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This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English dramatists adopted and reimagined an Italian model to reflect native concerns about and attitudes toward growing old. Anthony Ellis provides an in-depth study of the comic old man in the erudite comedy of sixteenth-century Florence; the character's parallel development in early modern Venice, including the commedia dell'arte; and, along with a consideration of Anglo-Italian intertextuality, the character's subsequent flourishing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In outlining the character's development, Ellis identifies and describes the physical and behav...
"Between 1550 and 1650, marvellous stories of women giving birth to animals, young girls growing penises, and valiant men slaying dragons appeared in Europe. Circulated in scientific texts and in the first two collections of fairy tales published on the continent, Giovan Francesco Straparolas Le piacevoli notti and Giambattista Basiles Lo cunto de li cunti, the stories invigorated readers and established a new literary genre. Despite the fact that the printed European fairy tale was born in Italy, however, contemporary readers tend to think of France or Germany as the genres place of origin.Fairy-Tale Science looks at the birth of the literary fairy tale in the context of early modern discou...
Italian Academies have typically been studied individually or in the context of specific cities, leaving an important lacuna in the scholarship on Italian culture and early modernity. Cutting across various disciplines, this volume traces the relationships of these Academies and explains how they prefigured networks like the République des letters.
In Lelia's Kiss, Laura Giannetti offers a new perspective on the way gender and marriage were portrayed, imagined, and critiqued on stage during the Italian Renaissance. Going beyond the traditional canon, Giannetti focuses her study on the social and cultural scripts found in a wide array of comedies of the period to reveal the relativity of sex and gender roles and their cultural construction in Renaissance society. Giannetti argues that the comedic dialogue and cross-dressing characters so prevalent in Italian Renaissance comedies played with the presuppositions of the day and engaged with contemporary social norms, expectations, and desires. Cross-dressing female characters reveal the re...
Senses of Touch anatomizes the uniquely human hand as a rhetorical figure for dignity and deformity in early modern culture. It concerns a valuational shift from the contemplative ideal, as signified by the sense of sight, to an active reality, as signified by the sense of touch. From posture to piety, from manicure to magic, the book discovers touch in a critical period of its historical development, in anatomy and society. It features new interpretations of two landmarks of western civilization: Michelangelo's fresco of the Creation of Adam and Calvin's doctrine of election. It also accords special attention to the typing of women as sensual creatures by using their hands as a heuristic. Its alternative interpretations explore in theory and in practice the sensuality, the creativity, and the plain utility of hands, thus integrating biology and culture.