Biography

Eleonora Serra is an FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) junior postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, and has a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is a historical sociolinguist working on language variation and change, attitudes, and standardisation in the context of early modern Italy. Her PhD thesis, which was awarded the Premio Nencioni by the Accademia della Crusca, critically examined the sociolinguistic notion of prestige, bringing together the analysis of sixteenth-century Italian metalinguistic texts (to reconstruct attitudes) and of the Buonarroti letter corpus (to reconstruct informal usage). Her project at Ghent explores the use and social functions of epistolary formulae in everyday letters from early modern Tuscany.

Project Summary

Women’s activity as letter writers in Renaissance Italy has come to the fore across a range of fields, including palaeography and cultural and literary history. When it comes to linguistics, several excellent studies have focused on the epistolary practice of individual women, but no attempt to date has been made to conduct a comprehensive analysis of early modern women’s epistolary language. However, private letters – both a privileged source to reconstruct language history, and the genre in which women’s participation was wider – represent the ideal locus to reconstruct the language of early modern women. This project provides the first corpus analysis of this kind by zooming in on late Renaissance Florence, which saw a significant increase in female literacy. It analyzes an original corpus of private, autograph letters by more than forty women from the Florentine patriciate from the archives (1540–1610), comparing it with an equivalent corpus of letters by men. By tracking linguistic usage across letters by women and men, and by laywomen and nuns, it will assess women’s receptivity to grammatical and letter-writing norms, and their potential role as linguistic innovators when it came to features that were changing “from below” in the Florentine vernacular. Drawing from historical sociolinguistic approaches that are rare in the Italian context, and focusing on unedited archival material, the project contributes to including women in Italian linguistic historiography.