Chapter 1: What? Where? When? Whose?
1 See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), trans. S.G.C. Middlemore, with an introduction by Peter Burke (London: Penguin, 2004). All parenthetical references are to this edition.
2 John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 97–9.
3 Paolo Malanima, ‘Urbanisation and the Italian economy during the last millennium’, European Review of Economic History 9/1 (2005), pp. 101–2.
4 See Cesare Segre (ed.), Volgarizzamenti del Duecento e Trecento (Turin: UTET, 1953); Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
5 For a survey of medieval renaissances, see Warren Treadgold (ed.), Renaissances Before the Renaissance: Classical Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).
6 Najemy, History of Florence, pp. 45–6.
7 Robert Black, ‘Education and the emergence of a literate society’, in John Najemy (ed.), Italy in the Age of the Renaissance: 1300–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 18. See also Ronald G. Witt, ‘What did Giovannino read and write? Literacy in early Renaissance Florence’, I Tatti Studies 6 (1995), pp. 83–114.
8 See Benjamin G. Kohl, ‘The myth of the Renaissance despot’, in Bernadette Patton and John Easton Law (eds), Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010); Philip Jones, The Italian City-State: from Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
9 See the relevant entries in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960–). Dante (Purgatorio, XX, 79–81) compared Charles’s bargaining off of his daughter to a corsair selling off female slaves.
10 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
11 This dynamic is underlined in Evelyn Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
12 See Peter Howard, Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Guido Guerzoni, Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400–1700 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), pp. 29–43; Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser, The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
13 See Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Niccolò Gallo with an introduction by Giorgio Ficara (Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1996). An English translation is available: Francesco De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, trans. Joan Redfern (New York: Basic Books, 1960).
14 Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. xiv–xv.
15 Mary Laven, ‘Encountering the Counter-Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59/3 (2006), pp. 706–20.
16 The essay is reprinted in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
17 See Brian Jeffrey Maxson, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
18 On the editorial history of Ariosto, see Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
19 ‘Descrittione della vita del Croce’, in Storia di vita popolare nelle canzoni di piazza di G.C. Croce, ed. Monique Rauch (Bologna: CLUEBB, 1982), p. 46.
Chapter 2: The Renaissance and the Ancient
1 The letter is cited from Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis, trans. Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 193–5.
2 The phrase is from a metrical epistle of Lovati’s, to a certain Bellinus, cited in Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism From Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 53.
3 David Wray, Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 5.
4 Valuable as overviews of Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s very diverse literary production are Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (eds), Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr (eds), Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
5 (‘Homerus … apud me mutus, immo vero ego apud illum surdus sum’). Petrarch, Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco (Florence: Sansoni, 1933–42), Vol. 3, p. 277 (letter 18. 2, of January 1354). Petrarch’s letters are available in English: Rerum familiarum libri, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols (New York: Italica Press, 2005).
6 Marianne Pade, ‘The fortuna of Leontius Pilatus’s Homer’, in F. T. Coulson and A. A. Grotans (eds), Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), p. 150.
7 The text may be found in Craig W. Kallendorf (ed.), Humanist Educational Treatises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
8 For discussion of the term and its history, see James Hankins, ‘Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy’, in James Hankins (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 30–2.
9 Maxson, Humanist World.
10 For a brief overview, see Hankins, ‘Humanism’, pp. 32–6.
11 Ibid., pp. 39–45.
12 See Salvatore Camporeale, Christianity, Latinity, and Culture: Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla, ed. Patrick Barker and Christopher S. Celenza (Leiden: Brill, 2014), esp. pp. 184–6.
13 Benvenuto Cellini, Vita, ed. Ettore Camesasca (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009), pp. 240–4 (Bk 64). For a translation, see The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956).
14 Carrie E. Beneš, Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), pp. 47–52.
15 (‘In vestibulo Iustine virginis et ante ipsum sepulcri tui lapidem’). Petrarch, Le familiari, Vol. 4, p. 245 (24. 8).
16 Beneš, Urban Legends, pp. 122–5.
17 Ibid., pp. 63–88.
18 (‘Aliquot sibi aureas argenteasque nostrorum principum effigies minutissimis ac veteribus literis inscriptas, quas in delitiis habebam, dono dedi, in quibus et Augusti Cesaris vultus erat pene spirans’). Petrarch, Le familiari, Vol. 3, p. 315 (29. 3).
19 (‘Et ecce … Cesar, quibus successisti; ecce quos imitari studeas et mirari’). Petrarch, Le familiari, Vol. 3, p. 315 (19. 3).
20 Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars, trans. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), Vol. 1, pp. 240–1 (2.75). On Petrarch’s use of Suetonius in his autobiographical writings, see Gur Zak, ‘Modes of self-writing from antiquity to the later Middle Ages’, in Ralph Hexter et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 498.
21 Diana Norman, ‘Splendid models and examples from the past: Carrara patronage of art’, in Diana Norman (ed.), Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion, 1280–1400, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Vol. I, pp. 164–71.
22 Petrarch, Le familiari, Vol. 4, p. 205 (23.19).
23 (‘Senza precettori, senza essemplo alcuno’). Il nuovo De Pictura di Leon Battista Alberti, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Rome: Edizioni Kappa, 2006), p. 89.
24 Michael Wyatt, ‘Technologies’, in Michael Wyatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 110.
25 Dora Thornton, The Scholar in his Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
26 Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
27 On domestic furnishing, see Marta Ajmar and Flora Dennis, At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006). On cassone painting, see Cristelle Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
28 See James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
29 Hans Baron, ‘Cicero and the Roman civic spirit in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 22/1 (1938), pp. 72–97. For discussion of the ‘civic humanist’ tradition, see James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
30 The best study of Traversari remains Charles L. Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977).
31 See Craig Martin, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
32 See Jill Kraye, ‘The revival of Hellenistic philosophies’, in Hankins (ed.), Cambridge Companion, p. 108; also ibid., p. 103 on Valla.
33 Martin, Subverting Aristotle, pp. 124–6.
34 See Brian Richardson, ‘The Prince and its early Italian readers’, in Martin Coyle (ed.), Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
35 (‘contro alla fede, contro alla carità, contro alla umanità, contro alla religione’). Machiavelli, Il principe, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), p. 118 (ch. 18). For an English edition, see Machiavelli, The Prince and Other Political Writings, trans. Stephen J. Milner (London: Everyman, 1995).
36 (‘una lunga esperienza delle cose moderne e una continua lezione delle antiche’). Machiavelli, Il principe, p. 4.
37 For Lucretius’s influence on Machiavelli, see Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 68–87.
38 Virginia Cox, ‘Rhetoric and political ethics’, in John Najemy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 179–81.
Chapter 3: The Renaissance and the Modern
1 Il nuovo De Pictura, pp. 165–6.
2 Pliny, Natural History, Bk 7, 4. On the status of artists in ancient Rome, see Peter Stewart, The Social History of Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 18–21.
3 Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, ed. Fabio Frezzato (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2003), ch. 2, p. 63. An English translation is available: Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook (Il libro dell’arte), trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New York: Dover, 1960).
4 Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 101 and n. 67. On the ‘famous women’ tradition generally, see Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 20–1, 24–6.
5 The key loci for this are Chapter 25 of Il principe, and Machiavelli’s letter of September 1506 to Giovanni Battista Soderini, known as the ghiribizzi (‘scribblings’). See, for the latter, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, ed. and trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (Delkalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 134–6.
6 Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic.
7 See Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014).
8 Elizabeth Currie, ‘Diversity and design in the Florentine tailoring trade, 1550–1620’, in Michelle O’ Malley and Evelyn Welch (eds), The Material Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), esp. p. 157.
9 Catherine Atkinson, Inventing Inventors: Polydore Vergil’s De inventoribus rerum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007).
10 Alessandra Baroni and Manfred Sellink, Stradanus (1523–1605): Court Artist to the Medici (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012).
11 Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Part IV (‘The Discovery of the World and Man’), pp. 185–229.
12 See Ann R. Jones and Margaret Rosenthal, The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008).
13 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
14 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1970), especially pp. 17–33.
15 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Loyola’s Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 117–19.
16 (‘non vogliate negar l’esperïenza/di retro al sol, del mondo senza gente’). Dante, Inferno, XXVI, 116–17.
17 (‘Errorem sane circa locorum notitiam multa pariunt, atque hec inter cetera: regionum inaccessarum nostris hominibus longinquitas, nominum mutatio, scriptorum raritas obscuritasque eorumdemque nonnunquam dissensio, sed super omnia incuriositas ingeniorum ac segnities nichil omnino curantium nisi quod ante oculos est’). Cited from Giancarlo Petrella, L’officina del geografo. La Descrittione di tutta Italia di Leandro Alberti e gli studi geografico-antiquari tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2004), p. 27.
18 (‘tam apud scriptores presertim cosmographos quam in descriptionibus terrarum et quibusdam cartis vetustissimis que ad manus nostras venerunt’). Ibid.
19 Fra Mauro made two sets of Ptolemaic maps, one for the Venetian government (surviving in the Marciana Library in Venice), c. 1448–53; the other for King Afonso V of Portugal, c. 1457–9. See Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map, trans. Jeremy Scott; foreword by Marino Zorzi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); also, more generally, Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
20 C. H. Clough, ‘The New World and the Italian Renaissance’, in C. H. Clough and P. E. H. Hair (eds), The European Outthrust and Encounter: The First Phase c. 1400–c. 1700 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994), pp. 291–328.
21 Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 11, n. 29.
22 See Jules Janick and Harry S. Paris, ‘The Cucurbit images (1515–1518) of the Villa Farnesina, Rome’, Annals of Botany, 97/2 (2006), pp. 165–76.
23 Cited from Anthony Grafton, with April Shelton and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 84.
24 (‘Gli huomini de’ tempi presenti che si dilettano di saper li siti della terra deono rendere infinite grazie al nostro Signore Iddio che gli ha fatti nascere in questa età’). Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978–88), Vol. 2, p. 502.
25 On the early history of medical dissection in Italy, see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 86–96.
26 Katharine Park, ‘The criminal and the saintly body: autopsy and dissection in late medieval Europe’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47/1 (1994), pp. 1–33.
27 Bernard Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press), pp. 61–3.
28 Further on this subject see Vivian Nutton, ‘Hellenism postponed: some aspects of Renaissance medicine, 1490–1530’, Sudhoffs Archiv, 81/2 (1997) pp. 158–70.
29 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence: Sansoni [later S.P.E.S.], 1966–97), Vol. 3, p. 506. The Vite are cited from the 1568 edition unless otherwise noted. For an English translation, see Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston C. De Vere, with an introduction and notes by David Ekserdjian (New York: Knopf, 1996).
30 See Domenico Laurenza, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy: Images from a Scientific Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 8–10; Shelley R. Langdale, Battle of the Nudes: Pollaiuolo’s Renaissance Masterpiece (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2002), p. 54; Schultz, Art and Anatomy, pp. 51–9.
31 The mention of the ‘book’ is found in Windsor Castle, Royal Collection, RCIN 9190599r. See Martin Clayton and Ron Philo, Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2012), p. 48. On the techniques employed in Leonardo’s anatomical drawings, see ibid., p. 22.
32 Windsor Castle, Royal Collection, RCIN 919027v. See Clayton and Philo, Leonardo, pp. 17 and 82.
33 Ibid., pp. 20–3.
34 See, for example, ibid., pp. 240–4.
35 Cited from Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 129.
36 Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 198–9.
37 Ibid., pp. 202–7.
38 Ibid., pp. 207–10.
39 Ibid., p. 135.
40 This text is available in an English edition: Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Modern Poets, ed. and trans. John N. Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
41 See Alina Payne, ‘Vasari, architecture, and the origins of historicizing art’, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 40 (2001), pp. 51–76.
42 The Guardaroba project is examined in Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography, and Politics in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
43 (‘… misurate perfettamente tutte, e ricorrette secondo gli autori nuovi’; ‘non è stata mai per tempo nessuno fatta nè la maggiore nè la più perfetta’). Vasari, Vite, Vol. 6, pp. 250–1. The discussion forms part of Vasari’s chapter on the Florentine Academicians.
44 Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, pp. 21–6.
45 Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 32–45.
46 Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 117.
47 Brian Pullan, ‘Wage-earners and the Venetian economy’, The Economic History Review, 16/3 (1964), esp. p. 415.
48 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (1976), trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 29–30.
49 On the increase in the size of libraries in this period, see Richardson, Printing, pp. 118–21.
50 On Luther and print culture, see Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For an overview of ephemeral print culture in Renaissance Italy, see Ottavia Niccoli, ‘Italy’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. Vol. 1. Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
51 Mario Infelise, ‘Roman avvisi: information and politics in the seventeenth century’, in Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (eds), Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 216 (translation slightly amended). See also Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 107–13.
52 Pierangelo Bellettini, ‘Pietro Vecchi e il suo progetto di lettura pubblica, con ascolto a pagamento, delle notizie periodiche di attualità (Bologna 1596)’, in Pierangelo Bellettini et al. (eds), Una città in piazza. Comunicazione e vita quotidiana a Bologna tra Cinque e Seicento (Bologna: Compositori, 2000), pp. 68–76.
53 Brian Richardson, ‘The debates on printing in Renaissance Italy’, La bibliofilia, 100/2–3 (1998), pp. 148–51.
54 Humfrey C. Butters, ‘Conflicting attitudes towards Machiavelli’s works in Spain, Rome, and Florence’, in Law and Patton (eds), Communes and Despots, pp. 81–5.
55 (‘Cum igitur haud ita pridem in Urbe nostra, secta quaedam emerserit hominum improbe curiosorum, qui quoscunque de publicis privatisque negociis, vel aliunde rimari possunt, vel ipsi etiam pro sua libidine comminiscuntur, domi, forisque facta, infecta, vera, falsa, nullo discrimine proponunt, recipiunt, et scriptitant, ita ut huius rei iam artem quasi quandam instituerint’). Bellettini, ‘Pietro Vecchi’, p. 70.
56 Amedeo Quondam, ‘Saggio di bibliografia della poesia religiosa’, in Paradigmi e tradizioni (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005), pp. 213–82, gives a sense of the range of this as yet little-studied literature. See also Cox, Prodigious Muse, pp. 32–41 on the more elite traditions of Counter-Reformation religious literature, and Niccoli, ‘Italy’, p. 194, for brief mention of popular religious literature at this time.
57 See Paolo Cherchi, Polimatia di riuso. Mezzo secolo di plagio (1539–89) (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), pp. 74–7, 211–33; Cox, Prodigious Muse, pp. 246–7.
58 (‘… perche in quei tempi era grandissima carestia di libri, e come uno sapeva un poco parlare per bus, e per bas, veniva adorato, come un Profeta, e gli era creduto ciò che egli diceva: ma di poi che questa benedetta stampa è venuta in luce, i libri sono multiplicati di sorte tale, che ogni uno può studiare; e massime che la maggior parte si stampano in lingua nostra materna’). Leonardo Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1564), 37v.
59 (‘Ella [l’arte della stampa] è stata causa di risvegliare il mondo; il quale era addormentato nell’ignoranza’). Ibid., 61v.
60 (‘la maggior parte delle genti tanto huomini quanto donne sanno leggere’; ‘forse un giorno verrà tempo, che tutti saremo Dottori a un modo’). Ibid., 62r.
61 (‘e così i gattesini hanno aperti gli occhi’). Ibid., 37v.
Chapter 4: Identity and the Self
1 Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
2 On the latter ritual, see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 119–34.
3 Marilynn B. Brewer and Constantine Sedikides (eds), Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self (Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2001). The definitions are from the editors’ introduction, at pp. 1–2.
4 Shihui Han and Ying Zhu, ‘Cultural differences in the self: from philosophy to psychology and neuroscience’, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2/5 (2008), pp. 1799–811.
5 Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, and Francesco Furlan (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), pp. 321–428. An English translation is available: Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1969).
6 (‘essere a tutti riverenti’). Alberti, Della famiglia, p. 58.
7 (‘Ob[servantissimo] fi[glio] et servitor’). Castiglione, Lettere inedite e rare, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969), p. 68 (letter 49).
8 (‘acciò ch’el impara a bonhora ad esser humano’). Ibid.
9 See Jerry Root, ‘Space to Speke’: The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
10 Sara J. Schechner, ‘Between knowing and doing: mirrors and their imperfections in the Renaissance’, in Early Science and Medicine, 20/2 (2005), pp. 141–54.
11 Laura Jacobus, ‘A knight in the Arena: Enrico Scrovegni and his “true image”’, in Mary Rogers (ed.), Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), esp. p. 23; ead., ‘The tomb of Enrico Scrovegni in the Arena Chapel, Padua’, The Burlington Magazine, 1311/154 (2012), esp. pp. 408–409.
12 Catherine King, ‘The arts of carving and casting’, in Norman (ed.), Siena, Vol. 1, p. 118. The medals date from 1390.
13 (‘credo che ad ognuno sia licito vestirsi a modo suo’). Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Nicola Longo, with an introduction by Amedeo Quondam (Milan: Garzanti, 1987), p. 158 (2.26). For an English translation, see Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: Norton, 2002).
14 (‘… debba fra se stesso deliberar ciò che vol parere e di quella sorte che desidera esser estimato, della medesima vestirsi’). Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 160 (2.27).
15 (‘Dapoi ch’io feci quella mia fodera de martore, l’usanza è venuta q[ui] de fare magiore le veste, trovo che adesso, alle veste che si usano, me li manca uno grande pezzo’). Castiglione, Lettere, ed. Guido La Rocca (Milan: Mondadori, 1978), Vol. 1, p. 236 (no. 162).
16 See Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 105–106.
17 See Rose Marie San Juan, ‘The court lady’s dilemma: Isabella d’Este and art collecting in the Renaissance’, Oxford Art Journal, 14/1 (1991), pp. 67–78.
18 Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
19 (‘el pictore ne ha tanto mal facta che non ha alcuna de le nostre simiglie’). Letter of 20 April 1493, cited in Joanna Woods-Marsden, ‘Theorizing Renaissance portraiture’, in James Elkins and Robert Williams (eds), Renaissance Theory (The Art Seminar) (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 363.
20 (‘una puva vestita alla fogia che va lei de camisa, di maniche, de veste di sotto, et di sopra, et de abiliamenti, et aconciatura di testa, et deli capili, come la porta’). Cited in Yassana C. Croizat, ‘“Living dolls”: François 1er dresses his women’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60/1 (2007), p. 97, n. 6.
21 (‘li profumi in bona quantità per donar a queste madimiselle … et guanti assai, et un albarello di savonetto da mane, che sia grande per darne a molte et ancor olio, polvere et acque’). Cited in Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 359 n. 81.
22 Ibid., p. 359 n. 82.
23 (‘grande inzegno’). Cited in Luke Syson, ‘Reading faces: Gian Cristoforo Romano’s medal of Isabella d’Este’, in Cesare Mozzarelli et al. (eds), La corte di Mantova nell’età di Mantegna, 1450–1550/The Court of the Gonzaga in the Age of Mantegna, 1450–1550 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), p. 287.
24 (‘neque actor … alienae personae, sed auctor meae’). Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), Vol. 1, p. 338 (2.194).
25 (‘Nec te celestem neque terrenum, neque mortalem neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor, in quam malueris tute formam effingas’). Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Discorso della dignità dell’uomo, ed. Francesco Bausi (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 2003), p. 10. The translation quoted is that of Elizabeth Livermore Forbes in Ernst Cassirer et al., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). The title ‘On the Dignity of Man’ was an invention of later editors; the original has no title.
26 (‘negli animi nostri sono tante latebre e tanti recessi, che impossibil è che prudenzia umana possa conoscer quelle simulazioni, che dentro nascose vi sono’). Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 163 (2.29). The phrasing echoes a passage in Cicero’s Pro Marcello, 22.
27 John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). See also Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).
28 Machiavelli, Il principe, pp. 115–16 (ch. 18).
29 Luba Freedman, Titian’s Portraits Through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 69–90.
30 Further on this point, see Virginia Cox (ed.), Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 20.
31 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
32 The detail is found in Carlo Dionisotti’s entry on Bembo in the Dizionario biografico.
33 See Guido Beltramini et al. (eds), Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento (Venice: Marsilio, 2013), pp. 208–209, which conjecturally identifies a painting in Besançon as the portrait by Titian mentioned by Vasari. The Cellini medal request is mentioned at ibid., p. 324.
34 On the Virgil codex, see Luba Freedman, Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 6. More generally, on Bembo’s collecting and interiors, see Susan Nalezyty, ‘From Padua to Rome: Pietro Bembo’s mobile objects and convivial interiors’, in Erin J. Campbell et al. (eds), The Early Modern Italian Domestic Sphere, 1400–1700: Objects, Spaces, Domesticities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014).
35 Raymond Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
36 (‘La natura stessa, della cui semplicità son secretario, mi detta ciò che io compongo’). Pietro Aretino, Lettere. Libro primo, ed. Francesco Erspamer (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1995), p. 156 (letter of 25 June 1537 to Lodovico Dolce).
37 Paula Hohti, ‘Domestic space and identity: artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena’, Urban History, 37/3 (2010), pp. 337–8.
38 Patricia Allerston, ‘Clothing and early modern Venetian society’, Continuity and Change, 15/3 (2000), p. 377; Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, pp. 39 and 157.
39 Cited in Woods-Marsden, ‘Theorizing’, p. 362.
Chapter 5: Renaissance Man
1 Thomas Greene, ‘The flexibility of the self in Renaissance literature,’ in Peter Demetz et al. (eds), The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 241–64.
2 Alberti, I libri della famiglia, p. 218. Giannozzo attributes the saying to the merchant-statesman Benedetto Alberti (d. 1388).
3 For more on merchants’ writings, see Vittore Branca, Merchant Writers of the Italian Renaissance from Boccaccio to Machiavelli, trans. Murtha Baca (New York: Marsilio, 1999).
4 Benedetto Cotrugli, Il libro dell’arte della mercatura, ed. Ugo Tucci (Venice: Arsenale, 1990), pp. 206–207.
5 (‘egli è sommamente utile et ancora necessario l’avere il corpo in buona disposizione, atto a simile essercitio, il quale a questa opera della consequition del fine concorrerà come instrumento adacto, non altrimenti che si facci il martello che concorre come dextro instrumento del fabbro’). Ibid., p. 145.
6 Alberti, Della famiglia, pp. 213–18.
7 Mark Phillips, The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 36.
8 Cotrugli, Della mercatura, p. 103.
9 (‘mai non perdé punto di tempo, sempre attento in acquistare l’amore del suo creatore Idio pelle sue limosine e buone operazioni, appresso in acquistare amicizia di buoni uomini e da bene e potenti’). Giovanni Morelli, Ricordi, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence: Le Monnier, 1956).
10 Maxson, Humanist World.
11 Eugenio Refini, ‘“Aristotile in parlare materno”: vernacular readings of the Ethics in the Quattrocento’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 16/1–2 (2013), pp. 311–41.
12 (‘molte cità: e molti costume de homeni’). Ibid., p. 334 and n. 99.
13 (‘li mercanti gravi et valenti non debbono essere come l’ago, che è vile strumento, perché non sa se non cucire’). Cotrugli, Il libro, p. 211.
14 Vittore Branca, ‘L’epopea mercantile’, in Boccaccio medievale (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), pp. 71–99.
15 Guido Guerzoni, ‘The demand for arts of an Italian Renaissance court: the case of d’Este of Ferrara (1471–1560)’, in Clara Eugenia Nuñez (ed.), Markets for Art, 1400–1600 (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1998), p. 56. See also Guerzoni, Apollo, pp. 47–9.
16 Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 221.
17 See Christopher S. Celenza, Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia: Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger’s De curiae commodis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
18 (‘furti, omicidii, odi, vendette, et ire’). See The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto: A Renaissance Autobiography, ed. and trans. Peter DeSa Wiggins (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 10–12 (Satire 1, ll. 97–9, 109–14), for unwelcome diplomatic missions and p. 106 (Satire 4, l. 147) for the Garfagnana.
19 Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 280 (3.16).
20 Ibid., pp. 59–61 (1.26).
21 Cicero, Brutus. Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 362 (23.78).
22 Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 92 (1.43).
23 Ibid., pp. 53–5 (1.21–2).
24 For the term, see Lisa K. Regan, ‘Ariosto’s threshold patron: Isabella d’Este in the Orlando Furioso’, MLN, 120/1 (2005), pp. 50–69.
25 (‘Ma perché par che la fortuna, come in molte altre cose, così ancora abbia grandissima forza nelle opinioni degli omini …’). Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 167 (2.32).
26 Ibid., pp. 128–30 (2.8).
27 Ibid. p. 179 (2.39).
28 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
29 See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
30 (‘mercatura autem, si tenuis est, sordida putanda est; sin magna et copiosa … non est admodum vituperanda’). Cicero, De officiis, 1.151.
31 The title of count awarded in such cases was a personal, rather than a hereditary, honour, and involved no grant of estates or land.
32 Molly Bourne, ‘Signs of success: Leone Leoni’s signposting in sixteenth-century Milan’, in Nelson and Zechauser (eds), The Patron’s Payoff.
33 (‘la qual oggidì forsi par mecanica e poco conveniente a gentilomo’). Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 102 (1.49).
34 (‘lo specchio della vita umana’). Vasari, Vite, Vol. 3, p. 4.
35 (‘non si curò egli mai di freddo, di fame, di disagio, di incomodità, di fatica, né di vergogna’). Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 528.
36 (‘e mostrerà agl’artefici che chi lavora e studia continuamente e non a ghiribizzi, lascia opere, nome, facultà et amici’). Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 614.
37 Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 641.
38 (‘[il] non meno eccellente che grazioso Raffael Sanzio da Urbino’). Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 610.
39 See especially Antonio Natali, Andrea del Sarto (New York: Abbeville, 1999).
40 Guerzoni, Apollo, p. 50. The calculation excludes years in which there was important ephemeral expenditure on events such as weddings and funerals.
41 Gregory Lubkin, A Renaissance Court: Milan Under Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 91, 138.
42 (‘che debbio far io qui, poi ch’io non vaglio/smembrar su la forcina in aria starne,/né so a sparvier, né a can metter guinzaglio?’). Satires, p. 12 (Satire 1, ll. 142–4).
43 Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 60 (1.26).
44 See on this Wayne A. Rebhorn, ‘Baldesar Castiglione, Thomas Wilson, and the courtly body of Renaissance rhetoric’, Rhetorica, 11/3 (1993), pp. 249–50.
45 On Scappi’s life, see Terence Scully, The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi: L’arte e prudenza d’un maestro cuoco (The Art and Craft of a Master Cook) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 12–25. On his honours, see p. 20.
46 Vincenzo Cervio, Il Trinciante, con l’aggiunta di Reale Fusoritto, ed. Emilio Faccioli (Florence: Il Portolano, 1979), pp. 30–31 (ch. 1).
47 On fifteenth-century dance manuals and their authors, see Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).
48 A modern English edition exists: Martino da Como, The Art of Cooking, with Fifty Modernized Recipes by Stefania Barzini, ed. Luigi Ballerini; trans. Jeremy Parzen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
49 The writings of the table professionals are discussed in Katherine A. McIver, From Kitchen to Table: Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). On horsemanship, see Federico Grisone’s The Rules of Riding: An Edited Translation of the First Renaissance Treatise on Classical Horsemanship, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Tobey (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014).
50 Cervio, Il Trinciante, p. 31.
51 (‘se ne trovano di quelli, che nati ignobilmente hanno nondimeno maniere d’huomini nobilissimi’). Claudio Corte, Il cavallarizzo (Venice: Giordano Ziletti, 1562), 115r. Corte acknowledges at 118v that the majority of cavallarizzi are in practice non-noble.
52 Corte, Il cavallarizzo, 114v.
53 Domenico Romoli, La singolare dottrina … dell’ufficio dello scalco (Venice: Giovanni Battista Bonfadino, 1593), 14r–v.
54 Corte, Il cavallarizzo, 121r.
55 On the culture of instrument-making, see Alexander Marr, From Raphael to Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
56 Silvio Leydi, ‘The swordsmiths of Milan, c. 1525–1630’, in Tobias Capwell, Sydney Anglo et al., The Noble Art of the Sword: Fashion and Fencing in Renaissance Europe 1520–1630 (London: Wallace Collection, 2012), pp. 177–201, esp. pp. 186–7.
57 See Joseph Connors, ‘Ars tornandi: Baroque architecture and the lathe’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 53 (1990), p. 220.
58 (‘il disegno è la chiave che apre le porte non solo a l’oro, ma a tutti gli essercitii’). Vannoccio Biringuccio, La pirotechnia (Venice: Girolamo Gigli, 1559), 279v (Bk 9, ch. IV: ‘L’arte del fabro orefice’ (‘The art of the goldsmith’)). All subsequent references will be to this edition, which is more accurate than the first edition. An English edition is available: The Pirotechnica of Vannoccio Biringuccio, ed. and trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (New York: The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1943).
59 Biringuccio, La pirotechnia, 301r (Bk 9, ch. XIV: ‘Discorso sopra l’arte figolina, con alcuni suoi secreti’).
60 See Marta Ajmar, ‘Mechanical Disegno’, RIHA Journal, 0084 (2014).
61 (‘tali artefici son gente senza dissegno e per il più, gente rustica, e grossa’). Biringuccio, La pirotechnia, 285v (Bk 9, ch. VI: ‘Dell’arte del fabro ferario’).
62 (‘Tal che (se non fusse esercitio tanto fatigoso, e senza aluna dilicatezza), direi ch’il fusse esercitio da molto esaltare, perche quando considero che li maestri di tale arte fanno li lor lavori senza forma, o disegno, o stampa, ma col bastargli solo veder con l’occhio, et col giudicio, e poi col battere li fanno giusti, e garbeggiati, mi par gran cosa’). Ibid., 287v.
63 These examples are added in the 1583 edition of the text (at 28v–29r), where Fioravanti generally expands his personal tributes to practitioners of non-elite arts; see George W. McClure, The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 73 and pp. 268-69, nn. 21 and 23.
64 McClure, Culture, pp. 214–15.
65 (‘non vi gloriate però tanto in questa vostra arte, se bene ella è bella, e vaga … perche non è però di quello ingegno et di quel grado che voi pensate’). On the rising status of tailors in later sixteenth-century Italy, see Currie, ‘Diversity and design’.
66 See especially, in English, John Jeffries Martin, ‘The imaginary piazza: Tommaso Garzoni and the late Italian Renaissance’, in Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. and Steven A. Epstein (eds), Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 439–54; McClure, Culture, pp. 70–140.
67 (‘quelle cose che con l’ingegno e la mano insieme si fanno’; ‘E non tutti gli artefici tritti e vulgari son da esser detti propriamente mecanici, ma quelli solo che con l’ingegno soccorrono alle difficoltà grandissime emergenti, ad utilità commune’). Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, ed. Paolo Cerchi and Beatrice Collina, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), Vol. 2, p. 1216.
68 (‘solazzo mondano’). Garzoni, La piazza, Vol. 2, p. 1423.
69 Ibid., 1285–6.
70 (‘superfluità … pompa’; ‘non più capanne, ma case, palazzi, castelli, et grandissime città’). Biringuccio, La pirotechnia, 304r.
71 (‘stimolati … dal natural desiderio dell’insatiabilità, che sempre vuole più di quello che si ha, e non mai contentasi di quello che ha’). Ibid.
72 (‘assai più divina, che humana, considerando gli effetti’). Biringuccio, La pirotechnia, 306r.
73 (‘le notitie nuove sempre partoriscon inventioni nuove negli intelletti e nuove notitie’). Biringuccio, La pirotechnia, 14v.
74 Pamela Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Long discusses Biringuccio’s treatise at pp. 178–82.
75 For a description of the scheme, see Larry J. Feinberg, ‘The Studiolo of Francesco I reconsidered’, in Cristina Acidini Luchinat et al., The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 47–65.
76 Guerzoni, Apollo, p. 118. The quotation in the text is taken from the account of the spectacle in Tommaso Porcacchi, Attioni d’Arrigo Terzo, re di Francia, e di Polonia, descritte in dialogo (Venice: Giorgio Angelieri, 1574), 28r.
77 See Lisa Sampson, Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre (Oxford: Legenda, 2006).
78 See Guerzoni, Apollo; and compare Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 397–425, on similar dynamics at work in fifteenth-century Florence.
Chapter 6: Renaissance Woman
1 Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne, ed. Lodovico Domenichi (Lucca: Vincenzo Busdraghi, 1559); Francesco Agostino della Chiesa, Theatro delle donne letterate, con un breve discorso della preminenza e perfettione del sesso donnesco (Mondovì: Giovanni Gislandi and Giovanni Tommaso Rossi, 1620). For discussion, see Cox (ed.), Lyric Poetry, p. 26; ead.,Prodigious Muse, pp. 22–3.
2 Fonte, Worth of Women, pp. 261–3.
3 Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘Learning the virtues: convent schools and female culture in Renaissance Florence’, in Barbara J. Whitehead (ed.), Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe. A History, 1500–1800 (New York: Garland, 1999).
4 See Margaret L. King, ‘Book-lined cells: women and humanism in the early Italian Renaissance’, in Patricia H. Labalme (ed.), Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York: New York University Press, 1980).
5 See Cox, Women’s Writing, p. 9.
6 An English edition is available: Annibale Guasco, Discourse to Lady Lavinia his Daughter, ed. and trans. Peggy Osborn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
7 On the concerto delle donne, see Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–97 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); on the balletto, Nina Treadwell, ‘“Simil combattimento fatto da Dame”: the musico-theatrical entertainments of Margherita Gonzaga’s balletto delle donne and the female warrior in Ferrarese cultural history’, in Todd C. Borgerding (ed.), Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 27–40.
8 See Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman Vol. I. The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C.–1250 A.D. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman, 1997); Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
9 Alberti, I libri della famiglia, pp. 268–81.
10 For an exhaustive overview of the humanist response to the Aristotelian position on women, see Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman. Vol. II. The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250–1500 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman, 2002). For a historically contextualized summary, see Cox, Women’s Writing, pp. 17–36.
11 The early part of the tradition has been surveyed in Stephen Kolsky, The Genealogy of Women: Studies in Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), and id., The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). Boccaccio’s Famous Women is available in a modern bilingual edition, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
12 (‘Le meschine non desiderano l’esser omo per farsi più perfette, ma per aver libertà e fuggir quel dominio che gli omini si hanno vendicato sopra esse per sua propria autorità’). Castiglione, Cortegiano, p. 279 (3.16).
13 Ibid., pp. 274–86 (3.12–18).
14 Ibid., p. 266 (3.5).
15 (‘giocare a palla, maneggiar l’arme, cavalcare, andar a caccia, e far quasi tutti gli esercizi che possa fare un cavaliero’). Ibid., p. 270 (3.7).
16 Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. and trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 512–14.
17 Gynevera has not yet been translated into English. The most accessible Italian edition remains that of Corrado Ricchi and Alberto Bacchi della Lega (Bologna: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1888). All subsequent references are to this edition. For a study, see Carolyn James, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti: a Literary Career (Florence: Olschki, 1996), ch. 4.
18 (‘Il suo piacere, presso il motevole parlare di honestà pieno, era la foresta’). Arienti, Gynevera, p. 332.
19 (‘fu virago in molti aspetti’). Ibid., p. 195.
20 (‘prati de diversi fiori et vaghe herbette et boschi de varii albori, cum animali dentro relevati, come naturali’). Ibid., p. 155.
21 (‘grandissima arte e callidità’). Ibid., p. 129.
22 (‘iocunda e grata in ricevere li amici e parenti, in forma che ogni uccellino facea parere falcone’). Ibid., p. 365.
23 See Margaret Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 131–74; also, for the Roberti paintings, Virginia Cox, ‘Gender and eloquence in Ercole de’ Roberti’s Portia and Brutus’, Rhetorica, 62 (2009), pp. 61–101.
24 On gender and the genealogical theme in Ariosto, see Eleonora Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando Furioso (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
25 On the history of women’s writing in this period, see Cox, Women’s Writing. On the significance of Colonna and Gambara in particular, see ibid., pp. 64–79.
26 For the text of the poem, see Cox (ed.), Lyric Poetry, pp. 77–82.
27 (‘Seguir se deve il sposo dentro o fore … a quel che arrisca l’un l’altro s’arrisca/equali in vita, equali siano in morte’). Ibid., p. 79.
28 See Virginia Cox, ‘The exemplary Vittoria Colonna’, in Abigail Brundin et al. (eds), A Companion to Vittoria Colonna (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
29 See Virginia Cox, ‘Women writers and the canon: the case of Vittoria Colonna’, in Pamela J. Benson and Victoria Kirkham (eds), Strong Voices, Weak History: Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 17–19.
30 On the gender microculture of Siena in these years, see Konrad Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); George McClure, Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 29–54.
31 See Virginia Cox, ‘The female voice in Italian Renaissance dialogue’, MLN, 128/1 (2013), pp. 53–78 for an overview; ead., ‘Il commento paradossale: un microgenere senese’, in Massimo Danzi and Roberto Leporatti (eds), Il poeta e il suo pubblico: lettura e commento dei testi lirici nel Cinquecento (Geneva: Droz, 2012), for the Atalanta Donati dialogue.
32 The Travels and Life of Sir Thomas Hoby of Bisham Abbey, Written by Himself, 1547–1564, ed. Edgar Powell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1902), p. 19.
33 (‘eroica e libera maniera di procedere’). Cox, ‘Il commento paradossale’, p. 335.
34 On this phase in the history of Italian women’s writing, see Cox, Women’s Writing, pp. 80–120.
35 (‘vederemo certamente che non l’antiquità de’ sangui, né ’l soggiogar de’ popoli, non l’oro né la porpora, ma l’animo di virtù splendido far l’uomo veramente nobile’). Chiara Matraini, Rime e lettere, ed. Giovanna Rabitti (Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1989), p. 94. Matraini’s Rime are available in translation: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. EleanorMaclachlan, with an introduction by Giovanna Rabitti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
36 Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems. The 1554 Edition of the Rime: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Troy Tower and Jane Tylus; trans. with an introduction by Jane Tylus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
37 On the figure of the courtesan in Italy, see Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On the broader culture of prostitution, see Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
38 The works of both are available in English translation. See The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Julia Hairston (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), and Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
39 By, respectively, Victoria Kirkham and Ann Rosalind Jones; see Cox., Women’s Writing, p. 109.
40 On this episode, see Deanna Basile, ‘Fasseli gratia per poetessa: Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s role in the Florentine literary circles of Tullia d’Aragona’, in Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
41 Cox, Prodigious Muse, pp. 253–70. For an overview of this period, see ead., Women’s Writing, pp. 131–65.
42 (‘per l’abuso, che corre oggidì in questa città, che non si vol veder donna virtuosa in altro, che nel governo della casa’). Moderata Fonte, Il merito delle donne, ed. Adriana Chemello (Venice: EIDOS, 1988), p. 9. An English translation is available: Fonte, Worth of Women.
43 See Virginia Cox, ‘The single self: feminist thought and the marriage market in early modern Venice’, in John Jeffries Martin (ed.), The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (London: Routledge, 2002).
44 On women’s role in musical and dramatic culture at this time, see, for example, Tim Carter, ‘Finding a voice: Vittoria Archilei and the Florentine “New Music”’, in Lorna Hutson (ed.), Feminism and Renaissance Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Anne McNeil, Women and Music in the Commedia dell’Arte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini and the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
45 On women artists in this period, see Frederika H. Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women Artists and the Language of Art History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and her Patrons in Renaissance Bologna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
46 On sixteenth-century Italian actresses, see Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 85–105; Rosalind Kerr, The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
47 For discussion, see Cox, Women’s Writing, pp. 97–8.
48 Adriano Valerini, Oratione in morte della divina signora Vincenza Armani comica eccellentissima […] (Verona: Sebastiano and Giovanni Dalle Donne, 1570), 5r. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition. For discussion of Valerini’s text, see Kerr, Rise of the Diva, 71–4.
49 (‘ella non solo nella scenica attione haveva il vanto, ma nel componer gli istessi Poemi, e nell’insegnare all’Interlocutore il vero modo dell’arte’). Valerini, Oratione, 9r.
50 See MacNeil, Music and Women, pp. 50–51; Kerr, Rise of the Diva, pp. 123–7.
51 On Fontana, see Murphy, Lavinia Fontana; on Mantuana, Evelyn Lincoln, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 111–45; on Elisabetta and Girolama Parasole, Cox, Women’s Writing, pp. 160–1.
52 Victoria Kirkham, ‘Creative partners: the marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55/2 (2002), pp. 498–558.
53 The painting and the commission are discussed in Murphy, Lavinia Fontana, pp. 73–6.
54 On Strozzi’s Hymns, see Cox, Prodigious Muse, pp. 58–9.
55 Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
56 Jonathan K. Nelson (ed.), Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588): The Painter-Prioress of Florence (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
57 Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also, on other centres, Craig A. Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Convent (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Colleen Reardon, Holy Concord Within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
58 Cox, Prodigious Muse, pp. 7–9.
59 Monique Frize, Laura Bassi and Science in 18th Century Europe (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), pp. 32–3.
60 Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘The nun apothecaries of Renaissance Florence: marketing medicines in the convent’, Renaissance Studies, 25/5 (2011), pp. 627–47. On nuns and history-writing, see K. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Conclusion
1 On Marino’s literary impact and the coming of the Baroque, see Cox, Women’s Writing, p. 177.
2 On the seventeenth-century misogynistic backlash, see Cox, Women’s Writing, pp. 166–227. On Arcadia, see ibid., pp. 229–33.
3 Cox (ed.), Lyric Poetry, pp. 38–40.