Biography

Friederike Ach studies early modern literature in English, German, Italian, and Latin, with a focus on female readership, lovesickness, and the novella. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 2025 with a thesis titled “Textually Transmitted Diseases: The Lovesick Female Reader from Boccaccio to Burton.” Her published work includes articles on John Milton, William Shakespeare, and Philip Sidney.

Project Summary

From the second half of the fourteenth century and with increasing intensity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is a striking proliferation of women as the protagonists in Western European love plots, who choose to commit suicide, often looking to classical models for inspiration. Alongside new retellings of ancient stories such as those of Hero and Leander or Pyramus and Thisbe, early modern writers increasingly created new heroines, living in contemporary European cities, who imitate their classical forebears in their choice to die for love. The result is a broader cultural transformation, still insufficiently studied, in which female self-killing moves from a marginal and largely unspeakable act in medieval culture to a central literary and artistic topos in Renaissance Europe. This research project explores the diffusion, adaptation, and visual representation of these narratives across literature, translation, and print culture, in a period marked by the recovery of classical antiquity and the rapid circulation of texts and images through early printing. The goal is to understand how Renaissance writers and artists used classical models of female suicide to rethink desire, agency, and the cultural meanings of self-inflicted death.