From Arcadia to Revolution: The Neapolitan Monitor and Other Writings

Winner of the 2020 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition

Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel was a poet, a political writer, a journalist, and a politician. She was the editor, and virtually the only writer of the Monitore Napoletano (Neapolitan Monitor), the journal in which she recorded the events and debates that took place in the short-lived Neapolitan Jacobin Republic of 1799. She sought to influence both government policy and public opinion. She also put forward with this journal one of the first analyses ever of popular culture and its political implications, and confronted the challenge of trying to implement a revolutionary political project in a situation of abject poverty intertwined with a deeply conservative populist mind-set.

"Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel richly deserves a major Anglophone study, and in Verina Jones she has found an editor-translator whose edition of Fonseca Pimentel’s writings more than makes up for past neglect. Jones has made these writings and their author accessible to a broad and non-specialist readership through introductory and narrative sections that place Fonseca Pimentel in inter-linked historical, biographical, political and cultural contexts, and not least in her far from uncontended place in gender and feminist studies. The Epilogue complements this with a critical review of the changing bibliographies and interpretations of Fonseca Pimentel, and takes up the defense of her politics against critics who have accused her of ignoring issues of gender."

-John A. Davis, Emiliana Pasca Noether Professor of Modern Italian History, University of Connecticut

VERINA JONES was for many years Head of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Reading (UK), where she founded the Centre for Italian Women’s Studies. She has published extensively on Manzoni, women’s history and writing, and dialect literature and culture. She is currently working on the writings of Italian Jacobin women.

REVIEWS

Journal of Modern Italian Studies 26.1 (2021): 90–91. Reviewed by Filippo Sabetti.
Modern Language Review 116.1 (2021): 190–191. Reviewed by Ursula Fanning. 
Quaderni d'Italianistica 41.1 (2020): 178–180. Reviewed by Antonio Mileo. 
Renaissance & Reformation 42.4 (2019): 218–20. Reviewed by Archie R. Macgregor.

WRITE-UP

Vaccaro, Alessandro. "E Pimentel Fonseca è tradotta in inglese." La Repubblica, June 5, 2019, 12. https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2019/06/05/e-pimentel-fonseca-e-tradotta-in-ingleseNapoli12.html. [A write-up following a presentation and book talk at Biblioteca Nazionale on June 4, 2019.]