Helena Sanson

Wendy Ayres-Bennett

Professor of French Philology and Linguistics Wendy Ayres-Bennett

Professor of Italian History of Linguistics and Women's Studies Helena Sanson

This volume offers a ground-breaking investigation into women's contribution to the description, analysis, and codification of languages across a wide range of linguistic and cultural traditions. The chapters explore a variety of spheres of activity, from the production of dictionaries and grammars to language teaching methods and language policy.

Women in the History of Linguistics

Alessandria, Italy, 1628: a young woman, Isabella Sori, publishes her only known work, consisting of three different texts, at a time when war and the plague are looming. Written in the form of letters by a mother to her daughter, her Ammaestramenti e ricordi is a treatise on the ideal conduct of women in everyday life which draws from an impressive array of sources and displays an unusual level of erudition for the author’s sex and age. Attacked for her literary enterprise by unidentified malicious detractors, Isabella Sori is forced to defend herself (and the female sex) against their criticisms: her Difese still preserves her unfiltered indignation. A Panegirico of Alessandria, a cross between an idealized portrait and a historical document of the city, concludes the work. Amid questions of authorship and attribution, Sori’s work, with its immediacy and liveliness offers precious insight into the life and customs of a long-lost era, as well as a poignant testimony of a local ‘battle of the pens’ waged by the author with pride and dignity. This rich edition, comprehensively annotated and providing a meticulous reconstruction of her wide-ranging sources, restores Sori’s rare writings to the public once more, after nearly four hundred years of oblivion. Contents include: a historical introduction to the author, her times, and her work; a note on the text; the Italian text with notes; a glossary; an appendix; a bibliography; an index of names.

Isabella Sori, 'Ammaestramenti e ricordi', 'Difese', 'Panegirico'

The first modern edition of Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della instituzion delle donne, originally published in Venice in 1545 with the printing presses of Gabriele Giolito. A vernacular translation and adaptation (or plagiarism, according to some) of the 1538 edition of the De institutione foeminae Christianae by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, the Dialogo was one of the most successful works on female conduct written in sixteenth-century Italy. Dolce transformed Vives’s didactic treatise into a dialogue, in which Flaminio teaches the widow Dorotea rules of conduct for the three stages of lay women’s lives, that is, as unmarried girls, married women, and widows. Whilst indebted to its Latin source in terms of the ideas and precepts presented, and the many exempla used to substantiate them, Dolce’s Dialogo is nevertheless also new and original. In the lively publishing market of the time, the fruitful collaboration between Dolce and Giolito targeted new circles of readers, including women, who were not necessarily familiar with Latin, and who welcomed translations and adaptations into the vernacular such as this. Contents include: a historical introduction to the author, his time, and his work; the Italian text with notes; a bibliography; an index of names.

Helena Sanson

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