Widow City
Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance

Anna Wainwright (Author)

9781644533598

Paperback / softback, published 13 May 2025

218 pages, 2 color and 2 B-W images
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.286 kg

"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, University of Oslo

"In Widow City Anna Wainwright analyzes the evolving role of widow from subject to author in late medieval and early modern Italian literature. Wainwright probes the boundaries of gender in the poetics of widowhood as she moves from the tre corone to the radical reframing performed by Italian Renaissance women authors, many widowed, whose efforts led to a boom in women’s writing unmatched elsewhere in Europe. This book does honor to those women, as Wainwright brilliantly illuminates the story of widows and widowhood in Italian letters." - Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University

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.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Widowhood and the tre corone

1 Dante, Petrarch, and the Ethics of Widowhood
2 Boccaccio’
s Many Merry Widows

Part II: Context: Model Widows, Holy and Historical

3 Sacred Role Models from Judith and Anna to Birgitta of Sweden
4 Dido, Death, and Exemplarity: Public Widowhood from Petrarch to Vittoria Colonna

Part III: The Widow’
s Voice

5 Widowed Verse: Christine de Pizan, Vittoria Colonna, and Francesca Turina
6 “
Widowhood for its Own Sake”
: Widows in Two Dialogues of the Counter-Reformation

Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index