Ammaestramenti e ricordi; Difese; Panegirico. Isabella Sori. Ed. Helena Sanson. Modern Humanities Research Association Critical Texts 48. Cambridge: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018. x + 252 pp. $17.99

[...]those women who did write and publish were less integrated in their own cultural context than those from the previous century had been, and correspondingly their works enjoyed less circulation, appreciation, and visibility” (17). The impression that we have, as Sanson notes, is that we are reading a ragionamento of sorts; in this regard, Sori may be said to follow in the footsteps of another Alessandrian—namely, Annibal Guasco, whose Ragionamento a D. Lavinia sua figliuola, della maniera del governarsi ella in corte (1586) appears to have been her immediate and most striking predecessor (though there were of course a number of other male-authored texts in the genre that precede Guasco's). Sanson ventures to hypothesize, moreover, that, given the etymological implications of the term ricordi in the title, Ammaestramenti e ricordi, the manual “may refer to concise annotations that reflect actual memory of facts and circumstances experienced first-hand” (36).