Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina, (eds. and trans.) Isabella Andreini, "Letters" (Iter Press, 2023)

New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

Isabella Andreini, Letters, ed. and trans. Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Iter Press of the University of Toronto, 2023.

Winner of the Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition (2024) from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Welcome! My guest is Professor Paola Da Santo, Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia, who has some fascinating things to say about Isabella Andreini (1562–1604), an actress, poet, and playwright renowned for her literary and theatrical skill.

Acclaimed as "la divina Isabella," Andreini toured Italy and France as part of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. Letters (Iter Press, 2023) is a collection of epistles she wrote written in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. Andreini remade the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreini’s modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love and examines—from surprising perspectives—pertinent issues such as death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes.

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