In Poetry and Censorship Jennifer Helm offers insight into motives and strategies of Counter-Reformation censorship of poetry in Italy. Materials of Roman censorial authorities reveal why the control of poetry and of its reception was crucial to Counter-Reformation cultural politics. Censorship of poetry should enable the church to influence human inner life that ---from thought and belief to fantasy and feeling--- was evolving considerably at that time. The control of poetic genres and modes of writing played an important part here. Yet, to what extent censorship could affect poetic creation emerges from a manuscript of the Venetian poet Domenico Venier. The materials suggest the impact of Counter-Reformation censorship on poetry began earlier and was more extensive than has yet been propagated.

Twelve contributors offer new perspectives on the efficacy of the handpress book industry to support the Catholic strategy of the Spanish Low Countries.

Saint Birgitta of Sweden (d. 1373), one of the most famous visionary women of the late Middle Ages, lived in Rome for the last 23 years of her life. Much of her extensive literary work was penned there. Her Celestial Revelations circulated widely from the late 14th century to the 17th century, copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian editions. In the same centuries, an extraordinary number of women writers across the peninsula were publishing their work. What echoes might we find of the foreign widow’s prophetic voice in their texts? This volume offers innovative investigations, written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, of the profound impact of Birgitta of Sweden in Renaissance Italy. Contributors include: Brian Richardson, Jane Tylus, Isabella Gagliardi, Clara Stella, Marco Faini, Jessica Goethals, Anna Wainwright, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Eleonora Carinci, Virginia Cox, Unn Falkeid, and Silvia Nocentini.

This collection of essays engages with a variety of aspects of early modern book culture in the 16th-17th centuries, considered in the Catholic context. The contributions reflect on the engagement of institutions and authorities in the process of book production, bringing to the fore the role of networks in this process; show the book as a tool of resistance to the Protestant Reformation; give insight into the content and design of book collections; showcase textual production in the context of cultural appropriation and shed light on the role of the image in the propagation of Catholicism. Together the sixteen contributions demonstrate the diversity of the Catholic book in its forms and functions, in various social and national contexts.

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular. The thirteen essays of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation present a radical reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume’s contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theater, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period not only merits study but is positively innovative. Contributors include such renowned critics as Virginia Cox and Amadeo Quondam, two of the leading scholars on the Italian Counter-Reformation. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

Bilingual, annotated edition of more than 200 poems by Italian Renaissance women, many of which have never before been published in English. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance is the first modern anthology of verse by Italian women of this period to give a full representation of the richness and diversity of their output. Although familiar authors such as Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Gambara are well represented, half of the fifty-four poets featured are unknown even to many specialists. Especially noteworthy is an extensive selection of verse from the period following 1560, which has received little or no critical attention. This later, strikingly experimental, proto-Baroque tradition of verse is reconstructed here for the first time. Virginia Cox creates both a scholarly teaching resource and a collection of poetry accessible to general readers with no previous knowledge of the Italian poetic tradition. Each poem is presented in its original language, accompanied by a translation and commentary. An introduction traces the history of Italian lyric poetry from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Cox also provides a guide to meter, rhythm, and rhyme, as well as a glossary of rhetorical terms and a biographical dictionary of authors. Organized thematically, this book offers poems about love, religion, and politics; verse addressed to patrons, friends, family, and places; and polemical and correspondence verse. Four languages are represented: Greek, Latin, literary Tuscan of various levels of standardization, and the stylized rustic dialect of pavan. The volume contains more than 200 poems, of which about a quarter have never before been published in a modern edition and more than a third have not previously been available in English translation. "Exhaustive and insightful . . . This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies."—Renaissance Quarterly, reviewing Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650