G r a z i a N a p o l i
|
|
|
|
|
|
Introduction
A lot of years has passed from the time I wrote this book. It is joined to my English period, when I was studying Literature and Culture of English Civilization.
More of ten years has passed from that time, when I silently studied ancient books jealously kept intact in the North Library of the British Museum, in a long cold summer, in London, every day.
It was a long, hard work of linguistic, cultural and philological exegesis to search the original sources. I intended to give a scientific dignity to a work that I couldn’t imagine only as a non-research dissertation. I wanted to write it with synopsis of the documents, to compare the English text with the original ones or with the texts it was inspired to. It could be often a text by Italian or classical culture; sometimes, it was a Mediterranean culture text, I mean: French, Spanish, Greek. I intended to gather the essence of English scholarship in Elizabethan Age, when Prose work was taking its first passes in narrative. It wasn’t based on observation of reality, but on studying our Medieval and Renaissance texts.
Aurelia, inedited book with this title, by a less important writer, contemporary of Shakespeare, made me curious already for the title: a female name. It attracted me to go and discover thoughts, morality, way of life, places at Court and in society. It intrigued me to check, through the main female character and her guests, opinions, culture, sins and virtues of an Age and its women.
Aurelia is about life trough the Novella. A little and noble literary kind, that in a short story, encloses a life episode, symbol of a Life. It is based on a real chronicle fact, but never loses sight of the most complete scene of the habit and historical time.
Perhaps, in my speculative disposition is also my passion for telling real facts. Aurelia is a work that tells about Love, Marriage, Lonely and eternal opposition between Men and Women.
It s a learned book and encloses everything was known in ‘500. It’s a work of European Humanism and describes knowledge, costumes, culture, habits, Arts of Italian Renaissance Courts.
I decided to edited my research. So, I modified and updated it, in part I wrote again it, to adapt to my new need in comprehension of text and historical and cultural contest and to my new capacity in linguistic and critical expression.
I was obliged to do it as a woman, as an English specialist and as a journalist.
Grazia Napoli
|
|
|
|