Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets

This volume presents the life stories of 12 extraordinary women who lived passionately and recorded in poetry their happiness and heartbreaks. The setting is the Italian 16th century, the "cinquecento", the period of the High Renaissance. The focus is on noblewomen, bourgeois women and courtesans. What were they like, and what was life like for them? Their poetry speaks of their hopes, fears, anxieties and, above all, their loves, the blissful woe that was at once the reward and the punishment for their generous-spirited feelings for men who, platonically correct, idealized them but, in truth, hardly appreciated them - even betrayed them. This volume offers an insight into how it felt to be a women in the 16th century - if, that is, one was among the aristocracy or upper bourgeoisie, and had more than a rudimentary education. Besides containing 239 poems, both in the original Italian and in translation, the text also addresses challenging art-historical problems involving one or another of the women and suggests possible solutions.