Celinda: A Tragedy

Valeria Miani's *Celinda* (1611), the only female-authored secular tragedy of early modern Italy, is here made available for the first time in a modern edition. Miani's tale of the doomed love of the Lydian princess Celinda for the cross-dressed Persian prince Autilio/ Lucinia offers a striking example of the explorative attitude to gender identity that is such a marked characteristic of Italian drama in this period, both within the erudite and the *commedia dell'arte* tradition. Accompanied by Julia Kisacky's sensitive translation, and with a valuable contextualizing introduction by Valeria Finucci, this edition of *Celinda* makes an important contribution to our understanding of women's place within Italian literary culture in a period increasingly recognized as exceptional for the range and quality of femaleauthored writing it produced. **-Virginia Cox** *Professor of Italian, New York University*