Biography

Sarah Gwyneth Ross is an Associate Professor of History at Boston College and is fascinated by the intersections of intellectual and social history. She received her doctorate from Northwestern University in 2006 and thereafter enjoyed two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. Her publications include a book, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (2009), and several articles on related topics. Having just finished a new manuscript about the literary lives of physicians, she now turns to the literary lives of actors.

Project Summary

Some commedia dell’arte performers convinced audiences to see them as virtuous rhetoricians not “tumbling whores” (Ben Jonson’s phrase) – but how? At the heart of this study lies the Andreini family, two generations of theatrical and literary collaboration, and many questions about gender norms, humanism’s legacies and the boundaries between elite and popular culture.