Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beyond the Wall: Gender as Nexus
in Renaissance Italy
Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater
Part I Gendering Genre
1 Widows, Lament, and Ottoman Anxieties in Renaissance Florence
Anna Wainwright
2 Unhappily Ever After: Moderata Fonte’s Fairy Tale
Suzanne Magnanini
3 Amerigo Vespucci and African Amazons: Reinventing Italian
Exploration in Baroque Epic Poetry
Nathalie Hester
Part II Gendering Identities
4 The Princess Nun: The Familiar Letters of Suor Eleonora d’Este
(1515–1575), Daughter of Lucrezia Borgia
Gabriella Zarri (translated by Giuseppe Bruno-Chomin)
5 A Christian Romance for Married Women: Marriage, Female
Spirituality, and the Pursuit of Saintliness in Antonia Pulci’s
Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma
Emanuela Zanotti Carney
6 Maestre Pie Venerini and Filippini: Instituting Public Education
for Women in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Lazio
Jennifer Haraguchi
Part III Gendering Sanctity
7 The State of Grace in the Libro del Cortegiano
Michael Sherberg
8 Singing Women, Saint Cecilia, and Self-Fashioning
in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Courtney Quaintance
9 “Polemics That Might Seem Spiteful in Heaven”: Female
Spiritual Authority in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paradiso Monacale
Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater
Bibliography
Contributors
Index