WomenWritingSaints · Women Writing Saints: Proto-feminist Discourses in Religious texts written by Women in Counter-Reformation Italy

Women Writing Saints: Proto-feminist Discourses in Religious texts written by Women in Counter-Reformation Italy

The Action “Women Writing Saints in Counter-Reformation Italy” is an interdisciplinary project that looks at the religious production authored by different early modern women writers in Italy before the Council of Trenti until 1700. It looks at the depiction of female sanctity and the impact and continuities of the Reformation era in hagiographical representations. In particular, it researched how the female saint-philosopher has been a model of knowledge, agency, and ethics for many of the women writers who lived in the watershed years before and after the Council of Trent (1545). Such topics are important in reconstructing women’s contributions to knowledge and their impact on the development of Western thinking. Their thinking changed over time about what knowledge is, where it comes from, and how it gets validated; their views on this constitute their search for authority. Although the research has been focused on centuries distant from the present, it is relevant today because it challenges long-held perceptions of religious models which have too often been perceived as silencing women’s voices into fixed categories of submission. This project suggests that, on the contrary, religious models offered a platform of self-expression and affirmation for many writers of that time. Beyond its scholarly value, the project disseminates alternative narratives on women’s history, which can contribute to countering the oppressive patriarchal discourses that still have currency in parts of contemporary Italian and European society. Objectives of this Marie Skłodowska Curie Action (MSCA) have been: (1) to collect, analyse and compare the creative contributions of lay Italian women to the religious production of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy; (2) to investigate the strategies through which women have made use of female holiness in their writings by contrasting those with the official versions produced by the Church in the same years; and (3) to – as the ultimate aim – trace the readership of the lives of saints and the religious production taken into account in this study.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз