italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies

Dear all,

Two spaces have become available on the panels that I am co-organising for the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting next year in New York (27-29 March 2014). The panels, entitled ‘Muses, Icons, Interlocutors: Women and Vernacular Literary Sociability I and II’, will be taking place on Thursday 27 March from 3.00-6.15pm (further details below).

If you would like to participate, please send a 150-word abstract and a one-page C.V. (of no more than 300 words) to Judith Allan ([log in to unmask]) and Arjan van Dixhoorn ([log in to unmask])<mailto:([log in to unmask])> as soon as possible.

Muses, Icons, Interlocutors: Women and Vernacular Literary Sociability.

These panels seek to explore the roles that women played in largely male literary circles, both as active participants and as objects in the exchange of verse and prose. Why did particular women become the focus of poetic praise and/or censure? What was to be gained from writing about them, and what were the risks? How and why did women go about creating a space for themselves in such circles? How did they portray themselves, and what degree of agency did they have over how they were depicted by others? How were they dealt with and understood by their male counterparts? And how did they go about combining their dual roles as subject and object?

Muses, Icons, Interlocutors: Women and Vernacular Literary Sociability I

Chair: Julia L. Hairston, University of California, Rome

Respondent: Ramie Targoff, Brandeis University

1) Judith Allan, University of Birmingham

Patronage, Politics, Homosocial Exchange: Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci and the Creation of Poetry in Renaissance Florence

The death of Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci (1453-1476) unleashed an outpouring of literary grief from the poets who gravitated around Lorenzo de’ Medici. Whilst scholars have often assumed that they were simply flocking to commemorate an adored beauty, this collective enterprise was instead fuelled by poetic and political agendas that were, in turn, powered by the exchange of ideas and texts between poets who were both collaborators and competitors. The subject of an unprecedented number of funerary poems in the volgare, Simonetta became the medium through which writers jointly discussed, developed and promoted Tuscan vernacular literature. Yet such mutual poetic endeavour should not blind us to the fact that, as a Medici favourite, she was valuable homosocial currency for poets who were a step away from destitution.  Circulating their verse on Simonetta allowed them to combine forces, but also to outdo each other, and to win Lorenzo’s patronage in the process.

Keywords: Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci; Lorenzo de’ Medici; vernacular poetry; competition; collaboration; Florence; homosocial exchange; patronage; politics

2) Lisa Tagliaferri, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Vittoria Colonna as Writer and Muse

Famous as a friend of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna occasionally served as his poetic muse, though her own poetry received more attention during the Cinquecento. A bestselling author, her poems were featured prominently in anthologies, and she was the first woman writer whose work received a commentary before her death, proving her capable participation within the literary circle of her time.

Grounding my work in scholarship by Abigail Brundin, Alexander Nagel, and Virginia Cox, I examine Colonna’s social engagement with her contemporary literary culture. I address her artistic exchange with male poets through Counter-Reformation gift-giving, her letters to writers, and Castiglione’s mention of her in The Book of the Courtier. This book in particular will inform my treatment of her relation to her social circle, as it serves as a lens through which to gain insight towards the verbal conduct of Colonna and her peers.

Keywords: Vittoria Colonna; poetry; artistic exchange; gift-giving; letter-writing; Baldassare Castiglione; Counter-Reformation



Muses, Icons, Interlocutors: Women and Vernacular Literary Sociability II

Chair: Lisa Sampson, University of Reading

1) Courtney Quaintance, Dartmouth College

Performing female authorship in seventeenth-century Rome: Margherita Costa, virtuosa and writer

Margherita Costa, born in Rome around 1600, was an actress, a singer, and one of the most prolific female writers of the seventeenth century.  In her numerous publications—poetry, prose, letters, a comedy, and several other works for the stage—Costa dramatized and negotiated a space for female agency, authorship, and performance.  As a virtuosa, or performer, Costa was keenly aware of the need to construct and manage her public persona and reputation through her literary interactions with other writers and patrons. In Rome, she was the subject of both praise and defamation on the part of male writers who frequented the conversazioni (elite gatherings discussing literature, music, and performing women such as Costa).  My presentation will examine how Costa negotiated her own subjectivity as performer and writer though a rich variety of literary representations of femininity, as well as through her literary networking with powerful patrons both male and female.

 Keywords: Margherita Costa; literary sociability; gender; performativity; drama; early modern Italy; Rome

2) Tabitha Spagnolo Sadr, University of Lethbridge

Recto/Verso:   The Abbé de Choisy as Interloper, Interlocutor and Interpreter of the Female (Literary) Experience

Key to gender-specific discussion is the definition of gender itself.  While this panel seeks to explore specifically female literary agency/sociability, I will bend this enquiry to include the literary and social interaction of 17th-century French transvestite, l’Abbé de Choisy, with complicit members of an intimate network of noble and literary elite including Lafayette, Perrault, and La Rochefoucauld.  Choisy’s Mémoires and Aventures, though largely published posthumously, constitute a vibrant and immediate record of his life-long exploration of what Marjorie Garber termed the “crisis of [gender] category” – an experience lived in public fora from court to salons and finally cloister.  Each space, a fascinating locus of sociability within which his transgressive behaviour evolved.  In this context, I shall explore his candid writings and demonstrate how they reveal his unique perspective as female and male, subject and object, interlocutor and interpreter of the feminine (indeed, human) condition during the seventeenth century.

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