Widow City

Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance

Anna Wainwright (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

218 Seiten

2025
University of Delaware Press (Verlag)
978-1-64453-360-4 (ISBN)

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Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy investigates the evolving role of the widow in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to women poets including Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, as a key model demonstrating to readers how to mourn and how to live well after devastating loss.

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.

Anna Wainwright is an associate professor of Italian studies and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is coeditor of the volumes Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (Delaware, 2020, with Shannon McHugh), Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide (2023, with Matthieu Chapman), and The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden: Women, Politics and Reform in Renaissance Italy (2023, with Unn Falkeid).

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

Erscheinungsdatum	14.05.2025
Reihe/Serie	The Early Modern Exchange
Zusatzinfo	2 color and 2 B-W images
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Anthologien
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-64453-360-X / 164453360X
ISBN-13	978-1-64453-360-4 / 9781644533604
Zustand	Neuware