Feminism and Italian Sacred Writings: A Growing Space for Female Authorship, 1500–1600

The interaction between religious literary production and self-expression offers a challenge to the long-held perceptions that religious models silence women’s voices into fijixed submissive categories. This chapter focuses on the cases of Laura Cereta, Vittoria Colonna, and Chiara Matraini to demonstrate that the religious sphere enabled them to take on leading roles as teachers and distinguished interpreters of the social and cultural changes through which they lived, to the point that, in the counter-reformation climate, Matraini was able to assert, for the fijirst time in literary history, her role as the proud 'autrice', the creator, of her own work.