"The Manly Masquerade" unravels the complex ways men were defined
as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence: medical and travel
literature; theology; law; myth; conduct books; and plays,
chivalric romances, and novellas by authors including Machiavelli,
Tasso, and Ariosto. Valeria Finucci shows how ideas of masculinity
were formed in the midst of acute anxiety about paternity by
highlighting the beliefs--widely held at the time--that conception
could occur without a paternal imprimatur or through a woman's
encounter with an animal, or even that a pregnant woman's
imagination could erase the father's "signature" from the fetus.
Against these visions of reproduction gone awry, Finucci looks at
how concepts of masculinity were tied to issues of paternity
through social standing, legal matters, and inheritance practices.
Highlighting the fissures running through Italian Renaissance
ideas of manliness, Finucci describes how, alongside pervasive
images of the virile, sexually active man, early modern Italian
culture recognized the existence of hermaphrodites and started to
experiment with a new kind of sexuality by manufacturing a non-man:
the castrato. Following the creation of""castrati, the Church
forbade the marriage of all non-procreative men, and, in this move,
Finucci identifies a powerful legitimation of the view that what
makes men is not the possession of male organs or the ability to
have sex, but the capability to father. Through analysis, anecdote,
and rich cultural description, "The Manly Masquerade" exposes the
"real" early modern man: the paterfamilias.
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