Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy investigates the ever-evolving role of the widow in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—including Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesca Turina—and radically changed the conversation on public mourning. Engaging with broader intellectual discussions around gender, the history of emotions, the politics of mourning, and the construction of community, Widow City argues that widows served as key models demonstrating to readers not just how to mourn, but how to live well after devastating loss. At the same time, widows were figures of great anxiety: their status as unattached women, and the public performance of their grief, were viewed as very real threats to the stability of the social order. They are thus key to broader intellectual understandings of community and civic life in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Widowhood and the tre corone
Chapter One: Dante, Petrarch, and the Ethics of Widowhood
Chapter Two: Boccaccio’s Many Merry Widows
Part II: Context: Model Widows, Holy and Historical
Chapter Three: Sacred Role Models from Judith and Anna to Birgitta of Sweden
Chapter Four: Dido, Death, and Exemplarity: Public Widowhood from Petrarch to Vittoria Colonna
Part III: The Widow’s Voice
Chapter Five: Widowed Verse: Christine de Pizan, Vittoria Colonna, and Francesca Turina
Chapter Six: “Widowhood for its own sake”: Widows in Two Dialogues of the Counter-Reformation
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ANNA WAINWRIGHT is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Core Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is co-editor of the volumes Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (Delaware, 2020, with Shannon McHugh), Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide (2023, with Matthieu Chapman), and The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden: Women, Policy and Reform in Renaissance Italy (2023, with Unn Falkeid).
