Bigolina was the first woman to write a ‘prose romance’, the forerunner to the modern novel. Written around 1557 – fifty years or so before Cervantes was to pen his epic Don Quixote – Bigolina’s Urania languished unnoticed for centuries in the Trivulziana Library in Milan, until it was edited, published and then translated into English by Valeria Finucci in 2002.
