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Valeria Finucci - The Manly Masquerade Abstract

Valeria Finucci's book, 'The Manly Masquerade,' explores the complexities of masculinity and paternity during the Italian Renaissance, challenging traditional notions of fatherhood and gender roles. Through an analysis of various texts, Finucci reveals how societal norms around masculinity were constructed and deconstructed, particularly in relation to themes of castration and non-biological paternity. This work is a significant contribution to the history of sexuality and reproduction, offering a rich examination of early modern Italian culture.

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17 views2 pages

Valeria Finucci - The Manly Masquerade Abstract

Valeria Finucci's book, 'The Manly Masquerade,' explores the complexities of masculinity and paternity during the Italian Renaissance, challenging traditional notions of fatherhood and gender roles. Through an analysis of various texts, Finucci reveals how societal norms around masculinity were constructed and deconstructed, particularly in relation to themes of castration and non-biological paternity. This work is a significant contribution to the history of sexuality and reproduction, offering a rich examination of early modern Italian culture.

Uploaded by

evemariechia
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Valeria Finucci. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity,


Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance
Author: Cristina Mazzoni
Date: Annual 2003
From: Annali d'Italianistica(Vol. 21)
Publisher: Annali d'Italianistica, Inc.
Document Type: Book review
Length: 825 words

Full Text:
Valeria Finucci. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP,
2003. Pp. 216.

In this original contribution to the history of sexuality, Valeria Finucci examines the cracks and fissures in the edifice of masculinity
and paternity during the Italian Renaissance. Much has been written about the construction and performance of femininity according
to the standard of the male subject, but in the world Finucci evokes this standard turns out to be anything but reliable: Finucci's is a
world where fatherhood has a dangerous rival in spontaneous generation, where a man can become a father without sexual
intercourse with a woman; it is a world where a mother's imagination can erase the father's influence on their child and where fathers
have their little boys castrated for the sake of music and social advancement. Finucci examines a staggering number of texts from
many different disciplines--legal and medical treatises, political and philosophical classics, religious archives and theological tracts,
and particularly literary and theatrical texts--in order to explore some of the major ways in which masculinity and paternity (as well as,
more than incidentally, femininity and maternity) were constructed and deconstructed in Italy during the sixteenth century.

The book is divided into an introduction and six chapters. The introduction, "Body and Generation in the Early Modern Period," in
addition to presenting the main arguments of the book, provides some necessary background information on theories of generation
and the roles of men and women in this process. The first chapter, "The Useless Genitor: Fantasies of Putrefaction and
Nongenealogical Birth," interprets the beliefs in spontaneous generation, parthenogenesis, male pregnancy, and women's gestation
of non-human fetuses as belonging to a neurosis related to inadequate scientific explanations. Finucci also suggests more theoretical
explanations, such as the decentering of the subject and the fulfillment of a dream of no origins. In the next chapter, "The
Masquerade of Paternity: Cuckoldry and Baby M[ale] in Machiavelli's La Mandragola," the author presents a close reading of the plot
of Machiavelli's 1518 play in conjunction with Renaissance herbal medicine and the early modern fear of spiders. This interpretation
reveals a libidinal economy informed by a non-biological paternity: paternity is established by a husband's legal right over his wife's
body, and this bond is stronger than any genetic connection. The title of Chapter Three is "Performing Maternity: Female Imagination,
Paternal Erasure, and Monstrous Birth in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata." Like the preceding chapter, this one also focuses on a
single literary text of the Italian Renaissance, although the problematic parent is now the mother: the character of Clorinda in the
Liberata must die because of her monstrous nature, produced by her mother's pregnancy. In addition to being a woman, a pagan,
and a warrior, Clorinda is an Ethiopian (a people thought of as monstrous because dark, cannibalistic, and sexually overactive) and
an example of racial intermixing (she was born white of black parents). Chapter Four, "The Masquerade of Masculinity: Erotomania in
Ariosto's Orlando furioso," reads in the bawdy story of Astolfo and Jocondo (found in canto 28 of Ariosto's masterpiece) a shifting
construct of masculinity as a masquerade, one in which even the most aggressive virility is no guarantee of male power. The next
chapter, "Androgynous Doubling and Hermaphroditic Anxieties: Bibbiena's La calandria," examines the cross-dressing, gender
bending, and sexual confusion of Bibbiena's play within the context of Renaissance theatrical practice and sexual customs. Unlike the
preceding four chapters, the last one, "The Masquerade of Manhood: The Paradox of the Castrato," does not concentrate on a
literary text but rather on a cultural practice: the surgical treatment of male sexual organs for musical purposes, a practice whose
inception, though mysterious, is connected with the Italian Renaissance. It was usually an indigent father who would have one of his
sons castrated in hopes of fame and fortune for the boy: castrati were more desirable than women singers to both impresarios and
the public (but ironically also, at times, as lovers to women). Finucci examines castrati's sexual identity and preferences--with a much
greater variable than stereotypes would suggest--and Freud's reduction of castration from treatment of testicles to removal of the
penis and, especially, his identification of the castrator as woman, despite clear evidence that, historically, it was men that castrated
each other.

The Manly Masquerade is a marvelous book, a must for anyone interested in the early modern period or in the history of sexuality
and reproduction. It is unified in content and structure, original in its approach, amazing for the variety and quantity of the texts it
examines. Although the richness of the materials Finucci studies and quotes sometimes leaves the reader hungry for more answers
to the many questions the materials suggest, this turns out in the end to be a quality, and not a fault, of the book, which generously
gives the readers a gentle guidance and the relative freedom to draw some of their own conclusions.

Cristina Mazzoni, University of Vermont

Mazzoni, Cristina

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Annali d'Italianistica, Inc.


http://www.ibiblio.org/annali/
Source Citation (Chicago 17th Edition)
Mazzoni, Cristina. "Valeria Finucci. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance." Annali
d'Italianistica 21 (2003): 608. Gale Literature Resource Center (accessed November 30, 2023).
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A182338149/LitRC?u=txshracd2498&sid=googleScholar&xid=89c023dd.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A182338149

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