Writing Beloveds

"Writing Beloveds is a deeply researched, carefully analyzed, and engagingly written work that offers a masterful study of Petrarch's gender-inflected influence upon Latin humanist prose and Italian language poetry in the Renaissance." -- William J. Kennedy, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University "Aileen Feng has written a landmark reappraisal of the place of women humanists as writers, readers, and recipients of humanist praise. She adroitly blends her knowledge of women's studies with an understanding of Renaissance poetics." -- Timothy Kircher, Department of History, Guilford College

Covering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng’s engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism.

Covering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng’s engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism. Though Petrachism is usually read solely as a vernacular poetic tradition, in Writing Beloveds, Feng recovers the initial political purposes in Latin prose and traces how poetry set the terms for gender, agency, and power in early modern Italy.

By revealing the literary motifs in men’s and women’s writing about gender she maps how certain figures in Petrarch’s writing transmitted gendered ideas of power and reflected a growing anxiety about women as public figures. This work includes nuanced analyses of poetry, linguistic treatises, debates on imitation, representations of gender and epistolary correspondence in Latin and Italian. Writing Beloveds is a landmark study that highlights the new social reality of women writers in early modern Europe.