ABOUT THIS BOOK

Valeria Miani’s Celinda (1611), the only female-authored secular tragedy of early modern Italy, is here made available for the first time in a modern edition. Miani’s tale of the doomed love of the Lydian princess Celinda for the cross-dressed Persian prince Autilio/ Lucinia offers a striking example of the explorative attitude to gender identity that is such a marked characteristic of Italian drama in this period, both within the erudite and the commedia dell’arte tradition. Accompanied by Julia Kisacky’s sensitive translation, and with a valuable contextualizing introduction by Valeria Finucci, this edition of Celinda makes an important contribution to our understanding of women’s place within Italian literary culture in a period increasingly recognized as exceptional for the range and quality of femaleauthored writing it produced.
—Virginia Cox
Professor of Italian, New York University

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Valeria Finucci is professor of Italian and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Lady Vanishes (1992) and The Manly Masquerade (2003) and has edited nine more volumes on topics as far ranging as costumes in alba amicorum to Petrarch and Petrarchism. Her work has appeared in The Other Voice: Chicago series, in 2005, with Giulia Bigolina's Urania, a Romance, and in 2006, with Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, A Chivalric Romance. Julia Kisacky is senior lecturer in Italian at Baylor University. She is the author of Magic in Boiardo and Ariosto(1999) and has translated for the Chicago series Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, A Chivalric Romance (2006).

REVIEWS

"Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611), the only female–authored secular tragedy of early modern Italy, is here made available for the first time in a modern edition. Miani's tale of the doomed love of the Lydian princess Celinda for the cross–dressed Persian prince Autilio/Lucinia offers a striking example of the explorative attitude to gender identity that is such a marked characteristic of Italian drama in this period, both within the erudite and the commedia dell'artetradition. Accompanied by Julia Kisacky's sensitive translation, and with a valuable contextualizing introduction by Valeria Finucci, this edition of Celinda makes an important contribution to our understanding of women's place within Italian literary culture in a period increasingly recognized as exceptional for the range and quality of female-authored writing it produced."

— Virginia Cox, New York University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix
Editor’s Introduction
The Other Voice 1
Biography 7
Situating Miani’s Work: A Survey of Early Modern Drama
Penned by Women 14
The Pastoral Play Amorosa Speranza 21
The Tragic Genre 25
Celinda: Structure and Themes 30
The Fortunes of Valeria Miani 49
Note on the Italian Text 51
Note on Transcription 52
Note on the Translation 53
Celinda, A Tragedy: Italian Text with English Translation on Facing Pages 55
Endnotes to the Translation 370
Editors’ Bibliography 391
Index 407