ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the term 'post-renaissance' in a deliberate nod to the long-standing tendency to measure Italian literary production post-1560 against the period of the high renaissance and find it lacking, as the new classicising and reformed literary aesthetics of the later period failed to chime with the literary sensibilities of subsequent historical eras. How far the various Indexes of Prohibited Books issued in the second half of the sixteenth century concerned themselves with vernacular literary texts is a question that has attracted useful attention from scholars. The relation of the issue of gender to the presence of Italian literature on the Indexes is a fascinating one, that has been opened up in some useful ways by Virginia Cox's two monumental studies of women writers in the early modern period. Cox's encyclopaedic work allows us to chart the rapid increase in the number of published women in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century.
