Celinda, A Tragedy – A Bilingual Edition

Valeria Finucci is professor of Italian and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Lady Vanishes (1992) and The Manly Masquerade (2003) and has edited nine more volumes on topics as far ranging as costumes in alba amicorum to Petrarch and Petrarchism. Her work has appeared in The Other Voice: Chicago series, in 2005, with Giulia Bigolina's Urania, a Romance, and in 2006, with Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, A Chivalric Romance. Julia Kisacky is senior lecturer in Italian at Baylor University. She is the author of Magic in Boiardo and Ariosto(1999) and has translated for the Chicago series Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, A Chivalric Romance (2006).

"Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611), the only female–authored secular tragedy of early modern Italy, is here made available for the first time in a modern edition. Miani's tale of the doomed love of the Lydian princess Celinda for the cross–dressed Persian prince Autilio/Lucinia offers a striking example of the explorative attitude to gender identity that is such a marked characteristic of Italian drama in this period, both within the erudite and the commedia dell'artetradition. Accompanied by Julia Kisacky's sensitive translation, and with a valuable contextualizing introduction by Valeria Finucci, this edition of Celinda makes an important contribution to our understanding of women's place within Italian literary culture in a period increasingly recognized as exceptional for the range and quality of female-authored writing it produced."

• Acknowledgements ixEditor’s IntroductionThe Other Voice 1Biography 7Situating Miani’s Work: A Survey of Early Modern DramaPenned by Women 14The Pastoral Play Amorosa Speranza 21The Tragic Genre 25Celinda: Structure and Themes 30The Fortunes of Valeria Miani 49Note on the Italian Text 51Note on Transcription 52Note on the Translation 53Celinda, A Tragedy: Italian Text with English Translation on Facing Pages 55Endnotes to the Translation 370Editors’ Bibliography 391Index 407