Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please

Laura Benedetti is the Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture and Chair of the Italian Department at Georgetown University. She is the author of La sconfitta di Diana. Un percorso per la Gerusalemme Liberata and The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy (winner of the 2008 Flaiano International Prize for Italian Studies).

• Acknowledgments xiIntroduction 1The Other Voice: A Rediscovery and a Revision 1Marinella’s Life and Works 2Esortazioni 17Note on the Translation 34Lucrezia Marinella: Exhortations to Women and to Others if They Please 39Bibliography 205Index 217

"With this translation of Marinella’s Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please we can now read another crucial text from her extensive body of work, one that signals a radical ideological shift from her best known text, The Nobility and Excellence of Women; we can thus enjoy a fuller picture of the author and her opinions. Only three copies of Exhortations have been located in any library, and in the absence of a critical edition this translation will prove to be a point of reference for scholars and students alike. Benedetti’s thorough introduction situates Marinella and her works within early seventeenth-century Venetian culture and the Counter-Reformation more broadly, in a way that is profoundly influenced by philology and is also theoretically sound."