On Writing. Critical Itineraries on Literary Texts of the Sixteenth Century, 1985, n. 25-26

EDITORIAL, p. 3

This issue closes this series of "nuovadwf"; a new editorial board announces that starting with the next issue, the journal will appear in a different format and with a new policy and will be called DWF.

ZANCAN Marina, Introduction, p. 5

The guest editor of the issue explains that in the first part it comprises the proceedings of a conference organized by the Milan "Centre for Historical Studies on the Women's Liberation Movement in Italy", entitled Figures of Women. Literary Texts of the Sixteenth Century. Sources-Writing Styles-Critical Itineraries; the second part includes two essays resulting from work previously carried out within the research group on Italian sixteenth century literature.

ZANCAN Marina, Figures of Women. Literary Texts of the Sixteenth Century: Sources-Writing, Styles, Critical Itineraries, pp. 7-18

This paper opened the conference and outlined its aims, i.e. interpreting the ways and forms according to which the images of women are created and operate within one or more cultural contexts. The author singles out three types of texts interesting in this regard: 1) prose and verse literary texts where the female figure takes on multiple and often fundamental functions (textual, symbolic, ideological etc.); 2) some writing styles and genres which from the point of view of literary history and criticism can be said to play a minor role; 3) women's writings. She also outlines the research group's methodological assumptions and offers two examples of analysis reading texts by Baldassar Castiglione and Torquato Tasso.

ROSSI Rosa, Women Writing Around Teresa de Jesùs, pp. 19-25

In order to recover all the possible traces of women writing present in the historical milieu of Teresa de Jesùs, a true "monster" of female writing in the second half of the sixteenth century, the author makes use of the catalogue compiled by Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas, and of the interpretative scheme proposed by the anthropologist Ida Magli in her essays on female monachism. An interesting example of female writing were the relaciones de su vida y espiritu prepared by penitent women at the request of their spiritual fathers who meant them as a means of control; in fact the women were able to use them as a way of exercising, albeit in a marginal and limited form, their right to speak out for themselves. A brief analysis of Teresa de Jesùs is also included.

DAENENS Francine, Doxa and Paradoxa: the Use of Rhetorics and Rhetorical Strategies in Discourses on Women's Superiority, pp. 27-38

Among the literary sources of the sixteenth century the author chooses to focus on those treatises and speeches which argue paradoxically in favour of women's superiority. Convinced that they were a way of thinking about how to write on women, how to represent them, she analyses their rhetorical structures: fiction is also a form of knowledge. Daenens exemplifies the arguments put forward in these paradoxical writings, underlining their ambiguity, and shows how they contributed to a definition of woman's duties as wife and mother, according to the idea of a law-giving nature fully consonant with divine and human laws.

CHEMELLO Adriana, Ingenious Games and Learned Quotations: Images of the 'Feminine', pp. 39-55

Analysing the writings of two women, Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinelli, who lived in Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, Chemello convincingly argues that, through the pretense of games and entertainment, they wanted to speak out, to mark their historical presence. And the fact that they have become part of the literary scene is in itself a relevant fact.

BARADEL Virginia, Figure of Love. Aspects of the Figuration of Women in the Renaissance, pp. 57-77

If male power is an absolute, therefore self-reproducing one, which considers and orders the "feminine" in relation to itself, what then are the features and symbolic functions of forms in a feminine aspect? Starting from this question, Baradel examines through the figures of Hestia and Venus the influence of classical models in the Renaissance; she then reinterprets the iconography of great Renaissance painting (see the illustrative tables), underlining the changes which occurred in the conception and figuration of the "feminine" during the sixteenth century.

CIBIN Patrizia, Whores and Courtesans in Venice in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 79-102

The author looks at the figure of the courtesan in sixteenth-century Venice, as it emerges from the disciplinary rules regarding this social subject established by the Serenissima. Equally and symmetrically significant are the reactions to such disciplinary rules; both the courtesan and the whore use the control mechanisms devised to separate them from honest women both in order to survive - it is the case of whores - and in order to turn their relationships with men into sources of self-enhancement, income and power - and it is the case of courtesans.

SOLIS DE ALBA Anna Alicia, Writings about the Family in Italy in the Seventies. A Bibliography, pp. 105-127

The bibliography is preceded by a note explaining the methodological and historiographical reasons for a research on the writings published between 1970 and 1982, and by the list of sources.