Veronica Franco in Dialogue

"Marilyn Migiel’s Veronica Franco in Dialogue is an extended study of the fourteen dialogic poems that Franco published in 1575, in each of which a female voice (Franco’s) interacts and contrasts with a male voice (left anonymous). Migiel’s powerful close readings and probing literary analyses reveal for the first time Franco’s full identity as a poet. While earlier works have presented her as above all an iconic woman and protofeminist figure, Migiel’s work shows how Franco’s consistent and subtle use of important model writers in Latin and Italian makes the poet a highly significant Renaissance author figure. Migiel’s analysis will have a substantial impact on the canonical interpretation of Franco and on future analyses of early modern women writers."

MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies Committee

“This volume is an insightful and succinct example of the best type of literary reading: philologically astute, historically informed, properly contextualized, critically informed, and unafraid to advance distinctive, well-grounded evaluations of the poems under analysis…Marilyn Migiel offers us a veritable master class on the depth and intricacies of early modern poetry.” Maria Galli Stampino, University of Miami, Renaissance and Reformation

"Veronica Franco in Dialogue is a powerful, original, and groundbreaking study of Franco’s dialogic exchange with an unknown male author – real or imagined, single or multiple – that elucidates the ambiguous and oftentimes ambivalent construction of her selfhood as author, lover, and courtesan. Marilyn Migiel offers a masterful rhetorical close reading of these poems with original comparisons to Ovid, Petrarch, Dante, and Ariosto that highlight Franco’s highly sophisticated engagements with these subtexts in ways that have thus far been unnoticed by scholars."

Aileen A. Feng, Associate Professor of Italian, University of Arizona

"Marilyn Migiel’s new book provides an original and much needed reappraisal of the dialogic poems of the Terze Rime. Through a series of exquisite close readings, Migiel demonstrates how Franco writes herself into the long tradition of Latin and Italian poetry."

Hannah C. Wojciehowski, Thaman Professor of English, Department of English and Program in Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin

"Marilyn Migiel performs her usual insightful close readings, applied this time to the dialogic pairs of poems in Veronica Franco’s collected verse. Drawing out ambiguities and ambivalences in her analysis of their rhetoric, she advocates for replacing the view of Franco as a triumphant feminist with a more complex and nuanced but still admiring assessment."

Janet Levarie Smarr, Professor of Theatre and Italian Studies , University of California San Diego