This first full-length study in English on seventeenth-century Italian travel writing enriches our understanding of an unusually fertile period for Italian contributions to the genre. The intrinsic qualities of this literature can now be grasped in terms of the larger question of cultural identity in Italy. For Hester, the specifically literary characteristics of Italian travel writing"including its humanism or Petrarchism"highlight the classic eminence throughout Europe of a prestigious tradition inherent to Italy, one compensating then for the peninsula's lack of a national political identity. Appeals to the cultural authority of that tradition represent a means of addressing and overcoming anxieties about the Italian subject's diasporic status during the "Golden Age" of European global colonial expansion. Self-funded travelers Francesco Carletti, Pietro Della Valle, Francesco Belli, Francesco Negri, and Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri are the major authors studied who journeyed through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America.

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.

Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars was a well-regarded figure in Parisian salons and esteemed by King Louis XIV, and she traveled internationally to accompany her ambassador husband, playing significant diplomatic roles at the court of Savoy in Turin and at the court of Spain in Madrid. She became the confidante of the queen of Spain, Marie-Louise d'Orleans, the niece of Louis XIV, and, as instructed by the king of France, endeavored to pursue French political interests in Madrid with female members of royalty. This volume includes her surviving letters from Madrid to her friend Madame de Coulanges and an appendix of her letters sent from Paris and Turin. The letters from Spain, written between 1679 and 1681, paint a vivid and engaging picture of the royal court and its new queen.