Search results for ""Iter Press""

The first-ever print edition of a play by one of the first women playwrights in England. E. Polwhele (c. 1651-c. 1691) was one of the first women to write for the stage in Restoration London. This book presents the first printed edition of Polwhele’s first play, The Faithful Virgins, which until now has existed only in an unsigned manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. A tragicomedy apparently performed in London by the Duke's Company ca. 1669–1671, The Faithful Virgins is altogether different in tone from Polwhele's later, better-known prose comedy, The Frolicks; or, The Lawyer Cheated (1671). The introduction to this modern-spelling edition of The Faithful Virgins discusses the play in terms of radical changes in English stage practices following the restoration of the monarchy after England’s civil war and situates Polwhele’s play within the social and political life of seventeenth-century London.

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Vittoria Colonna’s 1538 Rime, originally issued without her permission by a small Parma press, was the first of many editions of her poetry published during her lifetime. Born into one of the most powerful families in Rome and connected to many of the great political, religious, and artistic figures of the period, Colonna was uniquely positioned to transform the landscape of women’s writing. The first woman to see her own poems appear in print in a single-author volume, she led the way for hundreds of other women of her time to publish their own works. Comprising more than one hundred and forty sonnets and two canzoni, the Rime expresses Colonna’s anguish over the loss of her husband and her struggle both to preserve his memory and secure her own future. This volume presents the first complete English translation of the 1538 Rime and restores the original Italian texts from the blemished Parma printing and later composite editions, a boon to readers of both languages.

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Key insights into women’s multi-dimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century. Lady Mary Carey (c. 1609–c. 1680) was a noblewoman who examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript that she intended for self-reflection and for sharing with restricted audiences of family and friends, rather than for print publication. Her poetry and prose, composed and revised between 1650 and 1658, were important enough to her inner circle, however, that her autograph manuscript was carefully copied by another hand in 1681. In addition to providing us with key insights into women’s multidimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century in England, Carey’s work teaches us a great deal about a woman’s deepest emotional and spiritual states while confronting the hardships of life—from the fears of childbearing to the sorrows over child loss to the terrors of war.

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A collection of essays on early modern women from a collection of leading figures in the field.Subject/Object and Beyond brings together essays by established and emerging scholars to honor the exceptionally rich contributions and career of scholar Colette H. Winn. It also celebrates fifty years of sustained scholarship on early modern women, along with the foundation of Women’s Studies as a recognized academic discipline in North America. The collection comprises seventeen articles that explore multiple perspectives on early modern women, including their writings, translations, reception, and contributions to various fields, including literature, music, politics, religion, and science.

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The first political treatise written by a woman. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the Body Politic is the first political treatise written by a woman. It not only advises the prince, but nobles, knights, and common people as well. It promotes the ideals of interdependence and social responsibility. Rooted in the mindset of medieval Christendom, The Book of the Body Politic heralds the humanism of the Renaissance, highlighting classical culture and Roman civic virtues. This new edition and translation offers a faithful rendering of Christine de Pizan’s writing, as well as a thorough contextualization of her career as a political writer at the end of the Middle Ages in France. The Book of the Body Politic resounds to this day, urging for the need for probity in public life and the importance of responsibilities and rights.

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The first treatise of its kind to be written in a European vernacular. Around 1460, Michele Savonarola produced the extraordinary Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara, a gynecological, obstetrical, and pediatric treatise composed in the vernacular so that it could be read not only by the learned but also by pregnant and nursing mothers and the midwives and wet nurses who presided over childbirth. Savonarola’s work is not merely a trivial set of instructions, but the work of a learned scholar who drew on, among others, the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, and Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. The first of its kind, Savonarola’s Mother’s Manual helps readers understand both the development of late-medieval and early-modern obstetrics and gynecology, as well as the experiences of women who turn to advice books for help with reproductive issues. This book also provides a key to understanding why and how a new genre of book—the midwifery manual or advice book for pregnant women—arose in sixteenth-century Italy and eventually became a popular genre all over Europe from the early modern period to the present day.

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Two volumes by a seventeenth-century French gentlewoman and teacher, published in English for the first time. According to the few historical records that mention Marguerite Buffet, she lived her entire life in seventeenth-century Paris where she taught French to aristocratic women. Buffet’s vivid example of proper language use in New Observations on the French Language offers a rare glimpse into the life, habits, and culture of seventeenth-century France. She describes common errors in contemporary language use and gives examples of correct expressions for speaking and writing all the while encouraging women to aspire to higher levels of intellectual achievement. In addition, her Praises of Illustrious Learned Women, a catalog of biographies of women who displayed exemplary intellect, wit, and conversation, includes a number of the author’s contemporaries such as Anna Maria van Schurman and Madeleine de Scudéry. Buffet’s collected praises of these women, many of whom were connected to the court of Louis XIV, show her unique position as both a participant in and historian of the intellectual and social world of the French salon. This volume presents Buffet’s work in its near entirety for the first time in English, bringing to light Buffet’s unique contribution to the centuries-long debate concerning the status of women known as the querelle des femmes.

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An engaging account of women’s travels in the early modern period. This book showcases three Frenchwomen who ventured far from home at a time when such traveling was rare. In 1639, Marie de l’Incarnation embarked for New France where she founded the first Ursuline monastery in present-day Canada. In 1750, Madame du Boccage set out at the age of forty on her first “grand tour.” She visited England, the Netherlands, and Italy where she experienced firsthand the intellectual liberty offered there to educated women. As the Reign of Terror gripped France, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin fled to America with her husband and their two young children, where they ran a farm from 1794 to 1796. The writings these women left behind detailing their respective journeys abroad represent significant contributions to early modern travel literature. This book makes available to anglophone readers three texts that are rich in both historical and literary terms.

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These essays explore problems with digital approaches to analog objects and offer digital methods to study networks of production, dissemination, and collection. Further, they reflect on the limitations of those methods and speak to a central truth of digital projects: unlike traditional scholarship, digital scholarship is often the result of collective networks of not only disciplinary scholars but also of library professionals and other technical and professional staff as well as students.

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Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded as the most erudite woman in seventeenth-century Europe. As “the Star of Utrecht,” she was active in a network of learning that included the most renowned scholars of her time. Known for her extensive learning and her defense of the education of women, she was the first woman to sit in on lectures at a university in the Netherlands and to advocate that women be admitted into universities. She was proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Persian, Samaritan, and Ethiopian, as well as several vernacular European languages. This volume presents in translation a remarkable collection of her letters and poems—many of which were previously unpublished—that span almost four decades of her life, from 1631 to 1669.

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Christine de Pizan was born in Italy and moved to the French court of Charles V when she was four years old. She led a life of learning, stimulated by her reading and by her drive to engage with the cultural and political issues of her day. As a young widow she sought to support her family through writing, and she broke new ground by pursuing a life as an author and self-publisher, producing an astonishingly large and varied body of work. Her books, owned and read by some of the most important figures of her day, addressed politics, philosophy, government, ethics, the conduct of war, autobiography and biography, and religious subjects.The God of Love’s Letter (1399), Christine de Pizan’s first defense of women, is arguably her most succinct statement about gender. It also rebukes the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose and anticipates Christine’s City of Ladies. The Tale of the Rose (1402) responds to the growth in chivalric orders for the defense of women by arguing that women, not men, should choose members of the “Order of the Rose.” Both poems are freshly edited here from their earliest manuscripts and each is newly translated into English.

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In the humanities, the field of “social knowledge creation” has helped define how social media platforms and other collaborative spaces have shaped humanistic critique in the twenty-first century. The ability to access and organize information and people has been profoundly liberating in some online contexts, but social media also presents many issues which come to light in the often-overlapping domains of politics, media studies, and disinformation. While these countervailing influences are all around us, the essays collected in this volume represent a humanistic ethics of generosity, compassion, and care. Social knowledge creation refreshingly returns to humanist values, emphasizing that people matter more than networks, facts matter more than opinion, and ideas matter more than influence. As a result, the speed and scale of digital culture has challenged humanists from many disciplines to more clearly define the values of education, collaboration, and new knowledge in pursuit of human justice and equality. In short, online culture has presented a new opportunity to define how and why the humanities matter in the age of social media.

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An introduction to a new early modern woman writer that makes her manuscripts available in print for the first time. This first print edition of two extant manuscripts by Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–1693) introduces a new seventeenth-century woman writer to the growing canon of early modern female authors. The edition provides transcriptions of the manuscripts and Calthorpe’s will, as well as a hefty apparatus that features a comprehensive introduction to Calthorpe, her family, and her work; a glossary of persons who figured in her writing and her life; and two genealogical charts. Calthorpe’s writings (including both prose and verse and ranging from Petrarchan love poems to roman à clef and devotional verse), and the thoughtfully constructed and illustrated volumes in which her texts appear, demonstrate the rich intellectual life of a previously unknown female writer and provide a compelling example of Restoration manuscript production.

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The voluminous correspondence of Maria Salviati de’ Medici. In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in Maria Salviati de’ Medici, specifically, in her role in Medici governance and her relationships with other members of the Medici court. Maria Salviati’s surviving correspondence documents a life spent close to the centers of Medici power in Florence and Rome, giving witness to its failures, resurrection, and eventual triumph. Presented here for the first time in English, this book is a representative sample of Maria’s surviving letters that document her remarkable life through a tumultuous period of Italian Renaissance history. While she earned the exasperation of some, she gained the respect of many more. Maria ended her life as an influential dowager, powerful intercessor for local Tuscans of all strata, and wise elder in Duke Cosimo I’s court. The first critical, analytical, biographical work on Maria Salviati de’ Medici’s life and letter-writing in English.

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Multiple conflicting perspectives come together in this collection to provide a Rashomon-style account of marriage, fraud, and trickery in seventeenth-century England. Mary Carleton was an ordinary woman from Canterbury who entered historical records when she was accused of bigamy. The seven pamphlets in this edition focus on the bigamy trial of Mary Carleton, in which the accused eloquently defends herself and is ultimately acquitted. Written in the early years of the English Restoration, they demonstrate that narratives presenting what “she said” and what “he said” can reveal, forcefully and painfully, how truth can be fragmented in the different arenas of law, love, and politics. Through their disparate accounts of a marriage gone wrong, these pamphlets reinforce the social status quo even while they radically shatter the very foundations that give it heft. In asking readers to question absolutes, they unmask the precarious relationship between words and the world.

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A subversive novel from 1710 that questioned political and aesthetic ideologies in eighteenth-century France. This novel reflects a shift in French values at the turn of the eighteenth century, which saw increased interest in the private lives of the aristocracy and the pre-Enlightenment questioning of political and religious orthodoxies. Novels of fiction and leisure gained popularity, and it was during this time that Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, the Countess de Murat, published her second leisure novel, The Sprites of Kernosy Castle. Combining humor, social satire, and a proto-feminist outlook, Murat crafts a well-constructed plot where the supernatural is debunked. Murat's career was cut short when a series of misdemeanors related to the countess's homosexual tendencies led to her arrest in 1702. Sprites, which was released during a partial reprieve from prison, is the final published work of this independent-minded early feminist author.

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A masterpiece of ethnographic observation on seventeenth-century Spain. While mysteries remain in her biography, Madame d’Aulnoy’s tremendous literary talent is finally being rediscovered. Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, baronne d’Aulnoy (1652–1705) was the first Frenchwoman to write, publicize, and publish the account of her travels into Spain as an independent woman. Considered the authority on Spain for nearly two centuries until historiographers labeled them as disreputable, Travels into Spain can now be appreciated for its ironic gaze on realities concealed from male travelers and Madame d’Aulnoy’s unabashedly female and often playful voice. Her writing casts a unique light on gender relations, the condition of women, cultural biases, national rivalries, and religious superstitions at a critical time in early modern cultural and literary history. The first modern translation of Travels into Spain, this book situates Madame d’Aulnoy’s account in its historical context. Travels into Spain is a masterpiece of ethnographic observation, expressing a woman’s view on gender relations, marriage, religion, fashion, food, bullfights, and the Inquisition.

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A page-turner featuring one of literature’s earliest female protagonists. Written in 1685, Transaction or the Description of the Entire Life of an Orphan by Way of Plaintful Threnodies, often referred to as Orphan Girl, is a valuable, long-lost, seventeenth-century poetic text that documents women’s writing in the early modern period. In this autobiographical account, Anna Stanislawska speaks confessionally and unsparingly about her life, from her infancy to her widowhood and withdrawal from the world. Stanislawska was an incomparable memoirist, revealing the depths of her private life in a manner not to be matched until modern times. One Body with Two Souls Entwined brings together this spirited poetic account with an in-depth introductory and literary commentary by Barry Keane. Together the book offers a remarkable piece of scholarly, translational, and dramaturgical work and puts it in context amid the backdrop of Polish history.

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Forty revealing personal letters written by a key figure from the Italian Renaissance. The most celebrated woman writer of the Italian Renaissance, Vittoria Colonna was known for her elegant poetry and use of the sonnet form to explore pressing religious questions. The selection of Colonna’s letters presented here for the first time in a collected edition was written to and from writers, artists, popes, cardinals, employees, and family members. Together they place Colonna at the center of intersecting epistolary networks as a political actor, theological thinker, literary practitioner, and caring friend. Revealing a historical woman speaking and acting with force in the world, these letters constitute a vital tool for anyone seeking to understand Colonna’s literary works. Newly translated, this work reveals new aspects and faces of the most celebrated woman writer of the Italian Renaissance.

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A collection of texts by a pioneering seventeenth-century French woman author. Comprising texts by Madeleine de Scudéry, including many from her novel Clélie, this volume focuses on the story of Lucretia, the Roman matron whose rape and suicide led to the downfall of the Roman monarchy. Through her work, Scudéry seeks to contrast the enormous cultural contributions of women with their physical vulnerability and to propose an alternative to sexual violation, as envisioned on the Map of the Land of Tender that charts an imaginary land in the novel and outlines a path toward love. In Scudéry’s version of this tale, Lucrece and her beloved, Brutus, follow the path of tender friendship. Scudéry contradicts history’s characterization of Lucrece as craving glory in the form of fame. Indeed, contrary to ancient sources, Lucrece’s glory will be her decision to sacrifice herself secretly for her tender friend.

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This volume presents the first printed edition of a late sixteenth-century poetic miscellany and provides invaluable insight into understanding the literature of the period. Its owner and principal scribe, Humfrey Coningsby, drew on texts circulating in manuscript , predominantly by contemporary writers of the time—including Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer, Arthur Gorges, Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I, the Earl of Oxford, Nicholas Breton, George Peele, and Thomas Watson. Coningsby also added at least two of his own compositions, along with anonymous poems not found in any other manuscripts or printed books. This edition preserves the appearance, spelling, and punctuation of the original manuscript while expanding antiquated contractions to provide an easily readable text. Textual notes appear on the page, and in-depth contextual notes and word glosses are provided in the commentary section. The analyses add to our knowledge of early modern manuscript culture and literary manuscript transmission, and a substantial introduction provides context for the compilation of the anthology.

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In her never-finished My Life’s Travels and Adventures, the eighteenth-century Polish doctor Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa plays a myriad of roles, including child bride, wife, mother, lover, adventuress, slave trader, writer, and home-taught physician. She successfully carved out a viable niche for herself, navigating the multicultural, multiethnic, and varied religious environment of Europe’s eastern periphery. Despite limited expectations for female professionals, she became a highly sought after and well-respected practitioner of the medical arts and rose to the position of court physician to Turkish pashas and Hungarian princes, and even to Sultan Mustafa III. My Life’s Travels and Adventures—part memoir, part autobiography, and part travelogue—provides a view into eighteenth-century social, professional, and gender interactions and weaves a rich narrative replete with vignettes of love, travel, and popular superstitions important to our historical, ethnographic, and religious understanding of the era. This edition brings the entirety of this personal and idiosyncratic memoir to English for the first time.

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The autobiographical narrative of Anne, Lady Halkett. Born in the early 1620s, Anne, Lady Halkett (née Murray) grew up on the fringes of the English court during a period of increasing political tension. From 1644 to 1699, Halkett recorded her personal and political experiences in both England and Scotland in a series of manuscript meditations and an autobiographical narrative called A True Account of My Life. Royalism, romance, and contemporary religious debates are central to Halkett’s vivid portrayal of her life as a single woman, wife, mother, and widow. Collectively, the materials edited here offer the opportunity to explore how Halkett’s meditational practice informed her life writing in the only version of her writings to date available in a fully modernized edition. The forty-four meditations in this volume redefine the importance of Halkett’s contribution to seventeenth-century life writing.

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A collection of inventive writings in letter form from a sixteenth-century star of commedia dell'arte. Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) was a commedia dell’arte diva who toured Italy and France as part of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. Letters is a collection of epistles written by Andreini in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. In her letters, Andreini remade the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreini’s modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love and examines—from surprising perspectives—pertinent issues such as death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes.

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A seventeenth-century play showing the reality of life for women. Valeria Miani’s Amorous Hope is a play of remarkable richness, subtlety, and verve. It presents a scathing exposure of society’s double-standards and it champions women’s dramatic agency by centering on the bleak reality they often faced, a reality that attempted to harm and silence its victims. The play’s salient episodes reflect realities modern women still face today. Miani’s literary achievements attest to her emergence as a cultural protagonist alongside Europe’s most talented women writers, such as Isabella Andreini, and she challenged the premodern notion that a woman’s eloquence is an indication of her sexual promiscuity.

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This volume is the first to bring together the entire extant correspondence of one of the most significant women in early modern Ireland, Elizabeth Butler, first Duchess of Ormonde. She was the wife of James Butler, twelfth Earl and first Duke of Ormonde, who, as Ireland’s only duke and three times its lord lieutenant, was a figure of considerable importance in seventeenth-century Ireland. But far from being overshadowed by her powerful husband, Butler was a person of significant power and influence in her own right. Descended from the tenth Earl of Ormonde, she brought a hefty portion of the Ormonde estate to the marriage. As Countess, Marchioness, then Duchess of Ormonde, as well as three times vicereine and a high-status courtier, she sat at the pinnacle of Irish and English society, unmatched by any other Irish woman of the period in terms of her wealth, social standing, and power. Her surviving correspondence reveals her importance within the Ormonde-Butler family and in the social, cultural, and political life of seventeenth-century Ireland. The volume comprises more than three hundred letters written by Ormonde to her husband and family, agents and servants, and friends and clients. Spanning six decades, these letters are meticulously transcribed, edited, and annotated, and the volume includes a substantial scholarly introduction, family trees, a glossary, and other resources.

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Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars was a well-regarded figure in Parisian salons and esteemed by King Louis XIV, and she traveled internationally to accompany her ambassador husband, playing significant diplomatic roles at the court of Savoy in Turin and at the court of Spain in Madrid. She became the confidante of the queen of Spain, Marie-Louise d’Orléans, the niece of Louis XIV, and, as instructed by the king of France, endeavored to pursue French political interests in Madrid with female members of royalty. This volume includes her surviving letters from Madrid to her friend Madame de Coulanges and an appendix of her letters sent from Paris and Turin. The letters from Spain, written between 1679 and 1681, paint a vivid and engaging picture of the royal court and its new queen.

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In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of Genesis. Erculiani weaves together her understanding of Aristotelian, Platonic, Galenic, and astrological traditions and combines them with her own observations of the world as seen from her apothecary shop in sixteenth-century Padua. This publication brought Erculiani to the attention of the Inquisition, which accused her of heresy, silencing her for centuries. This edition presents the first full English translation of Erculiani’s book and other relevant texts, bringing to light the cultural context and scientific thought of this unique natural philosopher.

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A new edition of all of de Varano's known works, several of which have never before appeared in English. Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524) was a Franciscan nun and the author of profound spiritual writings in both prose and verse. Raised in the princely household of Camerino in north-central Italy, she put her thorough humanist education to use explaining her own spiritual experience and delivering advice to others. Varano composed ecstatic revelations, prayers, poems, hagiography, spiritual direction, and commentary on convent legislation. She drew on a wide variety of sources, including scripture and Church Fathers, plus popular literature and proverbs. Varano was an erudite woman of considerable complexity, defying many of the commonplace images we associate with religious women of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

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Two accounts of the life of Saint Colette of Corbie. Saint Colette of Corbie (1381–1447) was a French reformer of the Franciscan Order and the founder of seventeen convents. Though of humble origin, she attracted the support of powerful patrons and important Church officials. The two biographies translated here were authored by Pierre de Vaux, her confessor and mentor, and Perrine de Baume, a nun who for decades was Colette’s companion and confidant. Both accounts offer fascinating portraits of the saint as a pious ascetic assailed by demons and performing miracles, as well as in her role as skillful administrator and caring mother of her nuns. This is the first English translation of two biographies in Middle French of the most important female figures of the Middle Ages.

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Witty and dynamic lovers’ dialogues for the stage. The actress and author Isabella Andreini won international renown playing the bold, versatile, and intellectual inamorata of the commedia dell’arte. After her death, her husband Francesco Andreini continued publishing her works, among them the thirty-one amorosi contrasti—or lovers’ debates— presented in this volume. Available in English for the first time, Lovers' Debates enables readers to envision the commedia dell’arte through the words of its most revered diva. Lovers flirt boldly, trade bawdy insults, exhibit their learning, and drive each other mad in stage dialogues that showcase Isabella’s skill in composition and drama. Sparkling with wit and bursting with dynamic energy, these brilliant lovers’ dialogues for the stage hold strong appeal not only for specialists in early modern literature and women’s studies, but for enthusiasts, scholars, and practitioners of classic and contemporary theatre.

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