Redreaming the Renaissance: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of Guido Ruggiero

By Mary Lindemann, Deanna Shemek, Douglas G. Biow and 11 more

Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: May 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9781644533383

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Redreaming the Renaissance

MARY LINDEMANN AND DEANNA SHEMEK

This book presents twelve chapters written by internationally known figures in Italian Renaissance studies whose work traverses the fields of history and literature. The use of italics here is meaningful. While the contributors are scholars trained in one field or the other, each is producing original work through a practice that sets the two disciplines of literature and history within a single discursive frame and turns them toward each other to produce analyses that are only possible thanks to the resulting dialogue. The effect is not simply the illumination of materials from one field by those associated with the other, much less the rejection of our coherent and distinct disciplines. Rather, we embrace a more expansive, more open, more dynamic conversation about Renaissance Italian culture that results from building bridges between literary and historical methods, materials, and insights. The studies presented here owe their vitality to this practice and to our shared admiration for the inspiring scholarship of the book’s dedicatee, Guido Ruggiero.

Why history and literature? Suspicions about whether literary texts harbor valuable truths or dangerous fictions are as old as the Western canon. Plato in the Republic already points to an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry (607b5–6) before condemning the latter: We are, at all events, aware that poetry mustn’t be taken as a serious thing laying hold of truth, but that the man who hears it must be careful (608a6–b2).¹ The great philosopher promulgated his own ideas through the vehicle of the semi-dramatic, literary, and thoroughly rhetorical form of the dialogue, even as he argued that poetry writ large, which is to say imaginative literature, whether lyrical, dramatic, or epic, was a pernicious form of rhetoric: it encouraged nonreflective empathy and dulled the mind. Plato’s star student, Aristotle, redirected this argument and contradicted his teacher by comparing poetry not to philosophy but to history. In the Poetics, he argued that history merely relates things that happen, while poetry presents "the kinds of things that happen and is thus conceptually more elevated" than historical narrative.²

The Renaissance Italian literary tradition reflects these tensions in some of its most celebrated works. Giovanni Boccaccio reports in the Introduction to Day Four of his Decameron that critics of his book endeavour to prove that my versions of the stories I have told are not consistent with the facts.³ He then addresses his detractors, tongue in cheek, by challenging them to produce facts of their own if they wish to disprove the veracity of his tales. Matteo Bandello, roughly two centuries later, would lean into the valence of the word novella as news, deriving a number of his 214 stories from reports he had heard about the affairs of his contemporaries. In the dedicatory letter to his collection, indeed, Bandello declares that he has assembled his collection with a purely documentary aim, neither to teach others, nor to increase the ornament of the vernacular, but only to keep record of the things that appeared to me worthy of being written.⁴

Debate over the value of Bandello’s stories as historical chronicles or invented fictions has waxed and waned in the modern era, but in his own century, a sometimes heated controversy aired over how literary works could legitimately pose, even fancifully, as historical accounts. The ruling elites of Italy were more than happy to be monumentalized in epic fictions depicting them as the descendants of legendary Greek and Roman heroes. Yet literary theorists were vexed by the question of how to control the historical and ideological implications of such representations. It was fine, for example, that the most popular literary work of the century, Ludovico Ariosto’s monumental chivalric adventure poem Orlando furioso, depicted the Este princes of Ferrara as the scions of the text’s fictional hero (Ruggiero) and heroine (Bradamante) and, even better, positioned the Este through Ruggiero’s line as distant descendants of the mighty Trojan warrior Hector. But critics in the generation following Ariosto’s grew uneasy over the questions raised in the poem about the relation between history and fiction. After all, in the Furioso’s most famous episode (canto XXXIV), the Christian knight Astolfo flies to the moon on the fantastical half-horse, half-griffin hippogriff. There, John the Evangelist divulges to him the apparent Gospel truth that history is a product of literary distortions devised by writers aiming to please their patrons: thus, if you want to know what really happened, turn all the stories upside down. He should know, declares John, because he, too, was a writer.

But the quarrel that emerged among the academicians over the Orlando furioso was not about John’s slyly blasphemous assertion. It was over things like whether romances—with their generic claim to relate the adventures of semi-historical legendary figures—ought to observe historical verisimilitude (plausibility) and cultural decorum (propriety) regarding distinctions of class, religion, and gender as understood by contemporary readers. Defenses of the poem’s depiction of powerful female knights, to meet these objections, resorted to historical claims that heroic women warriors had in fact really existed, in the past.⁵ This controversy demonstrably turned on concerns over sixteenth-century European cultural and political values, but more broadly it posed the problem of the relation between literary and historical writing: Which stories can we believe? In the end, the answer is perhaps not a matter of belief or even of writing but of reading. Today, Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince is read not only as political theory and historical account but also as literary art, while the biographies contained in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists are appreciated both as historical documents and as contributions to a creative genre of life-writing. Both genre categorizations are believable, in different ways.

Taking a cue from Italo Calvino, we might pose a counterintuitive question of our own: Should literary fictions matter to historians because they can be true?⁶ If so, then the task is to explore how this is so and whether literature conveys not only poetic and philosophical truths (as Calvino, no doubt, intended) but also formal and substantive historical insights, as Guido Ruggiero’s work suggests. Flipping the coin, we may aim to measure the literary dimensions of even seemingly straightforward historical documents. To set off in this direction is to venture onto uneven interdisciplinary terrain, but the trail has been blazed by our adventurous and sure-footed dedicatee.

Speaking in the voice of none other than Benvenuto Cellini, Ruggiero in a recent work seems to echo Calvino when he allows the brash sculptor and shameless autobiographer to defend a stripping away of precise historical details and faithful chronologies in order to achieve the deeper way of seeing things that was required by the shared culture of my day.⁷ Indeed, notes Ruggiero’s Cellini, biographers share with artists like himself a duty to offer something better, a deeper truth, and a more important one, through something called disegno: If they try to hide behind claims of just presenting things as they are, as the simple truth, they are sure to miss the real truth of what they are creating.⁸ We submit that Ruggiero’s most powerful work has been dedicated to just that disegno: the description of an underlying reality behind the infinite and unreproducible details of a subject … literally the truth behind the fiction of representation that emerges in conversations between history and literature.⁹

The authors of the studies in this book share a commitment to interdisciplinarity that is now well established (if not universally adopted) in the humanities and social sciences. Half a century ago, the microhistoricists of the 1970s were merging narrative analysis, documentary research, cultural anthropology, and ethnography to craft histories that considered the complex relations among individuals, small communities, beliefs, and everyday life practices. In 1973, historian and theorist Hayden White’s groundbreaking study Metahistory exposed the tropological structures inherent in historical writing itself, noting that the writing of history relies fundamentally on rhetorical, literary choices about how to build a narrative from bare information about dates and events.¹⁰ Conversely, the New Historicists of the 1980s galvanized literary studies by insisting on the historical and ideological underpinnings of literary writing. Perhaps the clearest sign of the institutionalization of these practices is the journal Literature & History, which since 1975 has provided an open forum for practitioners coming from the distinctive vantage points of either discipline … to explore issues of common concern.¹¹ Common concerns also emerge in this book, where our contributors variously consider and show how literature may constitute an authentic source for the writing of history and how historical materials may not only inform literary creation and interpretation but also themselves be analyzed for their literary dimensions. Thus, they take seriously the idea that fiction can be used as a basis for writing history.

Literary and historical research have often been bedfellows, if not always cozy ones. Historians are wont to bemoan literary scholars’ lack of historical acumen. Literary scholars persist in asking what makes historical writing objective, or indeed different from the writing of fiction, while lamenting the often simplistic manner in which historians draw upon literature merely to contextualize or add color to a historical argument. White caused many historians to shudder when he argued that a fact is a purely linguistic phenomenon.… you do not find ‘facts’ in reality. He called into question the whole idea that history could be objective or truly scientific in itself, unaffected by anything.¹² That statement on its own would probably not have annoyed those historians who have pointed out that objectivity is but a noble dream.¹³ Yet when the argument also seemed to indicate that history is nothing more than literary artifact, historians bristled. Curiously, however, White also praised and valorized narrativity as the most successful mode for writing history. What, indeed, do history and other forms of narrative have to do with each other? As many have noted, in Italian (and French and German and Spanish), words such as istoria and storia can refer to both.

If White, a historian by training, seemed to be fouling his own nest by ripping out the core of what many historians believe—that facts actually do exist and that historians can deal with them—other historians found themselves in (almost) perfect agreement with him that the line dividing fiction from history was a blurry one and that indeed historians should be far more willing to identify, appreciate, and analyze the fictional dimensions found in archival documents. French historian Natalie Zemon Davis made the virtues of such an approach apparent in her popular The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) and her Fiction in the Archives (1990).¹⁴ The latter described and applied an analytical approach to tales, in this case pardon tales, which documented the various explanations that subjects before sixteenth-century French tribunals gave to argue their innocence by telling contextual and anecdotal stories to justify their behavior. The former study was, instead, a modern reimagining of a much older story. It was a masterpiece of narrativity that also filled in the blanks in ways that were immediately appealing and historically successful (confirming White’s perception of what makes for effective history because history is narrativity, it does not merely use narrative as a mode). In both cases, there was blowback to Davis’s approach, most famously expressed in a forum in the American Historical Review where it was argued that, basically, her study wasn’t history at all, but rather a fiction in and of itself. Where, after all, were the sources?¹⁵

But, of course, history has always been about storytelling, as William Cronon pointed out in his 2012 presidential address to the American Historical Association. In pondering what made, or would make, history meaningful for a broader public, he suggested that "one answer … is arguably the most basic of all, and that is, simply: storytelling. We need to remember the roots of our discipline and be sure to keep telling stories that matter as much to our students and to the public as they do to us. Yet his form of storytelling did not, as we understand it, reduce facts to nothing more than artful inventions (however insightful) or linguistic phenomena."¹⁶

If a split divides the values, methods, and sensibilities of literary scholars and historians and if that rift determines how they approach texts (whether documents or literary works of all kinds), is there hope for scholars credibly to embrace both? The chapters in this book offer richly affirmative answers to this question, taking up in strikingly different and innovative ways the gauntlet Guido Ruggiero has thrown down in several works, most substantially in his Machiavelli in Love (2006) and Love and Sex in the Time of Plague (2021). While the title of the latter gestures enticingly toward the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s acclaimed 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera (two of whose principal characters are named Florentino and Urbino), Ruggiero’s subtitle may be the more important part: A Decameron Renaissance.¹⁷ Two words, one pointing to fiction and another to history, preview the content of a study in which he not only deploys his skills as a storyteller and a historian but also stages an intimate, book-length colloquy between a literary text and a historical period. In his exploration of Boccaccio’s quintessential work of storytelling framed by the historical event of the 1348 bubonic plague, Ruggiero, in his own words, shows how love, sexual desire, and emotions "were portrayed in [the Decameron’s] tales and that those depictions interacted with and reflected the understanding and living of love and sexual desire in Florence and the cities of northern Italy in the Rinascimento."¹⁸ One could say that he and the contributors to this book wear two hats, but this image would be wrong because they do not so much double or alternate methodologies as fuse them. We might say they are scholarly amphibians, researchers who dwell and thrive in both the literary and historical milieux.

How then does the amphibious historian/literary scholar evolve? Obviously, and as the chapters in this book demonstrate, no one path—and certainly no one right path—leads to the creation of the harmonious and intellectually constructive blend of the historian-cum-literary scholar or literary scholar-cum-historian. As in so many amalgams, there often exists a little more of one and a little less of the other. Certainly, no scholar has produced a more euphonious counterpoint of history and literature than Guido Ruggiero. Ruggiero, however, did not begin as a disciplinary border-crosser, nor has he devoted his scholarly production solely to writing history through an engagement with fiction. Rather, throughout his career, he has both written narrative, interpretive history based on deep archival research and become ever more deeply involved in exploring the dialogue between these two modes of knowledge transmission. Thus, his method developed over a series of years and publications, each one moving the two approaches closer together, one never submerging or obliterating the other.

The social historian Ruggiero, as perhaps most clearly represented in his first book, Violence in Renaissance Venice (1980),¹⁹ turned away from a prevalent scholarly fascination with revolutionary violence to examine asocially aggressive interactions. Ruggiero was one of the first to use statistical methods to examine crime as a social phenomenon in late medieval and early modern Europe. But this was far from a strictly quantitative study: behind the numbers, he was able to summon up stories: of rape, knife fights, casual violence, verbal aggression, and the people who engaged in these acts under specific circumstances. Such stories and how to narrate them as well as his increasing interest in the correlations between sex, sexuality, and crime became major themes of Ruggiero’s work of the late 1980s and early 1990s, beginning with The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985).²⁰ Boundaries includes a chapter on the rhetoric of legal case briefs and on the expanded language of sex crime and already signaled the generic and disciplinary borrowing that would become the hallmark of his method. The subtitle of his Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (1993), however, marks a clear move toward his growing fascination with what stories tell us.²¹ Here Ruggiero himself emerges, Boccaccio-like, as the listener who turns witness and raconteur, lending dignity to his subjects through a careful and deeply sympathetic reading of the precious few remaining traces of his subjects’ lives. A carnival cast of hapless schemers—Apollonia, Fra Aurelio, Don Felice, la Draga, and the other Venetians intent on binding licit and illicit relationships through magic and marriage—in Ruggiero’s readings exceed their documentary confines. They attest instead to what he calls the poetry of the everyday, which in his view was ceding ground to the prosaic, institutional logics of an impending modernity.²²

To be sure, neither The Boundaries of Eros nor Binding Passions really dealt very much with literature per se; rather they were concerned with how ordinary people told tales. For the next few years, Ruggiero and his collaborator, historian Edward Muir, in a series of books and articles, introduced the English-speaking public to the microhistory that was being showcased in the Italian scholarly journal Quaderni Storici. Here, stories once again dominated the discussion.²³ Yet another project accelerated the evolution of the social historian into the hybrid historian/literary scholar: the edition and translation of Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (2003) Ruggiero coproduced with the literary scholar Laura Giannetti (2003).²⁴ In the process of thinking about and translating these comedies, Ruggiero developed a stronger sensitivity to language as well as a deep appreciation for theatrical fictions and their relationship to social life. Along with comedies by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Pietro Aretino, the Sienese academicians known as the Intronati, and the anonymous writer of La Veniexiana, Machiavelli’s La mandragola (The Mandrake) played a special role. Now something clicked, and what had long been simmering in Ruggiero’s mind distilled into the concept of consensus reality that he later defined as imagined realities, but none the less real for that, and which were shared within the various groups with which an individual lived and interacted, groups such as family, friends, social peers, fellow workers, fellow confraternity members, and broader communities and solidarities.²⁵ Ruggiero and Giannetti’s collaboration on the comedies clearly served as another turning—or jumping-off—point for the historian of Renaissance sexual mores. It was followed by a volume entirely devoted to the conversation between literary and historical analysis. In Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance (2011), literature and history fertilize one another continuously.²⁶ With palpable glee, Ruggiero carries over to this important book about Renaissance erotic culture the playfulness of the comedies, opening the volume with a discussion of the sexually charged Renaissance party game known as Letting the Bird Peck at the Fig.

Thenceforth, documentary sources ally with literary ones (including novellas, letters, dialogues, and theatrical comedies) in all of Ruggiero’s work, as he explores relations in the Rinascimento between personal identity and sexual reputation. Bridging from the comedy translations, two of Machiavelli’s plays come in for analysis in this book, as does Pietro Aretino’s Marescalco (The Master of the Horse), but looking forward, we also discern the seeds of Ruggiero’s book on the Decameron in a chapter on Boccaccio’s tale of Rustico and Alibech—tellingly explored alongside historical documents about a sixteenth-century Venetian nun who accused herself of sleeping with the Devil.

Thus, we perceive how the successful transformation of Ruggiero’s work into his characteristically harmonious blend of the methods of literary scholars and historians occurred. The concerted integration of archival and cultural sources in the writing of Renaissance history culminates most emphatically in his own telling of the history of the period in a book that merges political, social, economic, military, and cultural history with elite and popular cultures. In engaging, lively prose pitched for both the student and the scholar, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (2015) offers both a performance of Ruggiero’s methodology and an extension of his work’s implications into a full-blown, highly nuanced reimagining of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries in Italy as both a narratable period and a set of movements.²⁷ Ruggiero harnesses world events; social conflicts; public and private spaces; city and countryside; communities and individuals; new industries and technologies; literature, painting, and other arts; intellectual and spiritual movements; sexual mores; violence and criminality; and more to support the book’s sweeping and provocative representation of the Rinascimento, the first attempt in more than a generation at offering an acceptable paradigm and genuine overview of Italian history and culture from 1250 to 1575. And there is yet more.

In his most recent book, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague, Ruggiero once again allows the subtitle, A Decameron Renaissance, to highlight both argument and method. Ruggiero formulates his approach by declaring that what is most important to him is how "discussion of love and sexual desire and the emotions … were portrayed in [the Decameron’s] tales and the way in which those depictions interacted with and reflected the understanding and living of love and sexual desire in Florence and the cities of northern Italy in the Rinascimento."²⁸ Does this complete and perfect the transformation to a hybrid literary studies scholar/historian? Perhaps, but perhaps not. A clue may come from his playful yet also deeply serious recent gem of an article in which Ruggiero ventriloquizes Benvenuto Cellini, also cited previously. Ruggiero/Cellini (writing from hell!) "magnanimously corrects the irritating ignorance of life writers in general and in regard to my Vita."²⁹ Thus, the real and literary Cellini (like the real and literary Ruggiero) explains work that is equally informed and enriched by literary and historical scholarship.

Ruggiero has shown the way in which scholars can use the rich textual world of the Italian Renaissance as an excellent proving ground to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines. His amalgam of historical and literary research is the explicit theme of this book and all the works in it. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres—prose fiction (Magnanini); plays (Eisenbichler, Ferraro); poetry (Ascoli, Rospocher, Hairston)—but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period. These include philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy (Arcangeli); life-writing (Biow, Findlen, Hairston, Ray); religious debates (Hairston, Magnanini); gender and race narratives (Ferraro, Findlen, Magnanini); menu descriptions and other food writing (Eisenbichler); diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs (Quaintance, Rospocher); and scientific discussions (Biow, Ray). The final three chapters included here (Ascoli, Terpstra, Rospocher) turn to methodological reflections in recognition of the role that the book’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of literary and historical studies of the Renaissance into provocative interplay.

This book is divided into four parts: Visions, Passions, Dramas, and Methods. The first three chapters address visions and envisioning and include reflections, dreams, and representations. In his piece on the role of mirrors in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Douglas Biow reflects on both literal and painted reflections while also addressing a question of genre. Biow reminds us that istorie was a term referring to both fictional and factual narratives but also to visual representations in certain types of paintings: scenes historical or mythological or imaginary constructed in the grand manner. Revisiting the famous account of Filippo Brunelleschi’s public demonstration of the new geometric art of analytical perspective, where the artist employed a flat, mirrored surface to illustrate his technique, Biow notes that Vasari, the author of both literary and painted istorie, omitted the story of the mirror from his life of Brunelleschi. This, Biow argues in his reflections on the pictorial lessons of mirrors in Vasari’s Lives, is because Vasari was fundamentally not interested in optics—in what the eye can and does do or what mirrors themselves enable, for all of their importance in the science of optics—but rather in how mirrors in paintings instantiate what artistic technique may achieve.

Alessandro Arcangeli analyzes Renaissance dreaming, a type of experience intimately related to visions and yet different from them, and dream interpretations. Unlike Guido Ruggiero’s attention to redreams and their metaphorical sense of utopian ideals, Arcangeli’s investigation focuses on the dream as literary genre, on fictional representations of dreams, and on dream reports in pursuit of a cultural history that bridges the history of the emotions and the history of the senses. Focusing first on literature and reference books of the Renaissance, Arcangeli offers an extensive review of words associated with dreams in dictionaries of the period and reflections on dreams found in florilegia and commonplace books. He then turns to the personal dreams recorded and interpreted in the writings of famed mathematician and polymath Girolamo Cardano (1501–74) and to the publication in print of ancient works on dream theory and interpretation. Comprehensively, Arcangeli considers the dream as a form of cultural production. His archeology of the dreaming subject leads to a revisionist perspective of the Enlightenment as a paradigm shift toward critical self-knowledge.

The final contribution in this part turns to another form of envisioning. Suzanne Magnanini examines how African women were figured in two texts by the Neapolitan poet, courtier, and fairy-tale collector Giambattista Basile. Basile, she shows, offered two very different representations of African women: one, a positive, subtle description of African characters in his epic poem in verse, Teagene (1637), and the other, a racist description of Blackness and gender that frames his more famous Tale of Tales (1634 and 1636), a collection that deeply influenced the Brothers Grimm, among others. Magnanini argues that only by examining Basile’s works within their social and historical context and alongside other canonical texts of the period, by reading "both story and storia, both literature and history, can we account for the apparent contradictions between Basile’s two figurations of Blackness. Set against the backdrops of Basile’s own identity as a colonized subject in Spanish-dominated Naples, the importance of Africa for the expansionist efforts of the Catholic Church, and the transatlantic slave trade, Basile’s texts in Magnanini’s reading reveal the complexity of early modern racecraft at work."

The next part turns to the passions, those of the Renaissance and those of everyday life: love, sex, crime, and religious turmoil. The three chapters in this part analyze and counterpoint the dramas of everyday life in Renaissance Italy as reflected in archival sources (Ferraro and Findlen) and in epic poetry rooted in the tumult of sixteenth-century religious debate (Hairston). Both Joanne M. Ferraro and Paula Findlen focus on tales found in the archives that were also mirrored in literature. Ferraro analyzes tales of marriage, concubinage, prostitution, and mésalliance that come directly from the judicial archives, finding rhetorical strategies filled with omissions and fabrications … [that] made history less from experience than from retrospective interpretation. Oligarchic regimes compelled elite families in Venice and its subject cities to make endogamic matches in order to consolidate wealth. In this milieu, while choosing one’s own spouse was highly unlikely and separations were difficult to achieve, financial principles did not preclude the formation of long-term, informal living arrangements, some of which ended up in litigation. Ferraro turns to the Renaissance stage as a space where adultery and elopements offered both comic relief and imagined solutions to unhappy relations, noting that theatrical comedies were in some ways a better litmus test of behavior than the testimonies offered in the courts, which were constrained by legal convention. Ferraro further reminds us that, while literature is by definition an artful invention, court records preserve another kind of fiction, constructed from rhetorical strategies, often coached by lawyers, aimed at winning a cause.

Findlen challenges us to consider the degree to which literary writings may help us reconstruct a real life and, conversely, how short the documentary remains of a life may fall as we seek the truth. At the heart of her contribution is the figure of Giovanni Bordoni, who, upon death from an infected gunshot wound in Siena in 1743, was discovered to be anatomically female. The intense scrutiny of Bordoni’s body and the search for a birth identity led to the name of Catterina Vizzani, as described in a highly literary pamphlet, the Brief History of the Life of Catterina Vizzani, written by Doctor Giovanni Bianchi, who conducted the autopsy. Notably, Findlen did not discover Giovanni in the folio pages of archival records, where this story should have been [found], but rather in Bianchi’s pamphlet, which was widely translated and adapted in later years. It was Bianchi’s literary account, possibly written with the goal of challenging social norms and expectations, that pulled Findlen and other historians back into the archives in an effort to restore [Bordoni’s] life. Surveying additional sources, including a historical novel that imagines Catterina as a girl reading same-sex love episodes from the Orlando furioso, Findlen hazards that historical fiction can go places where historians fear to tread.

Finally, in Julia L. Hairston’s piece, we encounter a chivalric epic penned by a woman in in the first half of the sixteenth century, in a time roiled by religious turmoil that was personal as much as political. Tullia d’Aragona’s Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino reflected the debates over the influence the Protestant Reformation had on religious life in Italy. Hairston identifies the several types of clues—linguistic, literary, religious, sociocultural, and historical—found in d’Aragona’s text that allow a better grasp of what role that debate played in society and in private lives. In shaping her poem, d’Aragona placed in the mouths of her characters commentary about their psychological motivations and about religion. Hairston analyzes how Tullia transposed Andrea da Barberino’s early fifteenth-century prose tale (Il Guerrin Meschino) into Renaissance ottava rima and what d’Aragona’s emendations reflect of the often violent religious controversies of Cinquecento Italy—and their implications for life and belles lettres—to demonstrate the impact of religious culture on literary production in the period.

Three chapters in the next part consider the role of drama and other performance arts in Renaissance society. Konrad Eisenbichler examines a range of secular and sacred comedies from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries not strictly as theater but for the insights they offer about economies, politics, sexual activity, and religious values of the time. He opens with an account from a fifteenth-century diary written by a former member of one of Florence’s religious associations for young men who later recalled with pleasure a Carnival festival that brought together food, wine, and the performance of a play. He then focuses on the frequent appearances of food and eating, both in Renaissance plays themselves—where actors and characters frequently consumed meals onstage—and in accounts written by spectators and commentators. Documenting the dizzying array of foods and wines mentioned in these texts by referencing recipes, account books, and descriptions found in kitchen management manuals, Eisenbichler illuminates the early modern Italian table, diet, and foodways but also eating, acting, and spectating as symbolic practices, especially during Carnival and Lent. As he shows, food items featured in these festivities were never simple props and certainly not arbitrarily chosen; they were saturated with religious, moral, political, erotic, and economical meanings that were not missed by their audience.

Meredith K. Ray’s chapter on Tarquinia Molza offers an overview of the life and celebrity of the Counter-Reformation-era Modenese poet, musician, and natural philosopher. Drawing from an array of sources, including biographies, book dedications, and letters, Ray focuses on L’amorosa filosofia (1577), a dialogue about love, cosmology, the philosophy of nature, and music written by Molza’s friend and admirer Francesco Patrizi. Patrizi cast Molza in a starring role in his text, depicting her as both muse and authority, a new Diotima who does not speak but whose singing voice is described in the dialogue as exerting a transporting power over her listeners. The learned celebrity Molza, Ray argues, epitomizes the interconnected nature of early modern intellectual and creative culture and the varied ways in which women could move between these intertwined worlds. Since many of Molza’s writings have been lost and she did not publish on the subject of natural philosophy, Ray’s reconstruction through indirect sources is a valuable attempt to assemble a coherent picture of Molza’s thought and activities and assign her due credit among the scientific, musical, poetic, and philosophical thinkers of her