Professor Helena Sanson

Teaching interests: 

Helena Sanson teaches across various papers for the Italian Section, in all years of the UG degree course. For the MPhil in Literature, Culture and Thought she teaches on the modules ‘Women and Writing in Italy’, ‘Approaches to Gender’, ‘Cultures of the Renaissance’, ‘Marginalities in the Nineteenth Century’, and on the core course seminars ‘Gender: Theory and History’. She also teaches on the MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies (Centre for Gender Studies).

Professor Sanson welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students interested in doing research on topics related to language, literature, and culture in Italy, between the 16th and the early 20th century, in particular with reference to women's history, women writers, conduct literature, history of linguistic thought, and history of translation. Prospective students are encouraged to get in touch by email with a provisional research proposal. Interdisciplinary projects are particularly welcome. Professor Sanson is also happy to supervise students applying for an MPhil or PhD at the Centre for Gender Studies.

Research interests: 

Professor Sanson’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the history of the Italian language, literature and culture in Italy, between the Renaissance and the post-Unification period. She is particularly interested in the relationship between the history of linguistic thought and the history of women, as representative of the less learned, as well as in the role of women writers and women readers, in the same period. She has published a number of articles and chapters on these issues and is the author of Donne, precettistica e lingua nell’Italia del Cinquecento: un contributo alla storia del pensiero linguistico (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2007) and Women, Language and Grammar: Italy 1500-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2011; this book was one of the winners of the ‘British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph Series’ competition). Another strand of interest is the vast production of conduct literature for and about women that aimed to define women’s nature and their role in society. She has prepared modern editions of sixteenth-century texts on conduct, and among these Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della instituzion delle donne, secondo li tre stati che cadono nella vita umana (1545) (Cambridge: MHRA, 2015), Isabella Sori’s Ammaestramenti e ricordi, Difese, Panegirico (1628) (Cambridge: MHRA, 2018; Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 2021), and  Annibale Guasco, Ragionamento [...] a Donna Lavinia sua figliuola, della maniera del governarsi ells in corte (1586). Con una scelta di lettere (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 2022). She also co-edited the volume Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470-1900: Prescribing and Describing Life (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016).

Her current research also focuses on women's role in and contribution to the history of translation in Italy. On this topic she recently published the edited volume Women and Translation in the Italian Tradition (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022).

Recent research projects: 

Among Professor Sanson's recent publications is the co-edited volume Women in the History of Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2020), a ground-breaking exploration of the role women have played in the history of language codification and the history of linguistic thought across a range of European and non-European traditions. Click here for more information. Professor Sanson is currently completing a new monograph, Knowledge across Boundaries: Women, Language and Translation in Italy's Long Eighteenth Century, which investigates the role of women translators in the circulation of new ideas and the popularization and dissemination of knowledge in Italy from Arcadia to the beginning of the 19th century. Thanks to a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2021-2023), she to continued to explore the history of the Italian language from a gender perspective. Her project Women and Linguistic Culture in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Italy examines the uncharted landscapes of women's everyday linguistic experience within both the domestic and the public sphere - across regions and social classes.

Professor Sanson was the UK host and co-applicant of the Newton International Fellowship project Female Portraits in Italian and British Travellers' Accounts from Poland (1600-1700) carried out by Dr Małgorzata Trzeciak Cygan (2018-2022). As part of the project, they have co-edited the volume Women and Their Worlds: The Perspectives of Early Modern European Travellers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthc.).

Together with Francesco Lucioli (Sapienza Università di Roma), she is co-editing three volumes on Le donne e la storia della letteratura italiana which will be published by Carocci in Rome.

Prizes and awards:

Professor Sanson is the recipient of a number of prizes and awards; among these: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship; British Academy Small Research Grant; AHRC research leave grant; British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph Series competition; CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) Early Career Fellowship; Isaac Newton Trust research grant; British Academy Conference Grant; MHRA conference grant; Cambridge Humanities Research Grant; Leverhulme Research Fellowship. In 2018-19, she was awarded a Senior Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, where she also was Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Classic Philology and Italian Studies in 2019-20 and Visiting Professor in 2023.

She is also the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize.

Published works: 

Selected publications:

Books:

Annibale Guasco, Ragionamento […] a Donna Lavinia sua figliuola, della maniera del governarsi ella in corte (1586). Con una scelta di lettere, ed. by Helena Sanson (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2022), 288 pp.

Women and Translation in the Italian Tradition, ed. by Helena Sanson (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022), 449 pp.

Isabella Sori, Ammaestramenti e ricordi, Difese, Penegirico, ed. by Helena Sanson (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 'Contributi e proposte', 2021), 312 pp.

Women in the History of Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; co-edited with W. Ayres-Bennett), 672 pp.

Isabella Sori, Ammaestramenti e ricordi, circa a' buoni costumi, che deve insegnare una ben creata madre ad una figlia, da citella, d'accasata e da vedova; [...] divisi in dodeci lettere [...]. Con [...] dodeci Difese, datte contro alcuni sinistri giudicii, [...] e nel fine un Panegirico [...] dell'Illustrissima città d'Alessandria (1628), ed. by Helena Sanson (Cambridge: MHRA, 2018, 'Critical Texts Series', vol. 48), xi+ 264 pp.

Da madri a cittadine: le donne italiane fra l'Unificazione e la Repubblica, co-edited with S. Delmedico and M. Di Franco. Special issue of The Italianist, 2018, 38(3), 298-459, 162 pp.

Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470-1900: Describing and Prescribing Life, co-edited with F. Lucioli (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), 438 pp.

500 Years of italian Grammar(s), Culture, and Society in Italy and Europe: From Fortunio's Regole (1516) to the Present, co-edited with F. Lucioli. Special issue of The Italianist, 2016, 36(3), 154 pp.

Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della instituzion delle donne, secondo li tre stati, che cadono nella vita humana (1545), ed. by Helena Sanson (Cambridge: MHRA, 2015, 'Critical Texts' Series, vol. 30), x+212 pp.

Women and Gender in Post-Unification Italy: Between Private and Public Spheres, co-edited with K. Mitchell (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013; 'Italian Modernities' series), x+272 pp.

Women, Language and Grammar in Italy, 1500-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2011), xiv+432 pp.32 illustrations (this volume was a winner of the British Academy Postdoctoral Monograph Series Competition)

Donne precettistica e lingua nell'Italia del Cinquecento: un contributo alla storia del pensiero linguisticio (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2007), xviii+382 pp.

Selected articles/book chapters:

• ‘Women, Language, Education in Italy’s Long Eighteenth Century: The Views of French and British Travellers’, in Women and Their Worlds: The Perspectives of Early Modern European Travellers, eds Helena Sanson and Małgorzata Trzeciak-Cygan (London: Palgrave Macmillan), forthc.
• ‘Women in the History of Italian’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Language, eds Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden (Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthc.
• ‘Learning Languages for Marriage: The Linguistic Experience of Aristocratic Women in Early Modern Europe’, in Women in the History of Language Learning and Teaching: Hidden Pioneers of Practice from Europe and Beyond (1400-2000), eds Sabine Doff, Giovanni Iamartino, and Rachel Mairs (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), forthc.
• ‘The Question of Language and the Languages of Literature’, in The Oxford Handbook of Italian Literature, ed. Stefano Jossa (Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthc.
• ‘French and Eighteenth-Century Italian Women: Language of Vanity or Language of Scholarship?’, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, eds Janice Carruthers, Mairi Mclaughlin, and Olivia Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 144-160
• ‘Two Nun Translators in Early Modern Italian Convents: Angelica Baitelli and Maria Stella’, in Women and Language in the Italian Tradition, ed. by Helena Sanson (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022), pp. 129-166 
• ‘Introduction: Women and Translation in the Italian Tradition Italy: From the Renaissance to the Present’, in Women and Translation in the Italian Tradition, ed. by Helena Sanson (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022), pp. 9-51
• 'Women's Social Status and their Access to Learning in Multilingual Early Modern Italy', in Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe, ed. by N. Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 'Proceedings of the British Academy’, 2022), pp. 46-70
• "Io che donna indotta e minima sono": Women, Translation and Classical Languages in Early Modern Italy, Women Language Literature in Italy, 2021, 3, 29-51
• 'Women in the History of Linguistics: Distant and Neglected Voices', in W. Ayres-Bennett and H. Sanson (eds), Women in the History of Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 1-29 (with W. Ayres-Bennett)
• 'Women and Language Codification in Italy: Marginalized Voices, Forgotten Contribution', in W. Ayres-Bennett and H. Sanson (eds), Women in the History of Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp.59-90
• 'Women and Conduct in the Italian Tradition, 1470-1900: An Overview', in Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470-1900: Prescribing and Describing Life, 2016, pp. 9-38
• 'Vittoria Colonna and Language', in Companion to Vittoria Colonna, ed. by A. Brundin, T. Crivelli Speciale, M.S. Sapegno ( Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 195-233
• 'Ma e in latino nulla? Qualcosa sì, ma tanto poco, che paja un nulla: donne e latino in Italia fra Sette e Ottocento', Romanische Forschungen, 2015, 127 (4), 449-81
• "Simplicité, clarté et précision": Grammars of Italian 'Pour les Dames' and Other Learners in Eighteenth - and Early Nineteenth-Century France', Modern Language review, 2014, 109 (3), 593-616
• '"Femina proterva, rude, indocta [...], chi t'ha insegnato a parlar in questo modo?": Women's "voices" and Linguistic Varieties in Written Texts (Italy, 16th-17th Centuries)', The Italianist, special issue, 2014, 34 (3), 400-17