Biography

Victoria Kirkham (VIT 77, 88, 96) is Professor Emerita of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. With interests in literature and the visual arts, numerology, and women’s studies, she is co-author of Diana's Hunt: Boccaccio's First Fiction (1991); author of The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio's Fiction (1993) and Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio's Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction(2001). Editor of Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle (2006); her co-edited volumes include Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons (2005); Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (2009), and Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (forthcoming).

Project Summary

Associated with the courts of Urbino, Rome, and Florence, the poet Laura Battiferra and her husband the sculptor-architect Bartolomeo Ammannati were prolific as a creative couple. This study of their lives and art traces cultural shifts across the sixteenth-century in a microhistory from high Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.