Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples - Letters and Orations: Volume 55 (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series)

Ippolita Maria Sforza

ISBN 10: 0866985743 / ISBN 13: 9780866985741

Published by Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,US, 2017

About this Item

2017. Illustrated. Paperback. . . . . .

Seller Inventory # V9780866985741

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples - Letters and Orations: Volume 55 (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series)
• Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,US
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0866985743
• ISBN 13: 9780866985741
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforza’s letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy, amid such grave crises as her brother’s assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto. Still, Ippolita lived as a hostage at the Neapolitan court, subject not only to the threat of foreign invasion but also to her husband’s well-known sexual adventures and her father-in-law’s ruthlessness. Soon after Ippolita’s mysterious death in 1488, the fraught Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.

About the Authors

Diana Robin is Professor Emerita of Classics at the University of New Mexico, Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She has published extensively on women and humanism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy.
 

Lynn Lara Westwater is Associate Professor of Italian at The George Washington University. For The Other Voice Series she is co-editor with Meredith K. Ray of Arcangela Tarabotti’s Letters Familiar and Formal (2012) and with Diana Robin of Ippolita Sforza, Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples: Letters and Orations (2017).
 

Diana Robin is professor emerita of classics at the University of New Mexico and a scholar in residence at the Newberry Library. She has written, edited, and translated several books, most recently Isotta Nogarola’s Complete Writings, also published by the University of Chicago Press.