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Gender, Genre, and Disease at the Sixteenth-Century Italian Court

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Gender, Genre, and Disease at the Sixteenth-Century Italian Court TEXTUAL HEALING: GENDER, GENRE, AND DISEASE AT THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN COURT Tessa Bullington Warren A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2020 Approved by: Ennio Rao Maggie Fritz-Morkin Reid Barbour Juan Carlos González-Espitia Federico Luisetti © 2020 Tessa Bullington Warren ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Tessa Bullington Warren: Textual Healing: Gender, Genre, and Disease at the Sixteenth-Century Italian Court (Under the direction of Ennio Rao) This dissertation is an examination of the functions of literary and art patronage in healing the socio-political and physical wounds wrought by a combination of newly emergent contagious disease (syphilis) and widespread social disorder associated with the beginning of the sixteenth century in northern-Italian courts. I focus on the court of Federico II Gonzaga, first duke of Mantua, and a lesser- known chivalric epic poem written in his honor, Giovanbattista Dragoncino da Fano’s La Marfisa bizarra (1531), in order to assess the poet’s atypical treatment of gender and genealogy in mythologizing the origins of the Gonzaga dynasty according to generic standards for the Cinquencento epic. Dragoncino’s poem re-genders expected norms for the mythopoetic representation of patrilineal dynastic genealogies associated with the genre and presents sexually transgressive behavior by the founding member of the dynasty using language that encodes and masks its salacious content. I ground my view of the Bizarra as an intentional instance of textual healing (or healing through contact with text) in the specific court culture established by Federico II Gonzaga and his immediate predecessors (his parents Francesco II Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este), and in the contemporary use of art and literature to combat social and physical disorder. My deployment of the term textual healing refers to both the intentionally propagandistic effects of sixteenth-century literary and art patronage, as well as to the physically curative function that meditating on aesthetic works was understood to possess in early-modern medicine. By considering Federico II’s syphilis as a threat to his physical, social, and political well-being within the specific context of his court at Mantua, I reconstruct the seemingly incongruous representation of masculine power in the Bizarra as the duke’s overt attempt to harness that which could be de-legitimizing and repurposing it to his own means. In the world encapsulated by the Bizarra, the transgression of sex and gender norms occurs within a normalizing context that serves to promote Federico II’s self-image as a man of iii “particular” tastes whose own struggle with a chronic and incurable love-sickness reinforces rather than destabilizes his legacy as a potent and capable ruler. iv To my beloved family and friends for all of the love and encouragement along the way, and to Ray and Ennio whose guidance and support have been my constant inspiration to push on. Et so ben ch’ i’ vo dietro a quel che m’arde. (Rime sparse 19) v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project, its research and writing, were made possible in part by support from the UNC Department of Romance Studies (ROMS), the UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies program (MEMS), and the UNC Graduate School and Roysters’ Society of Fellows. Additional support was provided by the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Reynolds-Finley Historical Library Fellowship in Medical History and the generous assistance of Peggy Balch and Anna Kaetz, and the Archivio Gonzaga at the Archivio di Stato di Mantova and the Biblioteca Teresiana in Mantua, Italy whose archivists and librarians were critical in helping me to develop my research – with especial thanks owed to Andrea Torelli at the Biblioteca Teresiana for sharing his limitless knowledge of the collections and its many resources. Also instrumental in helping me to achieve my goal of attaining this degree were Daniel Maier- Katkin, Terry Coonan, Dr. Lee Shuping and the staff of the UNC Center for Rehabilitation, and Cora Willow Passanisi – all of whom contributed in different ways to the realization of this project. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Society in Flux: Disease as Conceptual Disorder………………………………………………………6 Chapter Outlines…………………………………………………………………………………………..16 CHAPTER I: FINDING THE PHARMAKON WITHIN: TEXTUAL-IATRICS IN THE COMPOSITION OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SYPHILIS………………………………………………………24 I.i Towards an Institutionalized Model…………………………………………………………………..26 I.ii Syphilis: A Poem and A Concept…………………………………………………………………….30 The Epic Significance of Form…………………………………………………………………30 Rhetorical Prostheses and the Restoration of Plenitude……………………………………36 Building on the Void: Fracastoro’s Syphilis and the Platonic Pharmakon………………...42 Light from the Underside: Recovering Knowledge, Recreating Order or The Madness of Seeing..…………………………………………………………….48 Called to Arms: Invoking Authority…………………………………………………………….55 Binding the Immaterial: Naming within the Pharmakon or the Pharmakon within Naming..……………………………………………………………………60 Mythos and Logos in Fracastoro’s Pharmakon…………………………………….64 I.iii Breaking the Bone: Textual Healing in Literature………………………………………………….67 CHAPTER 2: REPURPOSING MARFISA: THE FEMALE WARRIOR GRAPPLES WITH GENDER AND GENEALOGY IN THE CINQUECENTO EPIC………………………………………..72 II.i Approach……………………………………………………………………………………………….75 Confronting Epic…………………………………………………………………………………75 Purity or Obscurity from Canon to Closet…………………………………………………….77 Resisting the Canon…………………………………………………………………………….79 Subject, Object, Scholar………………………………………………………………………..82 Bending the Canon and Scrutinizing Authority……………………………………………….83 vii II.ii Guerriere in Renaissance Literature……………..…………………………………………………88 Her Latin Origins………………………………………………………………………………...88 Early-Modern Context: Fitting the Guerriere into the Querelle……………………………..89 Marfisa’s Literary Legacy: Cinquecento Epic in Brief………………………………………..94 II.iii Your Grandmother Wore Combat Boots and Other High Compliments: Questioning Dynastic Encomia in Canto One of Dragoncino’s Marfisa bizarra…………………..105 II.iv Final Considerations………………………………………………………………………………..132 CHAPTER 3: HEALING THE BODY POLITIC: FEDERICO II GONZAGA AS PATRON AND POX SUFFERER...……………………………………………………………………………..134 III.i Giovanbattista Dragoncino da Fano’s La Marfisa bizarra: A Dynastic Aperture……………..137 III.ii Marfisa Unchained: Madness at the Pleasure of the Duke…………………………………….158 III.iii Marfisa bizarra, a Text that Heals………………………………………………………………..177 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………………………….180 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………………………………183 viii INTRODUCTION Syphilis. Sixteenth-century Europe finds itself at the dawn of a new cataclysm. The continent is being swept by a sexually transmittable bacterial infection that cuts across social strata and manifests both externally via skin lesions and internally with tumor-like growths and neurological symptoms and death. In 1531 Federico Gonzaga II (1500-1540), a member of one of Renaissance Italy’s most influential and powerful families, and a chronic sufferer of the disease, has commissioned the publication of La Marfisa bizarra (Bizarre Marfisa), a chivalric poem by Giovan Battista Dragoncino (1497-1547?) written in the patron’s honor. This study examines how the epic poem’s portrayal of the Gonzaga dynasty’s founding member occurs as an unexpected reversal of and departure from gendered norms for the genre, while operating within the memorializing function of the poem as explicitly elaborated in the introduction and conclusion to the text. In my work I assess the curative properties of an explicitly transgressive campaign of literary and art patronage directed at healing the social wounds inflicted by a new form of epidemic disease running rampant through the courts of Italy and of greater Europe during the first half of the sixteenth-century, using the Gonzaga duchy of Mantua as my point of focus. The “textual healing” that I identify within the Bizarra and similar works is directed not only at socio-political stabilization under the Gonzaga regime, but also at repairing the physical damage wrought by the duke’s ailing body through the rebalancing of a disordered humoral complexion. The character Marfisa first appears in Boiardo’s L’Orlando innamorato (1495) and is one of a cast of familiar characters called upon to populate the various chivalric epic poems whose production characterized sixteenth-century popular literature in Italy. The Renaissance epic genre emerged on the peninsula in the early fifteenth century and was popularized by Luigi Pulci’s 1483 poem, Morgante maggiore. The works of Pulci and Boiardo mark the genesis of a new and distinct form of chivalric poetry, drawing heavily upon literary themes already in vogue in southern France and northern Italy during the late Middle Ages. The emergent chivalric poetic form combined elements from the Carolingian Cycle, or Matter of France, with that of the Arthurian Cycle of Romances, or Matter of Brittany. 1 The characters and context for the Renaissance epic are largely borrowed from the Carolingian Cycle, which centers on a moment of significant conflict between Charlemagne’s army and that of the “Saracen” occupiers of southern Spain. Set in the court of Charlemagne, these poems revolve around the adventures
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