359 pp / Paperback / ISBN 978-0-7727-2136-5 / $45.95
Edited and Translated by Lisa Sampson & Barbara Burgess-Van Aken
“Partenia is unusual within the spectrum of Italian pastoral drama for its moral austerity and its spiritual overtones; a strange, haunting work, it well exemplifies the new directions Italian literature was taking at this time under the influence of Counter-Reformation religious fervor, and provides a fascinating counterpoint to the better-known pastorals of Isbella Andreini, Maddalena Campiglia, and Mary Wroth. Lisa Sampson and Barbara Burgess-Van Aken’s superb introduction, the fruit of intensive archival research, expertly locates Partenia within the traditions of pastoral drama and late-Renaissance Italian literature as a whole.”
– Virginia Cox
Professor, Department of Italian Studies, New York University
The Other Voice’s edition of Barbara Torelli’s pastoral drama Partenia (ca. 1586) is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of early modern Italian literature and women’s writing. This is the first ever print edition of the earliest secular play by an Italian woman, acclaimed at the time of its composition – the drama theorist Angelo Ingegneri placed it on par with Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Pastor fido – but long forgotten, to the extent that it was believed lost until the early twentieth century, when the first manuscript of it surfaced in Cremona.
To view an excerpt of this work, please click here (PDF).
Introduction
Partenia, a Pastoral Play
Appendix A: Paratextual verse for Barbara Torelli Benedetti, Partenia (MS Cremona, Biblioteca Statale, AA. 1. 33)
Appendix B: Other writings by Barbara Torelli Benedetti
Bibliography; Index
Lisa Sampson is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Reading (UK), the author of Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre (2006) and co-editor (with Virginia Cox) of Maddalena Campiglia’s Flori, a Pastoral Play (OV Chicago series, 2004).
Barbara Burgess-Van Aken is a SAGES Fellow in the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where she completed her PhD in 2007: “Partenia: A Bilingual Critical Edition.”
The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies no longer sells or distributes books in “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series.” Starting July 2015, volumes can be purchased by individuals and institutions from the Chicago Distribution Center. Contact CDC by email (orders@press.uchicago.edu), by fax (800-621-8476 or 773-702-7212), or by phone (800-621-2736 or 773-702-7000).
359 pp / Paperback / ISBN 978-0-7727-2136-5 / $45.95 (Price includes applicable taxes)
