Product Description: Raised by her aunt and uncle amidst the rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside, young orphan Virginia Tacci has always harbored a deep love for horses―though she knows she may never have the chance to ride. As a shepherdess in sixteenth-century Italy, Virginia’s possibilities are doubly limited by her peasant class and her gender...read more

When the young English poet John Milton meets Amaryllis, the shepherdess in Virgil, on a crowded London street, she takes him to her dwelling, an odd place that is hung with dripping animal skins and shared with a castrated expert on plague remedies.