In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Reign of Letters

In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Reign of LettersOverview The sixteenth century is commonly identified with the advent of print culture, but in truth it was also a century of explosive growth in the practice of handwritten correspondence. This is a book about one assiduous correspondent and the roles that letter writing played in her public and private life. Because the letters of Isabella dEste (14741539), daughter of the Este dukes of Ferrara and marchesa of Mantua, are so numerous, so wide

Overview

Deanna Shemek is Professor of Italian and European Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (1998). She has co-edited several collections of essays on early modern Italy, and has published essays on authors including Boccaccio, Ariosto, Aretino, and others. Her monumental edition of the Selected Letters of Isabella d'Este (2017) won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2018 prize for translation. She co-directs the online resource, IDEA: Isabelle d'Este Archive. 

214 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-7727-2524-0 softcover
Published: 2021

Contents

Introduction

Transcription Criteria, and Note on Naming

1. “What News Occurs to Me”: Isabella d’Este as Renaissance Correspondent

2. “Ci Ci and Pa Pa”: Script, Mimicry, and Mediation in Isabella d’Este’s Letters

3. “In Continuous Expectation”: Isabella d’Este’s Epistolary Desire

4. “When You Consider That I Am a Woman”: Isabella d’Este and the Properties of Persuasion

5. “Our Art and Our Fiction”: Isabella d’Este’s Mendacious Missives

6. “Neither Hope Nor Fear”: Isabella d’Este as Prince “About the Other Hand”: Isabella d’Este’s Epistolary Helpline

Praise

“Isabella d’Este made the letter the quintessential expression of her ability to negotiate on behalf of herself, her family, her state and its subjects. Deanna Shemek’s marvelous study of Isabella’s correspondence, the product of many years working with this immense archive, gives us a fresh and compelling portrait of one of the most fascinating and important figures in Renaissance Italy.” — Paula Findlen, Stanford University

“Deanna Shemek’s insightful and authoritative study of Isabella d’Este makes a major contribution to our understanding of this multi-faceted figure. Shemek’s deft analysis of her extensive correspondence illuminates how skillfully Isabella used the epistolary art to craft and manage her persona and her relationships. As much an examination of early modern epistolary culture and practices as a portrait of Isabella herself, Shemek’s book will be of great interest to scholars of all disciplines.” — Meredith Ray, University of Delaware

“Deanna Shemek is, without a doubt, the world’s leading scholar on Isabella d’Este. […] The knowledge and theoretical expertise that Shemek exhibits in this volume are matched, in my mind, by the profound humanity that all her chapters display, making it invaluable to its readers.” — Maria Galli Stampino, review in The Sixteenth Century Journal

“In her innovative study of Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) as the consummate Renaissance correspondent, Deanna Shemek sheds new light on the role of letters in the political and social economies of early modern Italy through her detailed examination of Isabella’s epistolary exchanges and their significance in both her public and private life. The monograph represents the first book-length study of Isabella d’Este’s letters themselves, following the author’s groundbreaking archival work examining and translating this documentary material. This study not only illuminates Isabella’s “purposeful conduct as an epistolary correspondent” (p. 18) but also, perhaps more significantly, argues for the value of letters as a critical“medium for personal contact, political agency, news-gathering, and self-fashioning” (p. 20) in the early modern period.” — Lauren Surovi, review in Forum Italicum