Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy / / Shannon McHugh.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Amsterdam University Press Complete eBook-Package 2022
• VerfasserIn: McHugh, Shannon,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam : : Amsterdam University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World ; 18
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)

This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism’s capacity for subjective expression and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry’s work in the world. These poets’ works challenge the traditional boundaries drawn around lyric’s utility. They show us how poems could be sites of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of shaping it.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1. Literary and Sociohistorical Context -- 1. The People’s Petrarch : Early Modern Italian Readers and the Gender of Celebrity -- 2. Context: Men and Women Writers in Late-Renaissance Italy -- Part 2. Making Gender Through Petrarchism -- 3. Ventriloquized Lyric -- 4. Correspondence Lyric -- 5. Religious Lyric -- 6. Conjugal Lyric -- Afterword -- Volume Bibliography -- Index