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Rethinking Mary in Early Modern Italy: Men's and Women's perspectives on the Virgin Mary (1450-1650)

Project description

The Virgin Mary as a role model

What is the cultural role of literary representations of the Virgin Mary? How has this shaped women's identity in Early Modern Italy? The EU-funded RethinkingMary project will find the answers. It will study and evaluate a corpus of printed and manuscript literary works on the Virgin Mary produced by Italian men and women between 1450 and 1650, a central period for the making of Italian and European modernity. RethinkingMary will deliver the first comprehensive study on the subject, produce a bibliographical database and question the idea that the Virgin Mary is a passive and submissive role model for women, considering that religious women writers used her as a powerful model of womanhood.

Objective

RethinkingMary aims to explore the cultural impact of the literary representations of the Virgin Mary on the construction of women's identity in early modern Italy. Using methodological approaches from philology, history of ideas, history of women and gender studies, Dr Carinci will build and evaluate a corpus of literary works printed and manuscript on the Virgin Mary written by Italian men and women between ca.1450 and 1650, a crucial period for the construction of Italian and European modernity. While offering a first comprehensive study of the impact of the literary representation of the Virgin Mary in Italian culture, RethinkingMary challenges the idea that the Virgin was only a passive and submissive role model for women, considering the ways in which she was used by lay and religious women writers as a powerful model of womanhood and how she influenced women's self-representation. This research will propose a completely new interpretation of the impact of the figure of the Virgin on early modern Italian culture and will produce a bibliographical database. The action will take place at the department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFIKK) at the University of Oslo (UiO), the Norwegian Institute of Rome and the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH), at Ca’ Foscari University, and will involve research trip to various libraries and archives. The project will be supervised by Unn Falkeid, professor of History of Ideas at IFIKK, expert in Italian women writers and Intellectual history and Principal Investigator of the international project 'The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden', funded by the Research Council of Norway (2018-2021), which explores the impact of Saint Birgitta on Italian women writers, involving an international and interdisciplinary research group. RethinkingMary is strictly connected and in part overlapping with such project and Dr Carinci will find the perfect environment to succeed and to develop future projects.

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Topic(s)

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2020

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 214 158,72
Address
PROBLEMVEIEN 5-7
0313 Oslo
Norway

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Region
Norge Oslo og Viken Oslo
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 214 158,72
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