| The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance Contributor(s): Finucci, Valeria (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822330652 ISBN-13: 9780822330653 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $27.50 Product Type: Paperback Published: March 2003 Annotation: "Valeria Finucci is at it again, patrolling and illuminating the unstable boundaries of sex and gender in early modern Italian culture and literature. Relating canonical literary texts to the medical and legal culture of their times, she explores the fascination that spontaneous generation, cuckoldry, the maternal imagination, androgyny, and the deliberate manufacture of castrati held for early modern Italians--and still hold for us."--Walter Stephens, author of "Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief" "Valeria Finucci's book questions the traditional concepts associated with the Italian Renaissance (harmony, spiritual perfection and beauty, etc.) and addresses much less 'luminous' aspects of sixteenth-century Italian culture."--Armando Maggi, author of "Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology" |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Men's Studies - History | Europe - Italy |
| Dewey: 305.310 |
| LCCN: 2002010947 |
| Physical Information: 0.86" H x 6.06" W x 9.38" (1.12 lbs) 328 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 15th Century - Chronological Period - 16th Century - Chronological Period - 17th Century - Cultural Region - Central Europe - Cultural Region - Italy |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher 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. |