Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune presents the life stories of twelve extraordinary women who lived passionately and recorded in poetry their happiness and heartbreaks. The setting is the Italian sixteenth century, the cinquecento, the period of the High Renaissance.
In twelve chapters -- one for each woman -- the focus is on noblewomen, bourgeois women, and courtesans. What were they like, and what was life like for them? This was a world ruled by dukes in whose splendid courts entertainment was lavish, love was the topic of choice in formalized conversations among brilliant, erudite, witty courtiers and ladies, and serious intellectual game-playing at courts and literary academies engaged the rich, the powerful, and the gifted.
But no matter how different from each other these twelve women were and how different the regions of Italy in which they lived, they all shared the heritage of culture that had flourished in the ancient Mediterranean world and was again flourishing with renewed vigor, and all aspired to making their names immortal through poetry.
Their
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