Representing Women’s Work in Early Modern Italy

These lines describing a female bookbinder at work come from a poem entitled ‘Bella Libraia’, by Gianfrancesco Maia Materdona.1 In seventeenth-century Italy there was a fashion for poems describing women at work. Why should this have been the case? It was the attempt to solve the puzzle that led to the writing of this chapter. It turned out that, in order to replace the poems in their cultural context, it would be necessary to study other representations of women’s work.