About

Jane Tylus is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her specialization lies in late medieval and early modern European literature and culture, with secondary interests in 19th-20th century fiction. Her work often addresses multiple national traditions through various genres such as epic, lyric, pastoral, and the letter, as well as through theoretical models like representations of the other and translation, or historical issues including religious crisis, female literacy, and the conquest of the New World. Tylus emphasizes creating inquiry spaces centered on works that are often ambiguously interpreted, with a focus on recovering and interrogating marginalized voices, including historical personages, dialects, minor characters, and the foreign in periods of heightened nationalism and linguistic boundaries. Her recent courses have covered medieval women’s writings, translation theory and history, representations of rural life from antiquity to the present, and detective fiction. Her current book project explores the ritual of departure in early modernity, particularly how writers and artists send their works into the world. Prior to her current position, she taught at NYU in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, where she was the founding faculty director of the Humanities Initiative, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been the General Editor for the journal I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance since 2013. Her research interests include artistic, literary, and religious currents in early modern Europe, medieval mysticism, women writers, the history of translation theory and practice, interface between music and other arts, performance studies, theatre history, and Sicilian literature.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Art history
• Art
• History
• Philosophy
• Classics
• Literature
• World Wide Web
• Library science

Selected publications

• Who Owns Literature?

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-01-09 · 2 citations

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  Interest in material culture has produced a rigorous body of scholarship that considers the dynamics of licensing, permissions, and patronage - an ongoing history of the estrangement of works from their authors. Additionally, translation studies is enabling new ways to think about the emergence of European vernaculars and the reappropriation of classical and early Christian texts. This Element emerges from these intersecting stories. How did early modern authors say goodbye to their works; how do translators and editors articulate their duty to the dead or those incapable of caring for their work; what happens once censorship is invoked in the name of other forms of protection? The notion of the work as orphan, sent out and unable to return to its author, will take us from Horace to Dante, Montaigne, Anne Bradstreet, and others as we reflect on the relevance of the vocabularies of loss, charity, and licence for literature.

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• Women Writers and the “Male” Canon

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23

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  Abstract This chapter explores the roles and recognition of women in Italian literary history, examining how female authors have contributed to, reshaped, and often contested the traditionally male-dominated literary canon. Dacia Maraini amplifies overlooked voices in Chiara di Assisi (2014) by recounting Saint Clare’s defiant life through a contemporary lens, challenging readers to question who decides canonical worth. Italian writers from the Renaissance onward, like Gaspara Stampa, boldly reinterpreted Petrarchan tropes and pioneered female expression within restrictive literary frameworks. Two more recent writers, Natalia Ginzburg and Elena Ferrante, have redefined Italian literature by infusing familial and female-centered narratives into the canon. Concluding with contemporary feminist scholars, the chapter emphasizes the ongoing effort to create an inclusive canon that values diverse, historically marginalized voices.

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• :<i>A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini.</i>

  Sixteenth Century Journal · 2024-09-01

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• Pondering Mary: Michelangelo’s Farewell to Dante

  BRILL eBooks · 2024

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  • Art
  • Art history
  • Philosophy

  The late medieval and early modern period witnessed in Catholic contexts an extension or ‘prolungamento’ of goodbyes. Michelangelo’s own inability to finish, and hence say goodbye to many of his works, both manifests this sense of prolungamento and introduces a disquieting new element that challenges the nature of human work as a means toward salvation. This is especially clear when we consider two aspects of Michelangelo’s career. One is his representation of Mary, the mediator who typically intervenes to assure the worth of one’s work. The other is his relationship to the poet he most admired, Dante, whose Commedia is very much a finished text that expresses hope in its own afterlife thanks in no small part to Mary’s presence in its final canto. In furnishing a reading of the (unfinished) Medici chapel as well as a handful of Michelangelo’s lyric poems for Vittoria Colonna, this essay situates the two Florentines, and two versions of Mary, within the framework of the changing spatial and temporal dynamics of the farewell at a time of religious turmoil.

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• (Dis)placing the foreign in early modern Europe: The example of Tasso's <i>Gierusalemme</i>

  Forum Italicum A Journal of Italian Studies · 2023-05-18 · 1 citations

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  Torquato Tasso, Italy's foremost early modern poet, engaged with issues of otherness throughout his complicated life and career—in no small part because of his own itinerant and often marginalized status. His first try at what would eventually become his monumental Gerusalemme liberata—an unfinished poem he wrote when he was 16, called simply “Il Gierusalemme”—gives us a glimpse into an early attempt to define epic as a space for welcoming in the stranger. The stranger was as much a character for Tasso as it was a parola pellegrina or foreign word, the latter a particular obsession of Tasso's. Dedicated as he was to seeing the vernacular not as “just” Tuscan, but as capacious enough to include other dialects as well as Latin and neologisms, Tasso quickly found enemies in Florence's Accademia della Crusca, which insisted on a much purer view of the Italian tongue. By connecting Tasso's theory of hospitality to the questione della lingua as it was being fought over in late 16th-century Italy, this article argues for a capacious understanding of both this early experimental work of Tasso's, as well as his later poem.

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• Listening for the Ending

  Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies eBooks · 2023-12-31

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• Making Birgitta Italian: The Time of Translation

  2023-12-15

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Come in una femmina sono fatte tante cose?" "How could so many things have been done by a female?"1This is the question that then-Cancelliere della Repubblica Fiorentina, Piero di Ser Mino da Montevarchi, was mulling over as he lay, dying, in 1410.Heir to the famous Coluccio Salutati, Piero was a person of consequence in early 15th-century Tuscany, and the question he was pondering was no doubt that of others as well.For the "femmina" was Birgitta of Sweden.Her writings had inspired a group of Piero's fellow Tuscans, including a close friend of Salutati, to found the first monastery devoted to the Birgittine Order in Italy, the Monastero del Paradiso.Barely a mile southeast of Florence's walls, the convent had already attracted two of Piero's brothers.Yet when Piero "heard and read about all the great marvels God had accomplished through [Birgitta], and in her,"2 he could not resist entertaining some doubts.As Satan comes to take his soul, provoking Piero's screams and others' stupefaction, "a venerable lady appears: Saint Birgitta" ("una venerabile donna, la quale era Santa Brigida").Given Piero's skepticism moments earlier, her gaze is "full of disdain, as though she were reproaching him for his lack of faith and that bit of doubt he'd entertained regarding her deeds."Nonetheless, he feels great comfort in her presence, and for good reason: when Satan sees her 1 Orazioni di Santa Brigida principessa di Svezia, ed.Francesco Grottanelli (Siena: 1867), 34, from the section "Come uno uomo famoso e notabile di Firenze, posto in estremo di morte per infermità apparvegli Santa Brigida, e scampollo, come quivi leggerai."Translations from Italian are my own unless otherwise noted. 2 "Udendo e leggendo le grandi meraviglie le quali Dio per lei ed in lei aveva fatte."Orazioni di Santa Brigida, 34.The line implies that Piero was already familiar with Birgitta's works.He could certainly have accessed them in Latin even as the Italian translation made in Siena in 1399 on which this essay will focus may have been available in Florence by 1410.It's of considerable interest that Piero di Ser Mino's question about the "femmina" echoes the rhetorical question made by Birgitta's confessor Magister Mathias in his prologue to Book I of the Revelations: "Quis enim, nisi eiusdem spiritus gracia preuentus, credere poterit, quod Christus, residens in celo, loquatur femine, in hac mortalitate adhuc degenti" ("Indeed, unless guided by the grace of the same spirit, who could believe that Christ, who resides in heaven, would speak to a woman [ femine] still living in this mortal condition?").

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• Translator’s Preface

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2023-01-19

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I first met Dacia Maraini on a chilly night in New York City-March 13, 2014, to be exact.I know the date because Dacia inscribed it in the copy of Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza that she kindly gave me as we were leaving NYU's Casa Italiana following my interview with her about this bracing new book.It was a book that had gotten under my skin as I was reading it in preparation for our meeting.So too does Clare of Assisi herself get under the skin of the novelist or "Cara scrittrice," the writer who is very much a character in her own book and who finds herself increasingly caught up in the Middle Ages despite her best intentions.I had the opposite experience, in some ways.Dacia lured me out of my academic fixation on the Middle Ages and into the pre sent, enabling me to work on a con temporary text for a change.How refreshing to be in contact with the author whose book you are translating and, in Dacia's case, some one who is always responsive to your every question, eager to hear your own thoughts; someone for whom a book is, truly, never closed.The novelist as vulnerable, compassionate, and, in a less ethical register, curious about the world around her, its past and its pos si ble futures, and especially its varied and always unsettling pre sent.This is the posture that Dacia occupies

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• Introduction: Cross-Dressing Technologies of Mobility, Trauma, and Freedom

  Renaissance Drama · 2022-09-01 · 1 citations

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• Editor’s Note

  I Tatti Studies · 2022-09-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Dacia Maraini

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  4 shared

• Margaret H. Beissinger

  Princeton University

  3 shared

• Susanne Lindgren Wofford

  3 shared

• Gaspara Stampa

  3 shared

• Troy Tower

  3 shared

• Karen Newman

  John Brown University

  3 shared

• Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici

  2 shared

• Norma Thompson

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Translation Award from the Society for the Study of Early Mo…
• Howard Marraro Prize for Outstanding Work in Italian Studies…