Widow City

"Widow City is an impressive study of the significance of widowhood in Italian Renaissance literature. Through subtle analyses of canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who constructed a rich poetic vocabulary around widowhood, to the numerous widowed writers such as Vittoria Colonna and Francesca Turina, who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century and drastically changed the conversation on public mourning, Wainwright singles out the evolution of a remarkably powerful discourse. What she convincingly labels as “poetics of widowhood” becomes nothing but a key to a broad intellectual understanding of literature, community, and civic life in early modern Italy."

In Widow City Anna Wainwright analyzes the evolving role of widow from subject to author in late medieval and early modern Italian literature. Wainwright probes the boundaries of gender in the poetics of widowhood as she moves from the tre corone to the radical reframing performed by Italian Renaissance women authors, many widowed, whose efforts led to a boom in women’s writing unmatched elsewhere in Europe. This book does honor to those women, as Wainwright brilliantly illuminates the story of widows and widowhood in Italian letters.