- Giulia Bigolina has been nearly forgotten by modern literary scholars. She was a married woman of the minor nobility who lived in Padua, in Venetian territory, ca. 1516-1569. Although none of her works were published during her lifetime, she did gain considerable local renown as a writer of novellas and other works of prose fiction dealing with love, a literary field to which Italian women of the early modern period almost never contributed because of the risk of public scandal. This critical edition brings together the Italian texts of both of Bigolina's known surviving works, 'Urania: the story of a young woman's love' and her 'Novella of Giulia Camposanpiero and Thesibaldo Vitaliani,' providing as well English translations in facing-page format. The notes and extensive introduction contain the fruits of Christopher Nissen's many years of original research on this author in the libraries of Italy and France. The notes to this edition include descriptions of all of Bigolina's surviving manuscripts, along with details of their textual characteristics and problems of interpretation. All of Bigolina's historical and mythological references are also explained in the notes. This edition aims to make the complete surviving works of this little known but highly significant author available to a wide audience of scholars for the first time, both in English and the original Italian.