Overview
Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy investigates the ever-evolving role of the widow in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—including Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesca Turina—and radically changed the conversation on public mourning. Engaging with broader intellectual discussions around gender, the history of emotions, the politics of mourning, and the construction of community, Widow City argues that widows served as key models demonstrating to readers not just how to mourn, but how to live well after devastating loss. At the same time, widows were figures of great anxiety: their status as unattached women, and the public performance of their grief, were viewed as very real threats to the stability of the social order. They are thus key to broader intellectual understandings of community and civic life in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Full Product Details
Author: Anna Wainwright
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Imprint: University of Delaware Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9781644533604
ISBN 10: 164453360
Pages: 218
Publication Date: 13 May 2025
Recommended Age: From 18 to 99 years
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print 
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Widowhood and the tre corone Chapter One: Dante, Petrarch, and the Ethics of Widowhood Chapter Two: Boccaccio’s Many Merry Widows Part II: Context: Model Widows, Holy and Historical Chapter Three: Sacred Role Models from Judith and Anna to Birgitta of Sweden Chapter Four: Dido, Death, and Exemplarity: Public Widowhood from Petrarch to Vittoria Colonna Part III: The Widow’s Voice Chapter Five: Widowed Verse: Christine de Pizan, Vittoria Colonna, and Francesca Turina Chapter Six: “Widowhood for its own sake”: Widows in Two Dialogues of the Counter-Reformation Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index
Reviews
""Widow City is an impressive study of the significance of widowhood in Italian Renaissance literature. Through subtle analyses of canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who constructed a rich poetic vocabulary around widowhood, to the numerous widowed writers such as Vittoria Colonna and Francesca Turina, who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century and drastically changed the conversation on public mourning, Wainwright singles out the evolution of a remarkably powerful discourse. What she convincingly labels as ""poetics of widowhood"" becomes nothing but a key to a broad intellectual understanding of literature, community, and civic life in early modern Italy.""--Unn Falkeid, The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena (2017)
Author Information
ANNA WAINWRIGHT is an associate professor of Italian studies and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is coeditor of the volumes Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (Delaware, 2020, with Shannon McHugh), Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide (2023, with Matthieu Chapman), and The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden: Women, Politics and Reform in Renaissance Italy (2023, with Unn Falkeid).
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