Article: Letters from the Cloister: defending the literary self in Arcangela Tarabotti's Lettere familiari e di complimento.

When the Venetian nun and protofeminist writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) published her Lettere familiari e di complimento in 1650, she positioned herself within a literary tradition that had gained new momentum in the sixteenth century and retained its cachet well into the next. No longer the sole province of Humanist writers, for whom letter writing had constituted a link to a classical tradition rooted in the letters of Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and Seneca, the epistolary genre had been revitalized with the publication of the first volume of letters of Pietro Aretino in 1538. (1) Written in the vernacular rather than Latin, the "new" epistolary genre was accessible ...

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