Arcangela (The Rebel Nun Who Defied the Vatican and Set the Renaissance World Ablaze)

The fascinating, never-before-told story of Arcangela Tarabotti, a 17th century Venetian nun who set the European literary world alight, advocating for women and combatting misogyny in her time.

Set amid the extravagance of 17th-century Venice, Arcangela unearths the biography of an iconoclastic nun whose controversial writings made her a literary sensation, only to then be completely sidelined from the history of the Italian Renaissance. Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652) was cloistered against her will at age thirteen, a fate she understood as life imprisonment. Yet through her own creativity and political savvy, she cultivated a robust intellectual and social network that brought her into dialogue with some of the most influential people of her day.

Writing books with titles such as Convent Hell, The Tyranny of Fathers, and Women Are Human, Arcangela developed a bold, proto-feminist critique of patriarchy and wrestled with the legacy of Augustine, Dante, and Machiavelli. Her published works were hotly debated at the time and later suppressed by the Vatican and discarded by a philosophical lineage oriented toward men. Her lifelong project of writing women into Renaissance humanism was forgotten. Until now.

Here, the world's leading experts on Arcangela offer a gripping reconstruction of her life and hard-fought literary battles. Ray and Westwater's story bursts from the page and restores the Venetian Nun to her rightful place in history.