The Theatre Couple In Early Modern Italy

Who were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies? These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional performers: Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) and Virginia Ramponi (1583–ca.1631). This book examines their artistic path – a deliberately crafted and mutually beneficial joint career – and links it to the historical, social, and cultural context of post-Tridentine Italy. Rooted in a broad research field, encompassing theatre history, Italian studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, and performance studies, The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy revises the conventional view of the Italian diva, investigates the deployment of Catholic devotion as a marketing tool, and argues for the importance of the couple system in the history of Commedia dell’Arte, a system that continues to shape celebrity today.

This book is a study of convent theatre in Italy, an all-female tradition. Widespread in the early modern period, but virtually forgotten today, this activity produced a number of talented dramatists and works worthy of remembrance. Convent authors, actresses and audiences, especially in Tuscan houses, the plays written and produced, and what these reveal about the lives of convent women, are the focus of this book. Beginning with the earliest known performances of miracle and mystery plays (sacre rappresentazioni) in the late fifteenth century, the book follows the development in the convents at the turn of the sixteenth century of spiritual comedy and of a variety of dramatic forms in the seventeenth century. Convent theatre both reflected the high level of literacy among convent women and contributed to it, and it attested to the continuing close contact between the secular world and the convents - even in the Post Tridentine period.

The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) has become a leader in the dialogue between Jews and Catholics as was manifested in the role that the Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea played in the adoption by the Second Vatican Council of Nostra Aetate, the charter for that new relationship. Still the encounters between Jesuits and Jews were often characterized by animosity and this historical record made them a tragic couple, related but estranged. This volume is the first examination of the complex interactions between Jesuits and Jews from the early modern period in Europe and Asia through the twentieth century where special attention is focused on the historical context of the Holocaust.

Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the diverse spoken languages of Italy. The second group of essays studies the influence of speech on the written word and reveals that, as fourteenth-century Tuscan became accepted as a literary standard, contemporary non-standard spoken languages were seen to possess an immediacy that made them an effective resource within certain kinds of written communication. The third part considers the roles of orality in the worlds of the learned and of learning. The book as a whole demonstrates that the borderline between orality and writing was highly permeable and that the culture of the period, with its continued reliance on orality alongside writing, was often hybrid in nature.

"Emerging in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, pastoral drama is one of the most characteristic genres of its time. Sampson traces its uneven development into the following century by exploring masterpieces by Tasso and Guarini, and many lesser known works, some by women writers. She examines the treatment of key themes of love, the Golden Age, and Nature and Art against the background of the textual and stage production of the plays. An investigation of critical writings associated with the genre further reveals its significance to the contemporary literary scene, by stimulating 'modernizing' attitudes towards the canon, as well as new enquiries into the function and possibilities of art."

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy -- PART I: Women as Protagonists in Male-Authored Drama: Comedy and tragedy -- 1 Fathers, Daughters, Crossdressing, and Names: Women, Rhetoric, and Education in Commedia Erudita -- Coda: "Margherita Costa's Li buffoni (1641): The First (Extant) Female-Authored Scripted Comedy"--2 Fashioning a Genealogy: The Rhetoric of Friendship and Female Virtue in Italian Renaissance tragedy -- Coda: Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611) among Fin de Siècle Italian Tragedies -- PART II: Women as Authors/Women as Protagonists: Pastoral Tragicomedy -- 3 Women Writers and the Canon: Satyr Scenes and Female-Authored Pastoral Drama -- 4 Isabetta Coreglia's Dori (1634): Writing Pastoral Drama Against the Backdrop of the Male Canon and an Incipient Female-Authored Tradition -- 5 Isabetta Coreglia's Erindo il fido (1650) and Isabella Andreini's Mirtilla (1588): Using a Female-Authored Classic as Paradigm -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index

This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres – from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing – was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.

Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe addresses the central question of the professionalization of women’s writing before the eighteenth-century from a comparatist perspective, offering intriguing case studies on as yet an underdeveloped area in early modern studies.