Women’s Voices
The World of Women in the Laurenziana Collections

exhibition catalogue: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 9 March-29 June 2018

The subject of this exhibition, ‘Women’s Voices. The world of women in the Laurenziana collections’, investigates women in the works at the library. The research that was undertaken in the catalogues of all the manuscript collections, from Greek papyri to 20th-century letters, pinpointed a large number of texts linked with women. All the pieces that have been chosen have women as the single common denominator, either as authors or as subjects – on various levels – of the works being presented. It also features an innovation in the field of exhibitions organized by the library, which have always privileged the oldest collections, paying attention to manuscript collections from the 18th and 19th centuries. This has made it possible to highlight codices and a large number of letters that have been studied very little, if at all, and have never been dismayed before. Moreover, those from the Ashburnham, Mediceo Palatino and Redi collections have never been exhibited before. The documents have been divided into six sections for total of sixty-six pieces.