Italian Bookshelf (download as PDF) - Ibiblio

478 “Italian Bookshelf.” Annali d’italianistica 25 (2007)
Curran concludes by suggesting further study on aspects of women’s poetry, which,
although important, are not yet fully understood.
The remarkable chapter by Ann Rosalding Jones, “Bad Press: Modern Editors
Versus Early Modern Women Poets (Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica
Franco),” discusses the reordering, censoring and false expansion of the original texts by
the above-mentioned writers by three editor-critics of the late nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries. The interest of these textual revisions lies, Jones affirms, in the
revelation of the gendered assumptions which form the basis of the canonization of early
modern European women. To the list created by Joanna Russ in her book How to
Suppress Women’s Writing, that includes “denial of agency,” “pollution of agency,”
“demeaning categorization,” and “isolation,” Jones suggests the addition of “purification
of agency,” aimed at transforming the woman writer’s work to fit a definition of
acceptable feminine authorship (308). After denouncing the double standard by which
men and women writers are held, Jones suggests that future editors preserve the authors’
original publication from beginning to end.
Lina Insana’s “Fascist Appropriations: The Case of Jolanda De Blasi’s Le scrittrici
italiane” well proves that this 1930 collection of women’s writing was the most
comprehensive in Italy to date and that De Blasi’s criticism was strongly biased. The
largest chapter in the collection is devoted to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, another
period in Italian history, according to Insana, in which the “woman question” was as
important in the social and literary agendas as during the 1930s. Insana detects a central
contradiction in De Blasi’s work: while its literary and historical component harshly
disparages most poetic production by women, its collection is the most comprehensive to
date. De Blasi equates inferior morality to inferior poetry, thus blurring the lines between
public and private domains, also a hallmark of Fascist policies and legislation. Finally,
Insana judges De Blasi’s work as participating “in the overall cultural program of
Fascism, which was to place its ideal woman at the center of a pro-family, pronatalist
society […] asserting its right to legislate the private in the interests of the public” (332).
In the last chapter of the collection, “A Woman for All Seasons: The Reinvention of
Anne Askew,” Elaine Beilin shows how religious texts by women have lacked, until
recently, full critical appreciation and how deep and pervasive the process of
“deauthorization” on the part of publishers and editors can be. Since the first publication
of the Examinations in 1546, Askew’s work became a mere proof of its author’s
martyrdom for the Protestant faith. Even the latest “reinvention” of her life and death, a
1998 episode in The Learning Channel’s Tales from the Tower, represents Askew as a
victim of torture and burning at the stake, but not at all as a writer. According to Beilin,
the exception to this representation is the 1965 fictional novel by Alison Macleod The
Heretics, which restores Askew as a woman, a martyr, and a writer at the same time.
The breadth of the collection, the excellent quality of the critical commentaries and
the bridging of national and temporal lines make this text a “must read” for any student
and scholar of the early modern period and a great addition to any public and private
libraries.
Paola Malpezzi Price, Colorado State University