The Defiant Muse: Italian Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Association of Teachers of Italian is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Italica. German, and Italian women's voices are presented with new English translations alongside the original texts. These four books also share the common subtitle Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present, though not the same approach to women's literature-the French is ultrafeminist, the Hispanic is historico-literary. The Italian Muse under review here contains 76 poems, seven anonymous and others by 50 women poets, among whom we find, for example, Compiuta Donzella, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Franco, Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo, and Dacia Maraini.In this volume, emphasis has been placed on the twentieth century (40-134), and there are no representatives from either the fifteenth or the seventeenth century. Surely the well-known Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici and Antonia Giannotti Pulci could have been included as examples of Quattrocento devotional poetry, since the word "feminist" of the title is used in a broad sense-poems dealing with love, family, death, war, and nature are included alongside those of female rebellion. Considering the fact that the seventeenth century is very rich in feminist prose treatises, one would expect to find a few examples in poetry as well: if nothing else, Margherita Costa's "Donne mie poi ch'ho provato," in which the poetess jokingly invites all women to return to sewing and spinning. It is also surprising that Luisa Giaconi, considered by now one of the best Italian women poets, is not represented in this collection.The seven-page introduction was written by Beverly Allen who tends to underline the negative aspects of women's conditions rather than women's achievements. For example, she laments the fact that usually only Compiuta Donzella and the Cinquecento women poets are included in literary anthologies, but she fails to correct this attitude by offering or mentioning the lesser known writers of the past. She simply states that the "relative paucity of selections here from the thirteenth, fourteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries reflects the fact that relatively few such texts are 344 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 6 Feb 2015 05:34:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions