This month GEMS is organising a talk by Dr. Eleonora Serra on women and language in late Renaissance Florence.
11 December 10am
Meeting Room 0.1 Simon Stevin
Campus Boekentoren, Plateau-Rozier
Women’s activity as letter writers in Renaissance Italy has come to the fore across a range of fields, including palaeography and cultural, social, and literary history. When it comes to linguistics, research has largely concentrated on the epistolary practice of individual women, while few attempts have so far been made to provide a more comprehensive analysis of early modern women’s epistolary language. However, private letters – both a privileged source to reconstruct language history, and the genre in which women’s participation was wider – represent an ideal locus to reconstruct the language of early modern women. In this talk, I present some results from a project that analyses a corpus of private, autograph letters by writers from over thirty families of the Florentine patriciate (1540–1609), focusing on a diverse range of features (morpho-syntactic features, formulae, forms of address). Drawing on unedited archival material, and adopting historical sociolinguistic approaches that have not been widely applied in the Italian context, this study seeks to compare men’s and women’s language in late Renaissance Florence.
Eleonora is a linguist who studies topics from the early modern period, with strong connections to history, culture, and literature. She has completed an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship and a one-year fellowship at Villa I Tatti – The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, and has just started her FWO Senior Fellowship at Ghent University.