Scala’s The Fake Husband offers readers and performers an accessible English script which captures the comic brilliance of the commedia dell’arte. Expanded from an earlier scenario, Il marito (The Husband), the play presents characters originally created by members of the Gelosi troupe, in particular the stars Isabella Andreini and Sylvia Roncagli. Scala’s ability to capture the individual artistry of these women makes this script especially exciting and shows his appreciation of the towering contribution made by the female performers who joined the troupes in the 1560s. Also included is a comprehensive study of Scala’s place in the theatrical world and beyond.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series, volume 75

The first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women, Famous Women affords a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential. Virginia Brown's acclaimed translation, commissioned for The I Tatti Renaissance Library, is the first English edition based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin.

This translation brings the complete works of three minor but important Italian poets — Dante’s contemporaries at the turn of the 14th century — to English speakers for the very first time. Taken together, the three authors sketch an idealized portrait of courtly life juxtaposed to the gritty, politically fractured world of northern Italy’s mercantile urban centers in which they lived. One poet, Folgore di San Gimignano, idealizes court life during the period; the second, Cenne da la Chitarra, looks at it more realistically and parodies Folgore; and the third, Pietro dei Faitinelli, takes inspiration from Folgore’s political writings and focuses on the politics of the times. The juxtaposition of the three poets in this work is effective and arguably shows them to be a poetic school. Tournaments, dinner tables, and public squares spring to life through vivid, material details, which should catch the interest of cultural historians and literary scholars alike. This translation is especially deft at reproducing the rich variety of culinary and sartorial vocabulary offered by the poets, and the translations of Pietro dei Faitinelli are especially well-executed.

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.