Mary Lindemann and Deanna Shemek
Hardback
May 2024 • ISBN 9781644533376 • $150.00
Paperback
May 2024 • ISBN 9781644533369 • $62.95
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Series
The Early Modern Exchange
History and literature have often been considered different fields and only seldom have “talked” to one another. This collection of essays remedies that situation by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero. The rich textual world of the Italian Renaissance offers an excellent proving ground to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres—but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period. These include philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. Within this volume the disciplines of literature and history blur, and with good reason, for early moderns did not always distinguish these fields or trouble themselves greatly about whether a political tract was a work of literary significance or whether an autobiography should be taken as a historical record. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.
About the Editors
Mary Lindemann is Professor Emerita of History, University of Miami. She has written extensively on early modern German and medical history. Her most recent books include: Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law, and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2009), and The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648-1790 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Deanna Shemek is Professor of Italian and European Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (1998) and of In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Reign of Letters (2021). She has also co-edited numerous volumes, including Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara (2005), Writing Relations: American Scholars in Italian Archives (2008), and Itinera chartarum: 150 anni dell’Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2019).
