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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 brings together essays from a range of disciplines within Early Modern Italian Studies, which focus on research areas pioneered by the prestigious Italianist, Letizia Panizza. The essays cover numerous themes, mirroring Panizza's broad scholarly interests, and refusal of artificial disciplinary separations. Contributions come from the fields of women's history, cultural history, intellectual history, political philosophy, and art history. They span from Giordano Bruno and the Renaissance interest in the lives of classical philosophers to the poetry of women in the Italian academies, representations of women in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and the poetry of Piero de Medici. The volume ends with essays on religious parody, libertinism, and controversial political writings. This book presents original new work by leading scholars in the intellectual, cultural and literary history of early modern Italy and is aimed at scholars of intellectual history, history of philosophy, literary history, women’s studies and Italian history.
Cursed Blessings explores the relationship between sexual nonconformity and religious radical dissent in the early modern Western European world. While many studies have been devoted to the process of the "hereticalization" of nonnormative sexual practices and its use in anti-heretical propaganda, this book is entirely devoted to understanding the meaning of unconventional sexual behaviors from the perspective of the dissenters. Divided into three parts, the first focuses on the Italian peninsula and explores alternative views on sexuality inspired by Renaissance currents of anti-clericalism, ancient Christian heresies, traditions of apocrypha of the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. I...
Leonora Bernardi (1559-1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first ever study of Bernardi’s life, and modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscript. Her writings appear in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, critical essays and contributions by Eric Nicholson, Eugenio Refini and Davide Daolmi. Based on new arc...
Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture argues that theatre, and the new genre of opera in particular, played a key role in creating a new vision of landscape during the long seventeenth century in Italy. It explores how the idea of gardens as theatres emerged at the same time as opera was developed in Italian courts around the turn of the seventeenth century. During this period landscape painting emerged as a genre and the aesthetic of designed landscapes and gardens was wholly transformed, which resulted in a reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and landscape. The importance of theatre as a key cultural expression in Italy is wide...
Shakespeare’s Shrews: Italian Traditions of Paradoxes and the Woman’s Debate investigates the echoes of two early modern discourses—paradoxical writing and the woman’s question or querelle des femmes—in the representation of the “Shakespearean shrew” in The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello. This comparative cross‐cultural study explores the English reception of these traditions through the circulation, translation, and adaptation of Italian works such as Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano, and Ercole and Torquato Tasso’s Dell’ammogliarsi. The enticing interplay of these two discourses is further complicated by their presence in the writing of early modern male and female authors. The examination of Shakespeare’s adaptation of these traditions in his “shrew” character highlights two key findings: the thematic fragmentation of the woman’s question and the evolving role of paradoxes, from figures of speech to “figures of thought”, both influenced by the gender of the speaker.
The first complete edition of a fourteenth-century Franco-Italian chanson de geste, presented with facing page English translation. The late medieval poem Huon d'Auvergne ("Hugh of Alvernia") belongs linguistically and thematically to both Italian and French literary history. Structurally a chanson de geste, an Old French epic form, Huon was created in the northern Italian peninsula for an audience of its courts and princes. It is the first poem to quote Dante's Divine Comedy. However, far from merely imitating the Inferno, Huon reworks a long and varied tradition of Otherworld journeys ranging in origin from antiquity to the fourteenth century, its protagonist's voyages echoing those of St ...
The romance or chivalric epic was the most popular form of literature in Renaissance Italy. This book shows how it owed its appeal to a successful fusion of traditional, medieval tales of Charlemagne and Arthur with the newer cultural themes developed by the revival in classical antiquity that constitutes the key to Renaissance culture.
Each book contains a CD featuring performances of the Song of Roland. The Song of Roland is a well-known hallmark of medieval French literature, yet students often read only excerpts and receive general introductions to the poem and its context. The challenges of teaching Roland include its age and subject matter, its form and composition in Old French, and its representation of Christians and Muslims. This volume in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature aims to help nonspecialist instructors teach Roland more comprehensively and to offer seasoned medievalists ways to invigorate their pedagogical tactics. Part 1, "Materials," surveys available editions, a wide range of secon...