OV 46 Awarded Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's
2017 Teaching Edition Award for a Work Published in 2016
Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi
Letters to Her Sons, 1447-1470
Edited and translated by Judith Bryce
Toronto: Iter Academic Press; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 46
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 493
The committee particularly appreciated this edition for offering a fascinating window through which students can begin to discover the rich complexities of daily public and private life in Renaissance Europe. The readable translation and well-researched annotations greatly aid the reader's understanding of Strozzi’s content, while the edition’s beautifully crafted introduction further contextualizes the letters and their author by explaining the larger political events against which Strozzi’s story unfolds as well as the quotidian demands, familial relationships, and emotional complexities that frame both what the letters say and what their “gaps, silences and roleplaying” hint at without saying overtly. By touching on the physical labor involved in writing texts such as these (as compared with what is involved in writing today) and by addressing questions of genre and women’s literacy in the early modern period, this work gives teachers and students alike an exciting resource through which to explore early modern women’s epistolary practices more broadly.
Print copies may be ordered from Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
The ebook may be ordered from Iter (institutions only).