Moral Combat: Women, Gender, and War in Italian Renaissance Literature(Toronto Italian Studies)

The Italian sixteenth century offers the first sustained discussion of women's militarism since antiquity. Across a variety of genres, male and female writers raised questions about women's right and ability to fight in combat. Treatise literature engaged scientific, religious, and cultural discourses about women's virtues, while epic poetry and biographical literature famously featured examples of women as soldiers, commanders, observers, and victims of war. Moral Combat asks how and why women's militarism became one of the central discourses of this age. Gerry Milligan discusses the armed heroines of biography and epic within the context of contemporary debates over women's combat abilities and men's martial obligations. Women are frequently described as fighting because men have failed their masculine duty. A woman's prowess at arms was asserted to be a cultural symptom of men's shortcomings. Moral Combat ultimately argues that the popularity of the warrior woman in sixteenth-century Italian literature was due to her dual function of shame and praise: calling men to action and signaling potential victory to a disempowered people.

Table of Contents:
Introduction The Philosophical History of the Armed Woman The Poetic and the Real: The Chivalric-Epic Commentary of the Armed Woman Women Writers Demanding Warrior Masculinity: Catherine of Siena, Laura Terracina, Chiara Matraini and sabella Cervoni Illustrious Warring Women: From Plutarch to Boccaccio The Noble Warrior Woman (1440-1550) The Fame of Women and the Infamy of Men in the Age of Warring Queens (1550-1600) Conclusion

About the Author :
Gerry Milligan is an associate professor at the College of Staten Island-CUNY.

Review :
"Milligan’s rich and dynamic investigation forges new intellectual approaches and offers important new insights to the study of women, gender, and war in the Italian Renaissance." - Victoria G. Fanti, John Hopkins University (gender/sexuality/italy, 5 (2018)) "Milligan offers a very detailed, well-documented, and illuminating study on gender and war in Renaissance Italy, and brilliantly illustrates how the proliferation of textual representations of warrior women impacted the culture, society, and moral norms of that age." - Lilia Campana, Texas A&M University (Renaissance Quarterly)