Overview

Full Product Details

Author:   Beatrice Righetti
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.453kg
ISBN:  

9781032688855

ISBN 10:   1032688858
Pages:   326
Publication Date:   21 May 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

Contents Foreword by Rocco Coronato Acknowledgments Introduction. “There’s a double tongue; there’s two tongues” Chapter 1 – “A wonderfull thing to hear”: paradoxes and the woman’s question as early modern literary traditions 1.1 – Paradoxical argumentation and its fortune in early modern England and Italy The classical tradition of paradoxical rhetoric Universities, Inns of Court, and Italian humanists The early modern paradox: the mock encomium as an epistemological tool Between Italy, France and England: the case of Ortensio Lando’s Paradossi A paradoxical development: the mock encomium and the argumentum contra opinionem omnium 1.2 – The woman’s question and its paradoxical portrayal of the female sex Literary antecedents and foundational texts of the woman’s question The woman’s question in early modern Italy: Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella The woman’s question in early modern England: the Swetnam controversy 1.3 – The paradox of the talkative woman in early modern Italy and England Italian talkativeness: from the Roman slave to the masks of the commedia dell’arte English talkativeness: folktale shrews and Shakespeare’s Kate The Italian cortigiana and the English shrew: a comparison Chapter 2 – The role of Italian mediators in the English debate on women and paradoxical literary tradition 2.1 – Of women and agency in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Harington’s translation Female infidelity and homosocial relations in Canto IV and Canto XXVIII Translating misogyny: omissions, additions, and alterations 2.2 – Witty women at the court of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano An Italian turned English: Thomas Hoby’s The Book of the Courtier A necessary presence: the ordering role of women in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano and Thomas Hoby’s The Courtier 2.3 – Ercole and Torquato Tasso’s Dell’ammogliarsi, Robert Tofte’s translation, and the “Bishops’ Ban” “Fained battles, fought in iest”: paradoxical misogyny in Tofte’s translation Misogynistic anecdotes and the Queen’s praise in Torquato’s defense Chapter 3 – “So sweet was ne’er so fatal”: the woman’s question and paradoxes in Shakespeare’s shrews 3.1 – The Taming of the Shrew: a shrew-taming narrative in paradoxical terms The pamphlet literature and the competing representations of the shrew Petruchio’s pars destruens: coercion and resistance through paradoxes Petruchio’s pars construens: the case of Kate’s new identity “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart” 3.2 – Something new, something old: the use of paradoxes and the woman’s question in Much Ado About Nothing Idealised partners in Shakespeare’s Messina “Thou thinkest I am in sport”: love talks and logical paradoxes The church scene and the shift in the use of paradoxes “Guarded with fragments” 3.3 – “My lord is not my lord”: paradoxes as figures of the soul in Othello The stage misogynist and the effects of slander “It is their husbands’ faults”: Emilia’s defence of women Iago’s poison: paradoxes as cyphers of tragedy and power imbalances “A word or two before you go” Conclusion – Figures of thought and thematical dispersion Opposite developments: the relationship between the woman’s question and paradoxes The variable of gender in the form and function of paradoxes The shrew’s éndoxa, women writers, and the resolution of the paradox Index

Reviews

Author Information

Beatrice Righetti is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Verona and member of the “Shakespeare’s Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and their European Dissemination” and “Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes” projects. She has published on Renaissance women writers and Shakespearean plays, examining the use of paradoxes, gender‑based violence, and Anglo‑Italian relations in Routledge edited volumes, NJES, and Linguae&.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Countries Available

All regions