Gender And Genealogy In Tasso S Gerusalemme Liberata

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

This book of essays brings together international scholars working on the literary, visual, musical, and theatrical representations and reception of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin, an early modern woman whose literal—geographical—“border crossings” serve here as the starting point for an investigation of her and others’ elisions and transgressions of borders of all kinds. The authors lay out strategies for exploring the ways in which she crossed geographical, gendered, cultural, and—in scholarly terms—disciplinary boundaries, and in so doing, consider how an investigation of those border crossings can enhance our understanding of early modern cultural formation. The new work presented here by some of the most distinguished junior and senior scholars working today in the fields of history, art history, literary history, the history of theater, and the history of music promises to stimulate a broader scholarly discussion about early modern border-crossing and women’s places in the early modern period in general.

Over the last 20 years, there has been an increasing interest in feminist views of the Italian literary tradition. While feminist theory and methodology have been accepted by the academic community in the U.S., the situation is very different in Italy, where such work has been done largely outside the academy. Among nonspecialists, knowledge of feminist approaches to Italian literature, and even of the existence of Italian women writers, remains scant. This reference work, the first of its kind on Italian literature, is a companion volume for all who wish to investigate Italian literary culture and writings, both by women and by men, in light of feminist theory. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for authors, schools, movements, genres and forms, figures and types, and similar topics related to Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and summarizes feminist thought on the subject. Entries provide brief bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies. This volume covers eight centuries of Italian literature, from the Middle Ages to the present. Included are entries for major canonical male authors, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as for female writers such as Lucrezia Marinella and Gianna Manzini. These entries discuss how the authors have shaped the image of women in Italian literature and how feminist criticism has responded to their works. Entries are also provided for various schools and movements, such as deconstruction, Marxism, and new historicism; for genres and forms, such as the epic, devotional works, and misogynistic literature; for figures and types, such as the enchantress, the witch, and the shepherdess; and for numerous other topics. Each entry is written by an expert contributor, summarizes the relationship of the topic to feminist thought, and includes a brief bibliography. The volume closes with a selected general bibliography of major studies.

Throughout early modern Europe, patronage became a means for the dominant classes to highlight their wealth, intellectual finesse, and cultural and political agendas, particularly within the court and religious institutions. Musical events like operas and carnival parades were an especially essential component of this patronage. However, the ways in which music patronage changed during the second half of the seventeenth century have largely remained underexplored. At the time, profound social and cultural transformations influenced the production and consumption of music in radical and permanent ways, not least through the influence of the Colonna family - Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and his wife Maria Mancini. Two of the most active patrons of seventeenth-century Italy, they were particularly active in the musical life of Rome. Through their sponsorship of an unprecedented number of operas, serenatas, and oratorios, they supported the careers of the most prominent composers, librettists, and musicians of the period. A new exploration of this period of music patronage, The Politics of Princely Entertainment follows Lorenzo Onofrio and Maria beyond the borders of Rome and through their far-reaching personal and institutional travels - to Venice, Naples, and the Kingdom of Aragon. Author Valeria De Lucca traces the journeys of not only scores and librettos, but also the singers, composers, and librettists whose art reached these distant corners of Europe through the Colonna family's patronage activities. The Politics of Princely Entertainment is a welcome addition to scholarly understanding of music patronage beyond traditional boundaries of gender, geography, and institutions.

Her afterword serves as a decisive intervention in the ongoing discussions in and about the field.

Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure, as bearers of information on material reality, as mediators between the mind and the outer world, and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy, music and poetry, gardens, food, relics and rituals. Collectively, the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.

This book offers a new reading of early modern romance in the light of historically contemporary accounts of mind, and specifically the medical tradition of love-melancholy. The book argues that the medical profile of the melancholic lover provides an essential context for understanding the characteristic patterns of romance: narrative deferral, epistemological uncertainty, and the endless quest for a quasi-phantasmic beloved. Unlike many recent studies of romance, this book establishes a detailed historical basis for investigating the psychological structure of romance. Wells begins by tracing the development of the medical disorder first known in the Latin west as amor hereos (lovesickness) from its earliest roots in Greek and Arabic medicine to its translation into the Latin medical tradition. Drawing on this detailed historical material, the book considers three important early modern romances: Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, concluding with a brief consideration of the significance of this literary and medical legacy for Romanticism. Most broadly, the interdisciplinary nature of this study allows the author to investigate the central critical problem of early modern subjectivity in substantially new ways.