Letters: Volume 100

by Isabella Andreini

A collection of inventive writings in letter form from a sixteenth-century star of commedia dell'arte.

Isabella Andreini (1562-1604) was a commedia dell'arte diva who toured Italy and France as part of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. Letters is a collection of epistles written by Andreini in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a "hermaphroditic" alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. In her letters, Andreini remade the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreini's modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love and examines--from surprising perspectives--pertinent issues such as death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1649590857
• ISBN13: 9781649590855
• Release Date: December 2023
• Publisher: Iter Press
• Length: 331 Pages