
Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy
Shannon McHugh(Author)
Amsterdam University Press
Published on 7. June 2023
Book
Hardback
296 pages
978-94-6372-027-4 (ISBN)
Description
This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism's capacity for subjective expression and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry's work in the world. These poets' works challenge the traditional boundaries drawn around lyric's utility. They show us how poems could be sites of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of shaping it.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Academic
Illustrations
2 Illustrations, color; 19 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
614 gr
ISBN-13
978-94-6372-027-4 (9789463720274)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Shannon McHugh
Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy
Book
approx. 12/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€68.10
Not yet published

Shannon McHugh
Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€60.49
Available for download

Shannon McHugh
Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€60.49
Available for download
Person
Shannon McHugh is Associate Professor of Italian and French at University of Massachusetts Boston. She is co-translator of Writings on the Sisters of San Luca and Their Miraculous Madonna (Iter Press, 2015) and co-editor of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (University of Delaware Press, 2020) and Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
Content
Introduction
Acknowledgments
PART I
1.The People's Petrarch: Early Modern Italian Readers and the Gender of Celebrity
2.Context: Men and Women in Dialogue in Late-Renaissance Italy
PART II
1.Ventriloquized Lyric
2.Correspondence Lyric
3.Religious Lyric
4.Conjugal Lyric
Afterword
Acknowledgments
PART I
1.The People's Petrarch: Early Modern Italian Readers and the Gender of Celebrity
2.Context: Men and Women in Dialogue in Late-Renaissance Italy
PART II
1.Ventriloquized Lyric
2.Correspondence Lyric
3.Religious Lyric
4.Conjugal Lyric
Afterword