Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy : A Religious and Artistic Renaissance

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. Contents List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Women's Creativity in Religious Context Part I: Women's Religious Expression: Thirteenth to 17 Fifteenth Centuries 2. The Feminine Mind in Medieval Mysticism 3. The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno's Revelations 4. Women and the Production of Religious Literature in the Vernacular, 1300-1500 5. Urban Spaces, Women's Networks, and the Lay Apostolate in the Siena of Catherine Benincasa 6. Chiara Gambacorta of Pisa as Patroness of the Arts Part II: Women's Religious Expression: Sixteenth and 155 Seventeenth Centuries 7. Piety and Patronage: Women and the Early Jesuits 8. Per Speculum in Enigmate: Failed Saints, Artists, and Self-Construction of the Female Body in Early Modern Italy 9. The Commentary on the Rule of Clare of Assisi by Maria Domitilla Galluzzi 10. The Mystic Humanism of Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (1566-1607) 11. Ursula and Catherine: The Marriage of Virgins in the Sixteenth Century Part III: Women's Artistic Expression: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 12. Suor Maria Clemente Ruoti, Playwright and Academician 13. The Making Of Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana's Componimenti Musicali (1623) 14. Four Views of Milanese Nuns' Music Notes on the Contributors Index of Modern Authors General Index 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.