Manly Masquerade

Finucci Valeria Finucci

Description

The Manly Masquerade unravels the complex ways men were defined as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence: medical and travel literature; theology; law; myth; conduct books; and plays, chivalric romances, and novellas by authors including Machiavelli, Tasso, and Ariosto. Valeria Finucci shows how ideas of masculinity were formed in the midst of acute anxiety about paternity by highlighting the beliefs-widely held at the time-that conception could occur without a paternal imprimatur or through a woman's encounter with an animal, or even that a pregnant woman's imagination could erase the father's "signature" from the fetus. Against these visions of reproduction gone awry, Finucci looks at how concepts of masculinity were tied to issues of paternity through social standing, legal matters, and inheritance practices.Highlighting the fissures running through Italian Renaissance ideas of manliness, Finucci describes how, alongside pervasive images of the virile, sexually active man, early modern Italian culture recognized the existence of hermaphrodites and started to experiment with a new kind of sexuality by manufacturing a non-man: the castrato. Following the creation of castrati, the Church forbade the marriage of all non-procreative men, and, in this move, Finucci identifies a powerful legitimation of the view that what makes men is not the possession of male organs or the ability to have sex, but the capability to father. Through analysis, anecdote, and rich cultural description, The Manly Masquerade exposes the "real" early modern man: the paterfamilias.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Italy
• History of Europe
• My Last Duchess

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384472
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

  

The Manly Masquerade          ,       ,                               Valeria Finucci o

                  

      &      

   

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Adobe Jenson by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To Anna Ferrarotti, Giuseppe Gerbino, Carmel Mullin, and Rosamaria Preparata, true friends



ix

 Body and Generation in the Early Modern Period 

  The Useless Genitor: Fantasies of Putrefaction and Nongenealogical Births 

  The Masquerade of Paternity: Cuckoldry and Baby M[ale] in Machiavelli’sLa mandragola

  Performing Maternity: Female Imagination, Paternal Erasure, and Monstrous Birth in Tasso’sGerusalemme liberata

  The Masquerade of Masculinity: Erotomania in Ariosto’sOrlando furioso

  Androgynous Doubling and Hermaphroditic Anxieties: Bibbiena’sLa calandria

  The Masquerade of Manhood: The Paradox of the Castrato 

 



 

The making of this book has spanned almost a decade, and in the course of it I have incurred many, many debts. Friends and colleagues from a variety of disciplines have through the years discussed, read, offered detailed criti- cism, and otherwise been very supportive of this project in numberless ways. I wish to thank for their unstinting generosity Giuseppe Gerbino, Elizabeth Clark, Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, Ronald Martinez, Walter Stephens, Susan Noakes, and Dino Cervigni. I am also indebted for spirited conversations to Giuseppe Mazzotta, Eduardo Saccone, Elissa Weaver, Mary Ann Frese Witt, Ronald Witt, Franco Fido, Daniel Javitch, Regina Schwartz, Tim Carter, Victoria Kirkham, Eric Nicholson, Antonia Arslan, Daria Perocco, and Robert Bonfil. This project has been generously supported by a number of grants and by a sabbatical leave from Duke University. I wish to thank Harvard Univer- sity for a year fellowship at their Renaissance center, Villa I Tatti, in Florence in –, where I wrote parts of chapters  and . Other grants from the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Endowment Fund, the American Philosophical Society, the Trent Foundation, the Research Council, and the European Studies Center of Duke University have helped the research along by freeing time or by sponsoring trips to archives in Italy. Special thanks go to the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office at Duke University for unfailingly pursuing all kinds of obscure requests and to the staff of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. For their timely generosity and enthusiasm, I wish to thank my many stu- dents and colleagues at Duke University, and the students and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and at Johns Hopkins University, where I briefly