Marilyn Migiel - Veronica Franco in Dialogue

In reflecting on the people who have made it possible for a book like Veronica Franco in Dialogue to come into existence, I have realized that a principal debt of gratitude goes to all the scholars who with their textual readings, historical research, and translations have expanded the field of Italian studies so that it includes many more women writers of the early modern period than it did when I first began my scholarly career. It is deeply satisfying to see that focusing on women writers is no longer an undertaking that places one at the margins of the profession.

I have been fortunate, in the course of writing this book, to receive generous commentary from friends, colleagues, and students. Special thanks go to the participants of our writing group: Kathleen Perry Long, Irene Eibenstein-Alvisi, Giulia Andreoni, Julia Karczewski, Riccardo Sam, and Magdala Jeudy. William J. Kennedy and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski provided important feedback on grant applications that helped me clarify the stakes of the project. Konrad Eisenbichler, Margaret Rosenthal, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Smarr offered helpful suggestions following my presentations at scholarly conferences. Reading Veronica Francos poetry with students at Cornell University and Bucknell University and in Telluride Association Summer Programs always proved invigorating.

The two scholars who provided anonymous readers reports to the University of Toronto Press offered invaluable comments that helped me strengthen the argumentation and the writing. Angela Wingfields expert copy-editing was invaluable, especially because it saved me from some inadvertent errors. To Suzanne Rancourt I express my thanks for her having solicited such helpful readers reports and for her having proposed the strikingly elegant image on the book jacket.

Thomas Gordon of the University of Manchester very kindly supplied information about the copy of Veronica Francos Terze rime found in the John Rylands Library.

is a revised version of my analysis of that poem published in Gender Studies and the Italian Renaissance, in Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives, edited by Antonio Toscano (Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1991), 2941.

The Italian text of Veronica Francos Terze rime is quoted by permission of Ugo Mursia Editore, S.r.l. from Veronica Franco, Rime, edited by Stefano Bianchi, 1995 Ugo Mursia Editore S.r.l. English translations of the same are quoted by permission of the University of Chicago Press from Poems and Selected Letters by Veronica Franco, edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal, 1998 The University of Chicago.

Veronica Franco in Dialogue is dedicated to William J. Kennedy, Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Cornell University. Over the course of his distinguished career, in his impeccable scholarship and his inspired teaching, Bill has modelled for us how to read literary texts with precision and care and how to write about them in ways that will engage others effectively. A consummate gentleman as well as a consummate scholar, Bill has also modelled for us how to support others so that they can do their best work. Dedicating this book to him is a way to thank him not only for everything he has done for me but also for everything he has done to ensure that Renaissance studies continues to flourish.