354 pp / Paperback / March 2014 / ISBN 978-0-7727-2154-9 / $39.95
Edited and translated by Julia L. Hairston
“Hairston has constructed a full personal, cultural and literary biography for d’Aragona, using newly discovered letters, archival material of other kinds, and contemporary theory about gender in women’s writing. Footnotes establish the intricacy of Tullia’s intellectual networks and her courting of intellectuals in rhyme. Hairston includes poems written to d’Aragona, including Girolamo Muzio’s long pastoral, Tirrhenia. She addresses with tact the question of how sexual Tullia’s relationships were with her various interlocutors. At times, as she says, one just can’t know, but that the issue is much less important than the poems themselves. I agree wholeheartedly. This is the editor Tullia has been waiting for: an indefatigable researcher, a creative biographer, and a precise and appreciative literary critic.”
— Ann Rosalind Jones
Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature, Smith College
“The figure of Tullia d’Aragona has long fascinated readers as the prototype of the ‘honest courtesan’, a woman who successfully exploited her physical and intellectual charms to win the adoration and respect of the Italian cultural elite. With Julia Hairston’s richly annotated edition of her collected verse, the product of more than a decade of scholarship, d’Aragona finally comes into focus also as poet. She emerges in this volume as one of the most distinctive protagonists in a key transitional moment in Italian literary history, when the aristocratic tradition of Petrarchist lyric began to be reshaped and democratized by its encounter with print.”
— Virginia Cox
Professor of Italian, New York University
To view an excerpt from the introduction, please click here [PDF]
Early Modern Women’s Journal, 11:1 (Fall, 2016), pp. 236-239. Reviewed by Courtney Quaintance.
Modern Language Review, 3:2 (April, 2016), pp 561. Reviewed by Helena Sanson.
Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 38:4 (2016), pp. 181-183. Reviewed by Ann Crabb.
Renaissance Quarterly 68.1, (Spring 2015), pp. 372-74. Reviewed by Julie Campbell.
Revue des Études Italiennes, (December, 2016). pp. 155-156. Reviewed by Fréderique Dubard de Gaillarbois.
Julia L. Hairston is Academic Director of the University of California, Rome Study Center where she teaches courses in Italian Literature. In addition to articles on Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Alberti, she co-edited The Body in Early Modern Italy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). She is currently preparing the introduction and notes for a translation by John C. McLucas of Tullia d’Aragona’s The Wretch (Il Meschino) that will appear in The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.
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).
354 pp / Paperback / March 2014 / ISBN 978-0-7727-2154-9 / $39.95
