I have been fascinated by the women of the Renaissance for as long as I can remember, and my research focuses on exploring the richness and complexity of early modern women’s experience. I’m especially interested in understanding how women expressed themselves and explored issues of power and gender inequity. My books and essays bring to life the women writers, philosophers, artists and scientists of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — and show the close Renaissance connections between the science and the humanities.

RESEARCH My first book, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance, explored the performative aspects of published epistolary collections – a genre that was all the rage in the early modern period. My work on women’s letters sparked my interest in another popular early modern pursuit, mentioned in some of the letters I examined: alchemy. I began thinking about the ways in which women participated in scientific culture – as patrons and practitioners, authors and readers — resulting in my book, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. My next book, Margherita Sarrocchi's Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy  explored the interplay between scientific and literary circles and between men and women in the age of the Scientific Revolution. My latest book, Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Italian Renaissance, aims to bring the stories of these women, and many others, to a wide readership. My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for Venetian Research, the Fulbright Foundation, and others.

TRANSLATION I also have a passion for convent culture in seventeenth-century Venice and, especially, the life and work of the radical, rebellious Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti. Forced into a convent as a teenager, with no religious vocation, Tarabotti spent her life protesting her imprisonment and denouncing the oppression of women and exposed the religious, political, economic and social factors that favored it. With my long-time collaborator Lynn Lara Westwater of the George Washington University, I have co-edited and translated several works by Tarabotti, including her Letters Familiar and Formal, Convent Paradise, and, most recently, Tears for Regina Donà.

TEACHING At the University of Delaware, where I am the Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian and have a joint appointment in Women & Gender Studies, I teach courses on medieval and early modern Italian history, literature, and culture. I love working with students and helping them pursue and develop their research interests.

About Meredith K. Ray

Meredith K. Ray
Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures)
University of Delaware