Urania, A Romance.

Giulia Bigolina. Urania, A Romance.

Ed. and trans. Valeria Finucci. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. xxxiv + 192 pp. index. bibl. $50 (cl), $21 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-04877-2 (cl), 0-226-04878-0 (pbk).

Maddalena Campiglia. Flori, A Pastoral Drama: A Bilingual Edition.

Ed. Virginia Cox and Lisa M. Sampson. Trans. Virginia Cox. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. xxvii + 348 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $25. ISBN: 0-226-09223-2.

With the publication of Urania, A Romance and Flori, A Pastoral Drama (1588), the Other Voice series has made it possible for English speakers to discover firsthand women's active presence in Italian literary culture during and after the Council of Trent and, as Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson argue here--and as Cox argues elsewhere--to become convinced of the falsity of the widely-held assumption that Italian women writers' participation in literary culture consisted only of their intense involvement in the phenomenon of Petrarchism and petered out at midcentury (Cox, "Fiction, 1560-1650," in A History of Women's Writing in Italy, ed. L. Panizza and S. Wood [2000]). But Bigolina's and Campiglia's works are valuable not just as evidence of continued activity per se; they are complex and skillful experiments in adapting the dominant genres of the age to the interests of women, and, as such, will be of great interest not only to specialists in European women's literature but to specialists in Italian literature of the second half of the sixteenth century. The inclusion of the Italian originals of Flori and of Bigolina's novella makes it possible for those with rudimentary Italian to approach the originals, and also makes these rare texts, not yet published in modern Italian editions, available to Italianists.

The editors do an outstanding job of presenting the authors and their texts. Cox and Sampson give a concise and careful account of Campiglia's life and works, Flori's structure and themes, and the play's reception; and, though their own discussion seems definitive, they generously and usefully point out opportunities for further research and critical analysis, so their lead in exploring Campiglia is certain to be followed by others. Throughout, the introduction draws on Cox's extensive knowledge of the history of women writers of the Italian Renaissance to place Campiglia and her Flori in that tradition as well as in the tradition of pastoral in general; anyone unfamiliar with the works of Italian women writers and their place in the period would be well advised to read this introduction, but those who work in the fields of Italian pastoral and of that country's women writers will also benefit enormously from Cox's erudition. The translation itself is delightful. Cox renders Campiglia's verse as prose--a sensible decision, especially given the Italian-English facing-page format: the result is so fluent and sprightly that it makes plausible Cox and Sampson's suggestion that the original play may have been designed for staging and not just for a closet production. My only complaint about the volume is that it does not include the appendix of commendatory poems that was attached to some copies of the original edition. Cox and Sampson's discussion of these poems begins their account of Campiglia's reception, and, given what an essential part of the paratext of Italian Renaissance volumes such laudatory poetry was, the modern reader who wishes to understand Campiglia is missing a crucial piece.

Finucci is the ideal translator of Urania, steeped as she is in the romance after having produced the first-ever Italian edition in 2002. The volume also includes a facing-page version, oddly omitted from the title page, of Bigolina's "Novella of Giulia Camposampiero and Tesibaldo Vitaliani." Finucci's introductory essay, "Giulia Bigolina and Italian Prose Fiction in the Renaissance," offers a condensed version of the results of her thorough research into the difficult records of Bigolina's life and reputation, as well as helpful, brief summaries of the plots of Urania and "Giulia Camposampiero," a discussion of Bigolina's handling of the genres of novella and romance with special reference to the Ariodante and Ginevra and rocca di Tristano episodes in Ariosto's Orlando furioso, and an analysis of the debates about love and women that are inserted into the beginning of the romance. Though Finotti calls the Urania a "psychological romance" (15) and the book does explore the feelings engendered by love and by devotion to art, Bigolina is more interested in the straightforward expression of ideas than in character development; characters state what they feel and little is evoked through description of feelings, appearance, settings, events, allegory, and so forth. Thus, the "treatise on the worth of women" (1) does not seem out of place stylistically in Urania, and, by laying out the issues about women so clearly, it makes the reader inescapably aware of the book's strong social and philosophical agenda.

Both volumes have the potential to be very stimulating to students of English literature. Not only do they make it possible for scholars to situate English women writers in a European context (as do all the books in this series), but coincidences of genre and mode offer unusual opportunities for very productive comparisons with specific English texts. Flori resembles Mary Wroth's Urania and her Love's Victories. Like the English Urania, Flori explores the place of the woman intellectual in the real world through pastoral. Like Love's Victories, Flori begins with a vow by Cupid to demonstrate his power through the action of the plot, and it focuses attention on women's friendship and love of each other as well as their love for men. Just as Flori may well have been intended for production, so Love's Victories may have been. But the interest of Flori for scholars of English literature is not restricted to comparison with works by women writers. As a pastoral drama in which a woman author presents a variety of possible women's points of view about love and love relationships, Flori provides a stimulating intertext to consider with English pastoral drama in which women's points of view are important, but are ventriloquized by male authors and male actors. As You Like It in particular comes to mind as a work that would be illuminated by Flori.

In her first dedicatory epistle, Bigolina engages explicitly with the problems faced by women writers of romance. This will lead English readers to recall the similar discussion in Margaret Tyler's dedication to her translation of the Spanish romance The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1578): both authors draw attention to the transgressiveness of their participation in the genre of romance rather than the spiritual works more conventionally expected of women. And, of course, not only its genre, but also its very title, urges that Urania be read with Wroth's Urania (1614), as Finucci notes. Both authors use the character Urania to explore the topic of woman's intellect and creative capacity. As is typical of pastoral romance, the texts are substantial prose narratives about love entanglements and share stylistic features such as extended speeches by characters and an episodic structure, though the complex plot and elaborated style of Wroth's romance are far from Bigolina's simple plot and spare language. The origins of many plot elements in both can be traced back to the Orlando furioso; Bigolina's relationship to the earlier poem takes the form of reworking episodes in which female characters experience gender confusion and confront desire, whereas Wroth's interaction with the Furioso is mediated by Philip Sidney's prior reworking of elements of the poem in the Arcadia.

Cox and Sampson and Finucci are to be congratulated for their excellent work in making these substantial texts accessible, as is the University of Chicago Press for supporting such a worthwhile endeavor as the Other Voice series over such a long period of time.

PAMELA J. BENSON

Rhode Island College