Widow City : Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance (The Early Modern Exchange)

Wainwright, Anna

University of Delaware Press（2025/05発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 218 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781644533604
• DDC分類 850.92

Full Description

Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy investigates the ever-evolving role of the widow in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—including Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesca Turina—and radically changed the conversation on public mourning. Engaging with broader intellectual discussions around gender, the history of emotions, the politics of mourning, and the construction of community, Widow City argues that widows served as key models demonstrating to readers not just how to mourn, but how to live well after devastating loss. At the same time, widows were figures of great anxiety: their status as unattached women, and the public performance of their grief, were viewed as very real threats to the stability of the social order. They are thus key to broader intellectual understandings of community and civic life in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Widowhood and the tre corone

1 Dante, Petrarch, and the Ethics of Widowhood
2 Boccaccio's Many Merry Widows

Part II: Context: Model Widows, Holy and Historical

3 Sacred Role Models from Judith and Anna to Birgitta of Sweden
4 Dido, Death, and Exemplarity: Public Widowhood from Petrarch to Vittoria Colonna

Part III: The Widow's Voice

5 Widowed Verse: Christine de Pizan, Vittoria Colonna, and Francesca Turina
6 "Widowhood for its Own Sake": Widows in Two Dialogues of the Counter-Reformation

Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index