Search results for ""Author Rinaldina Russell""
The University of Chicago Press Scanderbeide: The Heroic Deeds of George Scanderbeg, King of Epirus
The first historical heroic epic authored by a woman, Scanderbeide recounts the exploits of fifteenth-century Albanian warrior-prince George Scanderbeg and his war of resistance against the Ottoman sultanate. Filled with scenes of intense and suspenseful battles contrasted with romantic episodes, Scanderbeide combines the action and fantasy characteristic of the genre with analysis of its characters’ motivations. In selecting a military campaign as her material and epic poetry as her medium, Margherita Sarrocchi (1560?–1617) not only engages in the masculine subjects of political conflict and warfare but also tackles a genre that was, until that point, the sole purview of men. First published posthumously in 1623, Scanderbeide reemerges here in an adroit English prose translation that maintains the suspense of the original text and gives ample context to its rich cultural implications.
£32.41
The University of Chicago Press Dialogue on the Infinity of Love
First published in Venice in 1547, this work casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love. Tullia d'Aragona argued that the only moral form of love between a woman and a man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she sought to challenge the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemed all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, the book asserts, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honourable love must be based on this real nature. Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men.
£21.79
