This essay challenges recent positionings that characterize explorations of Maddalena Campiglia's ties with the dimesse of Vicenza as evidence of a post-hoc strategy of ideological containment whereby literary history works to “cloister” the separated woman-poet within a socially acceptable rubic for early modern female identity. By arguing an interpretation of the figure of the dimessa as an index of both the secularization of female devotion in the period and the emergence of the socially legitimate “third state” of female secular celibacy, the essay instead demonstrates how the figure of the pious dimessa resonates with certain aspects of the identity cultivated by the author after her separation from her husband in 1580.
Elizabeth Cary and Intersections of Catholicism and Gender in Early Modern England