Saving Casa Guidi

1973 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Emily Blanchard Hope
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Only Child ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Married Life ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Great Happiness

“Casa Guidi,” as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning affectionately called their apartment in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Guidi, was their home for nearly all of their married life, from 9 May 1848 until Elizabeth's death on 29 June 1861. They took the apartment furnished for three months in the summer of 1847 and found life there so pleasant that when in the following year it became available, they established themselves in Casa Guidi on a permanent basis and furnished the apartment themselves. Their only child, Pen, was born in Casa Guidi. Elizabeth wrote Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh there and Robert, many of the poems in Men and Women. It was to Casa Guidi that Robert brought home “the square old yellow Book” which, metamorphosed by him, became The Ring and the Book. These were years of great happiness for the poets, and it is appropriate that Casa Guidi should be preserved as their memorial.

A Report on the Published and Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836-1854

1973 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 37-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith B. Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Good Health ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Only Child ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Financial Uncertainty ◽  
Low Visibility ◽  
Sick Room

Florence and Swallowfield. The very names symbolize the high and the low visibility now associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford. Other contrasts could be drawn. The stifling sick-room and the garden of geraniums, the “poetess” and wife of Robert Browning and the “authoress” of Our Village who was the only child of Dr. Mitford, country gentleman. Or, to mention a point on which Miss Mitford showed some sensitivity, a life of financial freedom versus one of financial uncertainty. What was the attraction which insured the constant and copious interchange of letters, a record which can only be labelled remarkable in a century of remarkable letter-writers? The answer is a multiple one, as whoever reads Elizabeth's side of this correspondence will discover. But such a reader will also discover a whole host of subjects and figures which will give him fresh insights into the public and private lives of the correspondents, their families, and their literary circles. The excerpt which follows indicates the ease with which Elizabeth Barrett shared her thoughts with Miss Mitford whether on topics creative or critical, domestic or political, and whether uttered in sickness or in relatively good health.

The Senses and Religious Experience in Vernacular Theology

2018 ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Jacob M. Baum
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Vernacular Theology ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Prayer Books

This chapter utilizes fifteenth-century vernacular culture to challenge the notion that learned understandings detailed in chapter 2 fully determined the meaning of sensuous worship on the eve of the Reformation. Through analysis of the unusual diary of the Nuremberg widow Katherina Tucher (d. 1448) and a critical mass of personal vernacular prayer books, this chapter shows that people made use of some learned ideas about the senses promoted by learned culture but went well beyond them in many cases. Educated, urban lay men and women played games with sensory language in their personal devotional experiences and, in doing so, exercised limited agency as vernacular theologians in their own right. Following this analysis, this chapter shows how male intellectuals responded by increasingly identifying sensuous worship with femininity and non-Christians. It concludes with a summary of part 1.

Gender-to-Gender Anxiety and Influence in Robert Browning's Men and Women

1986 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Haigwood
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
Married Life ◽  
Important Exception ◽  
Wife Of Bath ◽  
Intellectual Independence

In their courtship and marriage, the Brownings did not contend for that “mastery” the wife of Bath and other traditional sources of marital wisdom cite as the usual object of competition between the sexes. Instead they struggled over the privilege of admiring and serving the other. Robert Browning won that competition, his victory both symptom and cause of a poetic silence that lasted throughout most of his married life. An important exception to his prolonged inactivity is Men and Women, Browning's successful attempt at bringing his innovative style to full, sustained articulation. In order to achieve the kind of psychological, as well as intellectual, independence that would enable him to speak “in [his] true person” (“One Word More,” line 137), however, the poet needed to alter the terms of his relationship with his wife, who was both the emotional center of his life and a more successful, more popular poet. Browning achieved this separation in Men and Women, particularly in “One Word More.”

scholarly journals ‘Come with me, sweetest sister’: Unravelling the Enigma of Sacred Sisterhood in Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kayla Marie Penteliuk
Keyword(s):  
Christina Rossetti ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
Goblin Market ◽  
Potential Strength ◽  
Close Friendships ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Narrative Poem

Throughout the Victorian era, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti occupied a prominent position in a newly emerging female literary movement. Both authors sought to resist and revise the limitations of Victorian womanhood through the composition of controversial works that rivalled the achievements of their male contemporaries. In the 1856 epic Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the 1862 narrative poem “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, both Barrett Browning and Rossetti employ an early feminist perspective to explore the parameters of Victorian sisterhood and the potential strength of female friendship. Although Laura, Lizzie and Jeanie in Rossetti’s work possess a sororal relationship that is distinct from Marian Erle and Aurora Leigh’s relationship in Barrett Browning’s work, the innumerable connections between both publications have caused critics to compare and hierarchize the two authors. Thus, a literary sisterhood has developed between Barrett Browning and Rossetti that curiously mirrors the sisterhoods of their fictions. This paper seeks to assess the inescapable presence of sisterhood in Aurora Leigh and “Goblin Market” by analyzing the manner in which a sisterly connection, not only through blood relations but also through close friendships that resemble sisterhood, allowed female forces to be allied, nurtured, and empowered amidst the patriarchal and misogynist structures of mid-nineteenth century Britain.

scholarly journals "Not as Enemies, but as Friends": Sanctioned Sex in Frate Cherubino's Regola della vita matrimoniale

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Amyrose McCue Gill
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Married Couple ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Married Life ◽  
Husband And Wife

During the 1470s, a Franciscan preacher named Cherubino composed a short treatise in nine parts entitled Regola della vita matrimoniale (Rule for Married Life), which describes in detail the mutual obligations of an ideal married couple. In this didactic work, Cherubino echoes the vocabulary of early Quattrocento writers who employed the concepts of friendship and companionship as framing devices for their discussions of the conjugal state. What is noteworthy in Cherubino's approach to this common theme, however, is his conflation of friends and spouses in the midst of an explication of the conjugal debt (sexual intercourse between husband and wife). Informed by recent work on marriage, sex and friendship as well as research into homosocial, homoerotic and homosexual relationships during the Italian Renaissance, this article explores the slippage between sinless marriage, friendship and procreation; and sinful marriage, enmity and sodomy in Cherubino's Regola and within the broad context of early fifteenth-century perspectives on the conjugal state.

Women Writers and the Medieval

2020 ◽  
pp. 567-582
Author(s):  
Clare Broome Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Augusta Webster ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter explores the ways in which medievalism gave intellectual and politically astute women the imaginative means to discuss contemporary social issues and problems without facing the censure that more open social comment might induce. Using medieval linguistic translations, themes, motifs, and settings for diverse artistic, religious, and socio-political purposes, many women writers expressed subversive and challenging opinions: while others, like Charlotte Mary Yonge, offered tales of gentlemanly chivalry and iconic femininity that upheld conservative ideas about society and gender. Women writers’ paradoxical uses of medievalism were seen most clearly in the literature of the Crimean War, and embodied in the role of the reigning monarch, who was both passive chivalric icon and modern ruler. From Anglo-Saxon scholarship to courtly fifteenth-century images, invocations of the Middle Ages provided women with a rich source of allegory and comparison. Many writers perceived the Middle Ages as a time of greater social freedom than their own nineteenth-century experience: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Augusta Webster explored imaginatively the position of women in Victorian society through medieval settings. Many writers used medieval figures to illustrate contemporary issues: Joan of Arc became an emblem of social equality and an icon for the suffragists, and the legendary Guinevere was used to highlight the confines and injustices of contemporary marriage legislation. By focusing on the work of women writers, this chapter highlights their often overlooked contribution to the development of the medievalist discourse in the nineteenth century.

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