Gender/Genre Trouble. The querelle des femmes in Women’s Writings across Literary Genres (from Vittoria Colonna to Isabella Andreini)

Sandra Carapezza

doi:10.6093/978-88-6887-343-1

Gender/Genre Trouble. The querelle des femmes in Women’s Writings across Literary Genres (from Vittoria Colonna to Isabella Andreini)

Authors

Sandra Carapezza

University of Milan “La Statale”

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5212-3932

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/978-88-6887-343-1

Keywords:

Querelle des femmes, sixteenth century, women, literary genre, , misogyny

Synopsis

Publisher: FedOA - Federico II University Press

Series: La Balestriglia

Pages: 333

Language: Italian

Abstract: This anthology offers a selection of texts from Italian literature on the querelle des femmes. “Of women (des femmes)” here means both ‘about women’ and ‘written by women’.The Italian women writers take a stand in the debate on the sexes, from the first group of women poets to the explicit theoretical arguments of the early 17th century. That is, from the most admired woman poet of the modern age, Vittoria Colonna, to a celebrity of Italian theater such as Isabella Canali Andreini. The path is organized into five literary macro-genres: poems, epic, prose narrative, treatises and epistolography. This choice allows for a better understanding of the dialectic between adherence to models and the specificities of women's writing. In various ways, the fourteen women authors anthologized (Andreini, Bigolina, Colonna, D'Aragona, Forteguerri, Franco, Gambara, Marinelli, Matraini, Moderata Fonte, Morra, Sarrocchi, Stampa, Terracina) not only ideally took up Ariosto's invitation (OF XXXVII 23) to immortalize their value through writing, but they also defended «the worth of women » aware that the supposed inferiority does not stem from nature: «but because she is raised in other pursuits, / for her education she is held in low regard»(Moderata Fonte, Floridoro, IV 4, tr. by Kisacky).

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Author Biography

Sandra Carapezza, University of Milan “La Statale”

Sandra Carapezza teaches Italian literature at the University of Milan. Her main research interests include Dante’s Divine Commedy, the sixteenth-century treatises, dialogue, novella and epic, The Betrothed and nineteenth-century novel. She has worked on Renaissance women writers, gender reception and female characters in Dante's poem (with the monograph Sorelle minori, 2024) and other literary works.