The women profiled in these chapters come from diverse cultural, social, economic and spiritual backgrounds: from patrician heads of household to widows, from saints to artistic patrons, each of the women featured in this interdisciplinary study offers us fresh insight and a broader perspective on the position and role of female protagonists in the history of early modern Tuscany. Employing a variety of methodological approaches, and aided by new archival material, this volume examines women’s ordinary and extraordinary experiences through their writings, cultural and religious activities, social and political networks, and commercial endeavors. In so doing, the volume raises insightful questions about the scope of women’s accomplishments and provides new direction for the future study of women’s agency and self-fashioning.

The women profiled in these chapters come from diverse cultural, social, economic and spiritual backgrounds: from patrician heads of household to widows, from saints to artistic patrons, each of the women featured in this interdisciplinary study offers us fresh insight and a broader perspective on the position and role of female protagonists in the history of early modern Tuscany. Employing a variety of methodological approaches, and aided by new archival material, this volume examines women's ordinary and extraordinary experiences through their writings, cultural and religious activities, social and political networks, and commercial endeavors. In so doing, the volume raises insightful questions about the scope of women's accomplishments and provides new direction for the future study of women's agency and self-fashioning.

Imagined Networks in Pre-Modern Italian Literature: Literary Mothers, Literary Sisters presents the untold stories of the literary mothers and sisters in pre-modern Italian literature and the vibrant intellectual networks they forged. The authors argue that these women writers became adoptive references for other authors, often as an alternative to an established canon of textual authority. The proposed concepts of literary motherhood and sisterhood focus on the agency of the writers in choosing a model, rather than adhering to hierarchical structures. The women showcased in this book defied conventions, and are aware of the generative power of their works and regard themselves as literary guiding lights for future authors. They built prolific communities through exchanges, correspondences, debates, oblique conversations, and sometimes subtle allusions that confer authority to each other. The six essays in this book bring to life the figures of Caterina da Siena, Isabella Andreini, Giulia Bigolina, Margherita Costa, Lucrezia Marinella, Arcangela Tarabotti, and the relationship between Gaspara Stampa and Luisa Bergalli, as well as that between Bianca Milesi Mojon and Maria Edgeworth.

This exciting and wide-ranging volume examines the construction and dissemination of the image of female power during the Renaissance. Chapters examine the creation, promotion, and display of the image of women in power, and how the artistic and cultural patronage they developed helped them craft a self-image that greatly contributed to strengthening their power, consolidating their political legitimacy, and promoting their authority. Contributors cover diverse models of sixteenth-century female power: from ruling queens, regents, and governors, to consorts of sovereigns and noblewomen outside the court. The women selected were key political figures and patrons of art in England, France, Castile, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italian city states. The volume engages with crucial and controversial debates regarding the nature and use of portraiture as well as the changing patterns of how portraits were displayed, building a picture of the principal iconographic solutions and representational strategies that artists used. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, and Renaissance studies.

Positing Medici women’s patronage as a network of devotional, entrepreneurial and cultural activities that depended on seeing and being seen, Alice Sanger focuses on the intersection of the visual and the sacred at the Medici court of the later sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries. By examining the religious dimensions of the Medici grand duchesses' art patronage and collecting activities alongside their visually resonant devotional and public acts, this book adds a new dimension to the current scholarship on women’s patronage in early modern Italy.

This book examines the sociocultural networks between the courts of early modern Italy and Europe, focusing on the Florentine Medici court, and the cultural patronage and international gendered networks developed by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere. Adelina Modesti uses Grand Duchess Vittoria as an exemplar of pan-European 'matronage' and proposes a new matrilineal model of patronage in the early modern period, one in which women become not only the mediators but also the architects of public taste and the transmitters of cultural capital. The book will be the first comprehensive monographic study of this important cultural figure. This study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, Renaissance studies and seventeenth-century Italy.

"Sixteen essays by an international group of scholars that examine the role of noble women as patrons of architecture and music in early modern Italy and that explore the behavior of woman art patrons and artists involved in the creation of art and architecture"--

What does the expression pop culture mean today? And how does it contribute to understanding a Country and a cultural group? This collection of essays, diverse in content, approach and perspective, tries to answer these questions. It aims at describing and figuring out the texture of Italian pop culture – as a meaningful juxtaposition between high and low, mass and elite, artistic and consumerist – in relation to the Italian mediascape and cultural context. Through the mosaic of narratives produced by television, music, comics and novels, to name a few, and the mixture of genres and types of cultural products analyzed in every essay, the reader is allowed to further the knowledge of Italian pop culture and to get a glimpse of Italians and ‘Italian-ness’.

Brunelleschi’s basilica of Santo Spirito in Florence was not only a product of creative genius, but also of communal bureaucracy, socio-economic traditions, human and financial resources, factionalism, and rivalry. This complex network of forces behind the monument serves as testimony to the determination and capacity of Renaissance Florentines to actualize the creative ideas of the extraordinary artists and architects who were transforming the profile of the city. Moreover, it reveals that the labor, spirit, and energy of those human beings who were building Renaissance Florence were just as important to its manufacture as the brick, stone and wood used to build it. By investigating those aspects that defined the building tradition of the Renaissance – the architect, the Opera (building committee), the quartiere (neighborhood), the cantiere (worksite and workforce) – we discover that behind a great monument lies a monumental account of collective human achievement.

Mazzotta calls for a new approach: the necessity to study the Renaissance in terms of the ongoing conversation of the arts and sciences."--BOOK JACKET.