575), Daughter of Lucrezia Borgia 93
11. 5 A Christian Romance for Married Women: Marriage, Female Spirituality, and the Pursuit of Saintliness in Antonia Pulci’s Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma 121
12. 6 Maestre Pie Venerini and Filippini: Instituting Public Education for Women in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Lazio 151
13. Part III Gendering Sanctity
14. 7 The State of Grace in the Libro del Cortegiano 177
15. 8 Singing Women, Saint Cecilia, and Self-Fashioning in Seventeenth-Century Rome 197
16. 9 “Polemics That Might Seem Spiteful in Heaven”: Female Spiritual Authority in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paradiso Monacale 231
17. Bibliography 263
18. Contributors 287
19. Index 291