Tullia d'Aragona – författare

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d''Aragona (1510–56) entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love. Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d''Aragona dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona''s sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality.

First published in Venice in 1547, this work casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love. Tullia d'Aragona argued that the only moral form of love between a woman and a man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she sought to challenge the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemed all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, the book asserts, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honourable love must be based on this real nature. Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men.

The only English translation of the first epic poem to be authored by an Italian woman.This is an unabridged bilingual, fully annotated edition of Tullia d’Aragona’s epic poem The Wretch. This mid-century epic reflects the many historical and religious changes taking place in the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe and the burgeoning literary debates following the publication of another Italian epic poem, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The Wretch recounts the adventures of Guerrino, a nobleman captured by pirates as an infant and sold into slavery. His famous quest in search of his parents and his identity involves abductions, same-sex seductions, and skirmishes with fantastical beasts as he travels through Europe, Turkey, Africa, India, Arabia, and the Purgatory of St. Patrick. The poem occupies an important position in the development of the prestigious epic genre, the highest step on the ladder to literary recognition and fame, and Tullia’s work paved the way for the epics of other women writers in subsequent decades.