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Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. RoqueRamírez (eds), Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 293. ISBN 978 0 19 989066 8 (hb); 978 0 19 974273 8 (pb).

In The Prodigious Muse, Virginia Cox reveals a sizable blind spot in the corpus of Italian literary history: the writings of Counter-Reformation women. Counter-Reformation literature has long lain in plain sight yet has remained largely untouched by scholars: a lacuna formed perhaps by the anti-clerical bias that has blinded modern literary scholars to the exciting nature of literature from this period. Counter-Reformation literature remains almost entirely open to exploration and interpretation, including the literary production of men. Cox encourages us therefore, somewhat unusually, to consider the writing of women from this period even before scholars have effectively mapped out the writings of their male counterparts. The period between 1580 and 1630 saw the publication of more than sixty single-authored works by Italian women, and Cox’s study represents the first comprehensive overview of their literary production. This era saw women’s almost complete integration into the tradition of Italian authorship, followed by their eventual exclusion from literary production by the 1640s, most likely as a result of male backlash against the perceived feminisation of both literature and spirituality. Cox considers the work of a great variety of writers, some of whom readers will already be quite familiar with (Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella and Archangela Tarabotti), as well as others who will surely prove new (Valeria Miani, Francesca Turina and Chiara Matraini). Their literary output was both prolific and diverse. The group of female authors she covers composed religious and secular lyric verse, secular drama and pastorals, sacred narratives about Christ’s passion, hagiographic epics, chivalric epics and didactical and polemical prose. Organised thematically by genre, Cox’s text systematically details the plots, stylistic nuances and innovations of their texts. Overall, the author wants readers to walk away with two main points. First, Cox challenges us to rethink the traditional separation of secular and religious writing. She demonstrates regularly how Counter-Reformation religious literature was necessarily formed in dialogue with the writings of Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto, among others; for instance, Fonte’s depictions of Mary Magdalene in her La resurrettione di Giesu Christo (1592) derived from Ariostan and Petrarchan literary archetypes and models.