The Prodigious Muse. Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy by Virginia Cox (review)

After the acclaimed Women’s Writing in Italy 1450–1650 (Baltimore, 2008), in which Virginia Cox offered a crucial critical overview of the phenomenon of Renaissance women writers, she now develops the most critically innovative section of her previous work with this important, intriguing, impressive, beautifully written, and comprehensive new book. The work under review concerns the way in which the Counter-Reformation, traditionally considered repressive for women, affected the literary production of post-Tridentine women. Cox notices an incredible proliferation, originality, and variety of women’s writings produced between 1580 and 1635 and convincingly argues that this occurred thanks to—and not in spite of—Counter-Reformation politics. According to Cox, by promoting women-friendly religious and decorous literature, Counter-Reformation politics encouraged women’s literary activity. Thus, within the general post-Tridentine tendency to convert secular literature into sacred or at least into decorous and acceptable literature, both laywomen and nuns with literary ambition—the principal addressees of this kind of “safe” literature—had more possibilities to publish their works and to experiment with different acceptable literary genres, approaching both sacred and secular subject matter often in very original ways.

In the first chapter, Cox defines the chronological boundaries of her study, analyzes the cultural context, and offers a general survey of women’s writings of the period. She then considers and discusses the works written by women in the period, both printed and in manuscript, dividing them by literary genres and themes treated but taking into account the specificities of individual works and the possible contamination between genres. Cox examines women’s lyric production, which, after the Council of Trent, tended to become mostly sacred, but she offers some interesting secular examples (chapter 2). Drama, formerly a genre almost unexplored by women, became particularly popular in the period among female authors, especially in its pastoral form (chapter 3). Sacred narrative—mainly represented by hagiographies in ottava rima, one of the most popular and underinvestigated genres of the period—offered to several women (such as Lucrezia Marinella) the opportunity to write a number of works and to convert the previous epic-chivalric tradition into something more suitable to the time (chapter 4). Secular narrative (including epic, chivalric romance; pastoral romance; and mythological-allegorical poetry) gave women the opportunity to use and transform traditional genres (chapter 5). Discursive prose (including sacred and secular treatises, dialogues, letters, meditations, discursive religious works, and polemical tracts) is characterized by the intention to instruct the reader (chapter 6).

Through the analysis and the comparison of these variegated texts, the book offers a very interesting picture of female literary production and its reception in the period, and considers the religious and cultural contexts in which they were written and published. The most famous and studied texts such as the pro-feminist works of Moderata Fonte and Marinella are brought together with the understudied religious writings of Marinella and Chiara Matraini as well as the works of little-studied authors such as Maddalena Campiglia, Francesca Turina Bufalina, Margherita Serrocchi, and Valeria Miani. Moreover, an appendix includes a very useful alphabetical list of women writers active in the period, with biographical data, works, and bibliography (if available).

The Prodigious Muse—which implies in its title the variety, ambition, originality, and exceptionality of women’s creativity of the period—is the result of a huge amount of research that opens the way to a new perspective on late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century literature and culture, not only contributing to studies of women but also offering a new view of the history of Counter-Reformation politics and culture.

The book is fascinating reading for those who want to learn more on the subject. It proposes a stimulating and well-documented new approach, offering important sources of information to those who work on Counter-Reformation literature and history, as well as on women’s writing. It also is...