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.

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