Sara Diaz

"This study explores the construction of Forese Donati’s gendered identity in Dante’s tenzone with Forese and, to a lesser extent, in the Purgatorio. The contradictory Forese episodes are analyzed in terms of gender practice and performance, and shown to be complementary representations of masculinity. I argue that as an aggressive contest for verbal dominance, the tenzone with Forese captures the dynamic struggle to assert hegemonic virility within Florence’s urban aristocracy. Viewed through the lens of a society that placed specific demands upon the men entrusted with the care of their households, Forese’s maleness is measured against his (in)ability to physically, economically, and affectively satisfy the needs of his wife. A gendered approach provides new insights into the nature of Dante’s comic insults, and casts doubt on some of the basic assumptions behind palinodic readings that connect the two encounters with Forese."

The startling image of a nude young girl in Dante’s Se Lippo amico sè tu che mi leggi has traditionally been explained as a metaphor for the verse’s lack of accompaniment; Dante gives the unclothed pulcella to his friend Lippo so that he may dress her with his music, or commentary. As Barolini notes, Dante casts his verse as an erotic object in this youthful poem, heralding what will be his continued tendency to code lyrical genres as sexual beings.  A similar trope of clothing the feminized lyric appears in Per una ghirlandetta, this time in reference to Dante’s use of another’s melody, “una vesta ch’atlrui fu data,” to dress his own ballata. While such readings are no doubt sound, I propose we explore how the naked female bodies of the Rime function as objects of gift-exchange. As gifts, the traffic of these gendered lyrics obligates their recipient to reciprocate with verse, approval, and/or interpretation. The mechanism of dressing and undressing thus forges intimate bonds between Dante and the men he identifies as friends (“amico”).  And indeed, in the Vita Nuova we learn that it was Dante’s dream of Beatrice’s unclothed body that gave rise to A ciascun'alma presa e gentil core, and through its circulation, his admission into the ranks of the “famosi trovatori.” Drawing from anthropological models of gift-debt, I will therefore explore how the exposed female form becomes an enticing locus for male sociability in Dante’s lyrics.

I discuss two satirical works by the famed singer, author, and reputed Italian courtesan Margherita Costa (c.1600/1610 – after 1657). During her long career in the courts and on the stages of Rome, Florence, Paris and Venice, Costa published literary works ranging from the laudatory to the risqué, writing in different genres and stylistic registers. She delved into burlesque comedy in a period increasingly hostile to female authorship. Her 1641 Li buffoni (The Buffoons), the first comedy published by a woman in Italy, parodies the Florentine court of Ferdinando II de’ Medici. Her 1639 epistolary Lettere amorose (Love Letters) enjoyed multiple reprints. It pairs prose and poetry, epistles and madrigals, and dramatized exchanges between decorous lovers and hunchbacks, dwarfs, and syphilitic paramours, all, supposedly, to comic effect. For this RSA, I will explore Costa’s ability to capitalize on her courtly connections, the print medium, and her audience’s taste for grotesque humor.

In this paper I analyze the anti-uxorial strategy found within Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la commedia di Dante. Boccaccio launches into a lengthy misogamous invective in his commentary on Inferno 16, arguing that Iacopo Rusticucci’s “fiera moglie” somehow soured him to all women and consequently drove him to sodomy. Boccaccio defends Rusticucci’s otherwise commendable “costumi” “animo” and “cortesia” citing a catalogue of wifely annoyances culled from classical and patristic sources, and already rehearsed almost verbatim in his own Zibaldone, Trattatello, and Corbaccio. As I will argue, Boccaccio consistently uses misogamy to defend a vulnerable masculine type – in Rusticucci’s case, a sodomite - rhetorically sacrificing one class of woman to build the prestige of a specific type of man.

Though virtually unknown to English-language readers, Margherita Costa was the most prolific secular female author of early modern Italy. Dramatist, performer, and reputed courtesan, Costa burst onto the literary scene with an array of publications that tested the limits of gendered propriety. She was a solo virtuosa and cantante di camera, compromised by her dubious profession as a ‘public’ woman, yet flourished in an era of dwindling opportunities for the honest letterata. Her works brim with mannerist conceits and burlesque innuendo, and capitalize on her almost freakish singularity as a female writer. As I will demonstrate, the bizarre figures that inhabit her “Buffoni” mirror self-referential allusions found throughout her works, and speak to a unique authorial construction that consciously frustrates traditional expectations of female beauty and decorum.

This paper examines the aesthetics of the grotesque in the performance of Margherita Costa’s 1641 comedy, "Li buffoni". Dedicated to the famed buffoon Bernardino Ricci and to an implicit Medicean readership, Costa’s work takes pride of place as being the first (surviving) female-authored comedy in Italy. While no direct testimony has come down to us attesting to how, when, where, or even if "Li buffoni" was ever staged, the play’s frontispiece, prologue, and dedicatory letter offer tantalizing clues to its original spectatorship and performance. "Li buffoni" is populated by a cast of human oddities – a non-professional troupe of pazzi, buffoni, e nani drawn from the Medici court and household staff. These ‘laughable’ types are engaged in bizarre yet paradoxically verisimilar roles, offering a satirical look at the mercenary culture in which Costa and her fellow entertainers eked out an existence. As I will demonstrate, the grotesque figures that inhabit Costa’s comedia ridicola echo self-referential allusions found throughout her works, and dramatize her own authorial construction as a marginal character at the Medici court.

Margherita Costa’s 1641 "Li buffoni" is an ‘irregular’ comedy written by a no-less ‘irregular’ dramatist. Resourceful, ambitious and, to use her own term, audaciously bizarre, Costa produced experimental texts with a theatrical flair that matched the Baroque tastes of her day. She published an eclectic body of literature ranging from dramatic, historical, and devotional works, to amorous, occasional, and satirical poetry, and even a comedy: "Li buffoni," the first ludic theatrical work penned by a female hand in Italy. In this paper I will illustrate how Costa’s atypical farce plays with the conventions of the ‘commedia ridicolosa’ genre while staging the unstable nature of patriarchal masculinity in her day. At the same time, I will consider the implications of her experimentation with a comic genre which, unlike decorous pastoral drama, hand never before been accessed, or been made accessible, to women.

In this paper I analyze ways in which masculinity is performed, threatened, and reasserted within Margherita Costa’s 1641 scripted comedy, Li buffoni. Set in the exotic kingdom of Morocco, the play is broadly structured around the unhappy marriage of prince Meo and his wife Marmotta, the sole and unwilling heir to the kingdom of Fessa. Their dynastic union is set off-kilter by a power imbalance between husband and wife, and pushed to the breaking point by Meo’s unabashed pursuit of the prostitute Ancroia. Their reconciliation hinges on the restoration of a male-line of succession and thus dramatizes, albeit in a comic light, the intimate relationship between sexual and political agency. As an ‘irregular’ comedy written by a no-less ‘irregular’ dramatist, Costa’s conjugal farce playfully stages, and satirizes, the highly unstable nature of patriarchal masculinity in early modern Italy.

In this paper I advance a gendered reading of Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, and explore its uneasy association with the feminine. I approach the topic by looking at how age functions as a gendered category in biographical and autobiographical statements made by Petrarch and Boccaccio on the subject of their literary vocation. I consider age-appropriate activities and the competitive dynamics governing male-on-male relationships, and demonstrate how discourses on youth and maturity might be manipulated to assert or deny textual authority.

This paper examines the figure of Dante Alighieri as a gendered construct in Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante. The Dante of Boccaccio’s making heroically wrestles with his passions, obligations, exile, and intolerable poverty, but it is his relationship to women which most tellingly defines, or threatens, his masculine auctoritas. Boccaccio interrupts the biographical narrative of his Trattatello to launch into an anti-matrimonial invective which conspicuously mirrors the polemical misogyny of the Corbaccio and, to some extent, Gualtieri’s objections to marriage in the Decameron X.10. This antifeminist excursus is all the more remarkable when we consider Dante’s own masculine self-fashioning in Boccaccio’s principal source text, Dante’s Vita Nuova. Drawing from recent scholarship on medieval masculinities, I examine the misogamous strategy behind Boccaccio’s anti-matrimonial digression, and how this rhetorical dissuasion against marriage serves to alleviate gendered anxieties over the form, and content, of Dante’s works.