Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Valeria Miani's
Celinda (1611), the only female–authored secular tragedy of early modern Italy, is here made available for the first time in a modern edition. Miani's tale of the doomed love of the Lydian princess Celinda for the cross–dressed Persian prince Autilio/Lucinia offers a striking example of the explorative attitude to gender identity that is such a marked characteristic of Italian drama in this period, both within the erudite and the commedia dell'artetradition. Accompanied by Julia Kisacky's sensitive translation, and with a valuable contextualizing introduction by Valeria Finucci, this edition of Celinda makes an important contribution to our understanding of women's place within Italian literary culture in a period increasingly recognized as exceptional for the range and quality of female-authored writing it produced."
* Virginia Cox, New York University *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ix
Editor’s Introduction
The Other Voice 1
Biography 7
Situating Miani’s Work: A Survey of Early Modern Drama
Penned by Women 14
The Pastoral Play Amorosa Speranza 21
The Tragic Genre 25
Celinda: Structure and Themes 30
The Fortunes of Valeria Miani 49
Note on the Italian Text 51
Note on Transcription 52
Note on the Translation 53
Celinda, A Tragedy: Italian Text with English Translation on Facing Pages 55
Endnotes to the Translation 370
Editors’ Bibliography 391
Index 407
