Women's writing in Italy, 1400-1650

Content: Origins (1400-1500). The \"learned lady\" in Quattrocento Italy: an emerging cultural type 
 The \"learned lady\" in theory: models of gender conduct and their contexts 
 The \"learned lady\" as signifier in humanistic culture 
 Renaissance particularism and the \"learned lady\" --
Translation (1490-1550). Women, the courts, and the vernacular at the turn of the early sixteenth century 
 Sappho surfaces: the first female vernacular poets 
 Bembo, Petrarchism, and the reform of Italian literature 
 \"So dear to Apollo\": Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna after 1530 
 Founding mothers, first ladies: Gambara and Colonna as models and icons --
Diffusion (1540-1560). Manuscript and print in the \"age of the Council of Trent\" 
 Virtù rewarded: the contexts of women\'s writing 
 Women writers and their uses: case studies 
 Literary trajectories: continuity and change 
 Women writers and the paradox of the pedestal. Intermezzo (1560-1580) --
Affirmation (1580-1620). Women\'s writing in the age of the Counter-Reformation 
 Chivalry undimmed: the contexts of women\'s writing 
 A literature of their own? Writing, ownership, assertion 
 The twilight of gallantry --
Backlash (1590-1650). The rebirth of misogyny in Seicento Italy 
 Misogyny and the woman writer: the redomestication of feminine virtù 
 Women\'s writing in Seicento Italy: decline and fall --
Coda --
Appendix A: Published writings by Italian women, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries --
Appendix B: Dedications of published works by women.