Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy - Hardcover

by E. Ann Matter (Editor), John Coakley (Editor)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Back Jacket

Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy is a collection of essays on the flowering of women's participation in the religious and artistic life of Italy from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It brings together scholars of religious studies, history, literature, music, fine arts, and philosophy from both Italy and the United States. Several essays document and discuss new discoveries, such as the extraordinary collection of musical compositions written by women in Bologna and Milan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the convent theater of sixteenth-century Tuscany. Other essays, in contrast, offer new interpretations of well-known figures such as Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno, or radical new assessments of the early modern debates over concepts of women's sanctity and the boundaries between holiness and heresy. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley and the contributors to this volume richly demonstrate that women in the late Middle Ages and early modern period were able to carve out creative space, most successfully in the religious sphere. They show that women did indeed speak with a creative voice in this period, and furthermore, that they were not entirely defined and limited by their marginality.

Author Biography

E. Ann Matter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. John Coakley is L. Russell Feakes Memorial Professor of Church History at New Brunswick Theological Seminary.