Professor Virginia Cox
- Honorary Professor of Early Modern Italian Literature and Culture
- Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College
Contact
Location
- Trinity College
- Trinity Street, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ
About
Virginia Cox graduated with a PhD from Cambridge and worked at the University of Edinburgh, UCL, Cambridge, and New York University, before returning to Cambridge as Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College in 2021. Her research focuses on Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italian literature (especially dialogue and lyric poetry), on the history of the reception of classical rhetorical theory in Italy between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the history of Italian early modern women’s writing. Her main current works in progress are a co-edited book for UCL Press (Poetry, Drama, and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy: The Life and Works of Leonora Bernardi, ed. with Lisa Sampson, with contributions by Eric Nicholson, Eugenio Refini, and Anna Wainwright), the Renaissance volume of the Cambridge History of Rhetoric, co-edited with Jennifer Richards, and a monograph on Renaissance lyric poetry and its paratexts, provisionally entitled The Social World of Italian Renaissance Lyric
Research
Main publications:
2021
- A Cultural History of Democracy. Vol. 3. The Renaissance, ed. with Joanne Paul. London: Bloomsbury
- Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact, ed. with Shannon McHugh. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
2015
- A Short History of the Italian Renaissance. London: I. B. Tauris.
2013
- Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
2012
- Verso una storia di genere della letteratura italiana: Percorsi critici e gender studies, ed. with Chiara Ferrari. Bologna: Il Mulino
2011
- The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
2008
- Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400-1650. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
2006
- The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Traditions, ed. with John Ward. Leiden: Brill
2004
- Maddalena Campiglia, Flori: a Pastoral Drama. A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. with Lisa Sampson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1997
- Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, trans. and ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1992
- The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Recent articles
2021
- ‘Quintilian in Renaissance Italy’. In Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, ed. James J. Murphy and Marc van der Poel, 359-79. Oxford: Oxford University Press
2020
- Re-Thinking Counter-Reformation Literature’. In Innovation in Counter-Reformation Culture, ed. Shannon McHugh and Anna Wainwright, 15-55. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press
2018
- ‘An Unknown Early Modern New World Epic: Girolamo Vecchietti’s Le prodezze di Ferrante Cortese (1587-88)’. Renaissance Quarterly, 71/4: 1351-90
2017
- ‘Rhetoric and Medieval Politics’. In The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Michael MacDonald, 329-40. Oxford: Oxford University Press
- ‘Dialogue’. In A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature, ed. Victoria Moul, 289-307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Teaching and supervision
Supervisor of:
Samuel FitzGibbon