Women's writing in Italy, 1400-1650 / Virginia Cox.

Origins (1400-1500). The "learned lady" in Quattrocento Italy: an emerging cultural type ; The "learned lady" in theory: models of gender conduct and their contexts ; The "learned lady" as signifier in humanistic culture ; Renaissance particularism and the "learned lady"
Translation (1490-1550). Women, the courts, and the vernacular at the turn of the early sixteenth century ; Sappho surfaces: the first female vernacular poets ; Bembo, Petrarchism, and the reform of Italian literature ; "So dear to Apollo": Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna after 1530 ; Founding mothers, first ladies: Gambara and Colonna as models and icons
Diffusion (1540-1560). Manuscript and print in the "age of the Council of Trent" ; Virtù rewarded: the contexts of women's writing ; Women writers and their uses: case studies ; Literary trajectories: continuity and change ; Women writers and the paradox of the pedestal


Intermezzo (1560-1580)
Affirmation (1580-1620). Women's writing in the age of the Counter-Reformation ; Chivalry undimmed: the contexts of women's writing ; A literature of their own? Writing, ownership, assertion ; The twilight of gallantry
Backlash (1590-1650). The rebirth of misogyny in Seicento Italy ; Misogyny and the woman writer: the redomestication of feminine virtù ; Women's writing in Seicento Italy: decline and fall
Coda
Appendix A: Published writings by Italian women, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries
Appendix B: Dedications of published works by women.