PARITY
Paratext and Privacy in Renaissance Italy
“Woman’s creation was one of parity - indeed, its circumstances were marked by greater excellence -
in which both were made similar in knowledge and with equal claims to eternal glory…”
Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny, book 1,1653,50
PARITY is a MSCA Seal of Excellence project designed at the Center for Privacy Studies, the University of Copenhagen, executed at the Faculty of Design and Art, University of Bolzano, and financed by the Department of Innovation and Research of the Province of South Tyrol (2023-2024). In 2025, work on the PARITY catalogue has continued to progress, thanks to the generous support of the Dorothy Dunnett Society’s Academic Award.
This web page – one of the project’s outcomes, is a work in progress, expected to expand significantly in the following period. At the moment, PARITY on-line catalogue consists of thirty paratextual elements connected with female authorship in early modern Italy. It aims to be an useful and pleasurable visual contribution to the recovery of early modern women’s work. PARITY also aims to contribute to the privacy and paratextual studies, and it hopes to be an example of the value of a bold interdisciplinary approach that combines history, literature and design. Finally, PARITY is designed, thought and developed with the main idea of the importance of studying past to understand present, and to contribute to the better future.
PARITY is an acronym which stands for key words of research: Paratext, Privacy, Renaissance and Italy. The noun ‘parity’ refers to one of the aims of the project: to examine and make visible the concepts and rhetoric of ideas of defense and equality (therefore parity) between men and women, in paratexts (mainly dedicatory epistles) connected with female authority.
It is an interdisciplinary research project that combines a textual-literary and a cultural-historical strand, focusing on paratexts both as texts and objects. It is based on the traditional study of archival documents, bibliographical and close reading techniques. Main theoretical disciplines used in this project are cultural history, history of emotions, gender history, literary/rhetoric studies, digital humanities and sociocultural anthropology.
Paratext
The term paratext refers to all liminal devices that are possible to find within the book, like titles, dedicatory epistles, dedications to the reader, errata corrige, and the text located outside the book but connected with the main text, such as diaries or letters. It was a French theorist, Gerard Genette who in 1987 offered the famous formulation “Paratexts = peritext + epitext”. The ‘peritext’, includes titles, dedicatory epistles, or dedications to the reader, and the ‘epitext’, is defined as text outside the book or under cover of private communication, such as letters, diaries, and others. In 2011 an important book appeared, Renaissance Paratext edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, where a group of researchers challenged and mostly extended Genette’s ideas in the context of early modern and renaissance paratext. They suggested an approach which analyses paratext both as text and as concept, alongside the paratextual conventions of the time, from different angles, literary, hermeneutic, physical, and practical, in particular historical context. In 2007, Julie A. Eckerle wrote that for women, who already wrote from the social margins, the marginal space of the book represented one of the strategic ways via which they could enter the text and somethimes say things that had no place in the main text. This marginal space, especially dedicatory epistle allowed women authors, for whom already the social and cultural margins were reserved, to enter the text and not rarely to express ideas connected with their private life and to claim the authority with the reference to the proper gender. In such a way, paratexts, mainly dedicatory epistles and dedication to the reader offer an important insight on the public-private relations, patronage relationship, the network of relations (transnational, intercultural, between the dedicator and dedicatee), authorial intentions in terms of book production and distribution, and not rarely some authobiographical references.
How much paratexts were important during early modern period, testifies the number of books dedicated exclusively to the themes of dedications of books, such as different collections of dedicatory epistles, among which the most important Lettere di dedicatorie di diversi, published in 16 books, from 1601. The other important book Della dedication de libri, con la Correttion dell’Abuso, in questa materia introdotto, Dialoghi, by Giovanni Fratta, was published in Venice, in 1540.
Selected Bibliography
Read more ↓
Privacy
The notion and expression of ‘privacy’ and ‘private practices’ in the historical texts changed as cultural and historical circumstances were changing. Privacy in the early modern period cannot be understand with today’s notions of privacy, but it can be understood as an analytical category useful to understand the ideas of self, the common beliefs of society, and the early modern state - public strategies to control human behavior. Since 2017, at the University of Copenhagen, within the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY) , the interdisciplinary team of researchers has been working on the notions of privacy in early modern period, by performing research on privacy connected with Space, Past and Present, Law, Home, Health, and Belief. The PRIVACY research team examines how notions of privacy shape relations between individuals and society across diverse historical contexts. We are particularly interested in indications of privacy as a quality and risk: in the emergence and development of the idea that too little privacy threatens the individual while too much may ruin society. https://teol.ku.dk/privacy/about-privacy/ The founder and director of PRIVACY, prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun developed the methodology important for “the historical study of terms and the historical study of a phenomenon”of privacy. In analyzing historical sources, PRIVACY traces terminology (priv* words), heuristic zones and semantics of privacy. By focusing on ‘priv*’ words, and their ‘cognate terms’ such as particolare, intimo and domestico, and their semantic frameworks connoting privacy in the antiquity and early modern period. Especially useful is PRIVACY's focus on areas where notions of privacy and the private are negotiated - the ‘heuristic zones’: society, community, household, chamber, body, soul/self. By focusing on these zones, the interconnected boundaries or thresholds between public and private become more visible. These zones become visible in the early modern paratext. In dedicatory epistle and dedication to the reader, for example, we can follow a double narrative, self-authorizing personal and private discourse which when necessary ‘slips back into a public voice, thus producing a double narrative of the public and the private…’ in order to enter into canon of textual authority. Moreover, all paratexts highlight the paratextual importance, e.g. dedicatory epistle has financial, celebratory, and other functions. They became the space for the negotiation and the legitimization of the new position of the author, book market and the literature in general, the site upon which cultural perceptions of materiality, value, and collaboration were negotiated.
Selected Bibliography
Read more ↓
Renaissance
The rise of individualism as an authorial ideal during the Renaissance, reflects public and private struggles of the author within a certain context, which gives Renaissance paratexts a unique hermeneutic importance. Paratexts stand between the private and public, and their epistolary character becomes one of their main patterns, especially in the 16th century - being a transitional period from the manuscript to the printed books. The Italian Renaissance culture offered more possibilities to women’s participation in the production of culture, than it is possible to find in some other countries. Cox’s study from 2008 lists 150 entries for “single-authored printed works by Italian women” published from 1540 to 1659. This was also a period of the debate on female rights - the querelle des femmes. Querelle des femmes opened the debate about the position of women in society, treated in texts written mainly by men, but also by women and was quite widespread during the sixteenth century. The French notion querelle des femmes or “debate about women,” in itself covers the vast literature on women and their roles within society during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in Europe. Written polemically, as dialogues, treatises, manuals of behavior, or sometimes in the form of oral discussion in universities, academies, or salons, these texts appeared on the Italian peninsula as well as in other parts of Europe. The peak of the debate in the Italian context was during the sixteenth century, particularly around 1580, in the literary academies of Veneto. Not rarely, for women authors, dedicatory epistle become an important space to participate to the debate querelle des femmes.
Selected Bibliography
Read more ↓
Transcriptions, publishing and editing criteria
All paratextual material in prose has been transcribed. The transcription follows the text as closely as it was possible, and small changes were made to enhance reading or to correct printer’s mistakes. Main intervention in the texts are:
- The letters v and u have been distinguished
- The letter j in initial position or between vocals has been changened into i
- Punctuation has been added/removed when it was necessary.
- The symbol & has been changed in et
- Adverbs and some names have been tied (poiché, invece…)
- Double consonants have been changed following today’s conventions
- Accents and apostrophes have been modernised
- The letter h has not been removed (hora)
- The original capitalization has not been changed (Amor)
- T followed by the vowel has been changed into z (silentio – silenzio)
In PARITY online catalogue all authors’ names are written as they appear in their books. All other versions of their names are mentioned, and in some cases the modern usage is pointed out. Female authors are listed by name and not by surname, following the model of early modern catalogues, where the name precedes the surname.
PARITY
Paratext and Privacy in Renaissance Italy
“Woman’s creation was one of parity - indeed, its circumstances were marked by greater excellence -
in which both were made similar in knowledge and with equal claims to eternal glory…”
Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny, book 1,1653,50
PARITY is a MSCA Seal of Excellence project designed at the Center for Privacy Studies, the University of Copenhagen, executed at the Faculty of Design and Art, University of Bolzano, and financed by the Department of Innovation and Research of the Province of South Tyrol (2023-2024). In 2025, work on the PARITY catalogue has continued to progress, thanks to the generous support of the Dorothy Dunnett Society’s Academic Award.
This web page – one of the project’s outcomes, is a work in progress, expected to expand significantly in the following period. At the moment, PARITY on-line catalogue consists of thirty paratextual elements connected with female authorship in early modern Italy. It aims to be an useful and pleasurable visual contribution to the recovery of early modern women’s work. PARITY also aims to contribute to the privacy and paratextual studies, and it hopes to be an example of the value of a bold interdisciplinary approach that combines history, literature and design. Finally, PARITY is designed, thought and developed with the main idea of the importance of studying past to understand present, and to contribute to the better future.
PARITY is an acronym which stands for key words of research: Paratext, Privacy, Renaissance and Italy. The noun ‘parity’ refers to one of the aims of the project: to examine and make visible the concepts and rhetoric of ideas of defense and equality (therefore parity) between men and women, in paratexts (mainly dedicatory epistles) connected with female authority.
It is an interdisciplinary research project that combines a textual-literary and a cultural-historical strand, focusing on paratexts both as texts and objects. It is based on the traditional study of archival documents, bibliographical and close reading techniques. Main theoretical disciplines used in this project are cultural history, history of emotions, gender history, literary/rhetoric studies, digital humanities and sociocultural anthropology.
Paratext
The term paratext refers to all liminal devices that are possible to find within the book, like titles, dedicatory epistles, dedications to the reader, errata corrige, and the text located outside the book but connected with the main text, such as diaries or letters. It was a French theorist, Gerard Genette who in 1987 offered the famous formulation “Paratexts = peritext + epitext”. The ‘peritext’, includes titles, dedicatory epistles, or dedications to the reader, and the ‘epitext’, is defined as text outside the book or under cover of private communication, such as letters, diaries, and others. In 2011 an important book appeared, Renaissance Paratext edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, where a group of researchers challenged and mostly extended Genette’s ideas in the context of early modern and renaissance paratext. They suggested an approach which analyses paratext both as text and as concept, alongside the paratextual conventions of the time, from different angles, literary, hermeneutic, physical, and practical, in particular historical context. In 2007, Julie A. Eckerle wrote that for women, who already wrote from the social margins, the marginal space of the book represented one of the strategic ways via which they could enter the text and somethimes say things that had no place in the main text. This marginal space, especially dedicatory epistle allowed women authors, for whom already the social and cultural margins were reserved, to enter the text and not rarely to express ideas connected with their private life and to claim the authority with the reference to the proper gender. In such a way, paratexts, mainly dedicatory epistles and dedication to the reader offer an important insight on the public-private relations, patronage relationship, the network of relations (transnational, intercultural, between the dedicator and dedicatee), authorial intentions in terms of book production and distribution, and not rarely some authobiographical references.
How much paratexts were important during early modern period, testifies the number of books dedicated exclusively to the themes of dedications of books, such as different collections of dedicatory epistles, among which the most important Lettere di dedicatorie di diversi, published in 16 books, from 1601. The other important book Della dedication de libri, con la Correttion dell’Abuso, in questa materia introdotto, Dialoghi, by Giovanni Fratta, was published in Venice, in 1540.
Selected Bibliography
Read more ↓
Privacy
The notion and expression of ‘privacy’ and ‘private practices’ in the historical texts changed as cultural and historical circumstances were changing. Privacy in the early modern period cannot be understand with today’s notions of privacy, but it can be understood as an analytical category useful to understand the ideas of self, the common beliefs of society, and the early modern state - public strategies to control human behavior. Since 2017, at the University of Copenhagen, within the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY) , the interdisciplinary team of researchers has been working on the notions of privacy in early modern period, by performing research on privacy connected with Space, Past and Present, Law, Home, Health, and Belief. The PRIVACY research team examines how notions of privacy shape relations between individuals and society across diverse historical contexts. We are particularly interested in indications of privacy as a quality and risk: in the emergence and development of the idea that too little privacy threatens the individual while too much may ruin society. https://teol.ku.dk/privacy/about-privacy/ The founder and director of PRIVACY, prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun developed the methodology important for “the historical study of terms and the historical study of a phenomenon”of privacy. In analyzing historical sources, PRIVACY traces terminology (priv* words), heuristic zones and semantics of privacy. By focusing on ‘priv*’ words, and their ‘cognate terms’ such as particolare, intimo and domestico, and their semantic frameworks connoting privacy in the antiquity and early modern period. Especially useful is PRIVACY's focus on areas where notions of privacy and the private are negotiated - the ‘heuristic zones’: society, community, household, chamber, body, soul/self. By focusing on these zones, the interconnected boundaries or thresholds between public and private become more visible. These zones become visible in the early modern paratext. In dedicatory epistle and dedication to the reader, for example, we can follow a double narrative, self-authorizing personal and private discourse which when necessary ‘slips back into a public voice, thus producing a double narrative of the public and the private…’ in order to enter into canon of textual authority. Moreover, all paratexts highlight the paratextual importance, e.g. dedicatory epistle has financial, celebratory, and other functions. They became the space for the negotiation and the legitimization of the new position of the author, book market and the literature in general, the site upon which cultural perceptions of materiality, value, and collaboration were negotiated.
Selected Bibliography
Read more ↓
Renaissance
The rise of individualism as an authorial ideal during the Renaissance, reflects public and private struggles of the author within a certain context, which gives Renaissance paratexts a unique hermeneutic importance. Paratexts stand between the private and public, and their epistolary character becomes one of their main patterns, especially in the 16th century - being a transitional period from the manuscript to the printed books. The Italian Renaissance culture offered more possibilities to women’s participation in the production of culture, than it is possible to find in some other countries. Cox’s study from 2008 lists 150 entries for “single-authored printed works by Italian women” published from 1540 to 1659. This was also a period of the debate on female rights - the querelle des femmes. Querelle des femmes opened the debate about the position of women in society, treated in texts written mainly by men, but also by women and was quite widespread during the sixteenth century. The French notion querelle des femmes or “debate about women,” in itself covers the vast literature on women and their roles within society during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in Europe. Written polemically, as dialogues, treatises, manuals of behavior, or sometimes in the form of oral discussion in universities, academies, or salons, these texts appeared on the Italian peninsula as well as in other parts of Europe. The peak of the debate in the Italian context was during the sixteenth century, particularly around 1580, in the literary academies of Veneto. Not rarely, for women authors, dedicatory epistle become an important space to participate to the debate querelle des femmes.
Selected Bibliography
Read more ↓
Transcriptions, publishing and editing criteria
All paratextual material in prose has been transcribed. The transcription follows the text as closely as it was possible, and small changes were made to enhance reading or to correct printer’s mistakes. Main intervention in the texts are:
- The letters v and u have been distinguished
- The letter j in initial position or between vocals has been changened into i
- Punctuation has been added/removed when it was necessary.
- The symbol & has been changed in et
- Adverbs and some names have been tied (poiché, invece…)
- Double consonants have been changed following today’s conventions
- Accents and apostrophes have been modernised
- The letter h has not been removed (hora)
- The original capitalization has not been changed (Amor)
- T followed by the vowel has been changed into z (silentio – silenzio)
In PARITY online catalogue all authors’ names are written as they appear in their books. All other versions of their names are mentioned, and in some cases the modern usage is pointed out. Female authors are listed by name and not by surname, following the model of early modern catalogues, where the name precedes the surname.