Manly Masquerade

Valeria Finucci is Associate Professor of Italian at Duke University. She is the author of The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto. She is editor of Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso and coeditor of Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, both published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Body and Generation in the Early Modern Period 11. The Useless Genitor: Fantasies of Putrefaction and Nongenealogical Births 372. The Masquerade of Paternity: Cuckoldry and Baby M[ale] in Machiavelli's La mandragola 793. Performing Maternity: Female Imagination, Paternal Erasure, and Monstrous Birth in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata 1194. The Masquerade of Masculinity: Erotomania in Ariosto's Orlando furioso 1595. Androgynous Doubling and Hermaphroditic Anxieties: Bibbiena's La calandria 1896. The Masquerade of Manhood: The Paradox of the Castrato 225Selected Bibliography 281Index 307

"Valeria Finucci’s book questions the traditional concepts associated with the Italian Renaissance (harmony, spiritual perfection and beauty, etc.) and addresses much less ‘luminous’ aspects of sixteenth-century Italian culture."-Armando Maggi, author of Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology ”Valeria Finucci is at it again, patrolling and illuminating the unstable boundaries of sex and gender in early modern Italian culture and literature. Relating canonical literary texts to the medical and legal culture of their times, she explores the fascination that spontaneous generation, cuckoldry, the maternal imagination, androgyny, and the deliberate manufacture of castrati held for early modern Italians-and still hold for us.”-Walter Stephens, author of Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief