Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please

With this translation of Marinella'sExhortations to Women and to Others if They Pleasewe 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 ofExhortationshave 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. -Maria Galli Stampino Associate Professor of French and Italian University of Miami