Along with the work of Craig Monson, Robert Kendrick, Kate Lowe and others, Elissa Weaver's research has firmly established the significance of convents as cultural centres and arenas for experimentation within early modern Italy. Her book Convent theatre in early modern Italy (2002) focused on productions by and for Italian – principally Florentine – nuns and included a brief discussion (pp. 97–104) of the playwright Antonia Pulci Tanini (1452?–1501), one of the first women writers to have her work published. Weaver has taken her analysis much further in this new bilingual, parallel text edition of five of Antonia's plays, three of which were first published in the late 1480s or early 1490s. Antonia's fluid and accomplished literary style found its expression in ‘sacre rappresentazioni’ (religious plays) focused on biblical characters and saints’ Lives, all written in rhyming octaves. Such plays were in demand locally and might be read as devotional texts, or performed by confraternities or nuns in convents. Weaver's assiduous research confirms that Antonia was never professed as a nun, and allows her to argue that the play Distruzione di Saul e del pianto di Davit is indeed the play attributed to Antonia in a brief account of her life written in 1528 (appendix 3). The detailed and wide-ranging introduction draws on Weaver's remarkable archival detective skills and reflects a fascination with material culture that has long characterised her work. Here, the result is a vivid reconstruction not only of Antonia's biography, but the people and places of her life: for example, an inventory for her parents’ three-storey house (in what is now Piazza San Firenze) is included as an appendix and identifies such details as the wall-fountain found in the main room, and the tongs and shovels in the kitchen. Meanwhile, placing Antonia within the broader context of writers of ‘sacre rappresentazioni’, a comparison of her play on the Prodigal Son with one by Piero di Mariano Muzi on which it was based shows how Antonia's rewrite introduced a new attention to human emotions. With the exception of Distruzione di Saul, all of the plays have been published before within Antonia Pulci, Florentine drama for convent and festival: seven sacred plays, ed. James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook (Chicago–London 1996). These translations have been corrected for this new publication, one pleasing new feature being occasional attempts at rhyming couplets, better reflecting the striking musicality and rhythm of Pulci's work that is otherwise lost in translation. This edition offers a lively introduction to an extraordinary woman writer of her period, placing her writings into context and bringing the drama of her texts to life.