About the group
Women thinking love: A gendered history of emotions in renaissance and counter-reformation Italy (1500-1650) delves into how women in Early-Modern Italy perceived and navigated romantic love. Moreover, this research explores how their ideas and experiences of love both influenced and were influenced by their understanding of gender.
Love held a central place in philosophical and literary discussions of the time. Many intellectual women conveyed their viewpoints through personal correspondences and by crafting literary personae in love-themed poetry, philosophical dialogues, and fictional works. This project focuses on women's interpretations, considering love not as a mere literary motif, but as an emotional entity.
Purpose
Within the theoretical framework of the history of emotions, this project intertwines literary studies, history of ideas, and women's studies.
By comparing contemporary love theories with a diverse array of literary and non-literary texts containing women's perspectives and cognitive interactions between men and women, drawn from printed and archival sources, this research challenges the notion of women as passive recipients of men's discourse on love.
Furthermore, it seeks to dispel the stereotype of the counter-reformation era as uniformly stifling women's agency, revealing nuanced viewpoints. It contributes to an ongoing re-evaluation of conventional historical periods, shedding light on the continuity of ideas and practices of love bridging the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation.
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