a lecture by Francesca Medioli
Dr Francesca Medioli (born 1962), lecturer in Italian, director of the Centre for Italian Women’s Studies, studied at Lawrence College, NY, and graduated in history at Bologna University, supervisor Carlo Ginzburg, with a dissertation on a XVIIth centuryVenetian proto-feminist nun – Arcangela Tarabotti – and her pamphlet L’inferno monacale (Monastic Life as Inferno, II edition, forthcoming, Toronto University Press. She took her PhD also at Bologna University and since 1995 she is lecturing at Reading University (UK). She is an expert in Italian religious and social women’s history, both modern and early modern. She has published articles on the condition of women and nuns in 17th-century Italy, and is currently writing a monograph on the strict enclo-sure of nuns in Italy under the Ancien Regime.