ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is primarily concerned with male-authored representations of female protagonists, although it includes two codas on female-authored texts, the only contributions extant in the genres of comedy and tragedy. It offers sensitive analyses of the several little-known sixteenth-century plays. The book investigates the ancient ideal of friendship—a paramount male-centered Renaissance virtu—and its celebration predominantly in female tragic characters. It provides some compelling evidence of a budding literary kinship among women writers in an incipient female-authored tradition of writing in the pastoral mode. The book demonstrates how female-authors use various forms of the rhetoric—embedded in the generic form of tragicomedy—in order to foreground female protagonists’ agency and, in some instances, in order to showcase diminished masculine virtu. It examines the Paduan letterata’s contribution to the exclusively male-authored canon.
