Ramie Targoff
Autore di Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna
Opere di Ramie Targoff
Opere correlate
Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall (New York Review Books Classics) (2002) — A cura di, alcune edizioni — 237 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Targoff, Ramie
- Data di nascita
- 1967-08-21
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Luogo di nascita
- New York, New York, USA
- Luogo di residenza
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- Istruzione
- University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.)
- Attività lavorative
- Renaissance literature (Brandeis University, Walham/Boston, MA, USA)
- Relazioni
- Greenblatt, Stephen (husband)
- Organizzazioni
- Brandeis University
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Guggenheim Fellowship
James Russell Lowell Prize (2015) - Breve biografia
- Ramie Targoff is a professor of English, the cochair of Italian studies, and the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion; John Donne, Body and Soul; and Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England. She lives with her husband and son in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Utenti
Recensioni
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Opere correlate
- 2
- Utenti
- 156
- Popolarità
- #134,405
- Voto
- 3.7
- Recensioni
- 1
- ISBN
- 18
The purpose of Ramie Targoff’s book is to belie Virginia Woolf’s claim, made centuries later in A Room of One’s Own, that it would be impossible for a woman of that time to be a serious writer; if Shakespeare had had a talented sister, Woolf said, she would surely have gone mad and died by suicide in the face of overwhelming obstacles. But Woolf was wrong. While only Shakespeare was Shakespeare, there were ‘sisters’ of considerable literary skill (albeit ones with aristocratic connections).
One of them was in Elizabeth’s funeral procession: Mary Sidney. Perhaps best known as the dedicatee of her brother Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, by the time of the queen’s funeral Mary Sidney had a growing reputation due to her own sophisticated and experimental poems, most of them based on psalms. She had also published her translations of her brother’s French writer friends, most notably Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, the first dramatisation of the Antony and Cleopatra story in English and a probable source for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
Peripheral to the procession, but connected to it by participating relations, were the three other women whose lives and work Targoff describes. Aged 13, Anne Clifford was judged too young to participate, but her mother, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, was among Elizabeth’s aristocratic mourners. Clifford’s diaries and autobiography are filled with tremendous strength of purpose revealing her struggle for her rightful inheritance. Then there is Elizabeth Cary, whose father-in-law marched as Master of the Queen’s Jewel House. Her two closet dramas, Mariam and Edward II, were written during an unhappy marriage and feature strong women standing up to powerful men. Finally, Aemilia Lanyer was a member of the minor gentry, whose husband Alfonso was part of the royal recorder consort. Her single book of poems, published in the same year as the King James Bible (1611) and including the story of Christ’s passion told entirely from a woman’s point of view, took 400 years to enter the Renaissance literary canon, but it is unlikely to leave any time soon, partly because the poems are simply very good.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com
Susanne Woods is the editor of The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer and author of Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford University Press, 1995 and 1999).… (altro)