Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation

Shannon McHugh is Assistant Professor of Italian and French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.Anna Wainwright is Assistant Professor of Classics, Humanities, and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire.

• AcknowledgmentsForeword by Amedeo QuondamIntroductionPart I: FoundationsRe-Thinking Counter-Reformation Literature by Virginia CoxScientific Discovery in Florentine Painting of the Counter-Reformation: Cigoli's Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (1590) and Stigmatizations of St. Francis (1596 and 1602) by Lisa BourlaPart II: GenderThe Armed Maiden of the Sixteenth Century and the Unmaking of Tasso's Clorinda by Gerry MilliganThe Fair Warrior in the City of Florence: Maddalena Salvetti's Poems to Christine of Lorraine by Anna WainwrightDevotion, Desire, and Masculinity in the Spiritual Verse of Angelo Grillo by Shannon McHughPart III: TheaterPerforming Drama: Theater as Spiritual Practice in the Works of Fabio Glissenti by Eugenio Refini"Deggio ferma tener la santa fede": Representing the Priest in Pastoral Drama in Counter-Reformation Italy by Lisa SampsonPlaying Milan: Secular Drama, Sacred Reform, and the Family Andreini by Sarah Gwyneth RossPart IV: Bologna: A City Case StudyBologna, Marian City in the Drawings of Francesco Cavazzoni (1559-1616) by Gabriella ZarriViolence in Early Modern Bologna: A Provisional Appraisal by Monica CalabrittoPart V: Emotion and ExpressionTasso's Poetic Self-Commentary, His Dialogues, and a New Philosophical Syncretism: The Last Phase of the Renaissance Love Treatises by Armando MaggiGirolamo Mei, Early Opera, and Experience by Joseph Perna"Sottoporsi agli occhi del mondo nelle stampe": Sarra Copia Sulam and the Venetian Press by Lynn Lara WestwaterContributorsIndex

"The essays in this collection aim at revisiting and problematizing in an interdisciplinary context the output of the Counter-Reformation period. As the brilliant contribution by Virginia Cox argues, the time has come to reevaluate the output of both men and women of the period, and to make room for the highly forgotten religious production. The other essays in the book maintain that it is time to stop judging the period as one of cultural involution. Instead we should start seeing it as one of creative innovation, a period in which the response to the Church’s desire for purging sensuality and licentiousness fostered the rewriting of various genres into more spiritual venues." - Valeria Finucci, Duke University, author of The Prince's Body: Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine