RT Article
T1 Teaching Widowed Women, Community, and Devotion in Quattrocento Florence with Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Antonia Tanini Pulci
JF Religions
VO 9
IS 3
SP 1
OP 13
A1 Wainwright, Anna
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2018
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1586354825
AB In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, a woman's social identity changed when her husband died. She became both a symbol of his loss, and a living monument to his legacy—an ambassador between the living and the dead. Responsible not only for preserving his memory on earth, a widow was also expected to pray on behalf of her husband's soul, to work to rescue him from the torments of Purgatory through her dutiful appeals. Widows were at once asked to pray quietly alone, and tasked with work central to society: the salvation of souls after death. This dual identity—sometimes isolated, yet of fundamental importance—makes the widow an opportune subject for students of early modern conceptions of the relationship between religion and gender. In this essay, I look at widows in Lucrezia Tornabuoni's Judith, Hebrew Widow and Antonia Tanini Pulci's The Destruction of Saul and the Lament of David. Taught side-by-side, these texts provide students with multiple, interconnected ports of entry into the early modern world, encouraging an investigation of how the two women writers worked to place widows at the center of their respective stories, rather than relegated to the margins.
K1 Antonia Tanini Pulci
K1 Lucrezia Tornabuoni
K1 Medici family
K1 Quattrocento Florence
K1 Digital Humanities
K1 sacre rappresentazioni
K1 Widowhood
K1 women writers
DO 10.3390/rel9030076