Biography

Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature and of Divinity at Yale University. Her primary interests are in late medieval and early modern Europe, especially as regards the history of the book, translation studies, religious writing, and women’s literature. Tylus is the author of Who Owns Literature?: Early Modernity’s Orphan Texts (Cambridge, 2025), Siena, City of Secrets (Chicago, 2015); Reclaiming Catherine of Siena (Winner of the 2010 Modern Language Association’s Howard Marraro Prize for Best Work in Italian Studies); and Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (Stanford, 1993). She has translated both contemporary and early modern women writers and edited the journal I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance for nine years. She has been an honorary member (socia corrispondente) of the Accademia degli Intronati, Siena, since 2015, and was inducted into the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 2024. Tylus’s administrative work has included service as associate dean for the humanities and arts (U. of Wisconsin-Madison), founding director of the Center for the Humanities and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs (NYU) and chair of the department of Italian Studies (Yale).

Project Summary

“Quid nunc agimus?” – whatever are we to do now? The words are Francesco Petrarca’s, long viewed as the first and foremost voice of the Italian Renaissance, but they were echoed throughout the long centuries of Europe’s modernity by countless individuals attempting to come to terms with the constant and yet unpredictable rhythm in early modern Europe of exile, departures, renunciation, plague, and, yes, death. Petrarch’s response – and that of the many other writers and artists whom this project will discuss – was to use the project of writing itself as a way to familiarize himself and others with leavetaking in various walks of life. Art as a practice that helps make sense of boundaries already crossed and prepares us for others by virtue of its own tenuous existence in and of the world. This study will look for patterns in that practice, while it will also note the many complications that emerged as early modernity became more “modern.” It focuses largely on literary and artistic works in order to propose something of a history of familiarization with the necessity of “staccarsi”: of letting go. The project at I Tatti will focus on two chapters dedicated to two ‘couplings’ of figures intensely interested, albeit in very different ways, in leave-taking: Clare and Francis of Assisi; and Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo. In parsing their writings and their associations, the chapters will seek to locate their own meditations on “separation” within larger cultural changes, as well as to attempt to understand the legacy of their individual choices regarding confrontations with thresholds of various kinds.