Book edited by UGA professor receives 2024 Josephine Roberts Award

A book project by University of Georgia faculty member Paola De Santo and her co-translator/editor Caterina Mongiat Farina of DePaul University has won the Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition, granted by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. 

The award honors the publication of "Letters by Isabella Andreini" (Iter Press in 2023), a volume in the acclaimed series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.

De Santo, associate professor of Italian in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of Romance Languages, teaches and conducts scholarship focused on the literature and culture of early modern Italy, particularly women’s writing and performance. 

"My co-editor/translator, Dr. Caterina Mongiat Farina, and I are deeply humbled and immensely honored to have received the 2024 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, a pioneering scholarly organization that supports and promotes inclusive and creative scholarship on women and gender across the early modern world," De Santo said.

Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) was the preeminent commedia dell’arte actress of the Renaissance and the first international diva of the European stage. Her troupe, Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi, performed for the Medici, Este and Gonzaga courts of Italy and the French court. Andreini was also a prolific and acclaimed writer of poetry and drama, as well as prose. 

Letters (1607) is a collection of 151 epistles in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. Wildly popular throughout the 17th century, Letters is a hybrid text that fuses literary reflection and dramatic representation while offering a strikingly modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity and engaging in feminist and social issues of her time. 

The projected was supported by the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities and the Nina Sallant Hellerstein Fund coordinated through the Franklin College department of Romance Languages.

Image:the cover of "Letters"