Product Description: From Leonie Frieda, critically acclaimed biographer of Catherine de Medici, comes The Deadly Sisterhood: an epic tale of eight women whose lives—marked by fortune and poverty, power and powerlessness—encompass the spectacle, opportunity, and depravity of Italy’s Renaissance...read more

Product Description: Confined by behavioural norms and professional restrictions, women in Renaissance Italy found a welcome escape in an alternative world of play. This book examines the role of games of wit in the social and cultural experience of patrician women from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth century...read more

Product Description: A gifted poet, a women's rights activist, and an expert on moral and natural philosophy, Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) was known throughout Italy as the leading female intellectual of her age. Born into a family of Venetian physicians, she was encouraged to study, and, fortunately, she did not share the fate of many of her female contemporaries, who were forced to join convents or were pressured to marry early...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Offering an in-depth synthesis of recent scholarship in the field, this book presents a reconstruction of the Renaissance in Italy as both a social and a gendered experience. Successive chapters explore this theme in the context of work, law, politics, and notion of the state; and as expressed in Renaissance concepts of honour, representational art, medicine and magic, sexual practices, religious organization and spirituality...read more

Product Description: The Lady Vanishes focuses on the representation of women in two key works of the Italian Renaissance: Baldassarre Castiglione's treatise Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) and Ludovico Ariosto's chivalric romance Orlando Furioso...read more