Virginia Cox

On crimes and punishments, and other writings

Published in 1764, On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) courted both success and controversy in Europe and North America. Enlightenment luminaries and enlightened monarchs alike lauded the text and looked to it for ideas that might help guide the various reform projects of the day. The equality of every citizen before the law, the right to a fair trial, the abolition of the death penalty, the elimination of the use of torture in criminal interrogations-these are but a few of the vital arguments articulated by Beccaria. This volume offers a new English translation of On Crimes and Punishment alongside writings by a number of Beccarias contemporaries. Of particular interest is Voltaires commentary on the text, which is included in its entirety. The supplementary materials testify not only to the power and significance of Beccarias ideas, but to the controversial reception of his book. At the same time that philosophes proclaimed that it contained principles of enduring importance to any society grappling with matters of political and criminal justice, allies of the ancien regime roundly denounced it, fearing that the books attack on feudal privileges and its call to separate law from religion (and thus crime from sin) would undermine their longstanding privileges and powers. Long appreciated as a foundational text in criminology, Beccarias arguments have become central in debates over capital punishment. This new edition presents Beccarias On Crimes and Punishments as an important and influential work of Enlightenment political theory.

Sixteenth-Century Women Petrarchists and the Legacy of Laura

A widespread assumption among feminist critics in their readings of early modern poetry by women has been that Petrarchism, as a poetic idiom, was inherently “male.” Female poets might appropriate this idiom—and indeed they did, in quite surprisingly large numbers, especially in Italy—but in doing so they are assumed to have been working against the grain of the tradition, and thus to have been disadvantaged with respect to their male peers. Petrarchism conventionally posited a male speaking subject and a female object of desire, and, to this extent, women poets attempting to usurp the role of poetic subject might be considered a priori to be excluded. More than this, however, it has been argued that the mode in which the female loveobject was represented within Petrarchan lyric further marginalized aspiring women poets. Petrarch’s Laura and her numerous Renaissance descendants are typically presented in a guise that denies them subjectivity and agency. They rarely speak and rarely act—other than, crucially, to deny satisfaction to their despairing suitors. True, their physical beauty is hyperbolically extolled and endowed with an extraordinary freight of philosophical and spiritual signifi cance, but even as physical objects they are curiously elusive, vaporizing upon close inspection into “scattered” fragments—a blaze of inevitably golden hair, coral lips, a light foot, a “fair and cruel” hand—whose serial citation and stereotypical character work to deny corporeal integrity to the human fi gure described. Simply, they do not add up. The focus of intense sexual yearning and tortuous intellectual construction on the part of their male lovers, they are themselves portrayed in a way that seems to deny them both sexual and intellectual substance, to the extent that many read-

The Female Voice in Italian Renaissance Dialogue

A remarkable novelty within the early modern Italian tradition of literary dialogue was its inclusion in significant numbers of women among the interlocutors portrayed. Read with due sensitivity to genre conventions, these dialogues can offer insights into gendered speech decorum that interestingly nuance the evidence offered by prescriptive texts such as conduct manuals. The essay offers an overview of early modern Italian dialogues featuring female speakers, encompassing a chronological account of their development, and discussions of their production contexts and thematics, as well as an analysis of their gender dynamics.