Carolyn James is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University. She completed her doctorate in 2000 at the University of Melbourne. She has published two books on the fifteenth-century Bolognese writer Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, and is presently engaged in an Australian Research Council funded study of women’s letter writing practices in the late-medieval and Renaissance periods. She is also writing a monograph on the marriage of Isabella d’Este and the Marquis of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga, based on their correspondence between 1490 and 1519.