In Defense of Women. A Bilingual Edition New

The Minonzio-King edition of In Defense of Women by Pompeo Colonna presents a remarkable text by a fascinating author and locates it within the complexities of the Renaissance period. The Latin text and English translation are enhanced by excellent contributions, including a foreword on key issues, a meticulous introduction, an extensive glossary of names, and a substantial postscript on the querelle des femmes, all of which will be useful to scholars and students. Overall, this volume is an exemplary work of collaborative scholarship and offers an important male-authored defense of women.
-Eva Del Soldato, Associate Professor of Italian Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Pompeo Colonna’s In Defense of Women (1529/1530), presented in this volume in its Latin edition and English translation, is one of several important defenses of women composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by male advocates of women’s moral and intellectual worth. Known as a cardinal and a warrior but also as an active participant in sixteenth-century Italian literary circles, the author addresses the work to his cousin Vittoria Colonna, the most renowned Italian woman poet of the era, who, he writes, had urged him to undertake it. His Defense not only refutes arguments of women’s inferiority and incapacity but, remarkably, asserts their ability to hold political office and govern.

MARGARET L. KING, professor of history emerita, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is author of, among others, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (1986); Women of the Renaissance (1991); and The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (1994); is editor of Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources (2014); and is editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies: Renaissance and Reformation (https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/).

FRANCO MINOZIO, Italian classical philologist and historian of science, is author of, among others, La “mala guerra”: Da Medeghino a Marignano; Come si diventa ciò che si è (2020) and Studi gioviani: Scienza, filosofia e letteratura nell’opera di Paolo Giovio (2002); is editor of Pompeo Colonna, In difesa delle donne: Apologia mulierum (2015) and Paolo Giovio, Dialogo sugli uomini e le donne illustri del nostro tempo (2011); and is editorial director of the press Polyhistor Edizioni.