The research group based at Sapienza University of Rome will consider devotional texts, with special attention to female authorship in early modern England and Italy Gender-oriented discourses will be contextualised within the Renaissance Anglo-Italian framework of linguistic, literary, and cultural influences and confluences. The research group will make use of the Corpus of English Religious Prose (CERP, University of Cologne), spanning 1150 to 1700. The condition of early modern women and their relation to devotion will be taken into consideration by focusing on the work of Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Olympia Morata as well as of Dominican nuns: women both as individuals and members of lay and religious communities shaped new spiritual directions, by disseminating devotional literature. “Catherine of Siena stand[s] at the centre [of] the genre of devotional literature” (Brown 2019) and will be one of the main case studies by exploring the paramount influence exerted by the Saint on early modern English devotional texts, contextualising it within the well-known and widely explored religious debate around the reception of pre-Reformed Italian Catholic texts. The function of the language of prayer books and multilingual devotional texts in the construction of female agency, especially in politically challenging environments such as the court and in the higher echelons of society, will also be the subject of investigation. A historical-linguistic framework will be adopted and, considering the text-type under analysis, a pragma-stylistic analysis will be implemented. Prayers and their performance (Sterrett 2018) both liturgical and private, and their communicative functions that serve to shape their textual development as a speech-purposed, interactive and performative genre (Denton 2010), such as Queen Elizabeth I’s Christian Prayers and Meditations in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greeke, and Latine, appeared in print in 1569 (interestingly, it was published by John Day who held the official patent for printing the Psalms in English); the untitled manuscript known as Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book which contains six original prayers, the first and the last being in English, the others in French, Italian, Latin and Greek; Elizabeth I’s translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Mirror of the Sinful Soul, as well as her stepmother Katherine Parr’s Prayers or Meditations and the Lamentations of a Sinner will be a few examples of the texts under investigation. Material aspects of devotional books will also be taken into account, such as Anne Boleyn’s book of hours prayerbook as presented by new scholarship at the University of Kent (2021).