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This book examines a pivotal moment in the history of science and
women's place in it. Meredith Ray offers the first in-depth study
and complete English translation of the fascinating correspondence
between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617), a natural philosopher and
author of the epic poem, Scanderbeide (1623), and famed astronomer,
Galileo Galilei. Their correspondence, undertaken soon after the
publication of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, reveals how Sarrocchi
approached Galileo for his help revising her epic poem, offering,
in return, her endorsement of his recent telescopic discoveries.
Situated against the vibrant and often contentious backdrop of
early modern intellectual and academic culture, their letters
illustrate, in miniature, that the Scientific Revolution was, in
fact, the product of a long evolution with roots in the deep
connections between literary and scientific exchanges.
This book examines a pivotal moment in the history of science and
women's place in it. Meredith Ray offers the first in-depth study
and complete English translation of the fascinating correspondence
between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617), a natural philosopher and
author of the epic poem, Scanderbeide (1623), and famed astronomer,
Galileo Galilei. Their correspondence, undertaken soon after the
publication of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, reveals how Sarrocchi
approached Galileo for his help revising her epic poem, offering,
in return, her endorsement of his recent telescopic discoveries.
Situated against the vibrant and often contentious backdrop of
early modern intellectual and academic culture, their letters
illustrate, in miniature, that the Scientific Revolution was, in
fact, the product of a long evolution with roots in the deep
connections between literary and scientific exchanges.
Throughout his life, Niccolo Machiavelli was deeply invested in
Florentine culture and politics. More than any other priority, his
overriding central concerns, informed by his understanding of his
city's history, were the present and future strength and
independence of Florence. This volume highlights and explores this
underappreciated aspect of Machiavelli's intellectual
preoccupations. Transcending a narrow emphasis on his two most
famous works of political thought, The Prince and the Discourses on
Livy, Mark Jurdjevic and Meredith K. Ray instead present a wide
sample of the many genres in which he wrote-not only political
theory but also letters, poetry, plays, comedy, and, most
substantially, history. Throughout his writing, the city of
Florence was at the same time his principal subject and his
principal context. Florentine culture and history structured his
mental landscape, determined his idiom, underpinned his politics,
and endowed everything he wrote with urgency and purpose. The
Florentine particulars in Machiavelli's writing reveal aspects of
his psyche, politics, and life that are little known outside of
specialist circles-particularly his optimism and idealism, his
warmth and humor, his capacity for affection and loyalty, and his
stubborn, enduring republicanism. Machiavelli: Political,
Historical, and Literary Writings has been carefully curated to
reveal those crucial but lesser known aspects of Machiavelli's
thought and to show how his major arguments evolved within a
dynamic Florentine setting.
The era of the Scientific Revolution has long been epitomized by
Galileo. Yet many women were at its vanguard, deeply invested in
empirical culture. They experimented with medicine and practical
alchemy at home, at court, and through collaborative networks of
practitioners. In academies, salons, and correspondence, they
debated cosmological discoveries; in their literary production,
they used their knowledge of natural philosophy to argue for their
intellectual equality to men. Meredith Ray restores the work of
these women to our understanding of early modern scientific
culture. Her study begins with Caterina Sforza's alchemical
recipes; examines the sixteenth-century vogue for "books of
secrets"; and looks at narratives of science in works by Moderata
Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella. It concludes with Camilla Erculiani's
letters on natural philosophy and, finally, Margherita Sarrocchi's
defense of Galileo's "Medicean" stars. Combining literary and
cultural analysis, Daughters of Alchemy contributes to the emerging
scholarship on the variegated nature of scientific practice in the
early modern era. Drawing on a range of under-studied material
including new analyses of the Sarrocchi-Galileo correspondence and
a previously unavailable manuscript of Sforza's Experimenti, Ray's
book rethinks early modern science, properly reintroducing the
integral and essential work of women.
The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to
rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social
spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of
established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry.
Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have
often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind
us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what
has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern
Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of
interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and
sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian
literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their
pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies
and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future
directions in these fields.
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Convent Paradise (Paperback)
Arcangela Tarabotti, Meredith K Ray, Lynn Lara Westwater
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R1,510
Discovery Miles 15 100
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The radical Venetian writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652),
compelled against her will to become a nun, is well known for her
scathing attacks on patriarchal institutions for forcing women into
convents. Convent Paradise (1643), Tarabotti's first published
work, instead invites the reader into the cloister to experience
not only the trials of enclosure, but also its spiritual joys. In
stark contrast to her other works, Convent Paradise aims to
celebrate the religious culture that colored every aspect of
Tarabotti's experience as a seventeenth-century Venetian and a nun.
At the same time, this nuanced exploration of monastic life conveys
a markedly feminist spirituality. Tarabotti's meditative portrait
of the convent enriches our understanding of her own life and
writing, while also providing a window into a spiritual destiny
shared by thousands of early modern women. The Other Voice in Early
Modern Europe - The Toronto Series volume 73
The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to
rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social
spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of
established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry.
Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have
often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind
us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what
has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern
Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of
interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and
sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian
literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their
pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies
and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future
directions in these fields.
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Nadine Gordimer
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(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
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