Complete Poems: A Bilingual Edition

Veronica Gambara (1485 – 1550) was one of the most celebrated lyric poets of early sixteenth-century Italy. Equally significant to Gambara’s literary repute was her political standing as the dowager Countess of Correggio. Though she never published a collected edition of her poetry, Gambara produced an extensive oeuvre of vernacular verse that has been extensively anthologized. This book presents the first complete bilingual edition of Gambara’s verse. It sheds light on the unique interrelationship between Gambara’s cultural currency and her political power, as she drew on her literary talent to participate in the political arena to emerge as one of the first women poet-rulers of the Early Modern Italian tradition.

"Molly Martin and Paola Ugolini’s edition and translation of Veronica Gambara shows that she wrote in an unusual range of genres in addition to the Christianized Petrarchism of her love poems to her deceased husband: a ballad set to music, paeans to beloved places, and letter-sonnets to friends such as Pietro Bembo. This edition brings all her poems together for the first time, provides a richly informed introduction filling in her biography, including her many social circles, and offers an excellent set of historical data and literary-critical references. The prose translations are accurate and useful, rendering Gambara’s intricate syntax clearly and showing how interesting the work of this early woman poet is."

-Ann Rosalind Jones, Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature, Smith College

MOLLY M. MARTIN received her PhD in Italian Literature from Columbia University. She currently teaches in the Global Liberal Studies program at New York University.

PAOLA UGOLINI received her PhD in Italian Studies from New York University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Italian at The University at Buffalo (SUNY).

REVIEWS
Annali d'italianistica 33 (2015): 428–430. Reviewed by RoseAnna Mueller.
Early Modern Women 10.2 (2016): 185–187. Reviewed by Rinaldina Russell.
Renaissance & Reformation 40.1 (2017): 256–258. Reviewed by Benedetta Lamanna.
Renaissance Quarterly 68.4 (2015): 1498–1499. Reviewed by Nadia Cannata Salamone.