Participant Info
- First Name
- Meredith
- Last Name
- Ray
- Country
- United States
- State
- mkray@jhu.edu
- Affiliation
- Johns Hopkins University
- Website URL
- http://meredith-ray.squarespace.com
- Keywords
- Renaissance Italy, early modern women, literary history, history of science, Galileo, natural philosophy, gender, convent history, epistolary culture, early modern feminism
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I’m the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. I’m fascinated by the contributions of women to Renaissance literature and culture, and my research focuses on exploring the myriad aspects of early modern women’s experience, from literature to art, philosophy, science, religion, and politics. I’m also interested in ecocritical approaches to early modern literature.
My most recent work has explored in depth the ways in which women participated in scientific culture – as patrons and practitioners, authors and readers. My latest project explores the engagement of early modern women in Italy with intellectual networks – including that of Galileo Galilei – and natural philosophy.
I also publish on convent culture in seventeenth-century Venice and, especially, the life and work of the radical Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti. Consigned to perpetual enclosure in the convent of Sant’Anna, Tarabotti published a number of works denouncing this practice and, more generally, the other religious, political, economic and social factors that fostered the oppression of women. My biography of Arcangela, co-authored with Lynn Westwater, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2027.
- Recent Publications
Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Italian Renaissance. Routledge, 2024.
Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Arcangela Tarabotti, Letters Familiar and Formal. Ed. and trans. Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012.
Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
- Media Coverage
- https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/winter/curio/caterina-sforza-fearless-regent-and-scientist-15th-century-italy, https://www.cas.udel.edu/news/Pages/Imported/ray-meredith-neh.aspx
- Social Media
- https://www.instagram.com/meredith_k_ray/
- Country Focus
- Italy
- Expertise by Geography
- Mediterranean
- Expertise by Chronology
- Pre-17th century, 17th century, Early Modern
- Expertise by Topic
- Gender, Literary History, Medicine, Science, Women
