Colonna, Pompeo. In Defense of Women: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. Franco Minonzio, trans. Margaret L. King

This deceptively slim volume is a tour de force of insights, analysis, and synthesis, an example of the plentiful fruits borne out of historical and philological abilities, and a welcome starting point for anybody interested in one specific aspect of the early modern "other voice" tradition: the so-called querelle des femmes.How are these divergent traits able to coexist?Thanks to Margaret L. King's seemingly inexhaustible desire to uncover what has been hidden for centuries and to make them available and easy to grasp for her contemporaries.Pompeo Colonna's Latin treatise Apologia mulierum, composed in 1529-30, did not see publication until 1909, and it was not translated into any living language (specifically Italian) until 2015 (xv).King's work dovetails with what Franco Minonzio has carried out; this Italian scholar is responsible for the most recent and most authoritative critical edition and aforementioned translation.In practical terms, their asynchronous collaboration opens with King's foreword (xv-xxxiv), continues with her translation of Minonzio's introduction to the 2015 edition (1-37), then moves on to King's translation of Colonna's Apologia (In Defense of Women, 41-87), followed by the Latin text (91-117).An illuminating "Postscript" (119-51), "Table " , and "Glossary of Names" (159-69) round out the volume.In her foreword, King focuses on Pompeo Colonna's profile as condottiere and later cardinal, and on the relationship he had with his cousin, the muchadmired poet Vittoria Colonna.By so doing, she draws attention to the social and cultural complexities of the High Renaissance in Rome and, more broadly, in Italy, shining much-needed light on the commingling of what to twentyfirst-century readers are two separate fields: the lay and political on the one hand, and the religious on the other.She then offers an overview of the treatise's structure and its salient motifs, making a cogent argument as to the importance of this text to the "other voice."Minonzio's introduction carries out different but no less important goals.After an initial overview of Pompeo Colonna's life, he frames the Apologia