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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book draws on the twenty years or so of research that resulted in my 2008 book Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Johns Hopkins). In that sense, the acknowledgments for help and inspiration o√ered in that book are equally relevant here. In addition, however, this second book profited from a very intense period of research and writing in 2008 and especially 2009. It is to this more specific and targeted later period of research that the present acknowledgments relate. The principal external institutional support from which I benefited during the period in question was from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and from the Lila Acheson Wallace Publications Fund of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. A grant from the Delmas Foundation funded a research trip to Verona, Venice, and Treviso in October 2009 that produced much valuable material, including one of this book’s foremost ‘‘discoveries ,’’ the manuscript of verse by the Venetian-born poet Lucia Colao discussed in chapter 2, which appears to have escaped any previous critical notice. A grant from the Lila Acheson Wallace Publications Fund helped subsidize the publication of the volume. It gave me particular pleasure to receive this support from Villa I Tatti since it was during my fellowship year at I Tatti in 1996–97 that I made my first acquaintance with many of the works discussed in this study, and first began to think through some of the historical issues that form its conceptual core. The Delmas Foundation was similarly implicated in the genesis of the project, in that it was with the assistance of a travel grant from the Foundation in 1991 that I conducted my first research on Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte, two of the dominant figures of this book. Working in a field such as early modern women’s writing is inevitably a peripatetic activity, given that many of the primary texts under discussion survive in small numbers or occasionally unique copies, which must be sought viii Acknowledgments out in the sole library in which they are found. I was fortunate to be based between Florence and London in 2009 and so had access to those cities’ exceptional library holdings, but even so, my work that year took me to more than twenty libraries and archives in thirteen di√erent cities, in addition to the British Library and Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale. While I am grateful for the help I received in all the libraries in question, a few more particular debts of gratitude need to be mentioned. My research on Lucchesia Sbarra was vastly assisted by Mariarita Sonego, archivist at the Archivio di Stato of Conegliano, whose knowledge of the cultural and publishing history of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Conegliano was vital in directing my investigations. I am also grateful to Emilio Lippi, director of the Biblioteca Comunale of Treviso, for making the manuscript of Colao’s rime available to me at a time when the Rare Book and Manuscript Room in the Library’s Borgo Cavour section was closed, showing a flexibility for which Italian libraries are not always famed. Other libraries and archives in which I encountered exceptional helpfulness from sta√ include the Biblioteca Civica V. Joppi in Udine, the Biblioteca Angelo Mai in Bergamo, and the Archivio di Stato in Verona. In addition to the help I received in libraries I was able to visit in person, I am grateful to Angela Rogges, of the Biblioteca Provinciale Tommaso Stigliani in Matera, for helping procure a copy of Isabella Capece’s rare Consolatione dell’anima and to Marco Mazzotti, of the Biblioteca Comunale Manfrediana in Faenza, for his kindness in sending me a copy of Felicia Rasponi’s Dialogo dell’eccellenza dello stato monacale free of charge; I am also grateful to Alison Lefkovitz, of the University of Chicago Library, and Robert Betteridge, of the National Library of Scotland, for their help in answering bibliographical enquiries. In addition to these institutional debts of gratitude, my thanks are also due to fellow scholars who were kind enough to share with me work not yet available in the public domain at the time I was completing the manuscript of this book. Valeria Finucci and Maria Galli Stampino sent me copies of the page proofs of their editions of, respectively, Valeria Miani’s Celinda and Lucrezia Marinella’s L’Enrico; Laura Lazzari shared with me the page proofs of her monograph on L’Enrico...

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