Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, Eds. A History of Women's Writing in Italy (Book Review‪)‬

Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, eds. A History of Women's Writing in Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. This book complements Rinaldina Russell's fine bio-bibliographical Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994) and Sharon Wood's Italian Women's Writing 1860-1994 (Athlone Press, 1994). In these works, the authors sketch a broad historical and thematic introduction to women's writings, which is then followed by studies of the main themes present in the works of individual authors. Panizza and Wood propose here an overview of seven centuries of women writing and the diverse genres in which they simultaneously participated. The book is divided into three major historical categories: the Renaissance, Counter-Reformation, and seventeenth century; the Enlightenment and Restoration; and the Risorgimento and modern Italy, 1850-2000. The historical division allows for the inclusion of women's writings "beyond the conventional genres classed as literature" (1). As Wood and Panizza point out in their introduction, writing literature in Italy has always assumed a classical education as well as one in Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Since women were largely self-taught and often did not adhere to fixed models or discuss certain themes prevalent in male writers, their writing has largely been underestimated if not ignored. The volume includes 19 essays written by women literature and history professors from the United Kingdom, North America, and Italy; six essays were translated from Italian. In addition to the essays, there is a useful bibliographical guide which gives a brief description of the writers discussed, followed by a short list of selected works and critical works. All works cited in the essays are included in the bibliography that closes the volume and that, admirably, attempts to recognize criticism on Italian women writers from both sides of the Atlantic.