Analyzes the pornographic poetry, letters, plays, and verse dialogues written in poet Domenico Venier's social circle, showing how male writers created female characters who were defiled and available to all. Also shows how two women writers with ties to the salon appropriated and transformed these tropes of female sexuality.

Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is a provocative analysis of the pornographic poetry written in patrician poet Domenico Venier’s social circle. While Venier and his salon were renowned for elegant love sonnets featuring unattainable female beloveds, among themselves they wrote and circulated poems in Venetian dialect in which women were prostitutes whose defiled bodies were available to all. Courtney Quaintance analyses poetry, letters, plays, and verse dialogues to show how male writers established, sustained, and publicized their relationships to one another through the exchange of fictional women. She also shows how Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco, two women writers with ties to the salon, appropriated and transformed tropes of female sexuality and male literary collaboration to position themselves within this homosocial literary economy. Based on archival work and Quaintance’s exceptional knowledge of Venetian dialect poetry, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is an unprecedented window into the understudied world of Venetian literature.

Sheds new light on how masculinity was understood, lived, performed and viewed during a period of huge change. Premodern masculinity was multivalent and dynamic, a series of intersecting, conflicting, and mutating identities that nevertheless were distinct and recognizable to people and their societies. The articles collected here examine a variety of means by which masculinity was constructed, deconstructed, and transformed across time, geographies, and cultures. Articles range across the twelfth to seventeenth century, from western Europe to the Volga-Ural region, from the Christian west to the Muslim east, from Ottomans to Mongols and Persians, from Baudri of Bourgueil to Blaise de Monluc; while topics include the chivalric hero, the effeminate man, beards, and spurs, represented variously in literature, historical documents, and art. Finally, in that period of great transformation that is the sixteenth century, they show how masculinity moved away from the traditional and recognizable to become something different and distinct from its premodern expressions.

Since the late twentieth century, the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco has been viewed as a triumphant proto-feminist icon: a woman who celebrated her sexuality, an outspoken champion of women and their worth, and an important intellectual and cultural presence in sixteenth-century Venice. In Veronica Franco in Dialogue, Marilyn Migiel provides a nuanced account of Franco’s rhetorical strategies through a close analysis of her literary work. Focusing on the first fourteen poems in the Terze rime, a collection of Franco’s poems published in 1575, Migiel looks specifically at back-and-forth exchanges between Franco and an unknown male author. Migiel argues that in order to better understand what Franco is doing in the poetic collection, it is essential to understand how she constructs her identity as author, lover, and sex worker in relation to this unknown male author. Veronica Franco in Dialogue accounts for the moments of ambivalence, uncertainty, and indirectness in Franco’s poetry, as well as the polemicism and assertions of triumph. In doing so, it asks readers to consider their ideological investments in the stories we tell about early modern female authors and their cultural production.

"This study considers the way in which a poetic convention, the beloved to whom Renaissance amatory poetry was addessed, becomes influential political rhetoric, an instrument that both men and women used to shape and justify their claims to power. The author argues that Petrarchan poetic conventions were part of a social discourse that signaled anxiety concerning the rising place of women as intellectual interlocators, public figures, and patrons of the arts."--

Leonora Bernardi (1559-1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first ever study of Bernardi’s life, and modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscript. Her writings appear in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, critical essays and contributions by Eric Nicholson, Eugenio Refini and Davide Daolmi. Based on new archival research, the substantial opening section reconstructs Bernardi’s unusually colourful life. Bernardi’s works reveal her connections with some of the most pioneering poets, dramatists and musicians of the day, including her mentor Angelo Grillo and the first opera librettist Ottavio Rinuccini. The second major section presents her pastoral tragicomedy Clorilli, one of the earliest secular dramatic works by a woman. It was apparently performed in the early 1590s at a Medici villa near Florence, before Grandduke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, and his consort Christine of Lorraine, but now exists in an enigmatic Venetian manuscript. The third section presents Bernardi’s secular and religious verse, which engaged with new trends in lyric and poetry for music, and was set by various key composers across Italy.

Because limited family resources favored some daughters' marriage prospects at the expense of their sisters', the family and marriage practices of the Venetian nobles led to a range of vocations for women, as well as for men.