Ramie Targoff is professor of English, cochair of Italian studies, and the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England; John Donne, Body and Soul; and Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Her most recent book is Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna.