Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy 9781474270311, 9781474270342, 9781474270328

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Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy

Cultures of Early Modern Europe Series Editors: Beat Kümin, Professor of Early Modern European History, University of Warwick, and Brian Cowan, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History, McGill University Editorial Board: Adam Fox, University of Edinburgh, UK Robert Frost, University of Aberdeen, UK Molly Greene, Princeton University, USA Ben Schmidt, University of Washington, USA Gerd Schwerhoff, University of Dresden, Germany Francsesca Trivellato, Yale University, USA Francisca Loetz, University of Zurich, Switzerland The “cultural turn” in the humanities has generated a wealth of new research topics and approaches. Focusing on the ways in which representations, perceptions, and negotiations shaped people’s lived experiences, the books in this series provide fascinating insights into the past. The series covers early modern culture in its broadest sense, inclusive of (but not restricted to) themes such as gender, identity, communities, mentalities, emotions, communication, ritual, space, food and drink, and material culture. Published: Food and Identity in England, 1540-1640, Paul S. Lloyd (2014) The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850, Sara Pennell (2016) Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750, David Hitchcock (2016)

Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy Brendan Dooley

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Brendan Dooley, 2016 Brendan Dooley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work. Cover design: Sharon Mah Cover image: Lucia Anguissola, Self-portrait, 1557/Raccolte d ’ Arte Antica, Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milano © Comune di Milano, tutti i diritti riservati All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-7031-1 PB: 978-1-3500-6713-4 ePDF: 978-1-4742-7032-8 ePub: 978-1-4742-7033-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dooley, Brendan Maurice, 1953- author. Title: Angelica’s book and the world of reading in late Renaissance Italy / Brendan Dooley. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016. | Series: Cultures of early modern Europe | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012319 (print) | LCCN 2016054716 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474270311 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474270328 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474270335 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Baldachini, Angelica–Books and reading. | Books and reading–Italy–History–16th century. | Books and reading--Social aspects–Italy–History–16th century. | Women–Books and reading--Italy–History–16th century. | Straparola, Giovanni Francesco, approximately 1480-1557? Piacevoli notti. | Literature publishing--Italy--History–16th century. | Censorship–Italy–History–16th century. | Italy–Intellectual life–16th century. Classification: LCC Z1003.5.I8 D66 2016 (print) | LCC Z1003.5.I8 (ebook) | DDC 028/.9092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20160123190 Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction 1 Straparola and Late Renaissance Publishing 2 The Trials of Literature in an Age of Censorship 3 A Woman’s Hand 4 Angelica and her Book 5 Reading and Gender 6 Book Conservation and the Digital Turn Conclusion Notes Select Bibliography Index

vi vii 1 11 29 41 67 97 123 135 141 176 197

List of Illustrations Figure 0.1 Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 2.1 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 4.1 Figure 5.1

Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1570), vol. 2, fol. 2r. Portrait of Straparola in Le piacevoli notti, vol. 2 (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1553). Title page from Girolamo Parabosco, I diporti (Venice: Griffio, 1550). Title page from Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1570). Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1570), vol. 1, fol. 144v. Title page of Filippo Baldacchini, Libro secondo del Prothocinio (Perugia: Baldassarre Cartolari, 1525). Title page of Camillo Baldi, Trattato (Carpi: Girolamo Vaschieri, Carpi, 1622). Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari, Florence, cupola fresco (detail), Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence. Lucia Anguissola, Self-portrait (Milan, Castello Sforzesco).

4 12 26 37 42 48 58 73 106

Preface Some of the most unusual discoveries occur when looking anew at what was there all along. By a quirk of perception all too familiar in the humanities, an object in plain sight may easily go unnoticed, and probably would remain so, if not for the casual insight that it might be important, or at least, might lead in directions that put other random clues in place. Set in context, it may suggest an untried route to be pursued by further study—in the case in point, regarding a half-forgotten European past and the place of a woman within it. In reporting a personal experience of research I make no pretense to a definitive account such as might appear in a specialized journal or a scholarly monograph. Instead, I propose to explain what drew me down a certain path, and after describing some of the surrounding terrain, to state where I think I arrived. Angelica’s Book is as much about ways of looking as about ways of understanding, and neither occurs without a good deal of curiosity and even a leap into the unknown. And unknowns in this story are many. I would almost be inclined to begin, as Alain Corbin did in his Le Monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot—aptly translated into English as Life of an Unknown—with a disclaimer. Of the main subject of his research, a nineteenthcentury clog-maker, he admits, “nothing has remained.”1 For writing about such a life, there is none of the material a biographer normally requires for anchoring a series of conjectures in the realm of the real. There are no legal documents, no writings, no testimonies by neighbors; there is no record of things owned or persons loved, places visited, or experiences recorded. In effect, all around there is “a void.” With an impish allusion to a kind of scholarship that seems to thrive instead on sounding the depths or tallying the sums of a huge mass of data, he remarks, “just the type of person I was looking for.” Nonetheless, expressing a certainty all the more impressive as it carries the weight of the intense archival knowledge that is the author’s trademark, he adds, “LouisFrançois Pinagot existed.” So did Angelica Baldachini. In a way, I know far more about Angelica than can be known about Louis-François, at least regarding matters relevant to the cultural historian. I know she owned a book, and I know what that book was. I know she could sign her name, and write of other things as well. Yet there are

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many gaps. Are they worth filling? I believe they are. The life of this reader and her book make a story worth telling, within the limits of the possible, for reasons that I hope will become apparent in the following chapters. I even hold that the eventual conclusions may be of some use not just to historians, but to anyone who has thought about the fundamental questions posed by our object-filled existence: questions such as the permanence or transience of the things around us, the conservation or destruction of what is familiar, the past intruding upon the present and vice versa.2 This is also a book about a book. It refers to a time when books were precious and readers were few; when communication was not ubiquitous. Words upon words did not march before one’s eyes in ceaseless profusion every day—sentences upon sentences in various media, involving social contacts and business correspondents. People were not drenched in texts of varying lengths with varying degrees of significance, delivered in various ways, including that hybrid entity to which we still attach the name “book.” Why, indeed, did people read at all? When not constrained by livelihood or family responsibilities, were they simply entertained or did they draw sustenance from texts? What did reading mean to people when reading was less and controls on reading were more? Not that such a time is impossible to fathom, if examined in the light of the way of life that has since disappeared, and people’s mentalities. Instead, I  suggest, our own world is incomprehensible without the world that came before. I’ll start with the past and save the present for later. Angelica’s book was not only a thing to be read. It was also a thing to be owned, cherished, stored, and maybe, at least in part, recycled (to mention just a few of the issues explored in the following pages). There is more. It marked the distinctions between people, between groups, genders, affiliations. Admittedly, I know more about the book than I do about the owner. I know its author and time of publication; I know what it contained and what it did not, and I think I know the reason why. Decades of scholarship on the matter have yielded a wealth of information, although there is still much more to learn. By strange meandering paths the book leads me to the owner and back again. Those who could read Angelica’s book, or the many volumes like it, stood apart from those who could not. Those who would read such a book, if given the chance, belonged to a community of shared interests, distinguished from other communities sharing other interests. Consisting of a collection of novels by the prohibited author Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Angelica’s book and the category of book to which it

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belonged also delineated the confines between licit and illicit; it marked the difference between right and wrong. It supplied authorities in Church and state with a token for exercising powers of surveillance. One might say, like other items on the Index of Forbidden Books, it gave growing bureaucracies yet another raison d’être, yet another instrument for distinguishing the compliant from the noncompliant, the disciplined subjects of authority from the undisciplined— not just for replacing disorderliness with orderliness, impurity with purity, but also for confirming the divinely ordained sources of human power. Evil books, and those who read them, placed the community in danger by provoking divine punishment, not just of the reader but of the people who enabled them. Governments and ecclesiastical institutions had to watch and act. Yet a study written from the standpoint proposed here does not fit easily into any one faculty, nor within the output of any particular department in the university, at least not as constituted today—although in our age of scholarly nomadism, the transition between one form of inquiry and another has ceased to require a passport stamped by the disciplinary border patrol. The contributions of legitimate refugees, so to speak, are judged on their own merits—and I hope mine are too. I am encouraged by Helga Nowotny’s insight that a new order of knowledge may hold some promise for allowing researchers to focus a combination of sometimes heterogeneous resources on a problem as long as they pay the cost, which requires a finely tuned appreciation of the different outlooks and approaches of each specialty, without any guarantee of forestalling criticism by any.3 If the result is a kind of “book history” that puts undue stress on the ever more generous limits around this subdiscipline, I will then propose a wider definition. For the time being, however, I can promise only to impart what I have learned, along with the fascination that this case has held for me, in spite of what has been, and may occasionally also be for my reader, due to the frequent stops and starts, the discontinuities in the narrative, the doubts and questions, a slightly bumpy ride. Normally this space is reserved for discharging, far from adequately, the multitude of obligations accumulated over the course of a project, and for acknowledging the many debts of gratitude to people, places, and institutions. These would include, in my case, Ann Blair, Mario Infelise, Ed Muir, Guido Ruggiero, Andrew Pettegree, Jake Soll, Peter Burke, and Sheila Barker, in the first instance, as well as, for various courtesies, Chris Michaelides at the British Library, Maria Mannelli of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, Francesco Martelli at the Florentine State Archives, Patrizia Rocchini and

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Barbara Giappichelli at the Municipal Library of Cortona, Ewa Glodowski at the Municipal Library in Lyon, Brian J. Dooley for reasons that you will see, plus many others whose conversation, perhaps unwittingly, added new aspects and sparked new interpretations, and finally, audiences at University College Cork, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Graz, and Florence University of the Arts, not to mention the many impromptu gatherings where Angelica’s story found ready listeners. At a crucial stage in the writing, I enjoyed the hospitality of the Bard Graduate Center in New York, where the lively discussions about material culture influenced the final versions of several chapters. There I would like to single out Peter Miller, Ivan Gaskell, Deborah Krohn, and Shawn Rowlands for special thanks. At Bloomsbury, I would like to thank Alexander Cowan and Rhodri Mogford for helpful suggestions and encouragement. Alas, a key figure in this research, responsible in a certain way for the discovery on which it is based, Signora Annamaria Colzi, late of Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, intelligent, good-humored merchant of marvels par excellence, though she did not live to see the results, nonetheless deserves honorable mention here.

Introduction

Perhaps it is only fitting that an inquiry about sixteenth-century reading patterns should begin in a junk shop. What other locale so effectively exemplifies the unpredictable vagaries, curious meanderings, and even the rootedness in real objects, typical of the humanist’s approach? The badly damaged book that will largely occupy me here betrayed none of its most precious contents at first sight. And along with a dozen other works liquidated for small change by a seller normally dealing in furniture, it sat on a shelf for years. In a moment of distraction, the new owner found the brief, neatly penned line of text on folio 144 which seemed to reveal something about women’s experiences a half-millennium ago. Working out from these two crucial pieces of evidence, a book and a signature, I seek the vague outlines of a forgotten world of semi-clandestine reading and its effects on the sixteenth-century psyche. If the definitive conclusions are few and the conjectures are many, at least, the journey will be accompanied by some of the best tales of intrigue and adultery, love and hate, devilry and piety, lies and confessions, that the sixteenth-century mind ever devised. Stories abound in this research, and as I embark on my journey of discovery, I seem to be one of those characters in Cristoforo Armeno’s folk tale, of Persian origin, first published in Venice in 1557 and later rendered into English as The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Serendip.1 It tells of three young men who set out in search of knowledge about the world by visiting the lands and courts of distant rulers, encountering a series of improbable adventures along the way. Horace Walpole, the English connoisseur and writer, apparently coined the term “serendipity,” based on this folk tale, in a 1754 letter to a diplomat’s secretary named Horace Mann (not the American reformist).2 There he uses it to refer to a new discovery he made by accident regarding the coat of arms of a Venetian noble family known as the Cappello, while researching a recently purchased portrait of Bianca Cappello, concubine of a Medici grand duke, which he considered to have been painted by the late Renaissance artist Giorgio Vasari. But the first to develop serendipity into the serious principle of research that I want here was Robert K. Merton, the Columbia University sociologist, whose

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study on the subject begins, conveniently enough for my purposes, by joining Horace Walpole, Horace Mann, Giorgio Vasari, Bianca Cappello, and the princes of Serendip.3 That the late Renaissance world, crucial to my theme, tangentially gave rise to the term, may just be another case of serendipity. Serendipity of course does not mean sheer chance. In Cristoforo Armeno’s work, the princes are predisposed to placing their mental abilities at the service of their fellow human beings—they discover an evil counselor in the court of a neighboring king and set off on a mission to retrieve a magic mirror in India, where they will liberate the country from a horrible curse. Each adventure requires the young princes to exercise their ingenuity and savoir faire, which is richly rewarded in the end. In India, in return for the queen’s hand in marriage, they are asked to solve two riddles, one of which calls for demonstrating how a man could eat an entire magazine of salt in one day. Brought before the salt magazine, the aspiring husband puts three salt crystals in his mouth, saying this would be his preferred approach—to the delight of the utterly infatuated queen. The most famous story involves a stolen camel, whose characteristics and manner of abduction the youths are able to divine on the basis of details such as the half-eaten grass on one side of the road (indicating a one-eyed animal) and a particular sensation experienced by the males while sniffing footprints in the dirt (indicating a female thief). Mainly on the basis of the camel episode, the fable has played an outsized role in discussions about intellectual innovation, which is the connection that interests me here. There are many ways of gaining new knowledge; and Merton names a few of the more familiar ones. Some seem more applicable to the task at hand, some less. I do not envisage much use of the so-called experimental method, where the researcher “contrives a situation in which it may be possible to make significant observations to support or discredit an existing hypothesis,”4 unless the situation in question is conjured up only in the mind. More to the point seems the method of retrospective prophecy, or “retroduction,” in Merton’s terminology. In this method we start with an anomalous effect, a strange phenomenon, and attempt to reason back to the most probable cause of what we observe. Whatever the method, Merton explains, a kind of orchestrated or controlled serendipity is always involved. Much actual foreknowledge of the possibilities is necessary, as well as careful preparation of the experimental setup, in order to make the seemingly fortuitous discovery that runs counter to accepted views. Likewise in this book, more than just fortune may have drawn me to the particular anomaly whose existence I wish to predict by the various causal theories. I have to be aware of what elements are important and what are not; and I must have more than

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a passing acquaintance with the accepted view. Serendipity has accompanied human curiosity over the centuries, as Merton shows, but it is seldom alone. I will see where it takes me. The objects in this quasi-archaeological exercise do not easily yield up their secrets. I am required to learn their language, and by that I mean not just the vernacular of Renaissance Florence. The context which they illuminate and which in turn sheds some light on them is a late sixteenth-century world still only barely understood in spite of the masses of documents in the Medici archive and the stacks of scholarly texts in various libraries around the world.5 I find rather a lot is known in general about this time and place; there is specific knowledge about a few people in it—usually those who left a long paper trail behind them, either because they were literary figures themselves, or because they were protagonists in the grand events about which the literary figures wrote and versified, or else because they committed crimes requiring documentation within the tribunals. But the lives of ordinary people who minded their own business without deserving extraordinary praise or blame usually do not appear on the horizon of the modern observer except by accident or by inference. Accident and inference are chief allies in this investigation. Time is also on my side. Before becoming evidence in an inquiry, the object I am scrutinizing was a book lover’s dream: an important sixteenth-century work in bad shape but still respectable, available at a bargain price, among other treasures that had been conserved within a piece of furniture that the proprietor was emptying of its contents. The book, bound in crinkled muddy-looking vellum with the leaves numbered by folio (recto and verso) as was common with sixteenthcentury editions, was missing the eight last folios and all of the first twenty-five folios except for a loose folio nine, tucked away between others. The absence of a colophon indicating the date, which could have been on the first or last leaf, removed the ordinary ways of determining the starting point of my story. However, the typesetting was definitely in “aldino,” or “italics” as we say in English, the style introduced in Venice by Aldo Manuzio in 1501, utilized for many early modern vernacular texts in Italian and mostly superseded by other fonts well before the eighteenth-century triumph of the typefaces invented by Giambattista Bodoni.6 I could have guessed the name of the work from the running titles at the tops of the leaves (“First Night,” “Second Night,” etc.), even if I did not encounter the full identification halfway through the volume, where a splendid engraving depicted three female figures seated on a balcony or terrace, engaged in spinning thread within a frame graced by classical architecture. They are easily

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recognizable. The Fates or moirai from Greek mythology were called Clotho (the spinner of the thread of human life), Lachesis (the disposer of lots), and Atropos (the inflexible one, i.e., the inevitable). In Plato’s Republic, they sing along with the Sirens: Lachesis about the things that were, Clotho about the things that are,

Figure 0.1 Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1570), vol. 2, fol. 2r.

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and Atropos about what will be. They offer a fitting complement to a book of imaginative literature that narrates the lives and experiences of mostly fictive personages, from the past to the present. Above the engraving is the title of the work: Book II of the Fables and Enigmas of Giovanni Francesco Straparola from Caravaggio. So the book could not have been acquired before 1550, when the first of many editions came out, and in fact, not before 1556, the date of the first one-volume editions of the two-part work. The curious object before me is a (broken) book by a certain sixteenthcentury writer; so my inquiry begins here. Who was Giovanni Francesco Straparola from Caravaggio, and what did he write? The scarcity of biographical details is enough to overwhelm even the seeker after information about the much less significant figure of Angelica. My inquiry sends me in pursuit of two unknown personages, not just one. Some details are suggestive. “Straparola” was very likely not a proper surname but a mere nickname, conveying the notion of “garrulous.”7 His geographical designation points to the same tiny Lombard town as his much more famous fellow countryman, the painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio, who lived about a half-century later. Here was as good a place as any for enjoying the pleasant Lombard landscape depicted in the upper corner of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” now hanging in the Doria Pamphili gallery in Rome, but not for seeking fame and fortune. The painter left as soon as he could, and so, apparently, did the writer. What little is known about Straparola suggests that he spent a good deal of time in and around Venice, possibly conversing in the academies there, and certainly engaging with the thriving publishing industry—the Venetian publishing industry that in the century since Gutenberg’s invention, had acquired a temporary position of world leadership. What can be imagined about his life there has already been set out by the folklorist Ruth Bottigheimer.8 Born around 1480, Straparola would have been under thirty when his firstknown publication came out in Venice: a collection of poems called New Work (printed in 1508 for Georgio di Ruschoni, self-identified as a “Milanese”),9 which went through at least one other edition seven years later, again in Venice, printed in 1515 for “Alexandro di Bindoni” (another name for Alessandro Bindoni, born, apparently, on Lago Maggiore).10 The work consisted of a collection of poems—sonnets and several other verse forms including the more exotic strambotti, often in ottava rima—covering a wide array of topics, ranging from human relations and religion to politics and travel. Just to give the flavor, I here translate a stanza (somewhat freely, reader be warned) from a poem which he

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dedicates to an Italian city, referring to the current power broker there, namely, Giacomo Pesente (or Pesenti): Oh my Caravaggio happy land Ser Giacomo at present is secure And virtue is his only cynosure With him as Lord your fortune’s well in hand.11 [O Caravaggio, castel venturato, come felice ti trovi al presente, godendo miser Iacomo Pesente che ti ten per virtú tanto inalzato.]

I am thus safe in affirming that the geographical diction attached to his name, “from Caravaggio,” was not merely a suffix, but a reference to his real home. Geographical rootedness is one element of an author’s profile. There may be others. Here is a stanza from a poem concerning a far more serious subject: O holy Virgin of celestial reign Great Queen of ardent fire, source of light From East to West most splendid guide in sight Of every navigator on the main . . .12 [Vergine sacra del celeste imperio somma Regina: lampa e focho ardente lume: e splendor: dal orto: al occidente guida fidata d’ogni bon nauclero . . .]

Sincere sentiments or just perfunctory? Direct or ironic? Holy or unholy? On the surface, a religious poem of the kind so common in contemporary literature as to suggest a strong demand among readers; but in the absence of any other signs of extraordinary devotion, I hesitate for the moment to assign a meaning in the context of the author’s biography. Alongside such routine expressions of piety, I find yet others regarding more profane matters, which place the possibly religious significance of some poems in a different light. The following is dedicated to another celestial being, whether virgin or not, I do not know: The Sun had travelled far beyond its height When my lady spread her splendid hair Than which Diana’s seemed less fair And Phoebus’s golden crown seemed far less bright.13

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[El sol nel megio gia rendea calore Quando madona stese i bei capelli che di Diana i soi parea men belli di Phebo i lor mancava di colore]

Recall one of Petrarch’s sonnets (Canzoniere no. 162) in Lorna de’ Lucchi’s early twentieth-century translation, a classic of love literature attempting to evoke the image of the beloved. I make no pretense of offering sufficient material to make an artistic judgment between the two. With the original Italian of both authors before me, there would be no question who is the greater; but that is not the point here. O fortunate fields through which Madonna goes, And you, O happy, happy flowers and sweet, O upland who her gentle accent knows And bears the dainty imprint of her feet, O saplings lithe and early, verdant sprays, O love-lorn violets pale, O forest dim Which beauty’s sun hath pierced with his rays And drawn in proud florescence unto him; O limpid stream that laves her lovely face, Her luminous eyes, and doth their radiance share, O primrose path, I envy you the grace Of tender, loyal servitude you bear! In you no single pebble now remains That is not kindled with my passionate pains.14

Even in translation, something of the power of the original comes through. However, my purpose is not to say that, in comparison, Straparola’s quiver of love-arrows is less packed, or his reservoir of metaphor less deep. I am engaged in recreating the wider cultural world of the writer of the broken book. What can clearly be said about all these examples from Straparola is that he is drawing on the same muse—that is, of Petrarch and subsequent masters— which would later inspire Shakespeare’s sonnets. However, this other sonnet by Straparola seems to add a particularly strong and novel element, one which will play a major role in later work, and in my account: namely, the vein of sensuality. I translate: The blushing visage, forehead, nose and eyes, The throat so delicate to see

8

Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy And my slow demise: the breast of thee Seem to me all made in paradise. The motion whence that smile doth arise The tresses, blonde, which always are to me So troubling, as when shoulders white I see Cleave my heart, which, suff ’ring almost dies. The subtle lips of red which cannot fade The tiny feet which toward me slowly stray In paradise by gods were surely made. The human tongue, which ’twixt white teeth doth lay Thus never mortal Jove has so displayed, The work of his own hands, in his own way.15 [Il tuo vermeglio e delicato viso la fronte el naso gli occhi con le mano la gola el petto qual mi da gran danno mi mostrati esser fatte in paradiso El moto col parlar el dolce riso le bionde treze che dato mi hanno con le polite spale un grave affanno forza gli ha facto al cor de esser diviso Le rosee labra con la bocha affilata li pichol piedi con li passi lenti certo che da li dei in ciel fu facta L’humana lingua con li bianchi denti credo el supremo Iove l’ha formata con le sue proprie mano e soi accenti.]

There is nothing here that would have scandalized either Petrarch or Shakespeare. Nor, on the other hand, is there anything like the transgressive spirit of Pietro Aretino’s “Lewd Sonnets” (as the Encyclopedia Britannica calls his “Sonetti lussuriosi”) penned in 1527 and accompanied, in publication, by Giulio Romano’s series of engravings, “The Positions” (“I modi”), depicting, as the title implies, the positions taken by couples during intercourse.16 Straparola’s most recent translator (me) is at no loss to lend a measure of fidelity to the original; there is no particular coarseness or obscenity to convey by ill-fitting modern terminology in English. There are no lines even approaching Aretino’s “Tu m’hai ’l cazzo in la potta, e ’l cul mi vedi,” which may or may not be perfectly rendered

Introduction

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by “You have your cock in my pussy and you see my ass.”17 In Straparola’s case, I am nonetheless obviously in the workshop of an artist who is experimenting with modes of expression which he may consider to have a certain power or at least appeal, due to the extended description of sense experience. The theme of sensuality, as introduced by Straparola, in fact belonged to a venerable tradition within Renaissance ethical discourse. The positive valuation of sensual pleasure, drawing freely upon ancient sources, was supposed to stand in contrast to a medieval ideology, inspired by the Church Fathers, which turned attention instead exclusively to the soul’s salvation. There is no need to evoke the enthusiasm of Walter Pater or the other Victorian rediscoverers of the sensual Renaissance to appreciate the significance of this aspect. “Who then will lend mine eyes a font of tears,” exclaimed Pope Innocent III in the last years of the twelfth century, “to lament the misery of the human condition.” Man was “formed out of earth, conceived in guilt, born to punishment.” What he does is “depraved and illicit, is shameful and improper, vain and unprofitable.”18 Instead, said the fifteenth-century humanist Pico della Mirandola, quoting Hermes Trismegistus: “What a great miracle, Asclapius, is Man.”19 Designed by the Creator as a potential for good or ill, “with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.” Added Pietro Bembo, the noted Neoplatonist, writing some twenty years later, in 1508: “Since everything natural is good, Love, as a natural thing, is always good, nor can it ever in any way be evil.”20 Bembo places more explicit statements regarding sensuality in the mouths of the female characters in his dialogue, The Asolani. “But let us move on, if you wish, to the sweetness of love,” suggests Madonna Berenice, addressing her sex: “To be sure, there is great difficulty, O women, in finding words to describe what is easier felt than said.” She resorts to a genre switch. “A great painter may depict the whiteness of snow convincingly, but not the coldness, since what is sensed only by touching does not appear to the eye, which is served by paintings.” Literary synesthesia, the strategic combination of different sensory elements to evoke a real experience, was easier said than done. “I may have been able to explain a few of the benefits of love, nonetheless the sweetnesses which that spurting fountain, far greater than the one we see before us, makes fall upon every sense, overwhelming all of them, can never be grasped by any of our speech.”21 Hard as writers might try, they would always be bested by painters in the effort to convey what was felt—but this was no reason to stop trying. Renaissance artworks strikingly confirm Bembo’s insight, where the abundant themes of sensuality seem inspired by the same ethical precepts, shared by

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so many contemporary writers, of the normativity of nature and the essential goodness of creation, between the limits of law and lust.22 Moving beyond the age of Bembo toward the time of Straparola and the Venetian Renaissance painting of the late Titian, we note that the very paint itself is handled sensuously.23 Massive swirls of thick pigment adumbrate a nude form of extraordinary flamboyance, bedecked only with elegant but simple pearl adornments, in the Prado “Venus with Organist and Cupid” (inventory no. P00407), obviously enjoying the effect she is having on the distracted organist sitting next to her. Whoever he is, his eyes are glued to her crotch.24 The rich deep purple velvet coverlet beneath her throws off shimmering reflections of her radiance and that of the natural light seeping into the room from the garden scene outside, as she seems to press her feet nonchalantly into his side, while appearing to turn away to take advice from Cupid whispering in her ear. What music is being made here? To be sure, Straparola’s early poetry scarcely prepared me for the material I found in the work that now interests me and most interested his contemporaries, first printed by Comin da Trino in 1551 (or, according to the Venetian calendar, in 1550). The original title was Le piaceuoli notti di m. Giouanfrancesco Straporola  [!] da Carauaggio. Nelle qali [!] si contengono le fauole con i loro enimmi da dieci donne, & duo giouani raccontate, cosa diletteuole, ne piu data in luce, now usually called the Piacevoli notti. The misspelling of the author’s name on the title page apparently did nothing to diminish the appeal, and at least thirty-two more editions came out before 1613. The work was translated into French by Jean Louveau as Facetieuses nuits (1560); into Spanish by Francesco Truchado as Honesto y agradable Entretenimiento de Damas y Galanes (1578); and into German several times in now-vanished sixteenth-century editions and then by an anonymous translator working for Ignaz Alberti, Mozart’s Viennese publisher, as Die Nächte (1791), followed by a partial anthologization in Adelbert von Keller’s Italiänischer Novellenschatz (1851), all superseded by Hanns Floerke’s two-volume translation with the title, Die ergötzlichen Nächte (1908). The editorial history in English, save for the single story (II, 2) published by William Painter in his The Palace of Pleasure of 1556, begins with William George Waters’ translation entitled The Nights of Straparola (1894), which subsequently appeared as The Facetious Nights of Straparola (1898); next, translated by Sir Richard Burton, there were The Most Delectable Nights of Straparola (1906), and in a condensed version of Waters’ translation edited by Edward Robert Hughes, The Merry Nights of Straparola (1931). Recently, Donald Beecher, reusing much of Waters, gives us The Pleasant Nights (2012), and in her entirely new translation (2015) Suzanne Magnanini calls them the same, and so will I.

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My broken book began life in interesting circumstances. The Pleasant Nights was a collection of short stories or tales or novellas on the model of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron; and as in the work of two hundred years before, and again in the collections by Girolamo Parabosco and Antonfrancesco Grazzini dating roughly to Straparola’s own time, the tales were supposedly told over a certain period by a number of friends gathered, in his case, in the garden of a noble palazzo on the island of Murano in Venice.1 Boccaccio’s novellas were told over ten days in an ideally conceived country refuge from the Black Death then raging in Florence, forming not so much an object lesson about what to do when disaster strikes, as an effective metaphor for the birth of the Renaissance itself.2 Straparola changes days to nights (more titillating still?) and, like Parabosco, introduces real people and places. The friends who assemble in Murano at the house of the bishop of Lodi, Ottaviano Maria Sforza, are by no means all purely symbolic figures. They include Pietro Bembo, author of the Asolani and much else, one of the fathers of the Venetian Renaissance and a theorist of the Italian language. During the lifetime of the author, The Pleasant Nights circulated (I soon discover) in at least three major versions, whose own stories may be important here. In the first, which came out in 1550, the tales were recited over a period of five nights, with five tales per night.3 The book met with such success that Straparola decided to enlarge it by forty-eight more tales recited over another seven nights—that is, thirteen nights in all, of which on nights six through twelve, five tales were recited per night (for a subtotal of thirty-five) and on the thirteenth night, which must have gone on until late the following morning, another thirteen tales, so seventy-three in all. Finally in 1556, shortly before he died, yet another edition appeared: a one-volume amalgamation of the two volumes published in 1550 and 1553, which had in turn been republished as a two-volume set. The new 1556 version contained a key difference: tale three of night eight was removed, and in its place were two others, bringing the total

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Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy

Figure 1.1 Portrait of Straparola in Le piacevoli notti, vol. 2 (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1553).

number in the collection up to seventy-four. Was Straparola himself responsible for this change, which is reflected in subsequent early editions? Scholars are divided on this key issue, but for the moment other questions must claim my attention.4 Straparola’s first publisher was neither the greatest nor the least on the lively Venetian publishing scene. He was no Paolo Manuzio, churning out convenient pedagogical editions of the ancient classics, in the family tradition begun by the pioneering Aldo (as I shall call him here instead of the alternative name Aldus Manutius).5 Nor was he a Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari, attempting to take the world of vernacular publishing by storm.6 In fact, the identity of “Orpheo dalla Carta,” as he is styled in the Proem, is as obscure as is that of the only other dalla Carta in Venetian publishing, namely Giovanni Antonio.7 Maybe the two were

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brothers; and maybe both were connected to the Danza paper manufacturing family originating in the paper-rich region of Salò on the banks of Lake Garda, where a certain Battista used “a chartis” (i.e., “dalla carta”) in place of a surname; and maybe they pooled resources to open the shop in Venice around San Bartolomeo at the sign of “S. Alvise” that appears associated with both of their names. By Straparola’s time, the whole clan was well established in the Venetian book trade, and Straparola’s work would have fit perfectly with their other productions in imaginative literature, such as Panfilo di Renaldini’s spin-off from Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic romance Orlando in Love entitled Innamoramento di Ruggeretto figliuolo di Ruggero re di Bulgaria, con ogni riuscimento di tutte le magnanime sue imprese [The falling in love of Ruggeretto, son of Ruggero king of Bulgaria, with a full account of all his magnanimous enterprises] (Venice: Giovanni Antonio dalla Carta, 1554). Shortly before the publication of the Pleasant Nights, the sixty-five or so masters of the book trade in Venice were supposed to become a guild.8 Unlike other tradesmen, whose trades had been around since the middle ages, but not too differently from others in the same trade elsewhere during this springtime of bureaucratization, they did not come together spontaneously. Before they managed to self-organize in any formal way, they received orders from the Council of Ten, the chief government body, which thought to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the new censorship legislation of 1544 to extend vigilance not only to the content of publications but also to the form.9 Church, state, and economic interests were all closely bound up in this case: no books should be printed in Venice that contained heresy or that showed inferior industrial technique. Accordingly, the masters got a church in which to pray and meet, namely, SS. Giovanni e Paolo in the sestiere or district of Castello; and they got a set of rules, drawn up in conference with the Provveditori di Comun, the official body deputed to the task by the Ten, including a complete organizational scheme, along with such items as “Officers are not to abuse any member of our guild, either in chapter or out of it” and “Ordinary members may not insult one another on pain of a fine of five ducats.”10 Subsequent regulations limited printing to guild members and forbade the export of type fonts. Angelica’s book bore the birthmark of a new publishing regime that was to last through the eighteenth century. What kind of deal Orpheo made with the printer and the author is yet another mystery. About “Comin da Trino” I only know he came from Piedmont, not far from the home of the progenitors of the Giolito dynasty.11 He mostly did work on behalf of others, occupying himself exclusively with the production side of

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some 600 editions in all traced to him so far. Like many other printers in the first century of printing, he occasionally got in trouble with the authorities— mostly for engaging in commercial transactions with the unorthodox religious movements that were just then gaining ground in Venice and elsewhere. On the publications associated with his name, he gives his location as Campo San Luca—not far from the Rialto, “al segno del Diamante”—and I see no good reason to doubt this.12 Donato Pirovano suggests that he shared in neither the profits nor the risk of the Straparola edition, but was simply paid for the work, I  imagine, mostly in reams of paper, considering the publishers’ connections with Salò and the scarcity of this resource in the days of rags. The thirty-three or more editions of Straparola’s book appearing between 1550 and 1613 (including the separate volumes one and two) were due as much to the peculiarities of the Venetian printing industry as to the particularities of the writing. Orpheo himself produced the first four editions or so of volume one, two of which appeared in the same year, and the first four of volume two, as well as the first two and the fifth combined editions of the book. He probably paid Straparola a quantity of money and/or books for the manuscript of each edition he produced, keeping a certain number of copies to sell on his own or through whatever bookstore happened to be his partners in the venture.13 Whether he in turn exchanged the manuscript with other printers for books, cash, or paper, I do not know. In any case, some fourteen other printers around Venice produced the remaining editions, including Domenico Giglio, Francesco Lorenzini, Giovanni Bonadio, Domenico Farri, Domenico Zanetti, Altobello Salicato, and so forth. To protect his own rights to his work, before printing Straparola secured a ten-year “privilege,” the early modern version of a copyright, prohibiting anyone else from printing it without his authorization.14 Interestingly, considering the subject matter, the Venetian Senate approved of a privilege for a popular religious work in the same decree, namely, the “Narrations from the Evangelists” by a certain don Callisto da Piacenza, regular canon and apostolic preacher.15 Anyone caught illegally printing or selling either of these works was liable to confiscation and a 100-ducat fine, to be distributed among the accuser, the acting magistrate, and the Venetian Arsenal. Of course, the document, with the salutary warning that “all were obliged to observe what our laws provide in the matter of printing,” was valid only in Venetian territory; what happened elsewhere was none of the business of the 138 senators who approved it, out of a total of 147 voting, with twenty-four abstentions. In principle, once Orpheo and Comin finished with the manuscript it was fair game for anyone. I do not know whether they infringed upon Straparola’s

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rights or other printers’ rights or whether others infringed upon theirs, also because literary property legislation was still being thought out and often went unenforced. The relevant law of 1517 exclusively pertained to “new” works (opera nova). Perhaps this legislation explains, in fact, why Straparola entitled his first publication “New Work.” In 1544, a new law forbade any printing or selling of any work without prior consent of the author or the latter’s heirs, to be filed with the riformatori dello Studio di Padova, the body responsible for overseeing the university and now, increasingly, the book trade, on pain of confiscation and levying of a fine.16 The ineffectiveness of the law was proven by its reformulation three years later, and by subsequent decrees. How Straparola, or Orpheo, fared commercially in the end is hard to say. As in any other great commercial city, their success in Venice depended largely upon their entrepreneurial know-how and their willingness to take risks—as well as upon the intrinsic value of the product. By any estimation Venice was still a preeminent printing center in the midsixteenth century. No wonder all of Straparola’s early editions in Italian came from here.17 Anything I could say about the basic distribution patterns at the time would necessarily be inconclusive, even if early modern bibliometrics were more like an exact science.18 In attempting to get a sense of overall production, shall I count bound units only or also number of pages? Will broadsheets fit in? How to treat differences in print run between different titles? Do separate editions count as the same title? What about the market for used books? Not to mention the controversy regarding what the numbers mean in terms of the impact of particular texts. In any period, some key texts may take time to sink in; others printed in short runs may cast a long shadow. And supposing I had something like correct numbers year by year, should I not analyze the data by topics as well?19 Yet here another set of problems occurs, as modern subject systems are unsatisfactory, and contemporary ones are essentially hard to work with, apart from the problem of multiple possible categorizations of single items. Therefore, I will resist the temptation to engage in any profiling of given years according to whether, say, historiography was more prevalent than, say, literature. However, by numerous indices, including the number of actual printing presses in operation at any one time, Venice seems to have engrossed roughly 40 percent of printing in Italy by the mid-sixteenth century (down from about 90 percent at the end of the previous century); and drawing on the records of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, I note the concentration of some 10 percent of European production overall. Which edition of Straparola was the more influential? I leave the question open.

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Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy

To keep Straparola’s accomplishment in perspective, I observe that the first three parts of Matteo Bandello’s nearly contemporary Novelle appeared in three editions only, those of Lucca (Vincenzo Busdrago, 1554), Milan (Ascanio Centorio degli Ortensi, 1560), and Venice (Alfonso Ulloa, 1566); whereas the fourth part appeared only in the Lyon edition (Alessandro Marsili, 1573). Then there is a hiatus of a century and a half before the whole series of 186 stories gets printed again, except for the eighteen stories included by Francesco Sansovino in a collection published in Venice in 1561 (which, by the way, at first included twenty-two novellas from Straparola), reprinted in several versions. The book’s censorship history, similar to that of Straparola’s, is not sufficient to explain the difference in demand; nor is Bandello’s position as a prelate.20 Bandello’s publishing strategy involved dedicating each story to a different patron, beginning with Signora Ippolita Sforza e Bentivoglio, who commissioned the first versions of the stories when Bandello was in Mantua sometime between 1506 and 1524. The second story is dedicated to Prospero Colonna, a condottiero in the service of the Papal State, the third to L. Scipione Attellano, and so forth. Some novels were quite long: part 1, novella 2, in the Brognoligo critical edition of 1928, runs to thirty pages, although the average is twelve pages, almost exactly the same as Straparola in the Rua edition.21 There are some overlaps: both authors convey versions of the story of Cassandrino the master thief, Bandello, part 1, novella 25, and Straparola, night 1, tale 2, apparently due to a sharing of sources and information rather than direct contact. A particular feature of Straparola’s collection is undoubtedly its relative compactness. The single volume shares every element of the genre without trying to overwhelm. It can be easily transported, stored, perhaps even concealed. Such characteristics of course are not sufficient by themselves to lead readers to the work. What was in Straparola’s tales that could have attracted so much attention for so long? The first impression they convey to a modern reader comes from the variety of material. In a generally pleasing style, unpretentious, colloquial in spite of a certain lack of uniformity, they cover many of the same themes that helped make Boccaccio a timeless classic—not just cuckoldry, deception, mistaken identities, jokes and the usual aspects commonly associated with the adjective “Boccaccesque,” but also themes connected with the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, leaving open a wide interpretation attributing virtue also to cleverness and endurance in attaining one’s ends, in other words the Renaissance concept of virtù or manly courage, from the Latin word “vir,” but also including the female equivalent. Real or not, they deal with human experience as it might be lived or hoped. They are ultimately the products of those three Fates depicted

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in the engraving at the beginning of part two, spinning the threads of life as it is, as it was, as it may be. Surely an irresistible formula. Variety derives in part from the multiple sources.22 In fact, even the twentyone tales that are largely translated from the Latin of Girolamo Morlini’s Novellae (Naples: Jean Pasquet de Sallo, 1520), I find, derive in turn from a wide range of sources, including Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber facetiarum. Any effort to establish the originality or non-originality of Morlini, from whom my author borrowed so liberally, would take me too far off my purpose. But I have to say that Straparola took no great pains to mix Morlini with the rest of his material, and this facilitates the task of comparison, as all but two of the last twenty of his stories are basically related to this source. There are occasional liberties, as when the voyeur in Morlini’s tale about an adulterer caught in flagrante (no. 54) is transformed, in Straparola’s version, from the profligate son of a merchant into a novice friar, and the place is shifted from southern Italy northwards (XIII, 11) plus a few other changes. Otherwise the translations appear to be fairly faithful to the original text, even when the original has evident misprints, thus producing unintentionally comical results. For instance, the printed Latin version called “Novella XLVII” has a Genoese merchant shipping wine originating in a place designated as “ex foliscorum monte,” which does not exist, and obviously should have been “ex faliscorum monte,” meaning, from the Tuscan hillside. Straparola, straining to make meaning from the misprinted e, comes up with “del monte Falisco” (i.e., from the hill of Falisco).23 The joke was on him, but most readers would miss out. Attempting to give the real flavor of Straparola’s translations (if indeed he was their author and not just their publisher) would require more quotations from the original Latin version than I can provide here. I will only give a short one from Morlini’s “Novella VI,” about a German and a Spaniard who met in an inn one night. The Spaniard shared the abundant meal with his servant, whereas the German ate everything himself, leaving his own servant to salivate enviously by his elbow. Thus, “Mutulus Theotonicus omnia vorabat atque obliguriebat, et famuli minime reminiscebatur.” Straparola’s own translation of this phrase in his thirteenth night, tale 3, looks like this: “Il Tedesco stavasi mutolo divorando e sgolizzando ogni cosa, senza punto ricordarsi del servo suo.”24 The translation is not bad, and indeed, perhaps “sgolizzando” is an astute rendering of “obliguriebat,” both of them being relatively unusual terms in their respective languages. Lewis and Short (A New Latin Dictionary)25 give the latter as a “very rare” form of “abligurrio,” and although some versions of the Second Catilinian Oration have Cicero using the term “obliguriebant,” Egidio Forcellini (Totius

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latinitatis lexicon)26 and others say this is a misprint for “obligaverunt.” The Latin of Morlini has not been praised for its excessive elegance; nor is Morlini regarded as a particularly attentive emulator either of Cicero or of the Renaissance humanist par excellence, Poliziano.27 On the other hand, “sgolizzare” is not in any of the Crusca vocabularies published in Florence from 1612 onward by the famous academy in charge of establishing the Tuscan language. It appears in John Florio’s 1598 World of Words, the first Italian-English dictionary, with a cross-reference to “Sgoleggiare, to gluttonize, to gormandize, to devoure, to riot in gluttonie.”28 Was Florio reading Straparola? Perhaps more important than what Straparola borrows from Morlini is what he adds to the above story, bringing in elements from his framing tale; and here I will revert to the recent translation by Suzanne Magnanini. It begins thus, referring to the previous tale, tale 2, of the same night: The tale told by our valorous Signora brings to mind something that happened due to the envy born between the servants of a German and a Spaniard who were dining together. And although the tale is very brief, it will be, however, very delightful and it will please many of you.29

By the way, I find this modern translation to be particularly faithful to the original, which runs as follows: La favola raccontata dalla valorosa nostra Signora mi riduce a memoria quello intravenne della invidia nata tra gli servi d’un Tedesco e d’ un Spagnuolo che mangiavano insieme. Ed avenga che la favola sia brevissima, sarà però dilettevole, e piacerà a molti.

Next the speaker (Pietro Bembo) embarks on the tale, uttering what I have already determined to be translated more or less word for word out of Morlini’s Latin. This is followed by a return to the framing tale, including Straparola’s trademark: an enigma in the form of a poem, along with a witty or ironic interpretation. Once again, in Magnanini’s version: I stay shut in such a lofty place That neither wings nor feathers can reach me. Only the power of no small wit Makes me lend myself to one who lacks guidance. In a high place a gentle heart I lay, And I remain obscure to the one who expects things from me. But when struck by those who know nothing, They make me seem what I am not.

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The character called Pietro Bembo explains the enigma in the next lines, asserting that the entity “shut in such a lofty place” is none other than personified astrology. I could add here that the attribution of such thoughts to Bembo is not entirely improbable, since the historical personage in question not only possessed astrological texts but also, like many of his contemporaries, as we can judge from his work, read them.30 Before proceeding in my quest, I am also struck by the translation problem developing before me, far too fundamental to be liquidated by a few citations to the basic texts in the field of translation studies by Umberto Eco, Susan Bassnett, or even Peter Burke.31 The latter refers to Malcolm Crick and the school of Edward Evans-Pritchard saying that “anthropology is an art of translation”; I begin to think the converse is also true. An engagement with anthropology and ethnography may be necessary for understanding the dynamic between translator and translated. And I am not just referring to the dynamic between Straparola and Morlini. Here is the interpretation by William George Waters, of the enigma about astrology, drenched in the florid aesthetic of his late Victorian time period: I dwell in such a lofty spot That soaring wings can reach me not Much help I give to feeble sight, Working alone by wisdom’s might. I high exalt the soul serene. But never let my light be seen By those who claim too much of me. Oft am I made appear to be What I am not, just through the deed Of things that neither know nor heed.32

Some lines from Tennyson are ringing in my ears at the moment; or more to the point, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who showed a similar preference for tetrameter and used it even in serious verse (I’m thinking of the “Song of Hiawatha”), though pentameter here would possibly give a better rendering of the original mock-heroic alexandrines, and rhymed couplets don’t exactly capture Straparola’s ottava rima (a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c). Nonetheless, I have to say that Waters’ version does seem to convey at least some of the artistry in an original which sounds: Io mi sto chiusa in sì altiero loco, Ch’ arrivar non mi puon ali, né piume. La forza sol de l’ingegno non poco

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Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy Mi fa prestar, a cui non ha buon lume. Ad alto stato un gentil cor colloco, E sono scura a cui di me presume. Ma percossa da quei che nulla sanno, Quella che pur non son, parer mi fanno.33

Reading between the lines of the translation I seem to see the traces of Waters the translator, sometimes more distinctly, sometimes less. In some cases, elegance wins over precision, and he does not exactly capture Straparola’s boldness. With no other information about him except his evident interest in Italy and his publication of various works on Italian arts and letters, I have only his turnof-the-century dates to suggest to me that a note of period prudery may have separated his tastes from those of the late Renaissance.34 Here is a sample from his version of the enigma at the end of VII, 2: Nurtured in the kindly nest Of a maiden’s glowing breast, There I take my birth, and soon, As reward for such a boon, I labor hard by day, by night, To bear her offerings rich and bright.

The original conveys an element of frank physicality that indeed seems lost in the English version: Nel caldo sen di due vaghe mammelle D’una leggiadra ninfa il viver prendo, Et a lei, l’opre mie pregiate, e belle, Per tal effetto degno merto rendo.

More recently Magnanini has attempted to make amends, by choosing a more literal approach: In the warm bosom of two pretty breasts, Of a graceful nymph, I come to life; And to her my unique and noble deeds, I give as worthy thanks.35

All I can hope for here is to have conveyed something of a text that delighted readers well into the seventeenth century. But I am beginning to wonder if I will ever be able to deliver the essence of Straparola’s achievement in a language not his own. Will something not inevitably elude my grasp? Yet is not all literary

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analysis a form of translation? The problem is enticing, but I refuse to be drawn in. To discover more about what kind of author he was, I return to his own statements of intent. Clearly, the literature of borrowings and re-borrowings that I have described, or perhaps I should say, transmission and transformation, is the context in which I have to understand Straparola’s protestations of originality, in a letter appended to the second part of his work, at least in the first editions, which states: There are many men, affectionate ladies, who, moved either by envy or hatred, are trying to bite me with menacing fangs and to rend my miserable flesh, charging that the entertaining tales that I have written and collected in this and that other little volume, are not mine, but were stolen thievishly from one author or another. To tell the truth, I confess that they are not mine, and if I were to say otherwise, I would be lying; I have written them down quite faithfully according way they were recounted by the ten young maidens at that gathering.36

For the sake of argument I will suppose that this playful reply is actually the mask of a literary poacher, accustomed to invading other people’s territory and filling his bag with quarry belonging to them. According to this interpretation, the framing tale would be an allegory for Straparola’s “sources”—whatever these may have been—and his “originality” consists less in the substance of the stories themselves than in the selection, the framing tale, and perhaps the manner of telling. In this case the wider context of my discussion would be the practices of Renaissance authorship, involving that constant borrowing and remediation which were characteristic of a culture where imitatio of an author was the sincerest form of praise.37 Petrarch, one of the founders of Renaissance humanism, reverted to Seneca, not only as an author worthy of imitatio, but also as an author whose theory of imitation any aspiring writer ought to keep in mind. His evocation of Epistulae morales 84 was to have wide implications, where Seneca studies the question of literary productivity by way of the famous apian metaphor, wondering where the bees get their honey, whether by collecting it from the flowers or by elaborating their gatherings through some process of their own. For Petrarch, the latter was by far the worthier approach, in the manufacture of food as in the manufacture of letters. In the realm of authorship he uses this criterion as a standard for evaluating even a writer like Macrobius, in his opinion far too much of a collector and far too little of an elaborator.38 By Straparola’s time, the same values were still in place, but authors also gathered their material where they could, so that any protestations of originality ought to be viewed in the same spirit of ironic innuendo in which they were made.

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The question of exactly what Straparola invented, and how, takes me into a mare magnum of sometimes acrimonious scholarly dispute, flavored with insinuations about insufficient attention to Asian equivalents of the stories or to the role played in composition by the unlettered bearers of popular oral culture and lore.39 But there is more. Numerous stories (perhaps fourteen at least) involve persons in transit from rags to riches, enjoying a restoration of fortune, or experiencing change due to magic and the occult: the timeless fare of what ethnographers call “fairy tales.” The name itself is somewhat misleading, as fairies (if by that we understand a specific type of preternatural being) did not necessarily appear in the folktales first called contes de fée, collected in the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault and others, which by the following century gave us the English term.40 There is no direct equivalent in Italian, somewhat curiously considering that Straparola himself is credited (along with a slightly later writer named Giambattista Basile) with originating the literary form of the genre. Can there be a link between the hope for magic-induced change and the precariousness of fortune experienced in a commercial setting such as Venice? And supposing Straparola to have spent much or most of his time in Venice, would he have been inspired by his surroundings to come up with a new kind of fairy tale? Are the so-called “rise tales,” that is, those dealing explicitly with social improvement, such as the one in VIII, 4, about a tailor’s apprentice who learns sorcery and gains the hand of a princess, specifically influenced by such a context? Does such a reading still help to account for what seems to be an even more striking feature of the tale, which is the apprentice’s transformation from a man into a horse into a shark into a ring and back again, in a chain of episodes seemingly calculated to impress itself upon the memory after delivery by some unlettered raconteur? I don’t know what to conclude. In the absence of any more definitive proof, I admit that some conjectures are more plausible than others; but rather than taking a stand I simply refer to them in passing. There seems to be much to suggest that many of Straparola’s stories actually originated from within the tradition of popular folktale telling—or even street singing. Current scholarship is inclined to give credence to the clarification posted at the beginning of the work, signed by publisher Orpheo dalla Carta, but probably written by the author himself, stating that the roughness of the telling (“the low and humble style of the author”) was not to be attributed to an unschooled pen, but rather, to the author’s faithful transmission of tales remembered by others: “He did not write them as he wished, but as he heard them.” To some degree, this description of the writing method can be taken

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both literally and figuratively. Surely material from oral sources is included here; and indeed, according to one hypothesis, even the apparent overlaps between Straparola’s stories and those in other novella collections must be imputed to a reliance upon the same common fund of popular lore. If the allegory of the ten damsels and the faithful scribe actually represents a practice of extracting and transcribing an oral culture, a view shared by several scholars, then Straparola’s behavior, in the substantial portions of his book that are not traceable to any literary original, makes him a pioneering ethnographer two centuries before the Brothers Grimm.41 His originality would consist in writing down, indeed in typesetting, what he heard from oral sources, placing the world of folk wisdom and folklore under the discipline of mechanical reproduction, breaking the boundaries that stood between the literate and the illiterate, between high and low. The proponents of this interpretation do not regard the absence of definitive evidence as a sufficient disqualifier. Rather than assuming printed sources until proven otherwise, Jan Ziolkowski prefers to give orality the benefit of the doubt. “We have an obligation to approach each and every story with an open eye to possible orality lurking behind literature as well as to possible literature behind orality.”42 Suggestive traces from other times and places seem to point in the same direction, and a new historiography is attentive to the change. “Old dichotomies have broken down over the past decades in the understanding of medieval literature,” he points out; indeed, “it has been recognized that Latin texts from the Middle Ages could have features indebted to orality, popular culture, and secular tastes, while the literary products of medieval vernaculars could be literate, learned, and Christian.” Oral and written appear to circulate in loops or spirals of influences rather than to flow in one direction, from the written to the oral or vice versa. On this interpretation, Straparola would presumably have been tapping into the same traditions as those studied by Carlo Ginzburg in a series of memorable contributions pushing the historian’s method into areas where many feared to tread. Not that Straparola’s tales of fools and cuckolds bore any relation to the eccentric creation myth propounded by a barely educated Friulian miller brought up before the Inquisition in Udine on charges of heresy. Nor would anyone be so bold as to claim for his tales some remote Vedic origins, such as Ginzburg suggested in the case of Menocchio.43 Nevertheless, I appreciate the general line of argument viewing the culture of the oral and of the family and the hearth as not necessarily depending upon high culture, no matter what superficial similarity there may be between the ideas expressed and those published in books or delivered in lectures by learned philosophers a

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few towns away in Padua, site of Venice’s university; and I am ready to look for structural similarities to other mental worlds across cultures, times, and spaces, if I can find them.44 In later work, abandoning the search for a single diffusion point, Ginzburg peeled away the layers of legal and theological interpretation superimposed over a basic substratum of harvest and fertility cults, evident only in vestiges traceable here and there among records regarding witchcraft trials, to demonstrate the depth and profundity of popular beliefs and narratives in spite of their near-inaccessibility.45 Such narratives, on so many different topics, for edification and enjoyment, could have been at least a few of the basic materials available to Straparola the ethnographer avant la lettre. Indeed, a new strand in ethnographic research, recently featured on BBC News,46 joins a number of previously untried approaches to trace folktales back much farther than ever attempted. Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani apply comparative phylogenetic methods and autologistic modeling to show that a portion of the folktale material catalogued in the standard Aarne-ThompsonUther Index may go back as far as the Bronze Age.47 Using techniques normally employed for understanding more general issues of linguistic or cultural change and origin, they derive a model of variation over time by comparing various states of particular tales in different periods. Working back chronologically to a hypothetical starting point for the process of change, they conclude the origin must be located long before the advent of writing. To elucidate their work I feel inclined to reference it in their own words. To establish how far back shared folktales could be traced in Indo-European oral traditions, we mapped the evolutionary histories of the most phylogenetically conserved tales identified from the D [D is a measure of changes in a particular unit of analysis] and autologistic analyses using two models of discrete trait evolution: (i) . . . a Markov k-state one parameter model (Mk1), which estimates a single instantaneous rate of change for both gains and losses, given the distribution of the focal trait, a tree and set of branch lengths; (ii) an asymmetrical Markov k-state 2 parameter model (Mk2), which estimates separate rates for gains and losses on the tree.

Where Straparola’s early versions of tales which would later bear the more familiar names of Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, the Iron Man fit in here, I leave to others to determine; for it is time to return to my main theme. And I am beginning to think, if contemporaries had an impression that Straparola was heading up a veritable school for scandal, maybe they were right. The story of the incestuous Tebaldo, prince of Salerno, and his victim Doralice

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(I, 4) apparently belongs to the tale-group known to the folklore community as Aarne-Thompson-Uther 510B.48 That does not make it any less chilling, nor any less relevant from the standpoint of Western taboos about certain kinds of sexual relations. Tebaldo is “overcome by the strength of this devilish intent,” but Doralice manages to escape from her father’s unnatural embrace and after a series of adventures eventually becomes a king’s bride. Tebaldo pursues her to her new home, kills her children in a rage of jealousy and manages to get her accused of the crime. Thus demoted from her place of honor and reduced to the role of a criminal, she is ordered to be stripped naked and buried in sand up to her neck for the worms to consume her. Just in time to save her from her fate, an old acquaintance in Salerno discovers Tebaldo’s guilt and informs the king, who forthwith makes war on Tebaldo, captures him and orders him tortured, drawn, and quartered in a grisly final scene. Numerous stories in Straparola’s collection deal with seduction. And no wonder. Few themes were nearly so compelling to contemporaries or nearly so fraught with moral considerations. Dangers to family strategy abounded, where women played such a prominent role in the pursuit of honor, and where legitimate offspring were so necessary for the conservation of wealth.49 Apart from the obvious aspect of arranged marriages often in contrast with matters of the heart, temptations easily arose from age disparity deriving from different gender roles. Brides had to be practically adolescents, largely due to concerns about fertility, and their spouses had to be socially established—so said Leon Battista Alberti in his now famous manual on the subject.50 At least ten of Straparola’s tales deal openly with adultery. I will mention only four: in I, 5, Polissena, wife of Demetrio, is seduced by a priest; in III, 5, Isotta, wife of Lucaferro, seduces Travaglino; in V, 4, Marsilio falls in love with Tia, wife of Cecato Rabboso; and in VII, 1, Ortodosio Simeoni, husband of Isabella, makes love to Argentina the courtesan. When not dealing with adultery per se, the novels often touched upon themes of seduction. The story of Castorio’s castration in VI, 2, ostensibly about trickery, involves a lewd moment between Castorio and the wife of Sandro his neighbor. And in a study of 251 novels written between 1350 and 1560, by the whole range of authors including Boccaccio, Sacchetti, Sercambi, Grazzini, Bandello, Parabosco, Straparola, and others, Lauro Martines found no less than 150 were about seduction and the other 101 were “closely related.”51 Of the eight clearly identifiable stereotypes identified in that study—namely, the young woman or virgin, the old husband, the seducer, the intelligent go-between, the young widow, the naughty ecclesiastic, the intriguer, and the dupe or victim—all are abundantly represented here, either singly or in various combinations.

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Figure 1.2 Title page from Girolamo Parabosco, I diporti (Venice: Griffio, 1550).

Now, for the purposes of my own story, I want to focus on yet another aspect, which has less to do with what is told then with how it is told, the style rather than the substance, and here again I find myself deep in the territory of Boccaccio, the master storyteller of the early Renaissance.52 A notable feature of Boccaccio’s storytelling, and perhaps a feature that added to its irresistible allure for readers over centuries, was the carefully straddled line between licit and illicit, the suggestiveness about sinful activity without actually engaging in sinfulness by telling it—that is, lewd and polemical without blasphemy or pornography. Erotic, but not pandering. Surely Boccaccio’s supreme artistry lay at least partly in this. When Alibech’s naked beauty inspires friar Rustico to experience “the resurrection of the flesh” in III, 10, we know exactly what is going on, just as we visualize what is happening when Rustico teaches Alibech how to spread her legs in the service of the Lord and put the devil back in hell. More particularly, “cavorted to their hearts’ content” (III, 4) stands in the same way as “riding bareback astride the nag of St. Benedict” (ibid.) to signify the actions of couples

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in bed. Straparola is likewise capable of sensuous suggestiveness, where, in the novel about two friends who dupe each other into sharing each other’s wives (VI, 1), he refers to “the most loving embraces that a man ever gave to a woman,” and “many and many a time hereafter they took their pleasure together” letting the mind complete what the words do not. In concluding the book, he challenged readers to find any language that actually crossed the bounds into scurrility and blamed the over-scrupulous for their hypocrisy.53 Where suggestiveness would spoil the sense, Straparola opts for directness. In one story (VI, 4), significantly set in a “very famous monastery” of “the noble city of Florence,” the nuns cannot agree about who will be the next abbess, so the local bishop intervenes, commanding the three chief candidates to demonstrate their prowess in any way they choose. The result is a riot of scatological humor that no veiled language could convey. A candidate urinates through the eye of a needle with perfect accuracy. Another farts the grains of wheat off the surface of one of a pair of dice. Another pulverizes a peach pit between the cheeks of her behind. Part of the humor, perhaps, lies in the way the scatological vein is surrounded by the customary prim expressions of the tamer stories. “The bishop, along with the rest of the nuns, gravely pondered the abilities of all three women,” so the story concludes. “And finding nothing in his books to render the decision in such a case, left it unresolved.” There is nothing here of the torrents of bawdy language that we find in Rabelais, a rough contemporary, with whom Straparola’s name was associated by the first late-sixteenth-century German translator of Gargantua out of the French.54 He is Boccaccesque, not Rabelaisian; and there is a big difference. Another peculiarity of Boccaccio’s collection was a certain strain of religious libertinism, evident in the novellas to which I have already alluded. The very first novel of the collection referred to popular credulity and the validity of Church traditions. The protagonist is a certain Ser Ciappelletto, a villain and a cheat, who manages to fool a priest into giving him absolution in order to be buried in holy ground and achieves sainthood after death due to certain miracles having been performed in his name. Vivid anticlericalism is evinced in such other classics as the one regarding Friar Alberto (IV, 2), who persuades a girl that he is the Archangel Gabriel on a mission to make love to her. In another (I, 2), the Jew Abraham, on a visit to Rome, exalts the mercy of the Christian God who has not yet destroyed the city for its sins.55 Straparola attempts to tread the same fine line, even though the 1550s were no longer the 1350s, and his work was made to circulate in print, not in manuscript. I will see how it fares in the newly dawning world of early modern book legislation. For this was also the world of Angelica and her book.

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The Trials of Literature in an Age of Censorship

The emergence of print radically challenged the conditions for producing literature—not only by increasing the breadth of distribution, but also by bringing it far more into the public eye. I wonder how my book was affected. The first Index of Forbidden Books would be issued by Pope Paul IV only in 1558, possibly when Straparola was already in the grave, if I accept the presumed death date of around 1557. But change was already in the air—the Venetian government ordered prepublication censorship on all books already in 1527.1 Two decades later, Giovanni Della Casa, archbishop of Benevento, published a list of books to be considered heretical in terms of doctrine, although by this time the Protestant Reformation was only one of many book-related concerns. Reading and writing would never be the same again. Is a perceived change in ideas and their regulation one reason why Straparola eliminates tale three from night eight of his original collection of the Pleasant Nights, in the first one-volume edition combining the original five nights with the following eight? The novel is about a priest named father Tiberio who falls in love with Savia, wife of Chechino, a woodcarver in Florence. In their first encounter, writes Straparola (in my own translation, informed by other current ones), “seeing that she was fair and fresh as a bud with the dew upon it, graceful and well made, and in the flower of her youth,” the priest “fell so hotly in love with her that he scarce knew what he said or did, being carried away by the very sight of her beauty.” Nothing in this aspect of the story differed significantly from the Boccaccesque precedents; nor was there anything special about Savia refusing to give in to the unwanted advances and conniving with her husband to lure the priest into a trap. The type of trap nonetheless took Boccaccio’s irreligion one step further. With no hiding place ready to hand, at the arrival of Chechino the nude priest rises from the bed where Savia was supposed to join him, and spreads his arms Christ-like on a large crucifix in the room, hoping to go unnoticed among Cechino’s woodworking projects. After a day

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standing immobile in this fashion he is about to be given over to the local nuns as a finished work by Chechino, except that the nuns object to the excessively “realistic” private part, which the carver prepares to cut off, whereupon Tiberio leaps from the cross and dashes out of town, never to be seen again. Was it a second thought about such playfulness with religious imagery that eventually led to Straparola’s self-censorship? Whatever reasons he may have had for eliminating this novel from the final editions of the collection produced during his lifetime, Straparola would have had plenty more causes for concern by the time Paul IV’s Index of 1558 finally came out. There the proscriptions fell on notable classics such as the work on monarchy by Dante and all works by Machiavelli (including not only The Prince, but also the novella entitled “Belfagor, the Arch-Devil,” in which the devil takes a wife, the basis of Straparola’s night two, tale 4). Also banned were story collections like Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber facetiarum, largely plundered by later writers, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The latter was denounced for especially heinous offenses, having been, so said the compilers of the Index, “continuously printed with the most intolerable errors,” that is, errors in regard to good behavior, morals, faith, and especially, ecclesiastical decorum, which over the centuries, had never been corrected.2 If Straparola’s work was not on Paul IV’s Index, the material he took from Boccaccio (such as 12: 5, with modifications) surely was. Another even more closely related work was banned: namely, Girolamo Morlini’s Novellae of 1522. Although I have no access to the specific reasons which concerned this particular condemnation, I imagine that many of the same ones which motivated the condemnation of Boccaccio’s Decameron were at work here. Picking around in this collection for the novels which most probably incurred blame leaves me with some hard choices. What would the censors have made of the sex change in Morlini’s no. xxii, which becomes XIII, 9 in Straparola? The source was Battista Fregoso’s Factorum dictorumque memorabilium of 1508, a work of erudition, but the intent was obviously voyeuristic rather than scientific, as when the doctor performing the operation on the inexplicable swelling suffered by a girl sojourning in a convent of nuns releases an immensus priapus (in Straparola, “a certain large member . . . of a kind longed for by women”), to the consternation of the nuns, only because they would have wished to keep the newly made “boy” for their own pleasure and now are forced to share the secret with the world.3 For the moment I will say nothing of no. liv (Straparola’s XIII, 11), about a lover caught in flagrante. Straparola put his own signature of lewd allusiveness to this story—while Morlini expresses

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the sexual act simply as o[b]sculari coepit (he began to kiss), Straparola says “the priest took that thing that men hide and having raised her shift he firmly put it in the furrow made for this.”4 In spite of Straparola’s own scruples about the one-volume edition of the work, if I am not over-interpreting his replacement of the story concerning father Tiberio on night eight by two other possibly less scandalous stories, plenty remained to irritate the more delicate sensibilities. He left in the story (I, 5) about the bawdy priest who made love to Polissena, wife of Demetrio Bazzariotto of Venice, featuring scenes like this, at the moment when the suspicious husband acts on a tip and discovers the truth: The priest, who had already heard of Dimitrio’s departure, fearing neither rain nor wind, waited for the usual hour to go to his sweetheart. He made the sign and the door was immediately opened for him. After he went inside, he gave her a sweet, passionate kiss. When Dimitrio saw this as he was hiding in a narrow passageway, and when he was unable to contradict what his good friend had told him, he was absolutely astonished, and because of the justifiable grief he felt, he began to cry.5

The usual versified enigma offered at the end of the story by the fictional storyteller (Lauretta) is in this case based on a simple equivocation due to homonymy (the forename Ciascun for the qualifier ciascun meaning each) and has nothing to do with either the story or the subject matter. The enigma offered at the end of V, 5 to the contemplation of the fictional listeners (and the reader), however, could be regarded as somewhat audacious. No one could mistake the meaning, which the Waters translation conveys sufficiently well in spite of the substitution of ottava rima by couplets in tetrameter: My lady seats her in a chair, And raises then her skirt with care; And as I know she waits for me, I bring her what she fain would see. Then soft I lift her dainty leg, Whereon she cries, “Hold, hold, I beg! It is too strait, and eke too small; Be gentle, or you’ll ruin all.” And so to give her smallest pain, I try once more, and eke again.6

Pronounced by the storyteller Cateruzza, this enigma is said to have “provoked as much laughter as the Signora’s ingenious fable” about a wife who keeps a

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collection of all the pairs of shoes left behind by her various lovers. Almost as a challenge to would-be censors overwhelmed with the surfeit of metaphor that had grown up around the criminalization of lewdness in print, Straparola has Cateruzza insist that the subject is “tight shoes” not the closely fitting body parts that might occur to the lascivious mind. Yet another tale Straparola left in his self-expurgated edition was the one about a Genoese named Liberale who desires intercourse with Daria, the wife of a merchant away on business (VI, 1). To put her into a compliant frame of mind he invents a ruse, suggesting that the best way of finding lost items around the house was by a conjuring trick involving a search within her private parts enjoined after the following incantation: What you go searching for and do not now find At the bottom of the hairy valley lies Which keeps it hidden from your eyes. But fish well, fish well and you shall find.7

With her eager to reclaim her missing jewels and other objects (actually concealed by him), he “begins to fish in the hairy valley” utilizing the appropriate anatomical instrument, pulling up this jewel and that, and casting his line well in, until she demands more than the completely exhausted fisherman can cast at the moment, so the fishing expedition comes to a halt and they part. This time the concluding enigma begins “O my bright thing, hard and white/ Partly hairy, partly perforated” and ends as one might expect. Such was the text that escaped the censors in 1558. And what am I to make of the one about friar Bigoccio of Rome (XI, 5), who falls in love with a certain damsel named Gliceria, and even disguises himself as a layperson to go and marry her, but when he finds her pregnant he loses his passion and escapes back to the monastery? One day on a casual visit to the monastery church, the scorned woman, now a mother, recognizes him and reports him to the superior, who thereupon initiates legal proceedings, which eventually conclude in “making him do such a penance as he should remember for the rest his days.” Arguably, the successful judicial solution to this case of clerical misbehavior answered the demands of conventional morality to some degree. But the basic focus of the story is on how the couple “took much pleasure with one another,” including an interesting diversion into sex games involving playful toys: she, a pair of white gloves, he a hawk’s jess. I won’t go into details here. Obviously, the ban on Straparola was only a matter of time; and sooner or later the enemies of the sensual arts would turn their sights on him. By the time

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he wrote, a century of discussion had already touched on all possible themes connected with the evil effects of uncontrolled reading—a somewhat sensitive area considering the high regard in which the Renaissance humanists held the “pagan” writers, in spite of St. Jerome’s supposed refusal to read them (disputed by Lorenzo Valla).8 Yet within Renaissance culture there was always a certain tension between the natural human desire for knowledge recommended by Aristotle and the libido sciendi especially regarding “not necessary things,” decried by stillremembered medieval moralists like William of Auvergne.9 Humanist learning, Adriano Prosperi reminds me, excelled in skills of “correction,” “emendation,” “refinement,” in respect to texts as well as in respect to intellects.10 When Juan Luis Vives wrote about “the disciplines,” he used the term in all its senses, and he insisted on the “cultivation of minds,” something like the cultivation of plants using precision techniques, which separated humans from beasts and rendered them pleasing to God, who gave them letters.11 Pedagogy separated the few from the many, infusing minds, not with just anything, but with verified knowledge from trusted sources, carefully sifted and evaluated by the humanists.12 Authors were not to be chosen at random, but from a list; and those who edified were vastly preferred to those who did not. The discovery and diffusion of truths never went unaccompanied by the “suppression” of “error.” The Renaissance academies often employed an individual in the guise of a “censor,” responsible for vetting material to be presented for discussion or publication, eliminating what was not “suitable.” Vincenzo Borghini, a courtier of Cosimo I de’ Medici, was by no means the only academic who actually served a more public role as an official censor for the press.13 To some degree the advance of book censorship was simply an extension into the practical world of state and church bureaucracy of practices already conceived and theorized by the teachers, scholars, and theologians. Finally in 1563 the Council of Trent rolled into action, in Session 25, against books of heresy, magic and witchcraft, and, most pertinently, those “that deal with, narrate or teach things lascivious or obscene.”14 To be sure there were plenty of doubts, even within the Church itself, about exactly what book censorship was supposed to accomplish, such that the commissioner of the newly created Congregation on the Index Michele Ghislieri wondered whether the road now taken might ultimately lead to the condemnation of all culture, ancient and modern.15 To no avail. Imaginative writing, the council fathers insisted, must be carefully scrutinized, “since not only the matter of faith but also that of morals, which are usually easily corrupted through the reading of such books, must be taken into consideration, and those who possess them are to be severely punished

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by the bishops.”16 Almost as an afterthought, they added, “Ancient books written by heathens may by reason of their elegance and quality of style be permitted, but may by no means be read to children.” Two years after the Tridentine decree, Andrea Revenoldo and Giorgio de’ Zilij (Gigli), perhaps with financing from Giovanni Bonadio, produced an edition of the Pleasant Nights designed to forestall criticism and censure without tampering drastically with the contents. Perhaps the changes were not yet such as to break a writer’s heart or disappoint a reader (as other later changes might). Indeed, anyone knowing the original would possibly have had a good laugh at the expense of any prude who dared to interfere, for instance in tale IV, 1, where one of the many scenes interpreted by the miraculously prescient satyr Chiappino is a child’s burial where a priest is singing, actually the child’s father—here demoted from priest to simple cleric. In VI, 1 the “fishing” expedition involves fewer casts into the lady’s “hairy valley.” In IX, 5 the girl who dresses as a servant and spouts Latin phrases to fool the Florentine merchants into thinking the Bergamo locals are exceedingly well educated, is no longer a nun in disguise. In XI, 3, Don Pomporio Monaco, with the clerical epithet as part of his name, becomes the anagrammatical Don Pomporio Comona, and the story is no longer about a convent but about a private home. In the story of the three nuns aspiring to become the mother superior (VI, 4), the bawdy body parts competition becomes a tournament in sacred oratory. Suor Veneranda tells the story of Jesus Christ; Suor Pacifica narrates the life and letters of St. Catherine of Siena; and Suor Modesta decries the vanities of the world, to such great effect that some of the listeners were “ready to leave this life very soon.” The new version thematized the clampdown on libertine Italy. How many readers would have gotten the joke? So far as I know, Straparola’s work had no champions within the Congregation on the Index; so I can only imagine that the longish wait for the eventual condemnation was due to negligence not indulgence. It apparently first attracted the attention of the Roman censors in 1574, not for placing on an Index but on a handbill or placard (28 cm by 10 cm) entitled “Aviso ai librai” (Warning to booksellers), issued for the sake of information, a kind of watch list.17 There it was included among forty-two prohibitions evidently intended to augment the list of 1558, as an interim measure before the compilation of a more complete Index. It next appeared on various local indexes around Italy in the 1580s, and would have been placed on the Roman one in 1590, in the category of works which could circulate only if corrected (i.e., with the saucy bits taken out). Then came a reprieve, when the death of Sixtus V brought the promulgation of the

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new Index to a halt, and meanwhile it dropped off the list for the next Index of 1596.18 Finally, in a decree of 1607 it received due attention, and the name of the work was accompanied by the definitive statement “completely prohibited.” In what circumstances did my own broken copy of Straparola begin its life? Its legal status depends to some degree on that. When I acquired it I had no idea when or where it was printed, since it lacked a title page and therefore also a date and place, these being just the pieces of information that the printer did not bother to repeat when he placed a wonderful engraving of the Fates spinning out the lives of humans on the first recto of part two. It could have belonged to any one of the thirty-three or so editions listed by the bibliographers as having circulated in Italy between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the other convenient methods of determining which edition it happened to be, I was missing some key elements. Among the portion of the bibliophile community engaged in material bibliography, the preferred technique for identifying particular editions without actually having to view a number of exemplars in a host of libraries, a highly expensive hit-and-miss operation, is the comparison of the so-called fingerprints of each. Such fingerprints can be found in the online bibliographical records of the libraries where the tradition of analytical bibliography is more seriously practiced. Under normal circumstances, a quick search of such records should have answered my query; but these were not normal circumstances. An excursion into analytical bibliography seems therefore inevitable, if only to understand how to proceed. Suddenly I find myself in a new land, with respect to my usual interdisciplinary stomping-ground; and I attempt to gather what I can, while I am here. According to this approach, codified in the so-called London-Oxford-Cambridge collaboration (LOC), the fingerprint of a book is the string of sixteen alphanumeric characters (in four groups of four) which establishes beyond a reasonable doubt the exact identity of a particular edition.19 Thus if you have, say, two copies of a book, both labeled “Venezia: Marescotti, 1565,” the fingerprint would determine whether they belong to the same composition of characters or not. The method, meticulous but essentially simple, has the added advantage of being utilized by the major repositories of early books. To formulate a fingerprint I begin by going to the first folio (recto not verso!) after the frontispiece and taking the last two alphanumeric characters, reading left to right, from the final line (excluding any or signature or catchword), followed by the last two characters of the penultimate line. I have to suppose that this folio is not also a frontispiece. To get the next four characters I take the same combination from the final and penultimate lines, but this time,

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from the end of the fourth printed recto after the folio used for the first group of four. For the third group there are two possibilities: if the folios are numbered, I take the usual combination of characters from the end of a correctly numbered folio 13 recto; or else, if there is no such, the same for 17 recto. If neither of these is possible, if the folios are not numbered, or if such a folio was already used for groups one or two, I use the fourth recto following what was used for group 2. For the fourth group, I go to the verso of the folio I just used and take the first two characters of the final line and the first two of the penultimate line. Then I indicate at the end of the fourth group, in parentheses, where the characters for the third group originated: “3” if from page 13 or xiii; “7” if from page 17 or xvii, or else I put a “C” when the pages were hand counted either because there was no numeration or because there were not enough of them, and an “S” if it’s just a flysheet. Finally I put the date of the publication, followed by a special suffix denoting whether appearing in Arabic or Roman numerals. Thus if I go back to Straparola’s original New Work (Opera nova), published in 1508, here is the fingerprint: teia sosi o.ne qune (C) 1508 (A)

Suppose I take the 1558 copy of Straparola’s Pleasant Nights conserved in the Bavarian State Library. I compile: sehe etuo a,to lemu (3) 1558 (A)

The Italian union catalog (SBN) tells me that an exactly identical copy exists in the library of the Turin Academy of Sciences. Other editions have other fingerprints. Which, then, is mine? I have no title page, but why not match the characters on the other pages? There are dozens of possible candidates, even if the British Library and the Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund (GBV) mostly give no fingerprints online. Just as I begin feeling somewhat comfortable with the technique, my problems begin. As it turns out, not every identification system is applicable to every case; so comparing online catalog entries is not going to help. Although the first four characters of the fingerprint are to be drawn from the first recto page following the frontispiece, unfortunately my folios start at 25, except for a loose folio 9. Therefore, I am also out of luck for the second group of four characters, which should be four rectos later than the first, as well as for the third group of characters, which is from either 13 or 17 recto, and the fourth group, which shortly follows this. What to do? Libraries are my only salvation; all that is left is to compare my edition to whatever others I can lay my hands on. I’ll spare

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Figure 2.1 Title page from Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1570).

my reader the disappointments and move straight to the triumphs. Without going into detail, suffice to say that after a long search through a good part of the twenty-five or so editions dated to before 1600 that are available online and in situ I get a hit. Mine is identical in every respect to the Farri edition of Venice

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1570, conserved among the Stampati Palatini at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. This in itself is an important finding, linking my story once again to the theme of publication and danger. Clearly, my 1570 edition would have been no more or less subject to inquisitorial curiosity than any other edition of the work, but its printer, Domenico Farri, was a well-known rule breaker. In 1567 he dared to print a counterfeit edition of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the exclusive printing rights to which had been conceded by Rome to another Venetian printer, Paolo Manuzio. He even decorated the title page of the counterfeit with the distinctive anchor emblem of the Manuzio printing house (made famous by the humanist printer Aldo Manuzio, Paolo’s father). As far as I know, he only stopped distributing the work when Paolo complained and the Venetian Senate intervened.20 Again in 1571 he was called before the Holy Office for collaborating with others on a clandestine edition of the Office of the Blessed Virgin, whose exclusive printing rights belonged to the Venetian printer Bernardino Torresani. Finally in 1590, he was accused of printing yet another work without the necessary permissions: an edition of the Examen ordinandorum, containing “whatever pertains to the institution of the Christian Religion, briefly digested” with writings by various authors collected by a Carmelite priest named Nicolò Bonfigli (called Aurifico). If his infractions seemed to involve mainly religious and not secular material, perhaps the priorities of the Inquisition and Index are worth bearing in mind, which were far more energetically directed to such material than to any other. As Straparola editions go, Farri’s was neither the best nor the worst. His was clearly outdone by that of the printer Alessandro de’ Vecchi in 1599, incorporating the One Hundred Enigmas published in Bologna five years before by popular writer Giulio Cesare Croce.21 The title page on this edition was adorned with a vignette framed by two female nudes on the sides pouring water from large jars, one pointing her finger upwards to the top frame where the printer’s emblem features a twig with three roses, the other pointing down to where a river god frames the bottom of the page. Across the jars the diction GIOR and DAN indicates Giordano Zanetti, de’ Vecchi’s partner on the project, with a play on the name referring also to the sacred river Giordano (Jordan), where Christ was baptized, somewhat rude in the present context of bawdy stories. Zanetti had apparently used this title page decoration at least once before, in 1570, for a work on measurement by Silvio Belli entitled Libro del misurar con la vista, using his own emblem at the top. In the present instance, the right-hand nude’s downward indication of the river god could symbolize the two printers’ collaboration as two rivulets forming a larger current of combined labor. Not pictured was de’

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Vecchi’s motto “dabo omnibus gratum odorem” [I will give everything a pleasant odor], referring to his sometimes ribald publication list, which would have been particularly apt here, but which the printer perhaps preferred to leave implicit in the trope of flowing water washing away all corruption. Next follows a splendid full-page frontispiece apparently depicting the framing tale in the Prologue. Last but not least, each and every story in the de’ Vecchi edition is accompanied by an evocative half-page print. To be sure, what is being depicted is not always exactly clear. For instance, the illustration referring to the first tale on night one shows two bearded men on horseback in the foreground, evidently proceeding toward the city portrayed in the background, from whose main gate a winding road extends toward them. Are they Salardo and his beloved father Rainaldo? Yet according to the story, when Salardo sets out on his journey away from Genoa “to satisfy some appetite of his,” ending up in the state of Montferrat, he is accompanied by his wife Theodora Doria and their adopted son. Perhaps the illustration shows two times in the story: namely, a time when son and father rode together before the latter died, and the time when Salardo went seeking other horizons. The town in the background could well be Casale Monferrato, the margravate’s chief city on the banks of the river Po. Much clearer and to the point were the less elaborate illustrations in the 1604 and 1608 editions of this tale, which for this first story depict the crucial scene where the bound Salardo is being brought before the Marquis of Montferrat on charges that will result in a death sentence and a later reprieve. And again, the 1599 image for the story of Cassandrino the master thief magnificently portrays a bound person being led through the streets and beaten with a whip as people look on. Since the story describes no such scene, is this a hypothetical representation of what might have happened if Cassandrino had been caught in one of his robberies? The 1604 and 1608 editions instead show, in an admittedly smaller and less perfect rendering, the key moment in the story, as the master thief climbs down through the hole in the roof of the praetor’s house bearing the corpse of a physician dressed as himself, in an elaborate substitution which will fool the praetor into giving him a promised prize. To find a reason for these discrepancies I turn to another book published by de’ Vecchi the year before, his edition of Sansovino’s Cento novelle, where I find the same illustrations, but applied to different stories.22 Here they easily fit: the image of the two gentlemen on horseback refers to Sansovino’s day V, tale 4, concerning a group of knights and ladies who set off for a designated destination to enjoy a festive meal; and the image of the man being whipped through the streets from the same work, III, 6, refers to Teodoro who loves Violante the

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daughter of Messer Amerigo his lord, and gets her pregnant, whereupon he is condemned to be hanged and whipped through the streets, before finally getting a reprieve. Was de’ Vecchi aware of his own creation? The transferability of images from edition to edition, in part an artifact of cost-saving measures within the printing industry, generates a new level of meaning and interpretation adding further delight, reminding us about the complexities of Renaissance reading even where images were scarce. Of course, that these stories lent themselves so easily to visual representation also reminds us about the implicit visuality that was particular feature of sixteenth-century storytelling. In Angelica’s case, she would have had to keep her images in her head. However, there is some progress. Not only do I have an identity for the printer and the edition. I now have the earliest possible date for the acquisition of the book: in 1570 or sometime after that. And by whom? Here the plot gets a little thicker. Once again, owners of books often place their names on the book cover: there is none here. Or else the gift giver may sign the copy on the first pages: “to Roberto with best wishes from Tommaso.” Another text on my shelf, a Templum morale confessorum by Giovanni Girolamo Frezza, printed in Venice in 1694, is inscribed on fol. i verso thus: “Laus Deo. Adesso del Prete Michel Angelo Casucci da Castiglione Fiorentino per suo uso, pagato dal sopranominato pauli 2 = lire 1.6:8 questo dì di 30 maggio 1724,” attributing the book to this new owner, the said priest from Castiglione Fiorentino, for which he paid 2 paoli, or 1 lire 6 soldi 8 denari. A portion of the page above the inscription is torn off, presumably where the previous owner was inscribed. Now, Angelica’s book has no first pages. However, astonishingly, in the middle of the book, precisely on folio 144 verso, at the end of the fourth night of the first five nights which made up part one of the work, there is an acknowledgment of ownership, to wit: “Questo libro si è di langelica Baldachini,” in other words, “this book belongs to Angelica Baldachini.” I now know two things. I know who owned the book and I know the owner was a woman. Obviously, I have not exhausted the topic of Straparola and his book, that is, Angelica’s book. However, I do sense that I have reached a denouement. The time has come to turn my attention fully to the second fundamental piece of evidence in my story, and to make my acquaintance, however possible, with the person whose existence I can sense but not explain. Though her features are elusive, I will not be discouraged. The signing of a piece of property by its former owner to indicate the connection between her and it, to make a claim on another part of reality making it hers, encompassing within her reality the extraneous element of a book, raises a fresh set of questions.

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A Woman’s Hand

Who then was Angelica Baldachini? Why did she have this book? Indeed, what did this book mean to her? I shall begin with the first of these questions—not because it is the hardest but because so much regarding the others depends upon this. From the outset I am beset by a series of difficulties. Apart from her name on this book, no clue so far has surfaced connecting the person to her writing. And after all what is in a name? Shakespeare said, not much, and by way of a famous speech placed in the mouth of one of his best-loved characters, he mused upon the arbitrariness of nomenclature in respect to the things named.1 The space of the action in Romeo and Juliet left no room for deep reflection about the reality or unreality of specific categories, apart from the objects in them, an argument which bothered philosophers from Plato to Aristotle and beyond. Far from being purely arbitrary, names are highly significant markers of biological origins, family derivation, social rank, religious affiliation, gender, and culture. But before any of these meanings is attached to the name, there are the letters themselves, which form syllables pronounceable by the community capable of understanding what is written, or even merely hearing what is uttered. These utterances themselves have a history and may be rooted in the place.2 Angelica at first, before correcting, signs herself “Angellica” with two ls—a slightly uncommon spelling, but typical of the relative freedom within given norms, to make single into double consonants, or double into single, which I  encounter in many Florentine documents. A certain “Angellica” was buried in Santa Maria Novella in 1589, daughter (wife?) of a “Jacopo manovale,” a laborer.3 However spelled, the frequency of the name is hard to determine. The alphabetical listing of given names in the Florentine catasto of 1427, including males and females holding property in early-fifteenth-century Florence, yields Agnoletta, Alamanna, Albiera, Albizzina, Aldighiera, Alessandra, Ambrosina, Andreola, Angela, with a leap from here down to the name Antonia.4 No Angelica, either with or without an extra l. However, the name occurs from

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Figure 3.1 Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1570), vol. 1, fol. 144v.

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time to time in the baptismal registers conserved in the Florence cathedral archives, which begin in 1461. Just in that year, in fact, I find an “Angelica di Marco di Antonio”—daughter of Antonio’s son Marco—baptized on April 20, 1461.5 Another name in the earliest records, “Fiammetta,” occurs with greater frequency, perhaps an allusion to the character in Boccaccio’s Visione amorosa (known in English as Amorous Fiammetta). For literary allusions, the fifteenth century is too early for the name “Angelica”: there will be more chances later on. By the mid-1500s, baptismal records, more and more attuned to the hardening status lines in Florentine society, begin to include occupational data as well as names and dates. I thus find “Angelica di Stefano di Domenico, tessitore,” evidently a weaver’s daughter, baptized on September 21, 1544, “Angelica di Battista di Matteo, fornaio,” a baker’s daughter baptized on March 16, the following year, “Angelica di Leonardo di Battista, ortolano,” daughter of a greengrocer baptized on August 19, 1545, “Angelica di Cristoforo di Pasquale mugnaio,” the daughter of a miller baptized on December 8,6 and “Angelica di Marco di Pietro scultore,” daughter of a sculptor baptized on November 15, 1554.7 Occasionally there is a surname, as: “Angelica di Paulo di Michele Ferruzzi,” baptized on January 27, 1567; or “Angelica di Noferi di Francesco Dazi,” baptized on January 31, 1567.8 A common diction appears to be “Angelica, degli Innocenti,” referring to a girl child left on the anonymous foundling wheel at the hospital of the Innocenti, under Filippo Brunelleschi’s elegant loggia across the piazza from the Church of Santissima Annunziata, such as I find having been baptized on January 22, 1543 (along with a certain “Agnese” from the same place), on March 24, October 5, and December 9, 1544, on October 31, 1546, on December 23, 1547 (along with a certain Albina), and again on February 19, 1548, and so on.9 In these cases, no doubt, the name applied by the nuns of the hospital (not by the parents), would refer to the hope that the “angelical” aspect might augur future blessings for the child in spite of such inauspicious beginnings. Those whose baptism is not recorded in a particular place may yet have died there. The records of the Florentine magistracy, the Grascia, in charge of burials, are eloquent regarding who, when, and where. The same chancery practices operating in the baptismal lists also work here: individuals are identified by their fathers’ names and, in the case of women, by their husbands’, followed by the relevant trade, if there is one. After 1600, surnames become common even among the trades, although certain individuals, especially in the fine arts, have a dignity all their own. “Agnola,” for instance, was listed as the wife of “Jacopo Ligozzi, pittore.”10 Known to the scholarship as “Angela di Francesco Baldassini da Como,” she apparently died a month before the famous biological

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Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy

illustrator and Medici history painter, known for two great murals in the Salone del Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio; and she was buried in the Church of San Marco, next to the Casino di San Marco where Jacopo always had his shop, rather than in the town of Verona, where they started out their fifty-five-year marriage and where she lived for a time alone with the children before heading down to meet him. Not all observations are relevant, however much I would like them to be. Could Angelica Baldachini be the same as Angelica Baldaccini who died in November 1644 in the parish of San Lorenzo?11 The dates could possibly coincide, even considering that Angelica may have been in her maturity already by 1600. Perhaps indeed, “Giovanni Torcitore,” or “Giovanni the Throwster,” a man specialized in twisting silk for spinning, was married to the Angelica who read my book. Surely a person married to a laborer in the silk trade could have asserted his surname as her own with the same confidence as might a person born to a man bearing that surname. And if Angelica could write her forename with such latitude that she occasionally multiplied the letters l, perhaps she could write her acquired surname with a variation exchanging a c for a h. If this is so, “Angelica (Angellica) Baldaccini (Baldachini)” could be an example contrary to the accepted view that practically denies access to books, to reading, and to writing, at the lower ranks of the manual arts, except to the male half of humanity, and especially, access to books about sexual pleasure. The temptation is strong to suspend my search and declare a winner, to announce that the lost author of my book inscription has now been found. I decide to press on. Those involved in the choice of a name, usually a child’s birth parents and their wider families (except in the special cases just mentioned), may be inspired by many things. Was there something so obviously “angelic” about Angelica? Angelic in aspect, as a female baby child might be, or angelic in potentiality, in character, in future prospects, or all of these combined: such may have been the concept. Other influences may include family tradition, significant places or times, holy or respected persons, or indeed literary figures. After the 1490s, there is a possible literary allusion of equal significance to “Fiammetta,” with the publication of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato [Orlando in Love], and again after the 1530s, with Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso [The Frenzy of Orlando], two classics of the Renaissance epic romance tradition, both of which have a character called “Angelica” as the female protagonist. In Ariosto’s poem, she is a pagan princess, the daughter of the king of Cathay, and she becomes the love-object of sacred warriors among both pagans and Christians. The independent-minded

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Angelica eventually chances upon the wounded Saracen warrior Medoro, nurses him back to health, and runs off with him, driving the secretly enamored Orlando to madness. She is a trophy worth the best efforts of the greatest males of her generation: was this the goal her parents set for the owner of my book? Or was this literary allusion to Orlando actually a subtle class marking— ignoring for a moment the name-use for foundlings? Social scientists have claimed to find a connection between certain names and certain destinies in modern times, correlating for instance “Alexandra,” “Lauren,” and “Katharine,” with high income and higher education, compared to other names, such as “Amber,” “Heather,” and “Kayla,” correlated with the opposite.12 So far, evidence suggests that the name “Angelica,” like the names Alessandra, Artemisia, and Antonia, was deeply rooted in every social stratum of Florence. Fashions may change and yesterday’s high-end names may work their way down the social ladder from time to time, reappearing generations later. What the status of the “Angelica” name was at the specific time in which the name was given to “my” Angelica, I simply cannot judge. However, I am inclined to think that namefashions then were far more anchored in history and memory than they are today, when fortunes and families are made and broken in the blink of an eye. Perhaps she was a replacement for someone else, a “remade” child. A study of family lineages in fifteenth-century Florence revealed that nearly 75 percent of given names out of a sampling of 266 children were obviously passed down within the family. And considering the well-established predominance of males among those responsible for determining children’s names, I was somewhat surprised to find that the chosen names, for both male and female children, were drawn just as frequently from the female line as from the male one. In domestic discussions about the issue, apparently either side could win. Female children, moreover, in one-third of the cases, three times more often than their male counterparts, received the same name as an earlier sibling who died, suggesting the silent operation of a sort of compensatory mechanism to offset the presence of high infant mortality rates. Did Angelica have a sister, similarly named? Was she the surrogate for a lost child, a symbol of her parents’ present sadness and future hopes? Bearing the name of a predecessor would have inscribed her more definitely within the wider group of the extended family.13 In the study of fifteenth-century names, over a quarter could not be attributed to origins within the family. Was the same true a hundred years later, and was Angelica’s one of these? Surnames, too, were laden with significance, but of a different kind. By Angelica’s time, they no longer possessed a literal meaning connected with the

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word or words that made them up. “Di Pietro” no longer necessarily meant “of Peter,” as a sort of patronymic or as a sign signifying some relation of dependence to another individual such as a servant to a master. “Medici” no longer meant “of the healer,” if it ever did mean that, as one popular tradition attests was the distant origin of the name, due to a particularly resourceful ancestor.14 “Mancini” was detached from its original “left-hander” if there ever was one, “Serangeli” no longer made reference to some ser (i.e., notary) named Angelo. Likewise “Baldachini” (or its variant, Baldacchini) no longer meant “originating from ‘Baldaccha’,” which the seventeenth-century Tuscan genealogist Eugenio Gamurrini, reporting this tradition, identifies as “a city in Judea,” in fact, the Tuscan form for “Baghdad.”15 The medieval reinvention of surnames (apparently a prior Etruscan novelty) had been a boon especially where the stock of given names was being exhausted. Epithets and descriptives—“Spadaro” (sword maker), “Calzolaio” (shoemaker), “Fabbri” (smiths)—hardened into permanent designations. To a degree, the succession of patronymics could satisfy the necessity to designate which holder of a particularly common name might be meant, so that Giovanni di Giovanni di Donato would not be confused with Giovanni di Giovanni di Francesco; although we assume such awkward dictions would more likely be used in writing than in speech. Women too could be referred to the paterfamilias, as “Giovanna di Domenico.” Even after family names became rooted in history and tradition, epithets, and designations reappeared from time to time where endogamy restricted variety, such that the Venetian family Pisani “dal banco” who controlled a family bank could be distinguished from the Pisani “moretta” who descended from a certain “Almoretto.” Much later in nearby Chioggia, avoiding the possible confusion due to a surfeit of family groups bearing surnames like Scarpa, Tiozzo, and Boscolo, there evolved the so-called nicknames, distinguishing, for reasons mostly forgotten, a Boscolo “Pecchie” (bees) line from a Boscolo “capon” (capon). The real Angelica, for all I know, exists in no other book, either as an owner or as a writer. Nor can I easily proceed from the surname to the name. No “Baldachini” exists among the office-holding families in Florence from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. And among the property-holders listed on the tax rolls there is no entry for this name until 1654, when we find “Pier Camillo di Filippo Baldacchini, di Cortona,” being assessed for two scudi in the Red Lion district, comprising the parishes of San Pancrazio, San Paolino, and Santa Maria degli Ughi, within the Santa Maria Novella quarter in Florence.16 This does not exclude the possibility that the family rented property in Florence before this. If I suppose she belonged to a family which left some

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traces somewhere, the information gap would be at least be partially explainable by the indication that the family came instead from Cortona, a city acquired for a sum of money by  the Florentine Republic in 1411 that eventually became a major stronghold of the Tuscan grand dukedom. According to the nineteenthcentury genealogist Giovanni Battista di Crollalanza, the family migrated around Italy, with an important branch eventually settling in Naples, where they were designated by the more elaborate diction, “Baldacchini-Gargano.” How the family came to be associated with the Red Lion district is anyone’s guess. Count Enrico Ceramelli-Papiani (1896–1976), a passionate blazonry enthusiast whose collection is now conserved in the Florentine Archives, illustrates the arms thus (as I interpret in the terms of the art): party per pale, or and or, three wavy lines dexter azure, and sinister a bar azure.17 Angelica’s? Baldachini personages made their mark on history before and after her. I do not know if she was the child of one of these, or even the distant relative; but I will not let this discourage me from surveying the range of possibilities. Apart from the family’s intermarriage in the fourteenth century with the Casali, lords of Cortona, and the various ancestors who held office in the rotating administrative bodies of the city, the annals of Tuscan historical record-keeping (in spite of glaring documentary deficiencies decried by Gamurrini) refer to Filippo Baldachini (or Baldacchini), jurist and poet at the turn of the fifteenth century, trained in both civil and canon law, who held various positions under Popes Clement VII and Leo X, culminating in a governorship of the city of Perugia.18 Was Filippo indeed, as Gamurrini suggests, the founder of the only line of the family that survived to the end of the seventeenth century? According to this interpretation, he would have married relatively late in life just to avoid the imminent extinction of his line; and then he embarked upon a purely secular career representing the city of Cortona vis-à-vis the Tuscan government. Regarding the identity of this new wife, as well as that of most other women in the family tree, the records are silent. Filippo Baldacchini seems to me to make an interesting hypothetical ancestor for Angelica, even if his publications did not stand up to the scrutiny of the eighteenth-century soi-disant reformers of Italian language and literature, who read and derided them. “Not only ridiculous and full of foolishness, but also lewd,” Giammaria Mazzucchelli proclaimed them, in his six-volume bio-bibliography of Italian literature arriving up to the letter B.19 They fared only slightly better in the 1960s, at least as far as Grazia Guglielmi was concerned, characterizing them in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani entry as “generally monotonous.”20 Tastes change, of course, and the custodians of taste in one epoch may be the

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custodians of boredom in another. Baldacchini’s poetry seems relatively tame by modern standards; and it fits typologically with a vast quantity of academic verse written at the time, neither better nor worse. A work entitled Prothocinio (from a relatively obscure Latin word meaning “defense”) purports, in part one, to examine poetically all the variants in the various moods regarding the “state of love”: namely, the “prayers of love,” the “suspicions of love,” the “quarrels of love,”

Figure 3.2 Title page of Filippo Baldacchini, Libro secondo del Prothocinio (Perugia: Baldassarre Cartolari, 1525).

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the “hopefulness of love,” the “inconstancy of love,” “the injuries of love,” and in the second part, to demolish the positive aspects of the first part by exploring the “enemies of love,” the “fears of love,” the “wars of love,” the “infamy of love,” and the “transformation of love” into its opposite.21 I cannot promise that the following translation of one of the love poems conveys the presence or absence of artistic qualities in the original, only that it reflects the subject matter: I love and cannot bend love with my prayer It keeps me in suspicion and laments. Uncertainty and hope are always there: Injury and enmity ever-present. The heart is lost and every bone is bare. For faithful service only punishment. My enemy is love: and this is war; I’m barred from heav’n, but earth wants me no more.22 [Amo & con prieghi amor piegar non posso De sospecto e lamenti me mantiene. Spero inconstantia m’è continuo addosso: Ingiurie inimicitie in me contiene. Perduto è ‘l core e fracassato ogni osso: Per mio fidel servir reporto pene. Inimico mi è amore et mi fa guerra: Il ciel mi chiude et non me vole in terra.]

Other verses suggest that more was at play here than mere lip service to the Petrarchan tradition. Around the time of the publication or shortly afterward Baldacchini became a prelate (the prerequisite for his position as an Apostolic prothonotary). I seem to find some tantalizing autobiographical elements in the poem that begins, “Quel che non fece amor, facci lo sdegno”: What love has failed to do, leave to disdain, Entreaties, malice, waiting and deceit Our customs and our times so soon shall meet The faithful ones can always use the brain. To change the route and plan has come the time This malady will need a different cure In no way can I last another year I’ll have to move my things to other clime.23

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Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy [Quel che non fece amor facci Io sdegno Tempo importunità malitia e inganno: Così i costumi & l’età nostre vanno: Mostrasi fede et poi s’adopra ingegno. Mutar bisogna viaggio & desegno: Altro medico vol quest’altro affanno; Non andrà insieme questo & un’altro anno Che tutta harò mia parte in l’altrui regno.]

If such verses reflect a state of mind vacillating between the sacred life and the secular, we have to conclude that in the end, after renouncing the bishopric of Assisi and taking a wife, he attempted to have both. In another work published in Perugia the same year, Baldacchini developed this theme of contrasting options, sacred and profane, into a Dialogue on Patience featuring Flesh and Spirit in debate. His internal struggle, he explained, brought about an intense reflection about the nature of thought, the force of the intellect and the ways of the will. Intent on this not only by day and by wakeful night, but also in the deep slumber of my imaginative sense, ruminating about my daytime reveries, I have often considered the “yes” and the “no” together in order to discern clearly how to base my thoughts on truer and more convincing reasons, wherefore I might be able to determine which of the two alternatives was the better choice.

The delights of the world beckoned on one side, and the goods of the spirit on the other. “Who are you to speak to me so arrogantly, as though you were the real master,” Flesh complains.24 Spirit responds, “I instead am your master and both of us are under the same God.” Unlike Saints Paul and Augustine, whom he cites (along with Juvenal, Seneca, the juris consult Ulpian and many others), he seemed to find no solace in the truths of faith. Instead, he concludes with a compromise, articulated by Spirit, agreeing to “set his house in order” so as to be prepared should the end arrive suddenly; but “house” obviously also has a literal connotation in regard to lineage, considering that the entire dialogue is preceded by a poem explaining the Baldacchini coat of arms. Life in the Church, according to other reflections in the same work, was a farfrom-perfect option, as the system was founded on deceit and distributed power unjustly. “What are the canonical institutions good for?” he asked, except to bring persons in, who had legitimately inherited, “and take their possessions,” while giving authority to “those who instead of ruling ought to be ruled.” The obvious result was that the “weak flock has wolves pasturing among them.”25 Clerical positions

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seemed to go to the most unworthy, rather than to those urged by vocation: “The gambler, the thief, the person tarnished by infamy/ Jail-priests fit only for the prison/ Without knowledge, ignorant fools.” The Church was becoming “a house deserted and bereft of all goodness.” As a prelate himself, he could only say, “My breast is bursting, and the reason is clear.”26 No wonder that “preaching in our time is nothing other than mere pomposity full of fables and novellas.”27 Novellas like those in the tradition of Boccaccio, and eventually, of Straparola? In Baldacchini’s reflection concerning the ills of the world, women play an important part. Flesh laments the demise of his late consort, but Spirit cruelly refers to “how much destruction, how many conflagrations, how many murders, how many curses, how much damage has occurred and continues to occur” because of women, to correct any illusions about whether “the death of women is to be lamented.”28 Beginning with Eve, the fount of all evil recounted in Genesis, and proceeding down to Helen, the cause of bloodshed related by Homer, and Queen Semiramis, the perpetrator of incest as told by Justin, and other dangerous females in legend and lore, Spirit adds, women give rise to “all discord and all divisions between blood brothers” as well as causing “destruction of the paternal house and the house where they go in matrimony.” No wonder, when girls are born parents keep silent because “they see fire coming into the world,” whereas they rejoice in male babies. In the end, Flesh can only concede “It’s all true.” The Baldacchini women in fact remained in the background. Would Filippo have encouraged them to read? If so, to read what? Some essential clues seem to connect my personage to this family. A certain Angelica Brigida Baldacchini was reportedly born in Cortona on April 25, 1562. Was she the eventual owner of a copy of Straparola’s 1570 edition? An attentive research done by Dr. Barbara Giappichelli at the Municipal Library in Cortona has yielded a document recording her baptism at the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta. Her father was a certain Anton Bernardino Baldacchini, born on November 23, 1523, who was in turn the son of a Federico Baldacchini. Here, Angelica Brigida’s line begins to coincide with that of Filippo Baldacchini, the poetical prelate and politician, since Federico and Filippo were both sons of another older Anton Bernardino. The latter ancestor in turn traced his line back to the fourteenth century, and the whole string of patronymics sounds like this: Anton Bernardino di Camillo di Filippo di ser Francesco di ser Filippo. In fact, Angelica Brigida was not the only Baldacchini with her forename on file in Cortona, but the other one, a certain Angelica Margherita Baldacchini, born on January 13, 1558, apparently died before 1562. Have I found my reader? At this point, the Cortona trail goes cold.

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If indeed she resided in Cortona, she would have experienced some interesting times. Not just the effects of dwelling in a stronghold on the outer limits of the Tuscan state and therefore a pass-through place for refugees and soldiers during the Italian Wars that finally ended with the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. Ten years or so before she could have signed her book, the city was the setting for one of the many mini-dramas of the Italian Reformation. Small groups of Lutherans, Calvinists, and their various offshoots still dotted the Italian religious landscape in the mid-sixteenth century, offering easy targets for custodians of conformity intent upon refining the methods of control.29 Cosimo I de’ Medici, on the rise after the conquest of Siena and thinking to curry favor with his distant relative Pope Pius IV and the zealous Catholic churchmen of Italy, was just then renouncing the more adventurous affiliations of his youth and making a show of orthodox fervor worthy of the Counter-Reformation ruler that he dearly wished to be. Among the victims of his campaign were numerous Sienese Protestants who gathered around the conspicuous Sozzini family of patricians, recently returned to Siena after the fall of the Sienese Republic, including Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, originators of the Antitrinitarian doctrine, called Socinianism, later diffused in Northern Europe.30 The connection between this movement and a certain Don Florenzo from Provence, wanted by the newly founded Roman Inquisition on charges of heresy, may only be that he too was a Protestant. In any case, Cosimo, “desirous to satisfy your Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lordships,” promised to have him sent under guard to Cortona for further processing by the authorities in Perugia across the Tuscan border with the Papal State before final delivery to the Inquisitors.31 Whether the presence in Cortona of a personage like Don Florenzo provoked discussions or debates, and whether he was regarded by local people as a hero or a villain, as the victim of new controls on conscience or a devilish tempter, has not been recorded. Apparently, the roiling turmoil of consciences next door in Siena was observed quietly; and in the long run convenience dictated at least outward compliance. Convenience and compliance also marked the political realm, at least until 1569.32 That was when decades of fiscal pressure from a militarily beset Florentine government finally exceeded the Cortona administration’s capacity to keep its territories paying in peace. And the result was an event that has left an indelible mark on Cortona history, for more reasons than one. Here as elsewhere, the Tuscan state developed as a series of intersecting circles, with each minor city assuming responsibility for order and prosperity in its own territory and managing the extraction of money on behalf of Florence.33 As in every such setup in every time, the taxing power gave preferential treatment to itself: Cortona in

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respect to the rural communities; Florence in respect to everywhere else. Added to this was the particular oppressiveness of the socioeconomic system that was just then developing, with large proprietors becoming larger, and agricultural workers becoming more indebted.34 The country people demonstrated their frustration in the only way they could: by a wave of violence that culminated in the burning of the archives containing the property and tax records, the very records on which a modern historian might rely to reconstruct the troubles of those years. Angelica would have signed her book just as an uneasy normalcy was restored, based on the exhaustion of both sides and the advantages of peace compared to the disadvantages of disturbing the status quo. Regardless of whether she was a woman living in Cortona, or a woman belonging to the Florentine branch of a Cortona family, Angelica, or more particularly, her father, was no Louis-François Pinagot, the lowly clog-maker discovered and, so to speak, brought back to life by Alain Corbin in a curious exercise of historical recovery.35 In the highly stratified society of her time, I cannot be sure exactly how many degrees separated her from the shoemaker, the butcher, the baker, the wool-carder. In both Florence and Cortona the merchants of the wool guild, to which persons by her surname belonged, held a paradoxical position of prominence due to the thirteenth-century origins of textile manufacturing. In Florence, along with the other major guildsmen, the judges and notaries, the dyers, the bankers, the silk merchants, physicians and furriers, they played a key role in government in periods supposedly characterized by oligarchy.36 As the money accumulated, many left the arts and manufactures per se and went into finance, amassing, notably in the Medici case, colossal fortunes. Social stratification was literally written in stone, on the walls of the guildsmen’s sanctuary at Orsanmichele, where the costly marble and bronze statuary by artists like Donatello, Brunelleschi, Verrocchio, and Ghiberti, reminded citizens about the major guilds’ power and wealth. In all probability Angelica belonged to a family whose origins lay in manufacturing and that made its mark both in Florence and outside. Provincial patricians or patricians of the dominant city? In Cortona, many by her surname served on the city council: a total of fourteen in all were eligible for office in 1562, down to seven in 1574, still a good number. Although they represented the terziario or district called Santa Maria, an area of popular housing and shops (now centered on the Cathedral square), they actually reported living in more fashionable San Vincenzo, home to that portion of their kind which did not reside in the nonetheless equally fashionable area of Santa Maria.37 If her status in Cortona would have been guaranteed also by her male relatives’ deep

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immersion in the daily affairs of the city, her status in Florence would have been recognized in other ways. More like the family members of visiting dignitaries or prelates or provincial elites, there too she would have circulated in the upper echelons. In neither city, of course, could she ever participate first hand in city and state officialdom, closed off to any of her sex. Did she wonder about a world run by women, or in which women had a different role? The most concrete evidence I have about Angelica is the writing itself. But I do not despair. From a single signature, a single line, I will gather what I can. First and foremost, I know she was a writer, not just a reader. Her knowledge of letters was definitely active, not merely passive.38 And when she writes, she does more than simply sign her name. She joins an idea to it; indeed she incorporates her name-saying into a complete sentence. Thus, all of the scholarly objections to the use of signatures alone as an index of literacy fall to the ground here.39 She is in full possession of what François Furet refers to as a powerful instrument of change.40 Reading may change us; writing can empower us to change others. No wonder it was reserved for those destined to exercise influence outside the limits of the family or the neighborhood, to those whose thoughts, however banal, were of interest to the larger community due to the potential for concluding certain transactions or moving certain minds. Traditional gender roles came into play. For hundreds of years, according to historians of literacy, prevailing educational principles stipulated that women should be taught only the bare essentials for ensuring good behavior and religious devotion, so church and family made sure to impart only reading unaccompanied by writing.41 Reading served to channel the mind along the paths of piety, not along the paths of carnal pleasure. Writing was a useless appurtenance. Angelica informs us by her writing that her education has gone one step beyond that of many of her sex. She possesses the special distinction claimed by a growing number of females whose activity may push role boundaries to new limits.42 How did she learn to write? As Michel de Certeau reminds me, reading and writing are not learned in the same way; nor are they necessarily sequential.43 Reading the meaning in texts is different from simply deciphering texts, he adds. Both skills are usually learned in infancy, but the deciphering does not necessarily produce the reading. A wider cultural context is necessary. Nor does the deciphering or re-ciphering produce the writing, except at the most elementary level. There may also be writing without reading, my experience tells me. A Syrian launderer I knew in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1990s could not read, but he could write, after his own fashion. He could sign his name and write the names of his customers by sounding out the letters. When they came

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into his shop he could match the name he heard on their lips to the name he saw on the laundry slip. But he could not read a newspaper or form words on a page that could be assembled into a sentence. Semi-literacy stands in a peculiar space of daily practice necessary for performance in a particular job, without the potential for the application of specific skills to other possible jobs, should ever the need arise. Clearly Angelica is far from semiliterate. How she used this instrument, apart from transforming a book into her book, and communicating this knowledge to the world, is anyone’s guess. There is more in this line of text than meets the eye. Surely writing is a gesture of the mind as well as of the hand; and there are ways of understanding how to interpret the one in the light of the other. Good calligraphy was a Renaissance obsession, in spite of the rise of print, which, I can’t forget, at first bore typographic characteristics derived from script. And perfection in this art was regarded as a chief professional qualification in business and in government, nearly equal to good speaking. The tradition grew and spread, as I judge by Lord Palmerston’s evocation, famous and merciless, of the actual physical pain induced by reading the script of his less able underlings, which he likened to being jabbed in the eye with pen-knives.44 In Angelica’s own time, Angelo Ingegneri, in a work on The Good Secretary, recounted success stories based on practice and persistence. “There have been some,” he began, “who, picking up the pen by chance one or two times and forming three or four letters in a good hand, were able to introduce themselves into the office” of some important personage. Continuing to impress by their elegant penmanship, they “eventually went from being ordinary servants or even chamber valets (unrecognized by their masters) to being head Secretaries beyond their greatest expectations.”45 The chief criterion for good handwriting? That it should be legible “with the least effort.”46 Angelica no doubt wrote to be read: her text is clear and crisp. I feel I cannot stop here. What kind of handwriting did she have? Good standards of comparison are easy enough to find; and the differences are as suggestive as the similarities. She used none of the elaborate descenders and pronounced ascenders typical of the mercantile scripts included in Giovanni Antonio Tagliente’s The True Art of Excellent Writing, first published in Venice in 1524.47 And why should she? That style was more typical of ledger books precisely because of its pleasing aspect and resistance to the casual imitator. Nor did she use the florid “imperial” or seal-type initials characteristic of important documents and memorials. The “natural Florentine letter” in Tagliente featured a basically vertical slant, pointed descenders, slightly longer than the more looping ascenders. Hers was not like this. Instead, her writing resembled the one denominated “chancery or notarial

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letter,” with its soft slant and waist line more or less halfway from the base line to the ascender line. Chancery scripts had already gained wide currency and were “commonly used in missive letters,” noted one advocate, “because more delightful to read and available to all.”48 With her own variations, this is what she used. Still I am not satisfied. I know there must be more here; but before I draw any conclusions I turn to another set of manuals—those purporting to divine the character of a person from the marks they make. Renaissance people thought about the matter in connection with the broader themes of the study of human personality: its origin, its nature, its effects, its reflection in certain physical signs including facial expressions, and script. The prevailing psychological substantialism inherited from the ancient world supposed that character was impressed from birth on an individual and concocted from the outstanding humor (sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious, atrabilious) and quality (hot, cold, wet, dry), sometimes in relation to specific astrological configurations. Whatever natural causation may or may not have been involved, beliefs also no doubt had a self-fulfilling aspect, just as they do now. Individuals may be inclined to think of themselves in terms of a particular celestial sign, and therefore of a certain kind of temperament; likewise, they may think of themselves as being of a particular kind of script, to the extent that such a sign, and such a script, becomes a permanent auto-definition, so the real effect of a particular orientation will come from within, not from without.49 The period’s intellectual ferment about applying new observational methods to the study of nature is usually connected to the names of Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes. Others delved into more obscure mysteries. The Neapolitan philosopher Giovan Battista Della Porta is perhaps best known nowadays for his work on magic; and if his On Human Physiognomy (1586) is taken into consideration at all, this is usually more for the striking engravings (by Gerolamo De Novo) than for the accompanying text.50 At the time, however, his analyses of images of “normal” and “abnormal” individuals would have been viewed in relation to work done in classical antiquity by the renowned physicians Galen and Hippocrates regarding physiological defects.51 And what he had to say about the connection between lack of imagination and a caved-in forehead, or mental agility and physical prominence in this part, was only the first step of a discussion that eventually incorporated numerous arresting animal-human comparisons.52 An ostrich shown next to a man with a very small head gives rise to a discussion of the smallness of skull relative to body size denoting stupidity, whereas unusual largeness of skull indicates intelligence—the latter illustrated by a comparison of the heads of a Pointer dog and Plato.53 I find myself in the

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prehistory of phrenology here; but I can never forget what the sciences of the present owe to the sciences of the past. There is no need to go into such further juxtapositions as that of a monkey and a man in book 2 Chapter 9, referring to the small ears that denote lasciviousness and a lack of scruples, or the comments on national types, drawn from a wealth of ancient sources—as another author now demands my attention. Known still less than Della Porta is the figure of Camillo Baldi, an earlyseventeenth-century Bolognese physician and university professor who advanced the discussion from the study of physiognomy and skull sizes to the study of characteriology based on writing. I am still not sure what to make of his treatise on onychomancy, that is, divining by observing the fingernails, except that he accounted for the practice as an example of the acute application of observational technique to the signs and symbols left by intelligent nature for humans to decipher in view of some benefit.54 Although Baldi’s commentary on the ancient text known as the Physiognomonica, at the time still thought to be by Aristotle, did not add much to what Della Porta had already contributed to the science, his work on graphology clearly broke new ground.55 In yet another text, ostensibly unrelated, he revealed the salient feature of his intellectual approach: “The ancient philosophers believed that a man could only truly say that he knew something, when after considering the universal, he exercised himself in the particulars.” In this way, he added, intellectual inquiry was like a circle, such that the seeker “ended up where he began.” Indeed, “truth was clearest where sense joined up with intellect.”56 Baldi claimed to derive “much knowledge about the customs and quality of a writer” from “a missive letter,” just by looking at the “words, the phrases, the style and the concept,” as well as the “character”—that is, the calligraphy, because “whoever writes a letter impresses into it the image of his soul.”57 There can be no doubt, he goes on, that “different people write differently,” and individuals tend always to write more or less in the same way, unless they are trying to disguise their hand. From this there is no reason not to conclude that someone with an evidently “lazy” hand (pigro), forming characters “with a sort of stomping of the pen,” should turn out to be lazy also in life. He goes on to speculate, “it is also reasonable,” that such a person “would be dull in intellect, and evidently of careless judgment” to the extent that “he might promise much and accomplish little.”58 Taking the analysis a little further, he connected the “lazy” hand with a melancholy humor denoting “instability.” Whether the abuse of alcohol occasionally noticed in these cases was related symptomatically or causally to the general syndrome, he left up to the reader to decide.

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Figure 3.3 Title page of Camillo Baldi, Trattato (Carpi: Girolamo Vaschieri, Carpi, 1622).

Although I have no way of knowing what impression Angelica’s countenance may have made on those around her, also because no images, even of the most likely candidates for an identity match, are known to have survived, I do nonetheless have something to go on, however minimal, a bare trace, for

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comparing her script with the traits I just mentioned. And if I return to my book I find that certainly, the most exaggerated features of “lazy” writing are not there. I do not find characters which are “unequal, with uneven lines”; nor do I see the strokes “running all together.” If I did, at least according to Baldi, I would have to conclude the writer was “unstable,” “choleric,” and “apt to seek out [her] caprices.” Young people, he added, often write this way because they are unpracticed. When adults do so, this is a clear sign of a malformed personality deeply rooted in their being. But this, at least according to strokes I see, was not Angelica’s case. “If the characters are rapid and the letters are some of them large and others small, and this is seen not to be from a defect of the pen [itself],” Baldi elaborates, “probably one may conclude that [the writer] is uneven in other actions, and the same unevenness will appear in the voice as one sees in the writing.”59 Again, not in Angelica’s case. I also do not find that “the characters are very small,” indicating either advanced age, bad vision, or poverty of spirit. Nor do I find them “ugly, twisted but intelligible, badly formed, hasty,” of which Baldi quips: such are the clothes, so is the man.60 However, in one of Baldi’s writing styles I find some agreement with my observation of Angelica’s. This style is characterized by “a rapid, even, and wellformed character, demonstrating a delight in writing.”61 Certainly Angelica’s characters are even and well-formed, and they may additionally demonstrate a delight in writing, although in the absence of better evidence I hesitate to attribute a particular velocity to their formation. Perhaps, I am thus excused from accepting Baldi’s conclusion regarding such a writing type, namely, that it denotes a person “who knows little and is worth little.” He elaborates: “They are like painters: the better they are, the less are they prudent,” because of being always so absorbed in the minutiae of their art. Such persons tend to be “cold or avaricious or extravagant or immoderate,” and normally, they are young. She may have been young, but her characters appear to have been formed with care. Is my sensation of having gained some new insight merely an illusion? I feel a strong temptation to take the analysis one step further. The perceptions of Angelica’s contemporaries may be interesting; they may even be relevant from an antiquarian perspective. Are they valid? In the meantime, graphology has moved on. The modern version still claims to delineate the subtleties of human personality on the basis of the typical ways in which a given subject forms her letters on the page.62 Granted, it is no longer widely used as a tool for judging the suitability of job candidates anywhere except in France; and legal concerns regarding privacy have now been added to the long-standing scientific ones regarding the value of any assertions joining particular handwriting features

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with particular personality traits.63 Whatever credence it still commands is occasionally attributed to the so-called Forer effect, a psychological phenomenon produced by the power of suggestion. According to this view, which applies to other so-called pseudosciences like astrology, subjects believe in it because of an intuitive sense that its tenets, however discredited in the scientific literature, somehow correspond to actual daily experience. Lab tests show statistically significant numbers of people will attribute accuracy to personality analyses which are presented to them by researchers as being tailored to themselves based on evidence, but which, in fact, are simply general descriptions applying to anyone.64 Even if modern graphology could be modified to apply to historic scripts, I risk simply confirming what I want to believe about Angelica. Caution, not rejection, is in order, I am inclined to think. However, there is a problem. Graphology usually dealt with contemporary cases, existing in the here and now, as its practical uses demanded. Retrospective or historical graphology was relatively slow to develop, and may be said to date basically from Cesare Lombroso, a nineteenth-century criminologist writing around the same time as the early Freud. In the next few pages I will regard his work as foundational in his field, in spite of the controversies—I might almost say, somewhat as his younger contemporary’s work is viewed in the field of psychology. In his pioneering treatise he attempted to distinguish normal from abnormal humans on the basis of their writing, and drawing on an impressive sample of facsimiles including signatures and other writings by authors ranging from the ancient world to his own time, he claimed to place graphology on a scientific footing analogous to the other developing social sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology. “It is known that many of the unconscious movements of our muscles and flesh, measured and calibrated with the instruments of Mosso and Marey,” he said, indicating the Ergograph, a device invented by Angelo Mosso for recording the force and frequency of flexion of the fingers, and the Tambour Sphygmograph, a blood pressure gauge devised by Etienne-Jules Marey, “have been able to give us an idea of real emotive states of the mind and even the conditions of the intelligence and the attention span.” Speech acts were no longer a mystery, he went on: “We now know that some of our neuropathological conditions can be studied by accurate and graphical observation: for instance in respect to velocity, voice, pronunciation.” Who indeed would deny that “a slow and heavy pace” in speaking “denotes a cretin?”65 Now was the time, he said, to develop such insights and apply them to calligraphy. The results were not long in coming, in the first age of experimental psychology. Could they apply to Angelica’s time? The calligraphic feature of

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“the position called iuxta, i.e., isolation of each character, is the indication of an intuitive mind and is often found in poets, novelists, music masters and other artists, such as Ariosto, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Verdi.”66 By contrast, “writers who attach all their characters one to another are of a reflective mind, reason well, and easily predict the final consequences of their acts and others’.” This feature, he went on, “is evident in handwriting by Cardinal Mazarin, Prince Bismarck, the chemist Liebig and the historian Curtius.” Angelica seems to fall between these two styles, as shown below. Attached letters are connected by an understrike: qu_e_sto l_ibro si è di l_ang_el_l_ica Ba_ld_ac_hini

Would this signify that the characteriological determination would also have to fall somewhere between, say, Ariosto and Cardinal Mazarin? Female writing is almost entirely absent from Lombroso’s analysis except in the part reserved for extreme pathologies. The limit case of course is the criminal, and without other evidence I would hesitate to place Angelica here. “Homicidal women resemble homicidal males in their style of calligraphy,” explains Lombroso; “and in general they all tend towards the virile form.” Yet the “virile form” is also “common among honest women who are energetic.”67 Even though he fails to explain in any great detail exactly of what this virile form consists, I can see that the decisive characters of Angelica are certainly “energetic.” Was she thus an “energetic” type of person? According to him, the overlap between a certain kind of female person and a certain kind of male was particularly evident at the point of greatness. “In women of genius—Catherine II, George Sand, Madama Adam, Adelaide Cairoli, Maintenon, Elizabeth [Queen of England], Charlotte Corday—the virile writing is characteristic, so that distinguishing theirs as female writing would not be easy.”68 I have already noted that Angelica’s writing resembles a type which Baldi illustrated with no designation as to gender but which he obviously intended to refer to the male. It may be tempting, if hazardous, to identify her on this basis with, say, the last in the series, Marat’s assassin. A chief difficulty of retrospective graphology, of course, is the need to separate characteristics produced by individual differences from characteristics which more properly belong to a particular epoch. The bent-over ascenders in Angelica’s ls and ds, pointing to the right, were not her own: they belonged to a variety of sixteenth-century writing samples. I observe the characters in Giovanni Antonio Tagliente’s example on his folio A1r. All the ascenders have the same bent-over upper tip, pointing to the right. The same perhaps went

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for the curly protrusion over her uppercase B in “Baldachini,” although in this instance I might take the characteristic in context, noting her preference for lowercase, even in the name “angelica,” so that perhaps the B in “Baldachini” is an attempt to make an uppercase of a lowercase, conserving the long ascender and bent-over feature typical of the latter. For Lombroso, the letter i was invested with particular significance due to the way in which time, space, and personality in this letter were composed in the same subtle medley. Two elements played against each other in a creative tension: stem against dot, dot against stem. A weak dot indicated weakness, timidity, lack of effort.69 A round and accentuated dot: tenacity, decisiveness, thoroughness. Large and spot-like? A passionate and sensual nature. Placing was a key. If well after the letter, disorderliness and carelessness were insinuated. If far away from the letter, then canceled and moved, there is a tendency to goodness and selfcontrol. Missing the dot entirely denotes disattention and negligence. Regularly placed exactly over the stem of the i instead denotes love of order. And here I distinctly find Angelica. The dot over the i in “libro” is squarely and distinctly placed. The dot over the i in “si” is slightly high, with respect to the waist line, but still directly over the stem. The dot over “di” is sensibly and squarely placed; and the same goes for the calligraphy of this letter in the names “angelica” and “Baldachini.” I know I run a grave danger of over-interpreting, and worse yet, of worshiping false models; yet my desire for new information, stoked by the exhilaration of a new method, is too powerful to resist. Her writing evidences a certain upward sweep, with the baseline inclined some five degrees relative to the edge of the page. I turn again to Lombroso. Subjects not writing on lined paper, which may constrain their movements, express their general emotional state by the overall slant of their script, he suggests. He advises caution in drawing conclusions. “Our organism sometimes reacts in a similar way for different feelings,” he notes. Consider “the joy which causes tears, the pain which produces a spasmodic laugh, etc.” Thus the same movement of the hand could signify contrasting states of mind. “A descending hand signifies sadness but also exhaustion, effort, weakness.”70 A rising line of writing, on the other hand, could be referred to “ardor, but also ambition, and necessarily, activity.” However, the meaning could be different in different subjects. What implied ambition in a superior sort of person instead implied “fatuousness” in “a vulgar man.” Also the intensity of the slant is significant in Lombroso’s analysis. To keep Angelica in perspective, her five-degree slant is nothing like the 32-degree slant of Lombroso’s example no. 12, indicating “presumptuousness accompanied by egotism.”71 An aspect which

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seems to have escaped Lombroso, is whether such states of mind are temporary or fixed. I can imagine an optimistic Angelica today might be pessimistic tomorrow. I would need to see more writing, and even then I would not be certain of having achieved more clarity. I set aside Lombroso and turn to aspects more urgently in need of explanation. What to make of the apparent cancelation of a letter, namely the second of a double l in “angellica”? Either spelling was possible, in the context of the Florentine habitual carelessness in distributing single and double consonants, as already noted in the case of Angellica the laborer’s spouse, although Paolo Pellegrini, a philologist at the University of Verona, suggested to me that the doubling was more prevalent in the north. In Venice, a selection of popular novels was issued in 1682 where the double consonant occurs in the name of the Ariosto character, thus, “Angellica.”72 If my book owner’s choice indicates a particular relation to writing due to her education and upbringing, there is nothing else in her other strokes that prepares me for this. Although cancelation of a mark may denote hesitation due to insufficient schooling, the same hesitation is by no means evident elsewhere. If it indicates old age, again, there is no other symptom of infirmity or feebleness. Perhaps on the other hand, in the light of my other speculations, this pentimento denotes a more general insecurity or self-consciousness. I can imagine the case where at the moment of signing an important document, a person experiences a mental fugue and suddenly feels strange about completing a habitual action. Perhaps signing the book was such a moment for Angelica. I observe another form of pentimento in the placing of the accent before the e in the simple present of the verb “to be,” and also after, at the level of the cap line. Perhaps in this case, one of the placings is an accident of the pen rather than the mind; but I am reminded that the use of accents was by no means uniform. In Baldinucci, writing slightly later, when there are accents in the standard places (which is not always) I find only grave accents, and somewhat pronounced ones at that. Livia Vernazza, the concubine of Giovanni de’ Medici, son of a grand duke, used no accents at all. The accent here, whatever was intended to be the final placing, is similar to the dot over the ninth letter of the alphabet. Maybe the author was unsure whether to place a grave or an acute accent. In any case, I perceive a certain insistence on getting things right. Floating in the space above the ascender line in her name is a nearly horizontal stroke executed from right to left. A mix of odd spelling and a throwback to the standard earlier abbreviation for a double n? The distance from this stroke and the n in question should not negate this hypothesis. It is the same as between

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the e of the verb “to be” and the mark that I have interpreted to be an attempted accent over that letter. In both cases, the stroke is slightly moved to the right of where it belongs. If Angelica was able to misspell her name with a double l, perhaps she was also capable of giving it an extra n. In the history of Florentine writing the gratuitous doubling of n was not unknown. What I can conclude unequivocally from the writing, on the basis of a comparison with thousands of other hands from the sixteenth through the seventeenth century examined over a lifetime of dealing with such sources, is that it belongs to a person roughly contemporary with the printing of the book—that is, it dates to 1570 or some time not long thereafter. The irregular (perhaps, uncertain) use of double consonants, as well as the minuscule a in the forename, and the attaching of the article to the first letter in the forename all reinforce my interpretation. Even granting the possible operation of personal choice in the detaching or joining of letters, I cannot ignore a slight hint of the emerging seventeenth-century trend to a more fluid “cursive” kind of writing, which historians of calligraphy associate with the Baroque or possibly even with an advancing influence of French chancery scripts.73 If the time seems right, so does the place. The giveaway is the recourse to a seemingly reflexive form of the verb “to be” indicating possession. In the Tuscan dialect, then as now, the particle si can be an impersonal pronoun, as in the diction, noi si va, in place of noi andiamo in regard to the peremptory leaving of a place. Somewhat rarer was the use of the reflexive essere; but a manuscript of Boccaccio’s Decameron, now in the Vatican Library, contains the inscription, “Questo libro si è di me Antonio di Bartolommeo . . . MCCCCXXIII.”74 A fifteenth-century manuscript in the Laurentian Library containing works by Petrarch includes the inscription: “Questo libro si è di Fruosino di Lodovicho di Ciecie da Pragnio.”75 The Tuscan manuscripts, dating to somewhat earlier, of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, begin “Questo libro si è di San Brandano,” indicating ownership of the contents rather than the container.76 Finally, a fifteenth-century codex of works by Frate Guido da Pisa in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence among the Palatine manuscripts, contains the following imperative: “Questo libro si è di ser piero d’orsino cera[iuo]li; chi lo truoua lo renda” [This book belongs to ser Piero d’Orsino Ceraioli, whoever finds it must return it.]77 There was nothing particularly outlandish about Angelica’s usage—as long as I situate it in a Tuscan context. Where did she get the idea? The literary diction could not have come from common speech; she must have seen it written on some manuscript or book at her home or a neighbor’s. Angelica’s use of language bore with it the tradition of Tuscan writing in the vernacular, and probably, so did her reading.

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If there were other writings by her hand, what would they be like? Did Angelica have ambitions to create what others might read, for pleasure or instruction? Was she inspired by the work of others to become a writer herself? No attributable samples have survived except for the one I have. If she picked up the pen in a creative mood, would she have been an erudite like Olympia Fulvia Morata, author of verses and epigrams in Latin and Greek, or a literary critic like Laura Terracina, writer of a commentary on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,78 or a writer of madrigals like Maddalena Casulana,79 or indeed, a Paola Antonia Negri, author of a book of spiritual letters?80 Or did her experience and education discourage her from going public with her ideas? The temptation is strong to minimize rather than maximize, to see the glass half empty rather than half full. The closer I get to Angelica the more her presence fills my consciousness, to the exclusion of other voices telling me she was a single face in a crowd quite unlike her, that her attainments were the exception not the rule, that she is interesting for her individuality rather than for her representativeness, that her case must be viewed with reference not only to the early modern gender gap but to the predominantly rural character of that society and the predominantly urban character of literacy then. This I know: as a literate female she stood among a far larger group than the two or three hundred female writers whose activity the patient philological sleuthing of numerous literary historians over the past twenty-five years has traced throughout Italy across the sixteenth century.81 In consultation with colleagues who know far more than I do about such matters, I choose to see her as a cipher signifying a presence rather than denoting a lack. The more I know about Angelica the more I want to know; and whenever my quest runs up against the limits of my evidence, my mind rushes to complete what my facts do not. It is a dangerous game. Both the game and the object remind me of my own distant relative Delia Bacon, one of the earliest proponents of the so-called “Baconian thesis” regarding the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.82 A nineteenth-century American reader and writer who dared to defy prevailing gender roles as well as prevailing scholarly paradigms, she cut a unique and remarkable figure in the intellectual life of her time, to which Nathaniel Hawthorne bore compassionate witness in a biographical sketch entitled “Reflections of a Gifted Woman.”83 During her brief notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic, she fascinated audiences by her enthusiastic oratory and unwavering conviction in the face of mounting challenges to her outlandish ideas, until truth and belief finally collided in a pathetic moment at the edge of the Bard’s gravesite in Stratford-upon-Avon, followed by a mental breakdown. In

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another world, with other encouragements, perhaps with a more wide-ranging education, more inspiring mentors, she could have chosen a better battle, ended more happily, found her place in the annals of literary history. Maybe she could have been a bard in her own right, a “Shakespeare’s sister,” in Virginia Woolf ’s terminology, surprising us with her brilliance and her wit. Angelica too? The story that exists and the stories that might have been: the one seems to carry the others within it, or better, along with it, because they are the ones it excludes by its existence; but the exclusions place the inclusions in perspective.

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Angelica and her Book

I am, of course, not only interested in what the handwriting looks like as an indicator of time and place. I am also concerned with where it is in the book. Why did she sign inside and not outside? Libraries in modern times give highly utilitarian instructions about the marking of books.1 Apart from the typical library stamp on the title page and occasionally on the fore-edge for unequivocal identification, there may be a stamp on a particular page inside, the so-called “secret page,” which differs from library to library but which in Widener Library at Harvard is page 1, in Royal Holloway College Library is page 49, in the Municipal Library of Lyon is page 99, and in libraries all over Sweden seems to be page 17, serving simply in order to claim the book in case the title page gets lost, while facilitating easy location of the stamp for cancelation in case of a change of ownership. Was Angelica doing the same thing? Did she lose the title page and re-sign for identification purposes on folio 144v? Or did she receive this copy already mutilated and stake her claim where she could? Ownership, I know, involves a series of willful acts. Those acts, insofar as I am able to take account of them, may lead me back into the mind of the owner. The placement of her mark is the most obvious clue. Was this simply the first wide blank space in her volume? The area measures 5 cm from “IL FINE DELLA QUARTA NOTTE” [End of the fourth night] to the bottom of the page. Space in general is utilized parsimoniously in this economical edition of the text, but at the end of the preceding story, the fourth of the same night, on fol. 133v, there is more white space: 4 cm from end of text to bottom of page. There is more yet on fol. 182v: from “IL FINE DELLA QUINTA NOTTE” [End of the fifth night] to the bottom here, a generous 7 cm of unblemished paper beckons the potential signer. And in the second volume of this double binding, folio 1 is entirely blank on both sides, enough for a signature and maybe even some notes to self. All unused. Something else must have drawn her to this spot. Perhaps more to the point; was there something particularly compelling about the fifth story of night four, told by the fictional storyteller Leonora, which

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prompted her intervention? The story concerns a simpleton called Flamminio who (so says the short description) goes in search of death and instead finds life. To the many people he encounters along the route, he inquires, “Can you tell me perhaps what is this thing called death?” Supposing this was “her” story, it surely would have given her much food for thought. The question regards not only every Christian, but every human, as the many myths concerning death bear witness. Perhaps she too contemplated the paradox of death, of the land “whence no traveler returns,” of the ultimate experience, which no art or science can reproduce, explain, or describe, the one experience which is canceled in the making, and which has puzzled every society since the dawn of humanity and the origins of memory. The story places the enigma of death most eloquently in the mouth of a hermit, who utters: Oh, my son, do not worry about knowing, since she is a terrible and frightening thing and wise men call her a final end to suffering, the sorrow of the content, hope for the wretched, and the final end of worldly things. She divides friend from friend; she separates father from son and son from father; she parts mother from daughter and daughter from mother; she dissolves the bond of matrimony; and, finally, she disjoins the soul from the body. And a body separated from the soul cannot function anymore, but becomes so putrid and stinking that everyone abandons it and flees from it like an abominable thing.2

As so often in Straparola the story ends magically. By no other means could Flamminio gain the revelation to which humans may not be privy (barring the actual incidence of post-death experiences). The device is ingenious. He finally encounters an old hag carrying a sword and club along with a bag of medicines and ointments which, so she says, represent life, although obviously only in the limited sense of our pathetic attempts to beautify the ugly, to ease the pain, to slow the decline. No sooner does he ask her his usual question about death than she orders him to strip and chops off his head. Next she glues the head back on again, at first backward, in the fashion of the soothsayers in Dante’s Inferno, giving Flamminio a panoramic view of his own naked behind, meant also to signify perhaps that death gives a different perspective on life. Did Angelica long for this? Did she fear the consequences of her own curiosity? Certainly the experience of death in many forms would have been well within her comprehension. Shortly after her book was published, Tuscans were terrified by a plague outbreak that decimated the populations of Genoa and Venice and eventually spread to Sardinia. In the absence of any knowledge of the microbiological agent Yersinia pestis or its insect vectors, blame fell instead upon

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the usual scapegoats—migrant people, Jews, apostates, and the poor—against whom an overwhelmed officialdom might demonstrate praiseworthy zeal with no fear of opposition. Remedies largely involved prayer, quarantine, and flight, while a pamphlet war broke out between physicians of one opinion and those of another, in the effort to explain the unexplainable and evade professional responsibility for events that nobody could control.3 Death came and stayed and finally left, and everyone was much relieved, with only a few experts any the wiser concerning its ways and reasons, in spite of the long-term value of the exchange of ideas recently studied in detail by Sam Cohn. In Venice, a grateful city government commissioned Andrea Palladio to build one of his masterpieces; and to commemorate the event, every year on the third Sunday in July, Venetians still cross the pontoon bridge from the Zattere over the Giudecca canal to the votive church of the Redentore and back again in one of the most moving civic pageants in contemporary European culture. In Florence, as the alarming news trickled in regarding what was going on elsewhere, officials closed all entrances to the city; and for the time being, the population was spared.4 Rather than plague, what hit an already weakened Tuscany and its environs in 1580 was an epidemic, probably of rheumatic fever, known locally as the “mal del castrone,” using an old Florentine word for “cough,” of which the diarist Agostino Lapini noted “there were none or few who did not have it more or less,” and “many died.”5 Symptoms, apart from fever and regurgitated phlegm, were severe headaches and, at least according to reports from nearby Bologna about a similar contagion, even delirium, so there it was called “mal matton” or “crazy sickness.” At least for this disease the physicians thought they had a cure, and if bloodletting by the standard method of opening a vein failed to do the trick, the use of the cupping glass, preferably on the patient’s shoulder, seemed to relieve the symptoms by removing some of the malignant excesses that affected the balance of humors in the body, thus restoring health according to the typical textbook understanding of human physiology based on Galen and Hippocrates. The popular writer Giulio Cesare Croce published a song, probably hawked like his other works on the street by vendors, entitled “O look ye at the crazy sickness!” [Guarda, guarda il mal matton!], both as a warning to readers and as a commemoration of the trauma in families and communities, because in the early modern world, at every age and social level, illness and death lurked just around the corner.6 I wonder whether Angelica was drawn to this particular place in her book because of the recent death of a family member: a father, a mother, a husband, or a child—in Tuscany or elsewhere. Was she in mourning, and did the reading of this

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tale help bear her up? Or was she tempted by the story to imagine her own death, even in a humorous light? So far in my speculations I have supposed a young Angelica. What if she was old? Maybe she savored this particular tale because she feared death, or felt herself to be near death. To fear death she could, of course, be of any age. Christians are told: lead a good life now, because death may come unexpectedly. Death and the threat of death are ambiguous terms, according to this interpretation. The story of human salvation begins with the death that brings life through Christ’s resurrection. On the one hand, death is the goal of the believer, because after death there will be new life. Salvation removes the bite of death, because in death the soul leaves the body and begins the journey to Paradise. On the other hand, just as there can be preparation for the good death, by ensuring the presence of the clergy for extreme unction, there can also be preparation for the good death by making peace with the self, regarding transgressions during life. The better preparation for death would be by transgressing less—by a good life. “The peace of the just man’s death is greater or less according to the perfection of his soul,” said St. Catherine of Siena.7 The character in Straparola’s novel looked back upon himself in death, and the sight was not a pretty one. Were these thoughts on Angelica’s mind when she decided to “sign” this rather than some other story in her book? Ingmar Bergman, in his apocalyptic film The Seventh Seal, a brilliant exercise of cinematic imagination set in the midfourteenth century, pretends to record an encounter between personified Death, costumed in suitably dismal raiment, and a crusader returned from the wars. Unlike Flamminio’s encounter in Straparola’s story, this one is not deliberate, at least not on the part of the human. The soldier by no means goes out looking for death, although perhaps he knows, even if death does not remind him, that death has somehow been in his midst. Knight: Who are you? Death: I am Death. Knight: Have you come for me? Death: I have been walking by your side for a long time. Knight: That I know. Death: Are you prepared? Knight: My body is frightened, but I am not. Death: Well, there is no shame in that.8

Soldiers perhaps feel the presence more than others, but the cinematic metaphor is not so much about soldiering per se, as it is about living: the battle-weary soldier is the life-weary surrogate for every man.

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Flamminio’s adventure likewise is not only about death. It is about a journey, perhaps similar to the topos in medieval literature, essentially an allegory or at least a metaphor for the journey of life itself. He embarks on a journey toward death. Although a definite source for this story has still not been identified, we are clearly in the presence, so Donald Beecher reminds us, of a traditional folk story type—the “search for death,” to which the “Pardoner’s Tale” in Chaucer also belongs.9 At the same time, Flamminio exists in a larger archetypical universe that has to do with the very nature of literature and storytelling. His life has sense because it possesses a narrative direction beginning with a question and ending with an answer. Odysseus seeks his home. The characters in the Arthurian legend seek the Holy Grail. Sixteenth-century seekers after natural knowledge modeled their research procedure metaphorically on the concept of a hunt, a venatio.10 My inquiry in this research is inspired by the insight that the narrative of the journey is nearly as important as the results obtained, because the new juxtapositions of elements occasioned by chance encounters along the way constitute new knowledge in themselves. Flamminio, like me, is motivated by curiosity. Not all searches are fruitful; not all questions are good ones. Flamminio’s quest may not exactly be well-conceived, but he will only know at the end. About this, Straparola is explicit in setting out the story: “There are many men who go searching for things with care and diligence. But some things, once they’re found, they wish they had never set eyes on, fleeing from them as fast as the devil from holy water. This was the case for Flamminio.” That Flamminio happened to be “a young man somewhat wanting in wit and more eccentric than steady and prudent,” fixes the story within yet another tale type, namely, of the “boy without fear,” or the fool who runs risks unthinkingly, who engages in enterprises where instinct should say stop. Did Angelica’s “ownership” of this tale stand to signify her reflection on the human condition? In reading it, did she come to realize that the greatest enterprises sometimes stem from ignoring the dangers in favor of pursuing the elusive quarry to the ends of the earth, although we often see only in hindsight the folly of our ways? But perhaps the lesson of story five on night four is another, more connected with the first person Flamminio interrogates on his journey to find out about death—namely, the cobbler. Flamminio asks, why do you keep laboring at making shoes, when you have already made so many? The cobbler replies that he must keep on laboring and selling in order to accumulate the wherewithal to survive when he can work no more. This episode in the larger story appears to be about judicious accumulation, or indeed, home economics. Save for a rainy day. Make hay while the sun shines. Judicious accumulation is immune from the

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condemnation of another kind of accumulation aimed at getting for getting’s sake: that is, amoral acquisitiveness, the constant search for material comforts, against which the preachers railed from sixteenth-century pulpits, and which sumptuary laws were designed to curb.11 Likewise, of course, in this story there is a soupçon regarding vanity. Flamminio continues on his journey and encounters a tailor, whose shop is filled with all manner of garments: “And what are you doing,” said Flamminio, “with such beautiful and sumptuous garments and such respectable robes? Are they all yours?” To which the master replied, “Some are mine, some are merchants’, some are lords,’ and some are other people’s!” “And what do they do with so many of them?” said the young man. To which the tailor replied, “They use them at different times.” And as he showed them to him he said, “These in summer, those in winter, these others in between, and sometimes they wear one and sometimes the other.” “And then what do they do?” said Flamminio. “And then,” replied the tailor, “they keep this up as they go sliding toward Death.”12

Was Angelica an inveterate clothes addict, a fashion plate, a woman à la mode?13 Did she normally have to acquire all the clothes she saw, on the street or in the newly abundant fashion illustrations, and did she see this reminder of the vanity of all things, this memento mori, as a tale specially made for her? In contemplating the story about death, or about a journey ending in death, perhaps she too was thinking of the end of the world—a theme on many minds in her generation. Around the time when she could have acquired the book, work had commenced in Florence on the decorations inside Brunelleschi’s vast cupola for the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, depicting a colossal Universal Judgment ordered by Cosimo I from court artist Giorgio Vasari shortly before both were in the grave. The fresco she could have viewed from the first unveiling in 1579 was completed by Federico Zuccari, Vasari’s successor on this job, who was so pleased with himself that he had a medal struck commemorating the occasion. Not all Florentines were equally enchanted with the result. The academic poet and satirist Antonfrancesco Grazzini, known as Il Lasca, dismissed it in a poem dedicated to Benvenuto Cellini, who died in 1571. He imagines Cellini, a friendly rival of Vasari known equally well for extreme skill in sculpture and for razor-sharp jabs against more mediocre contemporaries, as having seen enough of the painting to compare it to the work of the greater master. Thus, Grazzini sings, picturing Cellini, He’d be leaping, running, fuming and be all around complaining

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and screaming out this loud lament: “For poor Giorgio of Arezzo what a torment!”14

Maybe Angelica shared this view, though every art critic first sees art with a child’s eyes. Did she develop into an educated viewer, more interested in the execution than in the scene? Would she have been edified by what she saw? Would it have reminded her of her readings, or vice versa? Reputedly the largest religious painting of all time, whatever may be the work’s aesthetic failings, Timothy Verdon, the current head of the Cathedral Museum (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) regards it as a monumental achievement in depicted theology: “Not a narrative, as in the thirteenth-century mosaics, but exquisitely theological. It is a system of doctrinal ideas without the remotest reference to the narrative: a complete conceptual system which transcends history.”15 It was not intended to stand on its own. The original iconographic program extended to the space underneath the dome, where large sculptures by Baccio Bandinelli depicted the dead Christ at the feet of God the Father on the high altar, and behind this, Adam and Eve committing their sin. The later removal of these sculptures disrupted a thematic concept which would have been evident in Angelica’s time, emphasizing the process of salvation through the saving intervention of Christ, mediated by Mother Church, as intended by the recently terminated Council of Trent.

Figure 4.1 Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari, cupola fresco (detail), Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence.

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The fresco has recently been returned to the pristine splendor that would have struck the sixteenth-century viewer. It is divided into six registers, spread concentrically across the eight panels of the octagonal structure. In the lowest is a sizzling hell dominated, in one panel, by a voracious devil recalling a similar figure in the variously attributed medieval mosaics on the baptistery of San Giovanni across the piazza, or even Beato Angelico’s choir panel of the same scene down the road at the now-defunct convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, conserved at the Museum of San Marco. The other six panels in this register show the seven deadly sins: there is Greed, where sinners are punished using huge money bags as nooses or as clubs; there is Lust, where sinners receive blazing spears in their gonads, as a wild boar prepares to gore them; there is Anger, where sinners run from a snarling bear only to be beaten up by infernal creatures. To each of the seven vices, in the register directly above, there corresponds one of the three theological or four cardinal virtues, so that for instance, above Anger there is Patience bearing a heavy yoke. Further up there are separate registers for the beatitudes, the various categories of saints, the mysteries of the Passion of Christ, an angelic choir, and the Elders of the Apocalypse. Did Angelica, considering her celestial name, view herself as ever belonging to any of these ranks? Orchestrating the whole, and occupying two entire registers of the panel facing the nave, is Christ himself, with the Virgin and John the Baptist. At his feet is the Church Triumphant, and further down, in plain sight from any part of the public area of the church, across from the Four Seasons and Death, the hoary figure of Time holds his hourglass aloft, as though reminding that the end is always near. Whatever may have been her inclination to stories about death and resurrection, the number 144 on the folio where Angelica inscribed her name was deeply imbued with eschatological significance. It was not just a sequential numeration after folio 143, any more than the number seven, in sixteenthcentury culture, was merely a numeral after the number six. In an age reaching desperately for the keys to harmony and prosperity (and I don’t mean today), quantity and quality seemed to chime; number and life. Occult philosophers sought to apply the techniques of gematria to find the numerological significance of words, and the techniques of geometry to find the secrets governing the works of the cosmos—some newly discovered, others inherited from an ancient past, including Plato and the Bible.16 Whoever could master them might gain control over a destiny otherwise immune to the best practices in society and politics. Numbers were all around, but they had to be interpreted. The number seven, in fact, might refer to the number of planets, combining the number of qualities

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(hot, cold, moist, and dry) with the three kinds of souls—vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual. The number three in turn indicated the Holy Trinity as well as the three letters in the Divine Name, the three Graces, and the three Fates. Visual arts and architecture drew upon number and proportion to create harmonies and channeled the power evoked by their symbolic representations. So when my colleague Crawford Gribben at Queen’s University Belfast, referring to the positioning of the signature in Angelica’s book, reminded me about the power of 144, I was surprised but not astounded. Perhaps it occurred also to the printer, and the ending of the story about death was placed here by no coincidence—although in subsequent editions he foliated the book differently, so any such connection was lost. Was Angelica aware of the relevant passages in the Apocalypse of John, also known as the Book of Revelation? In principle, she could have read them even in one of the various vernacular Italian Bibles which circulated throughout the sixteenth century under the disapproving eye of the Church, beginning with that of Antonio Brucioli, placed on the Pauline Index of 1559 because of the supposed dangers to faith posed by unsupervised Bible reading.17 She would have reheard the corresponding portion from chapter 7 of the Latin Vulgate every first of November for the first reading of the Ognissanti or All Saints’ Day Mass celebration, referring to Christ’s Second Coming when 144,000 chosen people with the seal upon their foreheads would be spared from the Day of Reckoning. The priest, in tones barely audible above the rumble of the crowd, and comprehensible only to listeners with good Latin, would have pronounced the following lines: In diebus illis: Ecce ego Joannes vidi alterum angelum ascendentem ab ortu solis, habentem signum Dei vivi: et clamavit voce magna quatuor Angelis, quibus datum est nocere terræ et mari, dicens: Nolite nocere terræ et mari, neque arboribus, quoadusque signemus servos Dei nostri in frontibus eorum. Et audivi numerum signatorum, centum quadraginta quatuor millia signati, ex omni tribu filiorum Israel.

Today at least in American churches the sealing vision from the Revised Standard Version is given thus: Then I saw another angel ascend from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God upon their foreheads.” And I heard the number of the sealed, a hundred and forty-four thousand sealed, out of every tribe of the sons of Israel.

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This crucial portion of St. John’s message occurs after the Lamb has opened the first six of seven seals on the great Book, unleashing the four horses of the Apocalypse upon the earth, followed by planetary destruction, whereupon four angels prevent the worst effects of the four winds just long enough for the chosen host to vacate before the opening of the seventh seal, the sounding of the seven trumpets and the culmination of the associated evils. A terrible forecast for some and a hopeful one for others. The passages have offered a rich mine of material to countless religious thinkers, orators, and would-be prophets over the centuries; and Fra Bernardino da Siena was by no means the first to utilize them in a diatribe against the vanity and godlessness of the early Quattrocento. In sermons delivered all over Italy, including at the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, he seemed to caution against the worst excesses of an overexuberant urban culture, encouraging the faithful to abandon the trappings of luxury and pleasure in favor of the benefits of prayer. Since the Sixth Trumpet had already sounded, he claimed, repentance would come not a moment too soon: “You will see overturned in all the world the order of justice, good works, honest customs and peace and quiet.” To be convinced that the end was near, he noted, all one had to do was to look around, “at the wars that have taken place over the past fifty years, and at how many cities, how many kingdoms, how many houses have been destroyed, how many vendettas, how many fires, homicides and betrayals there have been and that still dominate the universe.”18 In all probability, he commented, “the spirits of hell have been unloosed.” The ominous words, “Et soluti sunt quatuor angeli, qui parati erant in horam, et diem, et mensem, et annum, ut occiderent tertiam partem hominum” (Apoc. 9:14) [So the four angels were released, who had been held ready for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, to kill a third of mankind], applied to a vision not of some far-off future, but of the immediate present. We may never know what San Bernardino made of the hundred and forty-four thousand, since his entire manuscript devoted to the Apocalypse has since disappeared, and the acts of his canonization in 1445–49 made no speculations about what this might have contained.19 Girolamo Savonarola attended more to the spirit than to the letter of the Biblical text, and he paid for his prophecies with his life. Not that he left out any of the more spectacular aspects of the Apocalypse when he first preached it in Florence in 1490: the visions, the trumpets, the precious stones, the celestial battles, and the magic numbers.20 But he was a prophet in his own right, not an interpreter of the prophecies of others, as indicated by the characterization, “God’s trumpet,” attributed to him by his admirers.21 In his best work, he drew upon the

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words of his biblical forbears to explicate and interpret visions all his own: such as the sword of God quivering over Italy, which signified the punishing power of France.22 In the extreme circumstances of Charles VIII’s advance on the city during the Italian Wars, accompanied by the Medici government’s diplomatic bumbling and eventual expulsion, he managed to motivate Florentines into banning carnival and setting up a theocracy, at least for a time. The regime of austerity was not the only aspect that ran counter to prevailing customs: there was also the demand for a general amnesty to be granted to those involved in the recent civil strife, a striking novelty accepted under duress by a normally vindictive populace. If Florence was to become a safe and holy city, a New Jerusalem pleasing to God, Savonarola claimed, there was no choice.23 “God has made himself your physician,” he warned. “If you do as I have said, you need not fear your enemies, because you will always be the more powerful, and God, who is blessed in eternity, will protect you. Amen.”24 Over a half-century later, when Angelica was probably a child, the Medici were back in power and the Protestant Reformation was in full swing. A French former schoolmaster known in Italy as Dionisio Gallo came to call on Cosimo I with yet another message of reform and renewal made more urgent by threats of imminent destruction.25 The Lamb of God, whom he claimed to be, deserved attention, not only for the outlandish behavior that won him a reputation in Paris, where he went about with his clothes on backward wearing a tin crown on his head, or in Rome, where he walked the streets carrying a heavy wooden cross. He was destined to open the seven-sealed Book mentioned in Apocalypse ch. 5, and, as the sovereign charioteer, to lead the Church Militant to a new tomorrow.26 He managed to keep Cosimo engaged for several days with his exhortations about reforming the clergy, extirpating heresy, feeding the poor, and converting the Turks and the Jews.27 And to Cosimo he dedicated one of the manuscript productions later found in his possession and included in his Inquisition trial in Venice, entitled Liber, quem nullus aut in coelo aut in terra aut subtus terram, antea poterat aperire ne quidem respicere [Book, which no one in heaven or on earth or under earth could open or view before now]. Fortunately for him, the doleful messages were not imputed to heresy but to excess zeal; and with a little favor from his highly placed patrons, especially the Este family in Ferrara, he managed to avoid any harsher penalty for his pretensions than a brief prison term. Also around Angelica’s presumed time but farther away geographically, a scholar and sometime schoolteacher in Venice named Jacopo Brocardo read the Book of Genesis in the light of the Apocalypse, showing how Martin Luther was

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the harbinger of the last stage. In works which he preferred to publish in the Protestant lands where he went to live in self-exile, he suggested that the passage in Genesis 3:7, “Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked,” pointed to the discovery of clerical excess; and at Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman . . .” meant the strife between evangelicals and papists.28 His numerological exploration of the number 144,000 reinforced the same conclusions. Like Thomas Aquinas before him, he multiplied the Holy Trinity by the four corners of the earth, squared this and multiplied by 1,000, the symbol of perfection.29 The figure by no means indicated that only the tribes of Israel would be saved. “To those which were reckoned Israelites in the twelve tribes and were grafted in the tree from which the unbelieving Jews were cut off, there shall be joined many others who have believed the preaching of the gospel.” For explaining the criteria for inclusion he referred not to St. Thomas but to Lutheran doctrine. “Therefore besides the faithful Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians, which (as I think) are numbered among those 144,000 that are sealed, a great multitude from other provinces have believed. . . . All these then, along with the 144,000 who are marked, are called into the Catholic church and into the kingdom of Christ, being justified by faith.” With the end of strife all worship of Christ would be reduced to one, and “Christ’s people who get the kingdom of God and possess it,” would enter “into the palace of the papists and unbelievers” and peace would be restored.30 As I contemplate Angelica’s possible numerological interests, I am struck by how powerfully the number 144 has resonated across the centuries, especially in times of trouble. To get a better grasp of its peculiar power, including the power it had in the Renaissance, I will steep myself in the further ramifications of its story. The English radicals made reference to it, as the disruptions brought on by the Civil War seemed to offer rare opportunities for putting prophecy into practice. Francis Potter, a theologian-naturalist, was symptomatic of the trend among supporters of the Parliamentary cause in 1642, when he considered that the sublime formalities of biblical symbology contained clues for transforming civic turmoil into a heavenly order on earth. According to his proof, the sacred number of the New Jerusalem was none other than 144, based on the connection to other sacred numbers, three, four, and twelve. The “number of the Beast,” on the other hand, given as 666 in contemporary versions of Apoc. 13, referred to Roman Catholicism, he suggested, because of the papist connection to its approximate square root, namely, the number twenty-five, which was also the exact number of bishoprics in Constantinian Rome, and the number of the earliest cardinals.31 Biblical politics was still in the air in 1655, when a group

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of twelve petitioners, representing the square number of 144,000, approached Oliver Cromwell to gain release for the jailed Fifth Monarchy Men.32 By that time a farmer named John Robins, associated with the Ranters, who had begun assembling an army of 144,000 some five years before, was already en route to retake the Holy Land from the Ottomans and set up a godly community there.33 I fear that the connection of the Apocalypse and the 144,000 to the various millennial movements sprung from the deep vein of American religion would take me too far afield, but I cannot possibly omit at least one of the more literalminded of these, begun by William Miller, the visionary founder of the SeventhDay Adventists. He received his epiphany after surviving an artillery near miss in the War of 1812; and based on the number 2,300 in Daniel 8:14, he calculated that the Second Coming and the salvation of the elect would occur in the year 1843, later changing it to 1844. Failing this, his disciple Peter Armstrong gathered up a group of Millerites to form a utopian community on a 1,000-acre estate in Celesta, Pennsylvania, where the 144,000 elect, no more and no less, might wait as long as necessary in peace and prayer. In spite of the attempts to advertise the venture by way of a dedicated media outlet, The Day Star of Zion, and even an exemption from military service for residents solicited from Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War, numbers never grew sufficient for a thriving community. Also, because current interpretations seemed to suggest that salvation was already predestined to the elect, and therefore residence in one place was not required, the venture fizzled out and Armstrong moved on to continue his mission in Philadelphia.34 The thundering pageant of the Apocalypse has not thrilled all readers in the same way; and here is where I attempt to distance my world from Angelica’s. In his last published book, D. H. Lawrence found a riot of naive vindictiveness there, drenched in sentiments typical of a tiny portion of oppressed humanity attempting to take their mundane quarrels with the world to the cosmic stage. It was, he said, “a rather repulsive work.”35 Even the picture of the New Jerusalem was flawed—a place “where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness.” He mocked, “how terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!” However, he admitted that here was much for contemplation in the light of humanity’s perennial search for self-knowledge. Between the lines, or more to the point, underneath the given text, as in a palimpsest, was yet another text, altered by later Christian writers, perhaps imperfectly transmitted by John of Patmos, the supposed compiler.36 Rather than a prophecy or a metaphor for the stages of future boon and doom to be experienced by a throng of believers, it conveyed ideas about spiritual development deriving from very ancient civilizations. The

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seven-sealed Book in chapter 5, for instance, referred to “the seven centers or gates” of a person’s dynamic consciousness, which the theosophist James Pryse, one of Lawrence’s mentors, mapped onto the seven chakras or ganglia of Hindu medicine, running along the spine and culminating in the vestigial eye inside the brain. “Man has seven levels of awareness, deeper and higher: or seven spheres of consciousness,” Lawrence explained. In the opening of the seals, “we are witnessing the opening and conquest of the great psychic centres of the human body.”37 The problem of contemporary civilization for Lawrence was exactly this: how to interpret a text whose spirit had been killed by too-literal readings. But what was to be expected of a modern civilization where the individual “in relation to the State, to the world, and to the cosmos” stood “in mad hostility to all of them, having, in the end, to will the destruction of them all.” While the Apocalypse purported to bear witness to this final destructive act, it manifested, paradoxically, man’s earnest desire for “his living wholeness and his living unison.”38 Let unity and hierarchy thrive, he concluded; and if the democratic tendencies of his time interfered, so much the worse.39 As things stood, humans were alienated not only from their societies but also from themselves, deluded by their own illusions about individuality. Instead, “for man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.”40 Nor should all mental processes be oriented toward the accomplishment of a goal. Consciousness itself was goal enough. “We torture ourselves getting somewhere,” he observed; “and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.” The transit from Angelica’s world to D. H. Lawrence’s takes me across five centuries of Western history whose significance is the object of an exuberantly scrappy historiography expressed in a variety of languages and specializations, which cannot detain me here. To say that Lawrence exemplifies, as well as any writer of his time, a Western mentality’s turn eastward in the final stage of postVictorian globalization, in the midst of a process driven by colonial aspirations and populist militarism, is not saying much. Perhaps more to the point, he exemplifies the disenchantment enshrined in the work of his learned contemporary, Max Weber, who observed the emerging world with similar misgivings but different assumptions. Stiflingly rigid economic and social structures having begun to close in on the individual, and the embers of traditional confessional fervor having temporarily cooled, Weber, borrowing a line from Goethe, envisioned a future populated by “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”41 The advance of hedonistic consumerism for Weber was only the last stage in a

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process that began when humans’ life on earth was morally redeemed from the other-worldliness of the middle ages, and when activity within a business was eventually regarded as a virtue not a vice. Over time, however, “material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.” One had only to observe America, he went on, to view “the pursuit of wealth” having become the raison d’être. He indicated no escape route for the embattled self; but like Lawrence, he wondered whether “entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.” In the event, there would be both, in that interwar pandemonium; and arguably, there is more to come. The relationship between the old world and the new, between Angelica’s world and the twenty-first century, points also to the central ambivalence of the Renaissance. What kind of age was hers? Predominant styles of thought can obviously not be reduced to convenient formulae; but the Renaissance was once dismissed by historians of science for being an age of ignorance. According to Alexandre Koyré, writing in 1949, it “was one of the periods least endowed with critical spirit that the world has known. It is the epoch of the grossest and most profound superstition.”42 It is, in other words, entirely un-modern. So much for the Victorians’ misguided attempts to hearken back to it for inspiration and enjoyment. In particular, Renaissance people, according to Koyré, believed in magic and witchcraft, things unseen and unproved, baseless traditions and ancient errors. Less than twenty years later, Michel Foucault, reaching for the features that most distinguished it from his own time, began his inquiry with the description, found in a novel by Jorge Luis Borges, of a Chinese encyclopedia, confirming “the exotic charm of another system of thought,” closed to us by “the limitation of our own” and by what we would take to be, “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”43 More recently, the shifting sands of creative estrangement inspired Bruno Latour to wonder where we stood in relation to the present, now that we are no longer “modern,” that is, no longer committed to the logics of domination and emancipation that characterized the first half of the twentieth century.44 Other epochs would have to be readjusted accordingly. What was it like to exist in an age as profoundly respectful as the Renaissance was, of an ancient heritage whose wisdom its scholars had recovered? Some of that wisdom regarded areas of thought, such as astrology and divination, which would eventually move from the center to the far periphery of intellectual life; but in Angelica’s time there was no sign of this. Other forms of knowledge, destined to a longer sway, existed alongside these. There were jarring contradictions between knowledge acquired by authority and knowledge

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acquired by experience, between knowledge available in the city and what was in the countryside, between that available to whoever had sufficient means and to those without, between what was allowed to males and what to females, between what was sanctioned by religion and what by the state, between the truths of Christianity and those of paganism. Interesting syncretisms emerged: practices of healing that applied folk magic to Christian objects and ceremonies, practices of investigation that used observation, mathematics, and the occult.45 For as long as Angelica would have lived, there was no Descartes to call for starting over again from scratch. Apart from the variety of approaches, sixteenth-century persons were afraid there was simply too much to know.46 They also wondered how much of it was true. Stepping away from the sixteenth century, we may get the dimensions of the problem. Paul Veyne pertinently asks, “Did the Greeks believe in their myths?” To convey the idea, he juxtaposes an aspect that may mean little to us now against another that means much. “It is clear that the existence or nonexistence of Theseus and gas chambers in one point in space and time has a material reality that owes nothing to our imagination.”47 Things either are or they are not, quite independently of us. In order to sort out what is from what is not, we engage in a series of conventional thought processes placed at our disposal by our culture which allow us to regulate our perceptions and our ideas about them according to the prevailing set of norms. “Reality or unreality is perceived, misunderstood, or interpreted in one way or another according to the program in force. It, by itself, does not claim our attention; things are not perfectly clear. The same is true of the programs themselves. A good program does not naturally come into view.” Truth depends on context not just content. “There is no truth of things, nor is it immanent.” Now I wonder: when Angelica viewed the cathedral frescoes, did she take them for a representation of reality? Did she take the stories she read in the Bible as actual fact? When she read a novella what did she make of that? In his stories, Straparola, like all fiction writers before and since, in spite of the comic hilarity and even the occasional surreal moment, strives for the suspension of disbelief. Part of his pact with the reader involves the temporary dissolution of the boundary between fact and fiction. He never goes so far as Matteo Bandello, who declared that his stories “non sono favole ma vere istorie” [are not fables but true histories; Dedication to II, 11]. But he adopts a matterof-fact tone giving the emotional basis for a denouement which is all the more striking in that it is supposed to have involved real people. “At Genoa . . . there lived, not long ago, a gentleman named Rainaldo Scaglia, a man of great wealth,

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and endowed no less generously with wit and knowledge” (I, 1). And again, “In Bologna . . . there lived a young scholar of graceful and amiable parts named Filenio Sisterno, born in the island of Crete” (II, 2). Not to mention: “Near to Imola . . . there lived once upon a time a priest named Scarpafico, who served the village church of Postema” (I, 3). He sets stories in real places, including details which appear to anchor the accounts in reality. Consider this: I tell you then, pleasant women, that Carlo d’Arimino, as I think that some of you know, was a bellicose man, a scorner of God, one who cursed the saints, a murderer, bestial, and given to every form of effeminate lust. So great was his malice and so many and varied the vices of his heart that he had no equal. He was young, charming, and distinguished and he fell very deeply in love with a girl, the daughter of a poor widow. Although she was poor and she and daughter lacked the basic necessities, the widow was the sort of woman who rather let herself die of hunger than allow her daughter to sin (II, 3).48

In all these instances, he amply fulfills Aristotle’s definition of art as the representation of action, that is, the imitation of things, mutatis mutandis, that may have actually occurred. Readers are supposed to understand what they can and cannot expect from his work. They are, after all, persons of intelligence and good sense. The flattery he directs to humans in general, presumably, is meant to extend principally to them. Thus, “The human intellect is so acute, that without a doubt it surpasses all the human forces in the world” (V, 2). And again, “The human intellect . . . is so keen and subtle, that one would be hard set to find a task arduous enough to baffle it” (I, 2). This is not to say that no one in the world is stupid. “If we . . . wished to prudently discover with that diligence which is fitting how large is the number of foolish and ignorant men, we would quite easily find it to be infinite” (IX, 4). The tales themselves were meant to stand as an example. “If we wished to know the faults that proceed from ignorance, let us go with experience, the teacher of all things, and she like a beloved mother will show us everything” (IX, 4). A chief motor of the humor in many of the tales is the mistaken attribution of knowledge; for the worst fault of all is pretending to know what one does not. “From ignorance there springs, among other vices, that one which men call vanity, the real foundation of every ill and the source of every human error” (IV, 4). How readers are supposed to utilize their intelligence to derive pleasure and instruction, given the conventions of the genre, he leaves up to them. Arguably, even the more impossible episodes, such as the magic tuna in III, 1, or the doll that defecates money in V, 2, and so forth, were no more implausible

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than so many of the portents, prodigies, etc., retailed in the “information” press of the time. Often hawked on the streets, such works promised to tell, for instance, of the “great miracle having taken place in Arles in Provence,” with whatever details could be either found or invented.49 How were readers to interpret a broadsheet informing of a “horrible and marvellous monster” born in 1578 in the city of “Eusrigo, in the territory of Novara” featuring “seven heads and seven arms, and the legs of a beast,” adding that “the main head has a single eye in the forehead?”50 The accompanying image, purporting to have been drawn in the shop of “Noah’s Ark,” showed legs jointed like a goat’s and ending in veritable hooves. Comparable was another “monster, born in the city of Venice from a Jewish Woman in the Ghetto” three years before.51 Neither, in sheer weirdness, was any match for the giant insect that a certain Giorgio Ferando met on his way from his house to the beach in Santos, Brazil, standing ten feet tall, with what, judging from the illustration, could have been an ostrich’s legs and claws, a bird’s head, two large breasts, human arms and hands, and a human penis.52 Between such stories and those in Straparola, perhaps it was hard to tell which were more fantastic. Complicating matters still further were one-off publications drawn from novels but purporting to be news items. I am impressed by a pamphlet which appeared in Venice in 1558 with the title, Copia di un nuovo caso notabile intervenuto a un gran gentiluomo genovese [Copy of a new notable case which happened to a great Genoese gentleman], appealing to the reading public with the typical diction common in news publishing, but which was nothing other than the first tale of the first night in Straparola’s collection, concerning Salardo.53 “You will see how the son brought the father to justice, a thing very useful to know,” reported the title page, referring to Salardo’s stepson Postumio, who became his hangman in order to gain a double inheritance. The first of two copies in the Marciana Library in Venice displays the printer’s mark of the Bindoni firm, printers of Straparola’s first publication, the New Work. The second claims to have been published at the behest of one Vincenzio Cancelliere da Pistoia, “Astrologo,” pushing to a new level the possible credentials for a bearer of news; and at least according to the nineteenth-century bibliographer Bartolomeo Gamba, the dedication “to the Signori Gentiluomini di Venezia,” promises “I will attempt to use my intelligence on some work of mine to help chase away the melancholic humors in this heat, and in a short time you will have another whimsical work full of precepts and very pleasurable.”54 Sorting out information from disinformation, truth from falsehood, was an education in itself, necessitated not only by the commodification of news but also

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by the publicity needs of emerging states. Already in the late sixteenth century, distinguishing credible newsletters from incredible ones was an intelligent reader’s game. When reports began “it is said that,” or “some have heard,” or “it is reported,” or words to that effect, that was exactly what was meant, and the reader had to read between the lines to discover what sources were reliable and what were not. The invention of atrocities to serve as justification for massacre had not yet reached the superb levels of refinement seen in the twenty-first century.55 However, since cannibalism, paganism, apostasy, slaughter of one’s coreligionists, were all legitimate reasons for suspending the ordinary demands of humanity, if either side in a conflict could profit by exaggerating the sins of the other, there was little cause to expect a faithful rendering of events. The first casualty in the Spanish Armada affair, as in many other struggles, was credibility; where Dutch and Italian readers were served up stories of Francis Drake having died somewhere off the Orkney Islands, English ones heard of suspected Spanish landings in Scotland where the inhabitants were killed. In the end each side believed whatever was convenient.56 Just because stories were printed, it did not mean they were true. Print in itself, anyone knew, was no more of a guarantee of veracity than were the truth-claims of a writer. Shakespeare made the character Mopsa in The Winter’s Tale an object of derision because she thinks songs and ballads are true ipso facto because they are sold in print; but the audience is supposed to be too intelligent to be taken in by this.57 For Tommaso Garzoni, widely read in the late sixteenth century, print’s emancipatory potential lay not in the fixity of truth or any such thing, but rather in the printing of evident nonsense. “This is the art that indicates the fools, that exposes the arrogant, that makes known those who are learned.” Print enabled the distribution of a wide enough variety of material for individual readers to decide for themselves. “No more can lies be passed off as truths nor black be made to seem white. Everyone may give judgment concerning an infinite number of things about which, without printing, they would be unable to open their mouths to speak, much less judge.” Reputations could no longer be built upon unexamined claims, upon works promised but never delivered, upon knowledge supposed but never divulged. The closed world of the medieval intellectual elite had given way to a wider world offering mental liberty to those who worked to free themselves from dogma and lies. Lionardo Fioravanti, a physician writing around the same time, proclaimed, in this connection, referring to his popular audience by a bestial metaphor, “The kittens have opened their eyes.”58 Education in a society where stories are told, which is to say, every society, involves acculturation into the specific conventions of storytelling. The

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acculturation may begin almost as soon as young readers learn to deal with a succession of letters, words, and sentences. In popular literacy instruction manuals, such as the Fiore di virtù, dating back to the middle ages, but still in circulation in Angelica’s time, they read about individuals who experienced triumphs and tragedies not too far different from the characters in a novella, although conveyed with a little less irony and at much less length.59 For instance, in a chapter concerning the sin of lust, they would have read about how there once was a virtuous maiden named Acentina, who “heard the other women narrate and discuss about the delight and pleasure of lust” [contare e rasionare infra le altre donne del diletto e piacere de la luxuria]. Her curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to experiment with a young suitor. Soon she repented and “began to think about the abomination and horror of lust and about her great shame and about the fact that she had lost her maidenhood and that in no way would she be able to recover it.” So desperately did she regret her sin that she eventually “hanged herself by the neck.” Already the first line of the story conveys an admonition against the disastrous consequences of listening uncritically to what one “heard . . . narrate.” How Angelica evaluated the information in her book may have depended upon how much narration she had experienced in her life, and what conclusions she drew from it.60 Whatever her attitude may have been as a reader, the choice to claim Straparola’s Pleasant Nights as “her own book,” already reveals some important features in the emerging profile of this book-owning personage. Straparola, as I have already said, was an adventurous author—by which I mean an author, like Giovanni Boccaccio before him, who wrote about the manners and mores of his own society, often in the medium of attractive, playful, and sometimes explicit, narratives of transgression, pushing this last aspect slightly further, in fact, than the earlier author. By the time Angelica would have acquired the book, books like it were already under scrutiny by the Inquisition and the Congregation on the Index. Homes were being searched, in the first instance by the householders themselves and next by the appropriate officials, as prescribed in the relevant Instructio circum Indicem librorum prohibitorum [Instruction concerning the Index of Forbidden Books], appended to later editions of the severe Index of 1559.61 Booksellers and librarians were constantly in trouble.62 By associating herself with this book Angelica not only claimed its content as “her own” but also its context: the context of forbidden, transgressive, dangerous texts—if only in the privacy of her home. How many other women owned a copy of this book? Female readership of imaginative literature by Angelica’s time was already a stereotype. Straparola,

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no doubt influenced by a convention of the genre, writing to “you gracious and friendly women,” claimed to have published his work “only to please you.” There is no outright pandering to a female audience here, unlike in Agnolo Firenzuola’s “Epistle . . . in praise of women,” introducing the Ragionamenti (Florence, 1548), another typical collection of novels. And whatever misogyny Straparola may have shared with Boccaccio and many others of his time is never explicit. He does not make his chief characters say anything similar to what Boccaccio has a character say in the opening appeal to the Decameron, that “man is the head of woman, and . . . without a man to guide us it rarely happens that any enterprise of ours is brought to a worthy conclusion.”63 Nor does he mention anywhere, as Boccaccio did, that wives are a distraction from letters because of their vanity, intrusiveness, and antipathy to study. Indeed, complains Boccaccio, “what can one say about their hatred for books, when they see anyone opening one up?”64 Straparola makes no such accusations; and likewise he evinces none of the smug disdain which Boccaccio betrays elucidating the sins of “Eve, Our First Mother,” in On Famous Women.65 I tend to think that when he formulates the ideal company of storytellers in his book’s framing tale to include a majority of women, he does so not just because his great predecessor did so in the Decameron, but because he would have found a female audience somehow congenial. Perhaps he even imagined such an audience as he wrote. Rummaging for clues among women’s possessions in the period has so far not yielded any definitive results about women’s reading, so far as I know. Probate inventories would be the usual places to go for attaching owners’ names to their books in early modern times; and for the cities of Florence and Venice they have been studied in some detail. Unfortunately, few such inventories actually refer to possessions belonging to women; and of these, only a tiny number mention books. In Venice, a city of books, of booksellers, and arguably, of readers, a study of 600 probate inventories from between 1560 and 1600, many of them referring to books, turned up only three women’s lists where books were mentioned: novels were not among them.66 A similar study in Treviso regarding the second half of the sixteenth century turned up a larger number of women’s lists, amounting to some 12 percent of the total. In this last sample, prominent titles included various offices of the Blessed Virgin, a Libro dei Santi Padri [Book of the Holy Fathers], a Fiori Preciosi racolti da tutte le opere spirituali [Precious flowers gathered from all the spiritual works], and a Charlemagne romance entitled L’Innamoramento di Carlo Magno.67 Work on Florentine probate inventories shows the same patterns. Typical books owned by women include the predictable assortment of religious titles, a Trionfo della Croce [Triumph of the Cross], a Leggendario

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[Book of Saints’ Legends], a Vangeli di Quaresima [Lenten Gospels]. Secular titles included the likes of Dante and Petrarch.68 I cannot help thinking that such inventories give no particularly accurate picture of book possession, not least because any books possessed by females which would have been included in inventories made up for males, are impossible to detect. The book historian’s search for the slightest definite traces of women’s engagement with books has encountered some anomalies of interest mainly in a negative sense, for the caution they inspire regarding any excessive reliance on book lists for the history of reading. A Florentine woman called “monna Lessandra,” evidently the daughter or even possibly the wife of Manetto Fei, to whom her name is attached by the possessive “di” between her name and his on folios 572r–573r in file number 2655 of the Magistrato dei Pupilli or probate court, is shown to have left behind her a tiny hoard of fourteen esoteric titles, mostly in Latin, on topics ranging from astronomy to astrology, from cosmography to geography.69 Two single religious titles stand out from the rest: a Bible and a Trionfo della Croce. I would like to think of her as an erudite as well as a devout woman, with a penchant for difficult and highly specialized treatises. On the other hand “her” collection could be an amalgamation of property belonging to her and to someone else who may have died before, perhaps a husband, or even the father. Two texts seem to denote the interests of a sailor or ship owner—a work on “the astrolabe,” and a “manuscript concerning navigation,” perhaps an on-board diary; but this is all I can say about Manetto Fei. About monna Lessandra I am still not sure. Connecting collections to interests is no easier when the owner is better known. I wonder about the case of Cosimo I, the Tuscan grand duke when Angelica would have been a child. He owned over 1,300 books, including many dedicated to and/or given to him by the authors, and others acquired en bloc from the estate of Giovanni Mazzuoli (called lo Stradino) or from members of his own family.70 How many of these were actually acquired by and for the women in his midst is certainly an open question. Also, there is no way of knowing how many of these he actually read, except by finding traces in his correspondence; contemporary testimonies, even by his flatterers, do not regard him as having been a particularly learned man.71 Individuals who possessed much fewer books might have been more likely to read them. Yet his books served not only his own needs but those of a court circle, including his master of public works Giorgio Vasari and his physician Baccio Baldini. Not necessarily in the case of Cosimo, but in general, books served many other purposes besides reading: as decorative objects, professional qualifications, status symbols, reminders of the giver (living

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or dead), and even, in the case of holy books, as protections for the home. I will not pursue the theme of mutilation, or more precisely, the perennial recycling of images from books that goes on to this day, and which the disappearance of the original bindings and much else has rendered virtually untraceable. In the case of Angelica’s book two illustrations are gone, but the accompanying deficit of thirty or more other folios argues for destruction due not just to image-mining. Inquisition records occasionally mention books, especially scandalous ones, although most of the Florentine Inquisition records were lost in the depredations of the Napoleonic era, presumably excepting copies of those cases that were remanded to Rome and which scholars, over the last twenty years, since the opening of the Roman Inquisition archives, have yet to examine.72 The relatively better known and more complete records for sixteenth-century Venice may shed some light on the question, keeping in mind the necessary qualifications regarding a place reputedly less suffocated by controls.73 There, a certain poor spinner named Lunarda possessed a copy of Calvin’s The Catechism of the Church of Geneva explicating a radical anti-Roman ecclesiology accompanied by an equally unorthodox theology. A certain Aquilina admitted to possessing, apart from relatively innocuous texts such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Francesco il Cieco di Ferrara’s Mambriano, also Benedetto da Mantova’s Beneficio di Cristo, an underground classic of Italian crypto-pelagianism, thought by the German historian Leopold von Ranke to have been lost, but rediscovered in a unique copy at St. Johns College, Cambridge, in the mid-nineteenth century.74 In spite of their protestations to the contrary, couched in terms calculated to flatter the prejudices of accusers unaccustomed to esteeming female intelligence of any kind, these women probably read the dangerous books found in their possession. But I have no way of knowing whether Angelica was among them. The next best thing to those relatively rare explicit testimonies about reading which I sometimes find in letters, diaries, or journals, is the evidence in the books themselves. Annotations within books, for present purposes, may be of two types: indications on the book that the book belonged to so-and-so, and indications among the pages that so-and-so read certain passages, because they underlined or commented upon them—that is, marginalia.75 Rhiannon Daniels has recently explored the markings in a range of Boccaccio manuscripts and early imprints, drawing important conclusions about readership and ownership.76 My volume by Straparola was owned, Angelica tells us, by herself. She never tells us that she read it. No other marks of hers exist in the book, at least in its present condition. However by signing within rather than without, on the middle folio rather than on the title page, on a typeset page halfway through the book, rather

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than on the page identifying what the book is, she engages not only with the materiality of the book but with the material in the book. Hers is a reader’s signature as much as an owner’s signature—indeed the signature of an owner who wishes to be known also as a reader, and more particularly, as a reader of this book. She was not the only female reader of Straparola who left a personal mark in a book. A copy dated 1599 and numbered 058395 at the Morgan Library on Madison Avenue in New York seems to have been owned first by a certain Maria Caterina Buzzaccarini, who signed beneath the colophon with the preposition “di” to indicate possession, not long after the time of publication, in ink now barely legible due to traces of glue from an attached sheet, perhaps a blank label affixed during a transfer of ownership and later removed. Who was she? The family belonged to very old aristocracy in the city of Padua, although not rooted in the palazzo in via Euganea that now bears their name, later acquired by them and recently restored by the University of Padua for use as the History Department headquarters. Many males bearing her surname were authors, as we know from Giuseppe Vedova’s work on Scrittori padovani, where we find entries for Francesco (fifteenth century), son of Arcoano and Nobilia Manfredi; Francesco (sixteenth century), son of Brunoro and an unnamed spouse; and Antonio (1578–1632), son of Annibale and Diamante Anselmi. Nor was Maria Caterina the only owner of this copy; a later indication on the flyleaf preceding the title page, gives a certain Giovanni Battista Carrara, identified (by the man himself?) as a “a shepherd of Arcadia,” that is, a member of the prestigious Accademia degli Arcadi begun in Rome in 1690 to reform Italian literature and rapidly diffused throughout Italy, wherein he, according to the custom, was known by the fanciful pseudonym “Sassanisto Aliteo.” To him are probably due the occasional markings serving to reorder misplaced pages, which have been attended to in the book’s modern rebinding. Who penciled in the one-word solutions next to many of the book’s enigmas is still a mystery. Was it part of a game? Typically, ownership marks are mute about reading. The copy at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of the same 1570 edition as Angelica’s, shelf listed Palatini 2.10.1.8, was once owned by Michele di Ristoro Lippi, as he notes on the back of the last printed page in the book. His handwritten annotation says nothing about the book itself, whether he liked it or disliked it, only that he acquired it on April 28, 1590, from a relative, one Dionigi Lippi, living in Castelfiorentino, in exchange for a number of items he had on hand, including a “book called the book about China” which could have been the translation of a work about fever remedies by Juan González de Mendoza actually entitled Dell’historia della China

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(Venice: Andrea Muschio, 1586), but very likely having “Il libro della China” on the binding, along with eight copies of what must have been a pamphlet, broadsheet, or even devotional card, which he calls “Marcho Fuochi,” the details of which have so far eluded all efforts at recovery.77 His surname was a common one in and around Florence, and members had been eligible for office in the Florentine Republic according to the records of the Tratte or eligibility board. In the 1590s, we find a potmaker named Francesco di Ristoro di Michele Lippi and his brother Michele active in Poggibonsi; but this is far as I am determined to look for this reader, since there are others demanding my attention.78 Equally silent regarding his impression of the book is Sir William Pickering, who once owned the Houghton Library’s copy of the second (Venice 1551) edition, and the only mark he left indicating his possession was his family coat of arms stamped in gilt on the full calf covers. He obviously read other books; although there is no list. A diplomat under three monarchs, he was once considered a serious contender for the hand of Elizabeth I; and like his busy career, his book interests apparently ranged widely. Bound with the same copy, and perhaps associated in his mind with the same worldly concerns as Straparola, was Innocenzio Ringhieri’s Dialoghi della vita, et della morte, published in 1550 and containing reflections about “treasure and other riches,” “a well ordered and peaceful house,” “the pleasures enjoyed in the nuptial bed,” as well as “the ugliness of corpses and of death.”79 A book he did sign on the inside, with “W. Pykerynge, 1572,” was a copy of Hubert Goltzius’s Fastos magistratuum et triumphorum romanorum, analyzing ancient Roman ceremonial, published in Bruges in 1566.80 After he died in 1575, not this book, but the Straparola with its accompanying Ringhieri, made their way to the collection of the “Earl of Chesterfield,” so says the bookplate on the inside cover, presumably referring to the fourth earl, Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694–1773), protagonist of a celebrated quarrel with Samuel Johnson about other more recondite matters and owner of a number of other fine old books, including (the Houghton catalog informs me), the 1674 translation of Blaise de Monluc’s Commentaries, “wherein are describ’d all the combats, rencounters, skirmishes, battels, sieges, assaults, scalado’s, the taking and surprizes of towns and fortresses, as also the defences of the assaulted and besieg’d.”81 Love and war, the two chief interests of the aristocrat à la mode, one might say, amply represented. A certain “J. Abraham” marked an early copy now in the Lyon public library in France bearing the shelf number 380354; I assume a male, possibly a Jew. I cannot be sure of the origin, as the name occurs in early modern documents in Italy often as a forename, and in Germany and France as a surname. I would

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hesitate to call it a signature: the letters are finely formed, but separated, not cursive, in a modern style, sloping slightly upwards, evidently not coeval with the 1556 edition of Straparola. Whoever owned the book first had it bound in old parchment, and the inside of the cover still shows Latin script in a medieval hand. The book was donated to the library (the bookplate reveals) by Sébastien Gaeten-Salvador Des Guidi, a pioneering homeopath following in the footsteps of Samuel Hahnemann, who fled to France from the Kingdom of Naples to evade prosecution for his activities as a general of the revolutionary forces against the Bourbon government.82 There he enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career in Marseilles and in Lyon and became noted for some remarkable cures, while assembling the library to which the Straparola book once belonged. Again, actual reading is nowhere in evidence here. So far I have been assuming Angelica was the first owner of her book. I must confess that I have no good reason to do so. Only because I find the hypothesis somehow repulsive, I will not entertain the possibility that she is no real owner at all, but an interloper, vandalizing the property of someone else, for malice or for fun. On the other hand, I quite willingly accept that she too, like so many, could have received the book as a gift. I would expect the missing first pages to have contained some testimony to the giving, although the signing on the middle pages then would seem rather strange. I leave the question open, also because, gift or no gift, none of my conclusions so far is affected. If she acquired the book secondhand, after it had been in circulation for some time, that is another matter. Once again, I am missing what could be the crucial record on the cover or frontispiece telling who the previous owners were. But in such a case the chronology with which I have so far been working might have to be drastically advanced. In my own defense I can only presume a sense that her calligraphy roughly corresponds to the possible variations in the prevailing style at the time of publication. If the item was a gift, then was it from a female or a male well-wisher? In either case, supposing the giver knew the contents, there could be interesting insinuations. A gift may be part of a courtship, indeed part of a seduction. Was Angelica an innocent, whom some older adult attempted to lead down the path of pleasure, never to return? Here the bland vellum cover, masking the salacious contents, could help to make way past unsuspecting parents or guardians. A book reveling in adulterous titillation may have diverse implications depending on the marital status of the giver and receiver. Was she a married woman, whose husband or lover sought to stoke the flames of love? Supposing the husband was the giver, and supposing he himself had read the book, or knew of its contents,

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then the gift may have been intended to enter into the uxorial games of role playing and irony. Supposing the lover as giver, perhaps she was party, in real life, to the same kinds of love-games and ruses adumbrated in her book. Her decision to claim it on the inside rather than the outside might thus have a kind of conspiratorial significance. Perhaps the book, with its naughty secret, the secret of her claim to its contents, stood in her home as a clandestine reminder about a love-embassy, even a betrayal.83 If not as a gift, she may well have acquired the book by purchase. Many were the ways. A compact octavo measuring 11 cm × 16 cm bound, or 10 cm × 15 cm unbound as it probably would have been sold, is small enough to have been bought in the most casual of circumstances, not necessarily in one of the bookseller’s shops in Florence (one of her presumed abodes), located for the most part in the quarter of Santa Croce, between via Ghibellina, Piazza San Firenze and via Condotta.84 She may have seen it on a street side stall or among the wares being hawked by a so-called chapman or traveling salesman moving through the streets and squares with a load of the most portable printed genres, from novels to news, from battle prints to images of the Grand Turk.85 Did a shout of “novelle, historie” echo through the urban canyons within her earshot? The aural experience of early modern book buying has been buried with its makers, although I know something about market sounds musically evoked in Adriano Banchieri’s 1605 madrigal book called Barca di Venezia per Padova (Boat ride from Venice to Padua). Ladies of a certain rank may have strolled the streets of Florence when such calls could be heard, or alternatively, they might hear about the availability of such wares from their ladies-in-waiting, nurses, cooks, or other employees, or indeed, male friends or others more likely to be roaming about town, in order to be able to acquire them. Where would she have kept it? When not in her hand or on her person it must have occupied a customary place in the house. In a public room? In a study? Closed inside a cupboard, exposed on top of a piece of furniture, or on an open shelf? Such are the possibilities suggested by artworks depicting room interiors and by probate inventories listing books inside or upon objects. Already by the sixteenth century, the accumulation of goods in homes was causing space problems, and books added to the trouble. Anton Francesco Doni, the author of the first bibliography in a modern language, has a character in one of his dialogues observe that “few things are necessary,” and all else simply answers an urging that can never be satisfied. “The acquisitive one (voglioloso) I think suffers a great pain, because what he wants he cannot have,” and for having everything, even the accoutrements of a reasonably comfortable civic life, “all the money

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minted was not enough.”86 How much more so in the case of books, whose decreasing prices scarcely allowed the desirous to keep up with the constant increase in number and variety available on the market. He quipped, uttering a widely believed slur, “O what a wonderful place Turkey must be, where they don’t get involved in this curse of books.”87 Maybe she kept it in a private library. If so, it could have added to a general effect. Books in bulk, exposed to view, have a special kind of impact, more than the multiple of the single units. Every scholar who has ever spent time in the stereotypical book-lined room knows this. Walter Benjamin, in a reverie brought about while unpacking his books, quotes Anatole France on the transcendental value of a personal library, which may contain many items never read, and where the actual reading of each one is much less important than the potential reading of all.88 Books are bearers of desire; and the desire may have little to do with what is in the books. Actual contents may be less relevant than supposed contents. Giovanni Levi, the Venice-based scholar, contrary to the norm, keeps his books stacked horizontally (not vertically) with the spine in and the pages out. When asked how he finds anything, the response is, he knows where to look. Don Giovanni de’ Medici, on campaign in Friuli in Angelica’s time, corresponded constantly with his librarian in Florence about building library shelves and acquiring new texts for a library he would never see.89 Libraries were not only for use—they were portraits of their owners as well as status symbols of their families. Already a century before, the Sassetti and the Medici were envied, at least by Isotta Nogarola, for the books they had, even more than for the books they read.90 No one was renting out books by the foot for decorative purposes like Kenny’s Bookshop in Dublin; but bibliomaniacs’ descendants often lived among borrowed splendor. Would she have had other uses for it besides reading? As a custodian of memory, perhaps it triggered associations with a loved one or with a set of circumstances present at first acquisition or first use. Rowan Watson reminds me that books could serve as talismans against evil—perhaps not in the present case considering the subject matter.91 In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a book serves as an instrument for solving a crime, when the character Lavinia, a tongueless victim of her abductors, indicates certain words in a copy of Ovid in order to “recount” the story of what happened to her.92 Books have killed, or nearly killed, and Pliny the Younger may have recorded the first instance of this, in his account of how Virginius Rufus was severely injured by a falling book93; but to my knowledge, murder by the forced eating of a book does not occur before Peter Greenaway’s original screenplay, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife

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and her Lover (1989). Books present surfaces of a certain regularity suggesting places for accommodating other more precarious objects—cups, glasses, vases of flowers. Stacked in piles, they may substitute for stools or steps, or even, in the seventeenth-century case of the collector Antonio Magliabechi in Florence, as a bed.94 Whatever may have been her actual uses for her book, the potential uses no doubt were many more. A question has been haunting me for this entire portion of the research, one that reaches to the heart of the relation between Angelica and her book: what happened to the first twenty-five folios? Mine has already been almost as much a story about what is missing as about what is present. The evidence I do have seems to bear the imprint, to carry the marks, suggesting the existence of the evidence I do not have. At the same time, what is lacking may be lacking for a reason that could be important for what I want to say. What if the folios went missing during an episode that tells me more about my personages and their time? A mind more inclined than mine to novelistic invention might imagine different possibilities, ranging from accident to agony, from an event or events solely involving the book, to dramatic scenarios of deliberate destruction. What if the leaves were removed in Angelica’s own time, indeed, by Angelica herself? Could she not have made such a gesture out of anger or distress? Surely I would be approaching the limits of my interpretive remit, were I to attempt the reconstruction of such a scene. However, my own readers will surely do it for me whether I attempt it or not. How can they resist trying to fill in the blank in the record by positing, say, an emotional exchange between the book’s owner (Angelica) and some presumed Romeo, giver of this book to her? A more adventurous pen has already given me a solution. Consider: Angelica’s breast heaved as she uttered a groan of despair and shame and humiliation. Her hands trembled as she took the book he had given her down from the shelf, from behind the water pitcher where she had hidden it from the prying eyes of her parents for all of the summer. She stared at it, unable to do anything, her whole body trembling, a single tear trailing down her wan face. Then she opened the book slowly to the title page, where protestations of love forever were etched in brown ink, in the flamboyant hand of her admirer. Her trembling grew more agitated, her face squeezed and twitched into a rubicund grimace. With violence, she tore out the first pages, and the cover, and the cover piece, and flung the book to the floor. Now, she shredded the detached pages again and again, twisted and spit on them, and threw them out the window, watching them disperse on the cool Florentine breeze. It was dark. Nobody noticed. A glow of satisfaction briefly animated her face. Then, with great feeling

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Whether plausible or not, I leave to the reader’s discretion. Yet plausibility may not be the point here. The imaginative writer primarily seeks power and persuasion, not attention to the so-called facts. Here perhaps is where history may learn from fiction, although I hesitate to say the reverse is also true. I am reminded of the reason why I undertook the inquiry in the first place: not to entertain (or, not only), but to discover; and discovery needs a good messenger to be believed. The temptation is strong, to go even further down this road; I pull myself back because so much still remains to be told.

5

Reading and Gender

However Angelica may have gotten her book and for whatever reason, the acquisition put her en route to a world far from home. The experience of literature was in her grasp, all she had to do was read it. Yet I still do not know what kind of reader she was. When she picked up her book, how did it seem to her? Several problems arise. How to grasp a feature so intimate, so secret, so deep within the consciousness of another human being? How to enter the mind of a person long dead? I try not to let the difficulties overwhelm the quest, and seek answers from those who have thought most carefully about such matters. Roland Barthes distinguished between three types of reading which (synthesizing his argument very much) I will call fetishist, impassioned, and initiatory.1 In the first type, the reader is seduced by the words themselves and their various combinations. In the second, the reader is emotionally engaged by the inner force of the combinations of words, thus text and experience become one. In the final type, reading enkindles the desire to write. For the moment I set aside the last type and focus on the first two. Whichever kind she was, she read in a time when reading was being scrutinized anew as the basis of intelligent living. Over a half-century before Angelica’s time Niccolò Machiavelli thought about reading, and he recorded his ideas in a famous letter to Francesco Vettori. Writing in semi-exile from the city of Florence after the fall of the republic and the return of the Medici, he conveyed the experience by a metaphor: On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.2

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Like the ancient Greeks and Romans whom he admired, he takes orality here as the form of human interchange par excellence. Writing is nothing other than the means of enabling conversation across space and time. Reading is therefore a meeting of one’s mind with that of another, a comparing and contrasting of ideas, often a debate. It can thus be a dramatic exercise, with the reader juxtaposed against the writer as well as against the characters in the book. Machiavelli’s view stands in stark contrast to some views stemming from ancient Greece, which according to current scholarship understood reading as an essentially passive act, whereby readers empower writers by lending them their minds and voices for the expression of ideas.3 The pleasures of imaginative literature, outlined also in Machiavelli’s account, are less political and more personal. Typical fare might include “either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the lesser poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like.” He takes these with him on excursions to “the spring” and “the aviary,” which may have more significance from the standpoint of his own creative processes than the mere designation of particular locations on his estate.4 Such readings inspire introspection and the recollection of past experience. Of the authors and their works, he says “I read of their tender passions and their loves, remember mine, enjoy myself a while in that sort of dreaming.” This dreaming occurs within the same context as other diversions, for instance, playing cards and arguing with the neighbors, all of which, we might imagine, tend to the serious goal of encouraging mental recreation and exercise, in the fruitful combination of use and pleasure that the Renaissance ideal enshrined. In an age so intensely concerned with the transmission and transformation of learning, obviously much thought went into the retention of ideas. Machiavelli, in the letter just quoted, placed the issue in perspective: “And because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember, I have noted everything” that he heard in his fictive conversations with writers, “which has profited me, and I have composed a little work On Princedoms.” His hilariously self-effacing account of how he wrote The Prince should not distract from his apparent awareness of contemporary study techniques, even if he did not refer explicitly to pedagogues such as Gasparino Barzizza and Guarino da Verona, who accompanied their lists of important authors with instructions on retention and note-taking.5 The habit of reading with a book in one hand and a pen in the other was beginning to take hold, which has lasted at least until the advent of electronic techniques. He seems to have anticipated the concept of Antonio Sacchini, a late-sixteenth-century Jesuit, who recommended rewriting the original hastily arranged notes in systematic order.6 That he used Dante as an

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authority on reading retention seems particularly significant; and considering the number of citations to the poet throughout his works, he must indeed have taken good notes—as also on other vernacular greats, such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, whom he mentions by name. And surely he knew as well as anyone that not every set of notes can become a timeless classic. Between noting and using, many things can happen. To be of any use, the physical archive must bear some relation to the mental archive of information stored in the mind. Sacchini knew this well. This did not make him a memory theorist per se, although his suggestions may have been somewhat more practical than the ideas of those who are usually given this name. The true heirs of the mnemotechnics of the ancient world, ranging from Marsilio Ficino to Camillo Guidi to Giordano Bruno, had other purposes in view than the simple study and enjoyment of literature. And although they supposedly intended their systems to provide ways of storing information for deployment in oratory so the speaker might quickly recall salient points without any other aids, sometimes one has the impression that they got carried away by the beauty of the construction itself. Moreover, they had all they could do to keep track of the enormous repertory of ancient texts that the book hunters and philologists were restoring to the Western canon, without worrying about the vernacular poets, novelists, and treatise-writers of their own time. Nevertheless, they seemed to imagine that their methods could be transferable to any kind of knowledge from any period, including plot, character, or setting. If Camillo Guidi’s majestic memory theater attracted the admiration of Tasso and Ariosto, this was as much a tribute to its impressive versatility in regard to the moderns as to its historical importance, emphasized by Frances Yates.7 Guidi organized his memory theater as an actual physical space based on a fantasy of Solomon’s House of Wisdom in the biblical book of Proverbs. Each of seven corridors, corresponding to the seven pillars of the House, was connected to one of the seven planets (with their associated characteristics) and divided further into seven bands sharing a single feature, such as the various natural capacities of humans in the sixth band and the arts and sciences in the seventh band. Such a construction would allow the user to grasp the whole of creation at once, and the role or place of the specific aspects, natural or not, within it, including, presumably, the knowledge gleaned from literature. Vigilius Zuichemus, who viewed in Venice one of the several prototypes of this theater that were actually built, in a letter to Erasmus, claimed that “the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind.”8 The actual functioning of the invention, also in regard to

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jogging the memory on literary subjects, alas remained largely in the head of Camillo, since he never completed any of the writings associated with it. In his De umbris idearum (“The Shadows of Ideas”) Bruno, too, seems to be working to a much deeper purpose than merely to help the orator formulate a persuasive presentation.9 Here instead is an entire way of thinking, an entire philosophy, perhaps an entire way of life, issued more or less when Angelica would have been entering her maturity. The images in his system are not only aids for remembering the categories into which ideas might be divided; they are also magical symbols intended to inspire the mind in the search for the deepest mysteries. The decans and the houses of the zodiac, the planets, the mansions of the moon, and others from a central core of 150 stellar images, give rise to the rest of the cosmos, above and below. As the stars are diffusion points for powerful forces determining the destinies of every terrestrial thing, including plants, animals, humans, minerals, as well as the four elements, contemplating these images may lead the seeker to the origins of all, and the emanating power of divinity. From the current human authors of arts and entertainment, and their audiences, he seems to be taking me very far indeed. Or is he? Oratory and poetics are bound up with the ancient arts of rhetoric, and so is the making of literary prose. If Straparola was a prose stylist this was as much due to his (shall I say, “divine”?) powers of memory as to his abilities as a writer, translator, and compiler. What is more, literary appreciation is all the more intense as the knowledge of the literary, philosophical, and historical context goes deeper. The chances are slim that either Angelica or Straparola would have been aware of the more esoteric currents of contemporary philosophy circulating around them. However, they could hardly have escaped immersion in a culture that placed such emphasis on astral forces, and especially, on visual experience. In spite of all the efforts that the experts put into trying to understand creativity, reception, and the functioning of the human mind, these aspects continued to seem as mysterious as the forces of destiny that the storytellers constantly thematized in their books. How can I understand Angelica unless I understand this struggle? Clearly, the fruit gathered from particular methods of study depended not only upon the validity of the method itself but upon the minds involved. Machiavelli was no ordinary reader; nor were Guidi and Bruno. Contemporary thought on the matter conceded that different kinds of learning pertained to different kinds of intellect; and among those who devoted particular attention to this problem was the Puerto Rico-born philosopher and physician Juan Huarte.10 In a text, Examen de ingenios [An examination of minds], which already had

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a strong influence on an Italian thinker like Antonio Possevino before it was finally translated into Italian in 1590, he drew on Plato, Aristotle, and Galen to explain how physiology applied to reading. As in many features of behavior, the differences in complexion [complexio] caused by the given combination of qualities and humors made for fundamental differences in behavior between individuals. A few regularities were observable, due to the outer manifestations of this complexion, for instance between persons of tough skin and flesh, and those with softer bodies: the former being generally of good intellect and good imagination; with the latter normally possessing good memories but lacking in the other abilities. Hair was another indicator: “Thick rough black and full indicates good imagination and good intellect; delicate and tender indicates good memory and nothing else.”11 An important distinction could be made between males and females. Hot and dry (male) produced an aptitude for sustained thought, whereas cool and humid (female) tended toward the imaginative. In any case, where nature was deficient, nurture could step in, by proper care in ensuring the health of the two semens (male and female) in procreation, as well as adequate attention to the child’s development through proper feeding and instruction.12 What kind of a reader Angelica was, may depend on the kind of learner she was. In my mind’s eye several scenarios appear. Did she handle her reading reverently, like the premodern readers mentioned by book historians Roger Chartier and Rolf Engelsing?13 Did she speed through her frivolous book in the midst of other more important readings? Did she keep it around and dip in and out as the urge occurred? Already in the fourteenth century, Petrarch had given a particularly acute account of speed-reading, in the famous letter to Boccaccio where he reports his first impressions on having read a manuscript of the Decameron. “Your book, written in our mother tongue and published, I presume, during your early years,” he writes, “has fallen into my hands, I know not whence or how.”14 Now comes the confession: “If I told you that I had read it, I should deceive you. It is a very big volume, written in prose and for the multitude. I have been, moreover, occupied with more serious business.” He goes on in more detail: “My hasty perusal afforded me much pleasure.” The slight misgivings should come as no surprise, considering the later history of the work. “If the humor is a little too free at times, this may be excused in view of the age at which you wrote, the style and language which you employ, and the frivolity of the subjects, and of the persons who are likely to read such tales.” On the whole, he approved, while leaving the final word suspended: “Along with much that was light and amusing, I discovered some serious and edifying things as well,

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but I can pass no definite judgment upon them, since I have not examined the work thoroughly.” How did Petrarch read, when in a hurry? He explains: “As is usual when one looks hastily through a book, I read somewhat more carefully at the beginning and at the end.” Eventually, of course, Petrarch pays the ultimate tribute, by selecting the Griselda story (x, 10) to translate into Latin. He thus exemplified all the possible types: hasty reading, moderate reading, and the most careful and sympathetic reading a reader can do. By signing her book in the middle, closer to the beginning than to the end, on folio 144 of 353 in all, Angelica revealed herself as one not prone to perusing just prefaces and conclusions, eating the frosting, so to speak, and leaving the rest of the cake. Some recent work has considered that novel reading may have been partly responsible, at least in an English context, for introducing readers to the habit of reading straight through, borne away by the vitality of a text. According to this view, sometime between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, segmented reading gave way to sequential reading.15 Hunting and pecking around a text, grabbing this or that morsel of information, of insight, was replaced at least in some quarters by the leisurely enjoyment of a whole book. And no doubt, in order for there to be habitual page-turning on the part of readers, there had to be the invention of the writing that was a “page-turner.” Where to place such a development along the timeline of literature however may be open to question. Novels are always compiled of individual episodes; just as collections by the likes of Boccaccio, Bandello, and Straparola, are compiled of separate novellas, with the more rapid gyrations of single action contained within the greater revolutions of the story about how the stories are told. Straparola intended his stories to be read through, perhaps on successive days, and like the novella writers before him, organized his material in order to bring readers in to the telling of all the tales. In Angelica’s case, at least so far as I can surmise from the evidence of her intervention, he appears to have had his way. What was going through her mind? Reading obviously involves timeless aspects as well as timely ones, aspects subject to change as well as those that are constant in the human species. Some of her gestures in respect to her book would have been the same as mine. She would have combined the sensory effect of sight with the interpretive capacities of her brain, in ways that should be accessible by comparison and analogy. If historians have so far shown little interest in the neuroscience of reading, possibly because the approach is still so young, the disinterest has not necessarily been reciprocal. A recent text on the topic delves into, if not the history, at least the archaeology of reading, with chapters on “Prehistoric precursors of writing”; “From counting to writing”; “The

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limits of pictography”; “The alphabet: a great leap forward,” referring frequently to Shakespeare and Descartes, and beginning with a line from Quevedo, to the effect that “I listen to the dead with my eyes.” The eye is a poor scanner, this work shows. Retinal precision, while variable across individuals and subject to aging, is generally low. Only the central part of the retina, known as the fovea, is sensitive enough to make out letters, and in order to bring the text into its focus the eye tends to shoot this way and that along short paths called saccades.16 And yet our acquired pattern recognition habits allow us to deploy the scanning capabilities to an extraordinary extent. Only by a curious fluke of evolution could a brain made for reading have come about at all; and only by another series of improbable cultural developments could societies have found out what a powerful instrument this was. Angelica the reader was the highest product of a socio-physiological development of world-changing import. Yet the more I understand her brain, the less I seem to understand her reading. Clearly, the psychomotor modalities of reading may impinge on meaning and comprehension in a number of ways. So may the delivery of the text. Current debates have pointed to the effects of the Internet and digital textuality on the visual reception of communicated messages. The “fourth revolution”—after writing, books, and print—is credited with changing fundamentally the way we read. Not for the better, say some of the more vociferous Internet Cassandras.17 However, reports about encroaching superficiality and abstraction, adding to current worries about recent graduates’ readiness or unreadiness for a competitive marketplace, may be somewhat premature. The historical trajectory informs me that multimediality will inevitably be the norm; and whatever may be the future of the printed book, reading will never be the same again.18 Very likely, the permanent effects will include an increase in rapidity—as pages turn quicker with the eye learning to follow changes in text size, shape, and placement—and a decrease in privacy, as beeping messages and multiple popups accompany the reading. Meanwhile the “new literacies” demand earlier instruction on the nature and meaning of texts and a wider discussion about how the reading experience can be improved. Until I can be sure, I won’t aver categorically that I can read better than Angelica just because I have a better tool. Did she read aloud or silently? The spoken text adds a dramatic component that may be absent from silent reading, and for a long time was the method of delivery par excellence in the most intensely literate societies. Silent reading, already known in ancient Greece, is supposed to have come back into Western culture in the fourth century AD with Saint Ambrose, whose activities (HenriJean Martin reminds me) were described by a curious Saint Augustine peering

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into the master’s study.19 Walter Ong points out that Ambrose himself was of at least two minds: on the one hand, he utilized the visuality of script, on the other hand, he proclaimed the authoritativeness of the spoken word (“Sight is often deceived; hearing serves as a guarantee”).20 In Renaissance high culture, both traditions, the written and the oral, were cultivated deliberately, and whether silent or not depended on the circumstances. The Renaissance academies only formalized a widely diffused practice when they subjected the delivery of oral performances for learning and entertainment to playful rules. Princely courts referred to their representatives abroad as “orators” and not “diplomats,” and oratorical skills learned from studying Quintilian were regarded as equal in importance to letter-writing skills from Cicero for success in state officialdom. At the grand ducal court in Florence, dispatches were read aloud—some, such as those sent by Don Giovanni de’ Medici, also for their entertainment value; and meals were accompanied by learned performances in which writing may or may not have played a role.21 Galileo Galilei’s mastery of this multimedia practice was reputedly a lever for his advancement.22 Perhaps the strange liminal situation of literary expression in late Renaissance culture, between oral and written, explains to some degree the reason why drama and the theater received no special treatment by Church and state authorities responsible for regulating the arts. The only moment of intervention occurred when the printed publication was to take place. Far from banning the theater per se, as Plato had done from his republic, contemporaries sought to press its powers into service. The Jesuits, for instance, made it one of the pillars of their education program.23 Not that the special powers of the spoken word to move hearts and minds were any less widely recognized in Angelica’s time than at any other. Anyone could see that plays read with the parts assigned to speakers are experienced differently from silently read scripts. However, literary expression was regarded as more dangerous. When Paolo Sarpi remarked in the first third of the seventeenth century that “through these words come opinions into the world, which cause partialities, seditions and finally wars,” he was referring not to the theater or the oral sphere, but to “the matter of books.” These bore “words, it is true, but such as in consequence draw after them hosts of armed men.”24 Later on, with the textual turn that some historians date to the early eighteenth century, the suppression of plays begins to go along a different path from the suppression of books.25 By the end of the eighteenth century, mass mobilization was what forged nations, and the public stage seemed a likely place for fomenting sedition. At the time of the invention of mass politics and not before, control of the theater and control of public assemblies went hand in hand.

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Even silent reading may be accompanied by a moving of the lips. Also in Angelica’s case? Vermeer, among the Dutch painters of the mid-seventeenth century, was perhaps the most fascinated with private women’s reading, although the reading is invariably of letters. His very pregnant Woman in Blue (Rijksmuseum) is reading a letter, possibly from a husband or lover, with lips open, as though forming them to the words she sees. The same goes for the Dresden Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, although in the latter painting the lips could be parted in an attitude of dismay or even nonchalance. J. M. Nash notices that within the tense grasp of the girl’s hands the letter is crumpled, as though read repeatedly, and the gesture is one of concentration.26 Angelica’s book now shows serious signs of use, perhaps partly by the owner during the course of intense reading. Movement of the mouth in reading is no more a sign of ignorance than the intense handling of a book may be. When not a symptom of semi-literacy, the accompaniment of silent reading by lip action may betoken the notion of orality affirmed by Ambrose, that reality is in what is said, not what is seen. Reading with the eye of the mind and not the lips, but perhaps with other body parts, is instead depicted by Correggio in the much-copied Dresden Mary Magdalene painting, dated to some forty years before the publication of Angelica’s book and now lost, where the reference is not to people’s quotidian activities but to a rare French iconography preferred by Isabella d’Este, the work’s presumed patroness and a devotee of the great penitent. The book pictured is a hefty in-folio volume, which the subject seems to enfold in her seminude upper body as she lies on her side, elbow resting on one page, and breast on the other. Are these the writings of some learned saint or even the Bible, which she peruses while confined in the hillside retreat in Provence where she ended her days according to the legend? “Delicate eroticism,” says Maddalena Spagnolo, pervades the scene; and the intimacy is enhanced by the subject’s downward glance.27 Only a large crucifix awkwardly wedged in a rock reminds the viewer that the languor of sensual pleasure here must become the languor of holiness. Lucia Anguissola (sister of the better-known Sofonisba) is similarly tightlipped in her circa 1557 self-portrait at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, where she stares at the viewer as though we have interrupted some terribly important reading she has been doing, although the tiny book she holds down with her left hand reveals no signs of title or subject matter, only many, many scribbles signifying words.28 The delicate right-hand gesture touching the heart may be a sign of what is transpiring between the book and the mind, but it is at best an ambiguous one. The cruciform lace tie at her throat is not enough to point

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definitively to holy thoughts, and such thoughts are not the only ones that reading might elicit or that the hand on the heart might express. The deep chiaroscuro and the sober dress, as well as the inscrutable gaze, protect her privacy from the viewer’s prying eyes; what she is reading, and what she may feel about it, are not for us to know. Matters are somewhat clearer in her sister’s slightly earlier selfportrait, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where the painter/ sitter communicates to us directly through the book she is holding, on which is inscribed, “Sofonisba Anguissola, virgin, made this herself.” The same gesture of the book in one hand (this time the right) and the other on the heart appears in Lavinia Fontana’s group portrait in the Brera in Milan, painted a half-century later, I do not know for whom.29 This time the figure is a child, and the symbolism seems more pronounced. The hand of a male figure

Figure 5.1 Lucia Anguissola, Self-portrait (Milan, Castello Sforzesco).

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behind the child points upward with the index finger. To salvation? The hands of two other figures next to the child appear to stroke a pet dog, in acts of peace and friendliness toward the standard symbol of fidelity. If the triangular grouping, in Lavinia’s conception, seems to lend a certain authoritativeness to the idea of female custodianship of virtue, as Caroline P. Murphy argues, I feel myself to be, nonetheless, clearly in the realm of family values such as may have permeated the family setting where Angelica was brought up. Will the child here always obey the rules of what to read and what not? Books are such frequent props in the portraiture of the epoch that I am almost reluctant to attribute any specific meaning to them except in a general sense. Apart from the religious significance, they may be indicators of ever greater numbers of books in people’s lives, and markers of the value placed on the quiet pursuits of literature, learning, and the humanities in general, to which painting of course also belonged. There is another path to understanding how Angelica may have read or appreciated Straparola’s book: one which I have not yet pursued. What about the author’s own expectations? How did he think readers would read and react? Apart from the proem addressed to the ladies in part two (later moved to the beginning of the work, where it would have been situated among the missing folios of my edition), I can refer once again to the framing tale. Vaguely obscene, subtly suggestive, playfully erotic, the stories were read and obviously enjoyed in mixed company, by the named group of eight men and thirteen women including the storytellers, plus the two hosts and assorted unnamed others in the palazzo on Murano. Storytelling was not the only amusement. There was also (thus Straparola) dancing, music, and song. But the verbal play seemed to predominate in this voluble crowd, just as in the group described decades before by Castiglione in The Courtier, set in the Gonzaga court in Mantua. And since the reactions of the group to the stories recounted by each teller form part of Straparola’s narrative, let me see what they have to say. And what strikes most forcibly is the emotional response he attributes to the listeners at the palazzo and, I’m guessing, expected from his real audience. For instance: “The story told by Lauretta moved them several times to tears.” When they heard about the villain dying (Teodoro) or being chased away (Posturmio), and the hero saved from the gallows (Saladino), “they were pleased indeed, and gave thanks to God.”30 Story two of the first night, told by Alteria, again “pleases everyone,” and a discussion ensues. As the subject is the adventures of the famous thief Cassandrino, one of the listeners comments that Alteria must be a thief herself, to have so well understood her character; whereas Bembo notes gallantly that, thief she is, but only of men’s hearts. After the fourth tale of night one, regarding

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incest, listeners remain “no less compassionate than astonished.” More detailed is the response to tale five, after which “everyone with one voice commended the virtue and forbearance of the humiliated Dimitrio, especially as he had before him the priest who was the cause of all his shame.” At the same time, they remarked about the priest’s terror at being discovered so dramatically and embarrassingly in the house of Dimitrio, barefoot and wearing only a shirt. Here again the discussion ensues and there are “various reasonings,” which evidently stray from the subject at hand, so the hostess is compelled to call the group once again to order.31 A novella about the harsh revenge by a scholar on three women who tricked him, one of the few tales told by a male member of the group, elicits some indignation: too severe, say the hostess and the other women; too “displeasing and dishonest.” The scenario of the framing tale repeats the stereotype of a gender difference in what is allowed to be told or heard, in real life honored more in words than in deeds.32 More detailed is the reaction to night two tale four, where the main character is exposed to ridicule. “The honest women began to laugh at the foolishness of Carlo, who, thinking to embrace his beloved Theodosia, embraces and sweetly kisses the pots and pans instead.” What I seem to understand is that the stories are something like think pieces: tales in which virtues and vices are placed in various situations in order to reason out what values are in play. Testimonies about storytelling as a pastime in the Renaissance are too numerous and too detailed to have been mere literary conveniences invented by authors for framing their tales. Conversation per se, of course, occurred in many settings, among many kinds of people. What distinguished elite conversation from its popular counterpart was, I suppose, a certain formality and an attentiveness to social levels and social conventions respecting rank. These aspects received expression not only in the dialogue form inherited from classical antiquity and transported to the salons of noble palazzi by the likes of Castiglione. Civil conversation was itself the object of a treatise by Stefano Guazzo published in 1574, presumably, just in the years when Angelica would have been reading her stories. According to Guazzo, writing in the vicinity of the Gonzaga court, conversation was not a chance exchange of views, but an art to be cultivated. There were “good conversations” distinguished by efforts to “teach, question, confer, negotiate, counsel, judge, and express the affections of our soul, whereby men come to love one another and to associate with one another,” and bad conversations characterized by backbiting, scandalmongering, gossip.33 Norms ought to be observed (so he went on) in verbal exchanges between the old and the young, the noble and the non-noble, princes and private persons,

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the learned and the ignorant, citizens and foreigners, religious and lay people, men and women, and among people conversing within the same family. And in the last book of his treatise he gave an example of civil conversation occurring among the usual group of wellborn guests at the house of Signora Caterina Sacca dal Ponte in the city of Casale. Although they do not actually tell stories of the sort we find in Straparola, they certainly use short narratives to illustrate this or that principle which they wish to discuss in their various arguments—as when Cavaliere Bottazzo refers, as an example of astuteness, to a young woman whose husband implored her never to allow herself to be kissed by another, and, remaining ever faithful to that principle, gave herself nonetheless to pleasure by a lover in every part of her anatomy other than her mouth. Scipione Bargagli, on the other hand, writing in Siena around the same time, referred explicitly to storytelling as a “pleasant” parlor game, among others, now somewhat obscure, such as “the schoolmaster” and “the music of the devil,” which he contrasted with “serious” games like “favors asked between spouses,” and “epitaphs.” In the game of “novels,” which consists of nothing other than narrating stories, “one must allow for the narration to be drawn out to some length.” To be sure, the procedure of narration he explained in Game 100 was slightly different from the one suggested in the framing tales in Straparola’s or anyone else’s novel collections. After drawing lots on who would do the narrating, the narrator would assign to each member of the company a name corresponding to one of the elements in the story, which, upon hearing this mentioned, they were supposed to stand up and acknowledge. “If the story is to be the one about the innkeeper’s daughter, with that amusing switch of beds, to one [member of the audience] he would give the name of the innkeeper, to another of the innkeeper’s wife, to another the name of the cradle, another the bed, and so on.”34 Game 130 also called for the telling tales, but in a slightly different context. The game was called “how to regain the favor of the beloved,” and the tales had to have this as the theme. The more magical or fabulous plots he considered to be “less fine,” and therefore best left for telling by “simple girls.”35 Obviously in any games involving stories, every story presents different challenges to the teller, and each storyteller brings different abilities to the telling. In most of the novel collections I have discussed so far, the framing narrative presents an ideal scenario: a fine story told by an able teller in a perfect setting. However, a curious example of storytelling gone wrong occurs in Boccaccio’s Decameron, day six, tale 1, later repeated in Sansovino’s Cento Novelle and elsewhere.36 A merry group of friends sets off for an afternoon entertainment, and one of the knights offers to carry Madonna Oretta, wife of Geri Spina,

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swiftly along with him “[as though] on horseback,” by lightening the journey with a good story. As it happens, the knight is “perhaps better with his sword than with his tongue”—an allusion which will be explained in due course. His telling is a complete mess: “three or four or six times repeating the same word, and going back to an earlier point, and sometimes saying ‘I did not say it right’ and often mistaking the names, exchanging one for the other.” To make things worse he “badly accommodated his speech to the quality of the characters and the actions”—by which I suppose is meant that he put lowly words in the mouths of noble persons and vice versa. Poor Madonna Oretta is so upset by this, and deluded in her expectations as the story proceeds, that she goes into a sweat, and her heart stops, “as though she were ill and ready to collapse.” The roughness of the “ride” reminds us of the multiple levels of meaning at work here, from the explicit to the intimate. Since “she could suffer no more” also because “the knight had begun to go in a vulgar direction and could not reverse himself,” she asks to be let down off the (figurative) horse, and he obliges. The conclusion makes me wonder about the instrumentality of tale-telling, where an awkward telling may have a particular use, different from a skillful telling. The knight, “understood the gag [motto], and taking things in good stride [in festa et in gabbo preso], put his hand to other novels,” no doubt having more to do with the (metaphorical) sword than with the tongue—that is, unless the entire tale itself is an example of skillful “sword”-play. I leave the rest to the reader’s imagination. Only Andrea Calmo, the enigmatic Venetian comediographer mostly known for his amusing letters to his contemporaries, including some of the great artistic lights of his age, actually seems to talk about entertainments in which tales from Straparola were specifically mentioned.37 In the last (1556) volume of his Letters, he invites his addressee, a courtesan called Signora Frondosa, on a boat trip (real or metaphorical?) out of Venice to a rustic location among “fishermen’s huts,” where activities will include dimly allusive games reported in a particularly dense version of the local dialect. In one, a merrymaker draws a wolf in the ashes and points to a part of it, which the others are supposed to guess, blindfolded; hence “Che tochio de bolpe, compare Miridolfe?” [What part of the wolf, friend Miridolfe?] and the other replies, “Penin da drio, marchese Biribio,” referring to the back foot, to which the other comes back, “Gamba davanti, o conte Barabanti,” referring to the foreleg.38 With the foot behind and the leg forward, we are definitely in movement; but the direction—up, down, back, forth—is by no means clear. Then “we all sit around telling the most stupendous tales in the world, printed and imagined,” and there follows a list of a dozen or so titles, of which “the beautiful green bird” appears to be Straparola’s IV, 3, and “the ass that

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became a hermit” his X, 2.39 Whether the tales would have been recounted from memory or from the book, is left to the imagination. Would Angelica have been engaged in such parlor games, and would her reading of Straparola’s work have been somehow associated with this practice? Surely if this was a book to be shared with a company of storytellers, she would have named it on the front, also to prevent its being confused with other copies of the same book that may have been circulating among the audience. Indeed, if the book was to be exposed at all to the gaze of persons from outside the precincts of her private spaces, her books, and her things, I can imagine the placing of some slight mark on the binding, at least to indicate which book it was: and yet no such mark remains. Instead, the book was bound, presumably as soon as it left the print shop, in bland vellum covers, with no other indications or distractions than those presented by the vellum itself, which in its newness would not have presented the streaking and occasional blotchiness that we see now. True, books at the time were still few enough in circulation that the vocal designation of “Angelica’s book” might have been enough to distinguish the volume in any kind of company. But the placing of the signature in the middle rather than the beginning of the book seems to gesture instead to a private reading, a private enjoyment, a book belonging to her intimacy rather than to her public persona, whatever that may have been. I therefore feel justified in taking her appreciation of the work, at least in part, to have been done in private: an individual rapprochement with the subject matter, the personages, and the actions of the tales, which she may have discussed with others in a formal setting, but which may also, and perhaps mainly, have had a personal dimension. Unlike the fictive company in Straparola’s framing tale, the real personage Angelica is associated with no written reaction to the read material. The only path to her impressions is by way of the text itself. Such an approach is perhaps less outrageous than it appears. Modern reader-response criticism, a 1960s trend whose fashion waxes and wanes, viewed reading experience as a joint meaning-making exercise between a text and a reader. In one version, texts are seen to suggest a horizon of possible readings on the basis of who the reader/ interlocutor might be, also taking into account the chronological context of the writing and reading. “The structure of the text sets off a sequence of mental images which lead to the text translating itself into the reader’s consciousness. The actual content of these mental images will be colored by the reader’s existing stock of experience, which acts as a referential background against which the unfamiliar can be conceived and processed.”40 Wolfgang Iser goes on: “It is generally recognized that literary texts take on their reality by being read, and this

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in turn means that texts must already contain certain conditions of actualization that will allow their meaning to be assembled in the responsive mind of the recipient.”41 He stops short of closely reading the text to derive a profile of the implied reader; but that does not necessarily stop me from attempting this. The concept of the implied reader is therefore a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him: this concept prestructures the role to be assumed by each recipient, and this holds true even when texts deliberately appear to ignore the possible recipient or actively exclude him. Thus the concept of the implied reader designates a network of response inviting structures, which impelled the reader to grasp the text.

I won’t propose any such elaborate procedure here; nor do I pretend to immerse myself entirely into my subject’s mind. However, I find that Straparola’s text gives unmistakable clues about what Angelica might have found there and the meanings she might have made. If ever she wondered about the wider world, the book gave a sense of what was in it. Beyond “the fair city of Florence” (IX, 6) there was “Pisa, one of the noblest cities in Tuscany” (XII, 2) and, in another direction, “Bologna, the chief city of Lombardy, the parent of learning, and a place furnished with everything needful for its high and flourishing estate” (III, 2). Could she, would she, locate them on a map? Maps were not nearly as omnipresent as they are now; and those available for sale along with books, pamphlets, and broadsheets varied in quality according to price.42 Nor were they to the slightest degree standardized. Giacomo Gastaldi’s Italia of 1561 showed the peninsula laid out almost horizontally across the page, Milan on the left and Naples with a slight downward inclination on the right, Bologna due north-northwest of Florence rather than north-northeast. Sebastian Münster’s Cosmografia showed a map of Europe upside down, with the tip of the boot at the top and “Anglia” at the bottom, a disposition repeated in Abraham Ortelius’s later map of the southern tip of the peninsula, with the gulf of Taranto on top. Compass points were things largely left to navigators—and were optional even for some of these, as visual navigation in the Mediterranean was still being done by reckoning according to successions of costal landmarks such as those illustrated on medieval portolan charts. Famous places in Straparola’s account were offset by less famous ones, such as “Corneto, a village near Rome, situated in the Patrimony of St. Peter” (VIII, 2), and still further away, “In the Ligurian Sea . . . an island called Capraia” (III, 1). The remoteness of some was itself a matter of jest. “Above the domain of Piove

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di Sacco, which is, I need hardly tell you, a territory of Padua, seeing this must be well known to you all, is situated a village called Salmazza” (V, 4). Among the places singled out for brief description came “Verona, noble and ancient city” (XI, 6), and again, “Naples, a city which is justly celebrated and famous, one abounding in lovely women of virtuous carriage and rich in all good things that the mind can think of ” (VII, 4). The “famous and ancient city of Genoa” (VI, 1) paled by comparison with its rival Venice, giving the writer an opportunity to salute the domain of his framing tale while rendering due homage to the city of his patrons and publishers. Venice “outdoes any other in the world,” Angelica would have discovered, “in abundance of fair women” (VIII, 3). Moreover, “Her walls are the sea and her roof the sky, and though the earth produces nought, there is no scarcity of anything that life in a great city demands” (I,  5). To complete her education regarding the uniqueness of “The noble city of Venice” and its particular place among the ideal polities, it is “famed for the integrity of its magistracies, for the justice of its laws, and for being the resort of men from every nation of the world, is seated on the bosom of the Adriatic Sea, and is named the Queen of Cities, the refuge of the unhappy, the asylum of the oppressed.” Beyond Italy were the vague horizons of even more exotic locations: Spain (IX, 1), Portugal (IV, 4), and Athens, “the most ancient city of Greece” (IV, 2). In  Tunis, “a stately city on the coast of Africa,” there reigned, not long ago, “a famous and powerful king named Dalfreno” (III, 2). As the geographical panorama grows wider, the details fade off into the mythical. Was it entirely by chance that the Pig King in II, 2 was born in “Anglia” and not, for instance, in “France”? The western islands of Europe were noted by many contemporaries for being nearly as strange as the shores of the New World. Sebastian Münster, writing around the same time as Straparola, while conceding the beauty of the English women, called them “inhuman and inexpressive”; and although the males’ angel-like faces (Angeli) had given rise to the name of the place (Anglia), in battle they preferred total destruction of the enemy to the gentler custom of pillage.43 There were “three languages in England, the first and principal one being . . . shared by the English and the Scots, who are slightly more civilized than the others.”44 Matteo Bandello, Straparola’s rival novella-writer, singled out King Henry VIII for special invective: “Because of a particular appetite of his, he has become very terrible and cruel, and has spilt a great quantity of human blood, having heads chopped off of this one and that one every day, and largely annihilating the nobility of the whole island. He has also had two of his wives decapitated in a very short time.”45 Surely this was not the “Pig King” of Anglia (although the original of the story has not yet been identified), but

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contemporaries’ minds may spontaneously have recurred to such images when they read Straparola, in spite of the Venetian ambassador Daniele Barbaro’s more enthusiastic, but not immediately publicized, reports to the Senate regarding the latter-day softening of English customs.46 She would have read the stars in Straparola’s text not as bodies existing in space so much as meaningful signs and symbols accompanying and informing the unfolding life on earth. When she read “Phoebus already had his golden wheels in the salty waves of the Indian Oceans and his rays no longer shone on the earth; his horned sister ruled over the dark shadows with her pale light, and the pretty shining stars had already painted the sky with their glow,” the focus would have been not on astronomy but on time and narrative.47 The whole planetary system is brought to earth in a clever simile: Through a flowery garden gay, A red and a white rose run always; Unwearied ever along they fare, And sparkle bright beyond compare. There stands in the midst an oak-tree tall, From which twelve branches spring and tall; And every branch from out its store Gives acorns four, and gives no more. (XI, 1)48

In this enigma, presented after (but not in relation to) the story of Costantino and his cat, a version of what has come to be known as “Puss in Boots,” the flowers in the garden are taken to mean the stars in the sky. The red and white rose speeding along are, respectively, the sun and the moon, making their revolution around the earth every twenty-four hours. But the lesson is less about illustrating an Aristo-Ptolemaic cosmos than about suggesting that things in the macrocosm are related to those in the microcosm. The oak tree, explains the text, “is the year, having twelve branches to typify the twelve months” from each of which spring four weeks (acorns). Depending on how careful a reader she was, she would have noticed that the weeks and days will not suffice to fill out the year, and therefore they represent not the twelve months and respective weeks but the twelve signs of the zodiac, among which the red and white rose, sun and moon, will have to pass. Deeper meanings may have eluded her, such as the reference to the four humors and the corresponding four qualities, conveyed by way of the four excrescences out of each branch. She was, I imagine, no specialist. One very obvious reading of Straparola would have been as a kind of guide to worldly wisdom, an overview of the human condition with instructions

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about behavior. Some of the speeches seem to have been drawn directly from contemporary manuals on amorous gallantry. Consider this speech in II, 2, by a young scholar to his lady: Gallant woman, so great is your beauty that without a doubt it surpasses that of every other woman I have ever seen. There is no other woman for whom I bear so much love as I do for Your Highness. If you return my love, you will make me the most content and happy man in the world. But if you do not, you will see me instead deprived of life and you will have been the cause of my death. Loving you, therefore, my lady, as I do and is my duty, you must accept me as your servant, using me and my possessions, however few, as if they were your own. I could not receive a greater gift from heaven than to be subject to such a woman, who has caught me in her amorous snare like a bird.49

Now I consider a sample letter in Girolamo Parabosco’s manual entitled Amorous letters: My valorous Signora, because naturally anyone attempts to do whatever he can against death, I am forced, after great suffering, to reveal my ardor to Your Ladyship, which bit by bit consumes me, as one can observe by many signs. Nor has this occurred to me by chance or without great hope of being succored by Your Ladyship, who may advise me, since you are something divine and not human, as can be judged by your graces, your virtues and your beauties, such that you cannot fail to imitate God’s doings in all things, who not only listens to our anxious prayers, but constantly in every way commands us to pray to Him, saying that He has no other desire than to aid anyone in need of His grace.50

Admittedly, the subject matter of Parabosco’s fictive entreaty is slightly different, but the sentiment and the structured appeal obey the same syntactic and strategic canons. The young scholar in II, 2 finds more than one occasion to test his skills at fashionable lovemaking. And readers would no doubt have had some fun with his arrogance as well as his ingenuity, as they compared notes about their readings in the light of their actual experiences, particularly if they knew enough about the literary context to enjoy the spoof on the letter-writing tradition. Addressing a new acquaintance, he begins: Certainly it is not necessary, most charming lady, that I show you with words how fervent is the love I have for you and will have as long as my spirit inhabits these weak limbs and unhappy bones. Happy, or rather blessed, would I consider myself then, if I had you as my master, or rather as my only lady. Since I love you,

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therefore, as I do and am yours, as you can easily see, do not disdain to receive me as your most humble servant, since my every good and my very life depends upon you and no one else.

That the scholar’s two speeches are addressed to two different ladies who later meet and play a rude trick on him simply underlines the theme regarding truth and deceit, the fictions of the pose, the limits of rhetoric, that should have been part of the general education of any young female as well as male, in a society where courtesy was highly formalized. To put this story in a broader perspective, Vasco Pratolini, writing in Florence in the 1940s, makes Le ragazze di Sanfrediano [The girls of San Frediano] avenge themselves on such a lying wooer, but in his tale, unlike Straparola’s, the girls win in the end—suggesting the theme of freedom and constraint to which I now turn. The attentive reader, which I am assuming Angelica was, could have learned not only about family and gender roles, but about spaces for maneuver along the boundaries set by law and custom.51 Reminders about the severity of medieval justice abound. When the eleven-year-old Princess Luciana in day one, tale 1 is found pregnant due to a magic charm, King Luciano orders an investigation to discover and punish the father and thinks credibly to have her killed at once. But when she and the supposed perpetrator are thrown to the fishes, she is magically saved and devises a bold stratagem for rebuking the king. Good women in these stories ordinarily obey their husbands without question, Angelica would read; but when Genobbia, wife of Raimondo in IV, 4, obediently decked herself out in her finest raiment for high mass on successive days at the cathedral as part of some plot he was hatching, she did so only “because his command fell in well with her desires” to look around for a better mate.52 Her husband would soon discover that those who mistreated or ignored their wives could expect them to be borne off by rivals. Nor in general did women passively submit to austerities imposed by male-dominated home economics. The Devil in II, 4, masquerading as a husband, complains about his earthly wife’s extravagance, commenting “I’d rather be in the dark abysses of hell than where she lives.”53 She complains, “my clothes are all in the old style, and no longer like those the others wear.”54 Her wish, of course, is for compensation through things where other satisfactions have been so scarce. Perhaps the most astounding story, from the standpoint of traditional gender roles, is IV, 1, about Costanza/Costanzo, child of the King of Thebes. After the king and queen manage to marry off their three eldest daughters well, dividing their substance three ways to provide the dowries necessary for attracting three kingly spouses and keeping only the bare necessities for themselves, a new

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unexpected pregnancy brings Costanza into the world. Thinking to solve the dowry problem by making her desirable exclusively by virtue of her attainments, they have her educated in all the standard female arts—“to embroider, sing, play music, dance, and do all those things that are suitable to an proper lady.”55 Designing the education according to her aptitude, they join to this also the male arts, and after the lessons on warfare and horsemanship, she becomes such a skillful jouster that “more often than not she was the winner and took the prize just as those brave knights who are worthy of all glory do.” Even this is not enough: they turn her into such a scholar of “literature” that “not only during the day but also at night she was consumed by it, always striving to find things that were very refined.” Comes the time when she might marry, and the royal parents select the son of a local patrician who will accept her for the little they can offer. Her reaction features the finest arts of oratory applied to an assertion of female agency in a world of men. “You, my beloved father, have produced four daughters, three of whom you married most honorably to three powerful kings, giving them very large treasures and territories. Now you want to see me, who was always obedient to you and your rules, joined in such a lowly marriage?” She promises to stand her ground. “I say, I will never take a husband unless I can have a king appropriate to my status, like the other daughters.” Packed into those words were centuries of young women’s protests against the dictates of family policy denying the right to live and love by choice, which were already a literary commonplace by the time Lodovico Dolce satirized them in a dialogue on marriage written in the 1530s.56 So Costanza leaves home to go and find her fortune. Was Angelica paying close attention? Not only are gender roles crossed in this story but the reader also finds gender-bending elements almost recalling Pietro Aretino’s famously provocative The Stablemaster, featuring a marriage of two men. Paying heed to the usual difficulties experienced by women in transit in the early modern world, Costanza now assumes a male identity, becoming Costanzo, and makes her way to the neighboring kingdom of Bythinia. There she becomes the accomplished courtier of the local king, gaining ever more in reputation and respect. No wonder “he” comes to the attention of the queen, who, entirely infatuated, “thought of nothing but him day and night. With sweet and loving glances, she so intently made eyes at him that every hard stone and solid diamond would have softened.” However, when “he” receives the queen’s indecent proposal, realizing that “as a woman [he] could not satisfy her unbridled and eager desire,” there is nothing to do but humbly thank and refuse. “He” is now the enemy of the scorned queen, who

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hatches a plot to have “him” killed. By a series of adventures involving a wild man or satyr who must be tamed, “he” is present when the king discovers the queen has been cheating all along, as the ever-present ladies-in-waiting turn out to be cross-dressed males. After all the offenders are put to death, including the queen, Costanza reveals her real sex to the king, who thereupon offers to make her his spouse, and they live happily ever after. This story made such an impression on Giulia Bigolina, a Paduan aristocrat and acquaintance of Aretino, that she appears to have utilized plot elements from it in her own full-length romance, the Urania.57 The title character of the new work is a woman of plain appearance but extraordinary intelligence who manages to win the mind of her beloved but not his heart. She pens an eloquent paean for a love that transcends the banalities of conventional female beauty. Then, to cure her passion and soothe her disappointment she journeys northward from her home in Salerno disguised (like Straparola’s Costanza) as a man. After various adventures including an encounter with a female admirer who takes her for a person of the opposite sex, she returns home only to find her former beloved languishing in prison due to stealing from the king. The only way to gain his release is by kissing a wild woman, likely a version of Straparola’s satyr. This she does, whereupon her heart and her beloved’s are forever joined. Possibly due to scruples of whatever sort—religious, family, literary—Bigolina’s work lay unpublished and forgotten in a number of manuscript copies until its recent rediscovery. Angelica’s impressions regarding any such stories and any such critiques of gender clichés can only be imagined. But maybe the main message of Angelica’s book would have been about the education of the senses, the training of the sentiments, even the freedom to feel. Perhaps Angelica too, like the personages in the stories, knew “how great are the power of love and the urges of the mortal flesh” (I, 4).58 And perhaps her eyes feasted greedily on accounts such as the one in III, 5, where Isotta, “without saying anything else, having rolled her sleeves up to her elbows, . . . revealed her white, soft, and round arms that seemed white as snow [and] ably toiled with him to make the cheese. She often showed him her modest bosom where there were two small breasts that looked like two small apples. And besides this, she cleverly brought her rosy face so close to Travaglino’s that they almost touched each other.”59 What would come next, she may have wondered, eagerly awaiting the fair or foul conclusion to such amorous transports. And yet, she would have noted the profound distress in II, 5 that could accompany any sentimental yearnings: “Love is not by his nature kind, but only on rare occasions does he grant us a glorious and happy ending.”60 Indeed, “There would be nothing in the

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world, charming ladies, sweeter, more delightful or better than to find oneself in the service of Love, were it not for that fruit of sudden jealousy, a fugitive from Cupid’s assaults, a deceiver of in love, a most determined seeker of their deaths” (IV, 2).61 Perhaps she, too, would have concluded, with the princess Meldina of Anglia, married to the Pig King (II, 1), “Three things I have heard told: . . . . First, that which is impossible to find, it is mad to seek. Next, do not trust what is not right and honest. The third, the precious and rare gift that you have in your hands, hold tight.”62 One final question about Angelica remains, regarding the possible effect her reading may have had on her behavior, her thinking, her experience, her life. In pondering it I am reminded about the trials of culture in an age of censorship. Perhaps at no other time before or since, has imaginative literature been thought to affect people’s minds so profoundly. True, one of the most moving accounts of reading in all of literature exists already in Dante, writing nearly three hundred years earlier, who dramatized the irresistible allure of the chivalric romances in his account of Paolo and Francesca, as told by the latter: One day we read for pastime how in thrall Lord Lancelot lay to love, who loved the Queen; We were alone—we thought no harm at all. As we read on, our eyes met now and then, And to our cheeks the changing color started But just one moment overcame us—when, We read of the smile, desired of lips long-thwarted, Such a smile, by such a lover kissed away, He that may never more from me be parted. (Inferno 3: 127–35)63

Dante, through Francesca, has surely described the seductive power of reading that Roland Barthes theorized not only by reference to the “fetishistic” thrill of the vowels and plosives in our mouths, but also the “image of delectation” concocted by the gradual discovery of what, also for reasons of prudence, is hidden from us.64 In the event, of course, Francesca and Paolo rejoin one another not in an earthly paradise but in the second circle of hell, inhabited by the lustful. Such possibilities terrified moralists and theologians during the time when Angelica was reading, and attempts were made to stem the promiscuous production and diffusion of literature that threatened to corrupt the young and encourage defection from the right ways of Christianity. Sabba da Castiglione,

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the Hospitaler knight from Milan who published his Memoirs while Straparola was still alive, was only symptomatic of a general trend, when he warned young males against furnishing their females with too much of a patina of instruction, lest the effort result in excessive attention being paid to “the sonnets and songs of Petrarch, the Decameron, or the Fiammetta or Filocolo of Boccaccio, or the Vita nuova of Dante, or other similar lascivious and lewd works” at the expense of “the Bible, the Office of the Blessed Virgin, the legends of the Saints, the lives of the Holy Fathers, and other Catholic, devout, spiritual and religious works,” with far too much damage to tender minds and vulnerable souls.65 Curiously, Friar Sabba’s work was republished in Angelica’s time by exactly the same firm, of Domenico Farri, that published her own edition of Straparola. Angelica too may have been terrified about the possible ill effects of reading; but I assume, she did not desist. Montaigne, the French author whose essays were translated by a denizen of the Ferrara court in 1590, remarked that “books have many charming qualities for those who know how to choose them, but there is no good without an admixture of evil.”66 He experienced the controls personally when papal officials confiscated his books as he entered the papal states after a trip through Tuscany during what we are assuming was Angelica’s lifetime.67 Fortunately, he was not carrying his copies of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, books which he claimed to enjoy in spite of the fulminations by the Congregation on the Index. Different kinds of reading affected him differently at different times. In his old age he appreciated the wisdom of the ancients and derived pleasure from serious books of substance, having become as easily bored by frivolity in reading as in daily conversation. If a book seemed too difficult or written in a fashion unfit for keeping his attention, he discarded it and went on to the next one. He darkly alluded to a period in his life when books and women caused him as much turmoil as enjoyment—when he was “ravished” by the “facility and inventions” of Ovid and “tickled” by the amorous romances of Ariosto.68 What he found in Ariosto were the models of intractable womanhood that haunted him from early on: the figures of Bradamante and Angelica exemplified, respectively, “a natural, active, spirited, not mannish but manly beauty,” and “a soft, affected, effeminate, artificial beauty.” Which to choose? No wonder that “the gods have placed perspiring toil in the approaches to the chambers of Venus and not of Minerva.”69 In his case, he assured himself, the temporary folly failed to do any serious damage. Years later, and possibly after Angelica had left the scene, the theme of reading, mind, and body came back in the writing of Cervantes, whose hero

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was so enflamed by the fanciful love literature of his youth that he imagines himself to be living in the world of his books. Life and literature are bizarrely intertwined in Don Quixote’s attempt to craft a correspondence between the read and the real. The insanity reaches such a point that, with little thought to the absurdity of his quest, he actually suits up in some rusty armor and sets off on an old workhorse to right the wrongs of the world and rescue damsels in distress, just as he had seen his book heroes do, “putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant.”70 Whether this confusion, so artfully portrayed, places Cervantes at the edge of a new selfconsciousness about subjects and objects, about the problematic rapport between the representation and the represented, is a matter of great importance which I can only pursue tangentially.71 In any case, I acknowledge the transformative possibilities of a medium of communication that seizes the mind and directs action on the basis of a strong immersion of the self into the mimetic other: the dream of propagandists and game-designers, the nightmare of parents.72 How did Angelica live her books? I wonder whether she longed for the love of her life to appear in the form of a gallant wooer who would take her away to an enchanted world where they might live in perpetual delight, but was wise enough to know and accept the difference between the possible and the impossible, the reality and the dream. In modern Western societies, books are mostly no longer viewed as dangerous, or at least, not in the same way.73 Other media have largely displaced them, at least from the standpoint of control. Censorship has by no means disappeared, as indeed, a Censorship of Publications Board still exists in the country where I write. Set up in 1929, during the springtime of a new, independent nation, it gained notoriety over the years for its attitude to authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. At the time of writing it is still considering the prohibition of a novel by Alan Shatter called Laura, for reasons of obscenity and incitement to commit the crime of abortion.74 In the United States, where I have a home, tales of books being removed from library shelves or from high school syllabi are largely met with derision, although this does not prevent judges, school boards, and interest groups from invoking their powers of control.75 Most recently, the discussion over controls on the distribution of content, at least in the West, has largely shifted to such themes as the prevention of online property theft and the child-proofing of home computers. The Aristotelian rallying-cry, evoked in the Renaissance, about the “natural desire of humankind to know,”76 continues to echo, even as the focus moves to open information, open archives, open access, open data. Any such appeal evokes legal, political, and moral

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considerations regarding the need to prevent infringement on other freedoms or simply the need to keep reminding citizens about the structure of authority in the technocratic state. Angelica’s book recalls to mind that knowledge—of the sciences or of the sentiments—is often an agent of change, with all the destabilizing potential there implied. Yet I begin to think that the container may be as important as the thing contained. To what extent is the knowledge itself affected by its means of transmission? The future of the book is at stake—and by this I mean not only hers but all combined. A topic so large deserves separate consideration. But first, I return to the place, and the unfinished business, where my inquiry began.

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I realize the road ahead is not easy; and it has not been easy for the object of my thoughts. A time in the history of my broken book is entirely obscure and must remain so. When it went out of Angelica’s possession and later surfaced among the items for sale in a small junk shop on Piazza de’ Ciompi in Florence it left behind a total void. But surely, no book can survive the vicissitudes of family inheritance and the upheavals of urban development on its own for a half-millennium without careful human intervention. There was a flood in Florence in 1966; perhaps some of the battering I observe was inflicted by the elements. It has been saved from oblivion, but I do not know whom to thank, since the book came to me with no statement of provenance from the seller and no trace inside left by any reader besides Angelica. There must have been others, some at first perhaps for whom the name inscribed on folio 144 referred to kin or friend, whereas later readers would have been as ignorant as I am about Angelica’s circumstances, and much less curious. Their engagement with the book forms part of yet another story, that of the fortunes and misfortunes of Straparola’s writings through the centuries, which specialists in Renaissance and Baroque literature have only recently begun to write. I can only give the barest outlines here. In Italy, any readers of Straparola between Angelica’s time and the 1898 scholarly edition by Giuseppe Rua would have been reading a used book. As there were no more printings, the only access to the original text would thus have been through the stock of copies already produced from the first appearance up until the last printing of 1613. If we suppose a rather modest print run of 1,000 copies on average for each of the thirty-three or so known editions, considering that none of the great printers seems to have been involved, the total production may have been around 33,000 units.1 How many have survived is anybody’s guess. The EDIT16 census of sixteenth-century books, after polling some 1,545 public and semi-public libraries in Italy, turned up sixty copies published by

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various firms in various years. Which individuals or institutions owned them before they were incorporated into today’s libraries is seldom clear. Copies in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale are strangely bereft of markings by contemporary readers, but they speak volumes regarding the conservation of books. The 1551 edition shelf marked Rinasc. S.325 bears an inked stamp of the arms of the nascent Biblioteca Nazionale on the title page, as well as the embossed stamp of the Biblioteca Palatina (the library of the palace), showing an owl on a limb, symbolizing the Pitti Palace collection belonging to the Lorraine dynasty in Florence, eighteenth-century successors to the defunct Medici. The Palatina collection, given to the Tuscan state by the Lorraine dynasty in 1771, was joined in 1861 to that of the eccentric bibliophile Antonio Magliabechi, in its heyday one of the most important in Europe and a public library since 1747. The new “National Library” of the Italian kingdom, incorporating these and numerous other dispersed collections, would occupy the same space in the Uffizi office quarter as the former public library, until the eventual transfer to the present early twentieth-century structure along the Arno river.2 But inside this old vellum cover of this copy of Straparola, in tiny script at the top, I find the word, compiti [tasks]. Whose or what? Did someone begin to make a list and then stop? Certainly the number of transitions experienced by this book would easily have filled a page. The 1584 edition shelf marked I.5.4.37 bears the bookplate of Giovanni Nencini (1803–78), a local bibliophile who rose remarkably from shop floor to director of the public cigarette factory in Florence in the mid-nineteenth century. A passionate amateur gardener, he is also remembered as the eponym of a variety of camellias.3 Though lacking any formal schooling (his biographer notes), “he managed to apply himself to diverse disciplines,”4 and we find him acknowledged from time to time in print on questions of paleography.5 The rather plain and unadorned bookplate in this volume bears the inscription, attributed to Seneca, “Otium sine literis mors est” (leisure without letters is death), perhaps expressing the joy which the owner experienced in being able to turn his attention away from administrative matters now and then to the beauties of the humanities. Certainly he wished to be remembered this way, and to make sure, four years before his death, he transferred some 15,000 books, many of them rare and precious, the best of what he had accumulated over a lifetime, to the new National Library in Florence. Memories of a more distant past are inscribed here, unrelated to the contents: an ugly paper hole mars the title page, of which the repair on the verso, with pasted paper of the same kind, apparently produced the humidity

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that, seeping through the next 12 folios, has brought about the pronounced discoloration that I see on each. The 1608 edition shelf marked 3.5.184 shows evidence of a far more serious disaster, and a small slip glued to the back cover reveals what kind. “Konserviert durch Österreichische Florenzhilfe Wien, 1967,” it says, referring to the international effort to save the treasures of Florence after the flood of 1966. Book restorers have done their best, but the original pages had to be clipped to fit the new half-vellum binding, as I see by the badly angled edges and, on the title page, by the partially chopped-off stamp of the Florence Public Library (Publica Florentinae Bibliotheca), the library formed around the collection once belonging to Magliabechi, whose book this may once have been, though no trace of him is left. There are scattered missing leaves; and a badly truncated story 5 of Night 13 precedes story 4. The rebinding seems only to have compounded whatever pagination errors there may have been in the original, and a halfhearted attempt has been made to correct inconsistencies by hand in black pen, to little effect. The illustrations are preserved intact, which possibly explains why the book was allowed to survive its disfigurement. The survival is all the more surprising considering the 1586 edition shelf marked 3.5.183, also stamped by the Florence Public Library, but in much finer condition. Why the original binding on the 1580 edition bearing shelf mark 3.5.182 was replaced with its present full vellum, modern but made in the Renaissance style, I am not able to determine, but I am inclined to think the flood again is to blame. The only other indication of the book’s previous history is the handwritten attribution, “ex legati D. Equiti Antonii Francisci Marmii,” evidencing a previous life among the possessions of Antonfrancesco Marmi, Magliabechi’s testamentary executor at the time of the creation of the Florence Public Library, and a professor at the University of Florence. Possibly Marmi’s personal collection was not so extensive as to require call numberings, so I leave open the question of whether he or someone else gave it the old call number penciled in on the endpaper, 416 VI. STRAP. Although there are no signs of his reading here, he grew up in a literature-loving family where his father, Diacinto Maria, was employed by Grand Duke Cosimo III to organize the Palatine Library at Pitti from 1666. Disaster of another kind struck the 1604 edition shelf marked I.5.8.26, which was possibly acquired for the 10 lire price penciled on the inside cover, perhaps by Nencini, the former owner. A more thoroughgoing biological analysis however would be necessary to determine at what stage in its life the worm damage began, and how much time elapsed before the infestation produced the large cavity evidenced in the back board, none of which is apparent from the outside of the

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original binding, otherwise much like the binding of Angelica’s book, except for the faded almost illegible ink lettering on the spine indicating author and work. Apart from a general scattering of tiny holes, the text has remained readable and the illustrations have remained intact, framed in a rather elaborate formal pattern which was much simplified in the later illustrated edition of 1608. The New York copies tell a story all their own. Perhaps the most interesting is the one at the main branch of the New York Public Library, dated Venice, 1598, which is stamped on the opposite side of folio Ai indicating acquisition in 1918, seven years after the building at Bryant Park was officially opened in a ceremony attended by President William Howard Taft, built by architects Carrère and Hastings, already responsible for the interior of the Metropolitan Opera House and the Flagler mansion in Palm Beach. The book’s purchasing agent, “Astor Lenox and Tilden Foundations,” simply indicates the basic library grant originating with the mercantile dynasties in town. In pencil along the seam is “J. V. Hogan, Mar. 13/18, $5.00,” evidently the bookseller and the price. The back cover places the book in more troublesome circumstances. “This book was bound at the New York Public Library in chrome-tanned leather on the date noted below.” The date, August 10, 1943, is four days after German troops began invading Italy following the fall of Mussolini and four days before Rome was declared an open city due to Allied bombing. The annotation specifies the leatherwork was done by Neumann Leathers in Hoboken, New Jersey, a firm founded in 1863 by Raphael Neumann, possibly of German extraction.6 The fortunes of other copies in other libraries around town, such as that at the Butler Library at Columbia University, will have to wait. Instead, I turn to the fortunes of the book’s contents. And after the first half-century of production, bits and pieces turn up around Europe. Seventeenth-century purchasers interested not in the entire work but only in a selection from the poetical enigmas posted at the end of each story, could have hunted among the booksellers of the Netherlands for Gabriel Sculteti’s Leyden, 1679, imprint entitled Degli spiriti generosi, passatempo toscano (i.e., Some expansive spirits: a Tuscan pastime). The compiler, a scholar at Leipzig University, distinguishes himself in the front matter as “Onghero,” possibly intending to mean Hungarian. He elaborates on the reasons for his publication: “Not long ago, I was attempting to put my books in order and I happened upon these very ingenious enigmas of the above mentioned author, which after I read a few, so pleased me that I immediately resolved to have them appear in print.”7 The enigmas of Straparola, he claims, are not only “an example for subtle minds” but also “an instrument for sharpening base and humble brains.” Before giving

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his selection, he offers an enigma of his own: “Perchè essendomi nato Libero, son fatto Servo, e essendo servo, son fatto Libero,” which signifies, he explains, “service to God is true liberty.” If he intended this diction to suggest that he had embarked on an ecclesiastical career as a result of his studies at the university, the particular choice of enigmas printed in his edition implies that the new life did not categorically exclude the old. I choose to consider this one, seeming to celebrate certain tender parts normally not gazed upon by churchmen, expressed in the Magnanini translation: I am ashamed to say my name, I’m so rough to the touch and hard on the eyes. A big mouth have I without teeth or red lips Black all ’round and closer to the seat. Ardor often puts me in such a rage That makes me foam with all my might Surely I’m something that belongs to lowly serving girls And each, as he pleases, fishes about in me.8

Sculteti appropriates Straparola’s authorial coyness: the object in question is not the shameful one which immediately comes to the mind of the immodest reader, but another, far more innocent, namely, a stockpot. His reader’s impure intentions are thereby revealed, and so also perhaps his own. His own enigma, expressed in his preface, concerning liberty and service, may thus appear in a new light, especially where he suggests that “true freedom is service to God”—with all the possible libertine implications that would have occurred to seventeenth-century readers attuned to the subtleties of Baroque prose. That Straparola’s book could be considered “rare” by the early eighteenth century was the inevitable consequence of a century of neglect. Nicola Francesco Haym, a Roman librettist working in London in the age of Handel, was not surprised. So many other productions by Italian writers were likewise unknown to readers that he compiled a Biblioteca italiana in 1727 to satisfy the curiosity of the “large number of persons” in Europe who “hold the Italian language in high regard,” especially compared to the French language, and to provide them with a finding aid for the more obscure items.9 The culture wars were on full blast and the leading lights of the Italian pre-Enlightenment sought to assert the primacy of Italian literature in the “good centuries.” Bad taste and an inordinate love of all things French, they said, had turned Italian writers away from the best models. To give literature a boost, they inaugurated a new age of bibliographies and literary histories. None of the proponents of this movement, including

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Giovan Gioseffo Orsi, Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Apostolo Zeno, and others, would ever have held up the Pleasant Nights alongside works of Boccaccio and Machiavelli as a consistent model of good taste. But it had suffered from the same censorship practices that had caused the disappearance of so many items from the shelves, and Haym noted that Straparola editions after 1560 had been “castrated” (castrate), which I take to be a rather colorful reference to the already mentioned trimming of scurrilous stories to blunt the obscene effect.10 The new interest did not yet result in a new Italian edition of the still-prohibited Straparola text, but the stories were soon to get another lease on life. Between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries new nations were being forged and literary studies discovered folklore. Of course, it had always been there; but like Renaissance itself, and certain heavenly bodies only visible by telescope, now it had a name. It also had a program—one to which the rediscovered stories of Straparola might make a creditable contribution—at first, mostly among a small coterie of intellectuals inspired by the cultural trends of the time. Figures like Johann Gottfried Herder rejected the aspects of the European Enlightenment that devalued tradition, emotion, intuition; and he called for a new literature attuned less to the classicizing models and more to the human spirit, the sentiments, the sensations, and the soul. Such literature had existed in an earlier age, he surmised, and among simpler people than the overrefined aesthetes who frequented the literary salons à la mode. “To the extent that a people is more savage, i.e., the more alive and the freer a people is, so must their poetry be savage, i.e., alive and free”; and so also the narratives they shared.11 No wonder he reportedly held Goethe spellbound. And the study of folklore, Volkskunde, Volkspoesie, was born. Straparola, always a source of innocent enjoyment, could now serve as a kind of quarry for mining the precious materials whereof the European soul was made. That was the aspect highlighted by an anonymous contributor to the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen reviewing Friedrich Wilhelm Valentin Schmidt’s Berlin 1817 translation, published as Die Märchen des Straparola.12 The “thoroughly worthy undertaking” deserved praise “not so much for the greater or lesser value” of the writing itself as for the contribution to “the history of tradition and to the sort of research which largely remains to be done.” Noteworthy were the similarities between tales found all across Europe, such that “a connection can scarcely be denied,” although equally noteworthy were the aspects of individuality and context-relatedness found from place to place, especially since the tales “do not live and survive in books but in transmission by the peoples.” A lively interest in the tales was also assured by the “weighty

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points,” on which they seemed to resemble “the dark saga narratives of the Volk,” which surely would be illuminated through the use of those historical methods “which always bring some benefit.” Indeed, for these very reasons the Brothers Grimm devoted an entire chapter to Straparola in the separate volume of notes published in Berlin in 1822, as an accompaniment to the second edition of their fairy-tale collection.13 They expressed some reservations. “Straparola’s writing is very uneven both in style and power of delineation, nor is it particularly good even in his best pieces,” they observed, conceding that “many things are told agreeably, naturally, and not ungracefully.” Readers were forewarned about the naughty bits—after all, the Grimm brothers purported to collect children’s stories; whereas here we occasionally find “such shameless obscenity, that we are unable to excuse it on the score of the natural and free manners of the Italians, and of the period.” After the general appraisal came an account of the textual relations to other collections. For instance, the story of the he-cat in Straparola XI, 1, repeated with some changes by Giambattista Basile in his Cunto de li Cunti (1634), is related to a story known in German as “Die gestiefelte Kater” (in English, “Puss in Boots”), numbered 33 in the Grimms’ collection, most often told in the French version (“Le maître chat, ou le chat botté”) published by Charles Perrault in 1697,14 although bearing some resemblance to a story from Transylvania (found in the manuscripts belonging to the folklorist Josef Haltrich) as well as to an Austrian popular song found in the Österreichische Volkslieder collected by Franz Ziska and Julius Max Schottky (1819).15 But the deeper I delve into nineteenth-century folklore, the farther away I seem to get from Angelica’s book. Even when I try to look at books as vehicles for the transmission of popular knowledge and ponder the impact of this knowledge on society, I risk losing sight of this particular book in its ragged binding, an imperfect item with unique inside marks and an itinerary all its own. I am at least the third owner, and even I myself am merely a stopping point in a line of succession whose contours I can never know. What would have happened to it had I not acquired it? Would it have sat on the shelves of some collector, revealing its troubled vellum spine and nothing more? The book still has one fine engraving remaining of the three that illustrated it at the time of publication, or shall I say, at the time of Angelica’s ownership. Three seated Fates are there depicted in a Renaissance architectural fantasy spinning the thread which stands for the destinies of humankind. At one point, apart from the other copy of the Fates print, located under the argument for the first story on the first day, there was a title page bearing Domenico Farri’s typographical mark, the

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symbol of Hope, in a large oval frame, showing a winged lady or angel crowned with laurel extending a hand toward the divine light or praying, standing on a winged globe: possibly the same iconography that in some earlier version might have influenced Dürer’s Melancholia.16 Before I got the book, what if it had found its way into the hands of an owner ready to commit the final act in a long history of aggressions against it, by tearing out the remaining illustration, for framing, perhaps for sale? Books have deeply influenced their owners across the ages; I can only guess the importance of this one for Angelica. We rarely have explicit evidence about experiences regarding particular volumes in their tactile dimension; and marginalia, the ultimate record of interaction between the reader and the read, normally deal with the text, not the book itself. But specific books possess a special individuality. Perhaps the greatest reverence for books dates to an age when there were so few. Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, kept his copy of Homer’s Iliad, along with a dagger, under his head when sleeping; and in the daytime he kept it in a precious chest previously looted during the victory over Darius the Persian. 17 Not wishing necessarily to remain in the realm of the real, it occurs to me that Adams, the character in Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews, did not lavish such attention on his beloved copy of Aeschylus, but he kept it on his person for thirty years until he inadvertently dropped it into a fire, from which only the sheepskin binding was retrievable, a sly reference, one imagines, to new literature displacing the old.18 Rousseau confessed that in his entertainments with his patroness Madame de Warens, he “pretended to distinguish a physical book by its smell, and what was more unsettling, was seldom wrong.”19 He did not go into detail; but another book, “the dear music book,” containing musical notation, accompanied him on his ill-fated excursion to the seminary, where he got his first musical knowledge reading from its staves. Jorge Luis Borges recalled a copy he had of Cervantes’ novel in the Garnier edition, “red bindings with gilt titles.” Later, reading another edition, he seemed to read another book, with “the feeling that it was not the real Don Quixote.”20 By now I feel a certain affection for Angelica’s book. After all, it has accompanied me since the inception of this journey of research. It has informed me, inspired me, diverted me, enthralled me. I feel a responsibility for its future, though I cannot imagine what that might be, and my powers are limited. The prospects seem good, at least as far as the material is concerned. A book that has lasted 443 years has a good chance of lasting 443 more, in the best of circumstances. I am not so sure that a modern book would be so robust. Even accounting for

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the improvements in wood pulp paper manufacturing after the disastrous late nineteenth-century experiments with high-alum sizings that are eating away at the paper of many books in our libraries even as I write, I doubt that most of the paper particularly of the recent volumes on my shelves will stand up as well as the rag-paper leaves of my copy of Straparola. Its sewing has come loose in places, but some signatures are still tight and the vellum covers still protect it, unlike dozens of paperback trade books which at some stage cracked down the middle and now stand as two half-books. Tough as it is, dented, battle-worn, so to speak, perhaps battle-weary, it maintains its dignity and yet it bespeaks stress, it evidences decay, it calls to mind the frailty of all books. The surest safeguard against oblivion might be consignment to some institution specializing in the conservation of such objects. In a national library it might stand alongside multiple copies of the same and other editions of Straparola. Depending on the modalities of acquisition, it might receive a new binding, stamped on the back with the call number and collection indicator, although the current state of wear would probably suggest placing into an envelope or a box. There it would likely go undisturbed by curious readers of Straparola or even by the denizens of library rare book rooms looking for a finer copy. The catalog entry would inform about what is missing, that is, numerous folios at the beginning and the end, but not about what is present—namely, the statement by a former owner on folio 144. Even if Angelica’s succinctness in expressing herself in her annotation did not disqualify her from mention in the library catalog, her historical insignificance would preclude any intrusion into the laconic conventions of material bibliography, which bestow similar forgetfulness on the scattered marginalia of thousands of unknown readers, conferring the privilege of visibility only upon those who already have it, such as Galileo Galilei, whose annotated copy of Petrarch’s Rime in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (shelf number CFMAGL. 03.01.149) is distinguished in the card catalog by the diction “con postille autografe di Galileo Galilei.”21 Nor has Angelica’s book, so far as we know, experienced misfortunes so spectacular as to deserve a description like the one referring to a copy of Christianismi restitutio by the religious dissident Michael Servetus in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale (shelf no. D2- 11274), to wit: “Ex. sauvé des flammes au moment de la destruction de l’édition en 1553, et qui porte encore en plusieurs endroits les marques du feu” [copy saved from the flames at the moment of the destruction of the edition in 1553 still bearing in several spots the marks of the fire]. Untouched, undisturbed, anonymous, Angelica’s book might enjoy its advancing age in perfect harmony with its circumstances, for a long, long time.

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Libraries, after all, in spite of repeated forecasts of their demise, still perform a valuable function.22 Even when they do not provide Wi-Fi access to patrons, and even if they do not subscribe to all the available databases, text delivery services, e-publication bundles, digital libraries, and whatnot, they nonetheless provide a roof and, in most cases, reading space. The best allow entrance to practically any scholar upon application, if only for a few days per year. They have congenial staffs, on the whole, although almost always sadly dwindling in numbers, expert in the minutiae of local cataloging procedure and local customs regarding the handling of precious items, as well as in the bibliographies of particular disciplines. They have systems for ordering and retrieving books, mostly more friendly than the one in the Leningrad Library under the Soviet Union, where in Franco Venturi’s recollection, readers had to equip themselves with relevant call numbers before walking through the door. In most cases, with some patience and self-organization, a regular reader in the largest libraries can work around limited opening times and the near-universal trend to off-site warehousing of those less-consulted items which nonetheless in many cases seem to be the ones of greatest interest. Angelica’s book would surely be at home here. Yet, dropping this book into the ocean of early modern books may be just one more way to destroy it, erase its existence, and perhaps also to wash away the last known definitive trace of Angelica Baldachini. The annals of library science contain remarkable research instruments from times past, which attempted to avoid erasure, resist cancelation, and keep particular editions afloat, as it were, on the surface of bibliographic knowledge, ultimately in order to avoid losing the knowledge they contained. Each new multiplication of the store of knowledge and the number of its vehicles has entailed the development of new methods of retrieval, from handlists to bibliographies to study guides to learned journals. How to ensure that the seeker and the sought are painlessly united so new knowledge can be made? Ann Blair, at the end of a detailed survey of the information management tools of the past, points out that “human attention is one of our most precious commodities and many forces compete for it”—adding, in reference to developments over the last half-century, the availability of “an ingenious range of software and hardware devices.”23 An advantage of digital applications is, on the one hand, the possibility of preserving the particular without losing the aggregate, of joining the single object inseparably to the millions in its category, while on the other hand allowing a potentially unlimited audience to experience a one-off. Glenn Gould, the noted pianist, ridiculed the “tuxedoed fallacy” prevailing among some music enthusiasts, by which he seemingly meant, the notion that

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the only possible real musical experience was at the concert hall, pointing out instead paradoxically that a true “one-on-one” relationship between performer and listener could occur only by means of a recording.24 In his interview (with himself) on the topic, instead of invoking Marshall McLuhan on the potentialities of widely diffusing the objects of culture he could just as well have referred to the notion of a unique masterwork destined for appreciation by an elite few, which Walter Benjamin contrasted with a new infinitely reproducible work destined for the many. In spite of the ubiquity of “mechanical reproduction” in Benjamin’s time there were still few signs that Western culture’s centuries-long reverence for the “aura” of uniqueness, of authenticity, of the essence imparted to an object by its maker and enshrined in the notion of the artistic masterpiece, would entirely be displaced; and as cultural standardization, social massification and industrial invasiveness continue in the twenty-first century to impinge on the individual in the ways indicated by Habermas and others, the reverence seems only destined to increase, even in the form of a nostalgic response to vestiges of a disappearing past.25 Some developments in the art market point forcefully in this direction.26 How then to preserve a unique artifact while allowing access by the many? How to have Benjamin and McLuhan too? Possibly the theoretical difficulties are irresolvable. But the increasing reality of the virtual world (I hesitate to say “palpability”) suggests that the thing and its digital surrogate exist not in mutual denial but in a relationship of creative tension. Some “things”—are better “seen” through prosthetic eyes: faint inscriptions on stone, underlying frescoes, microorganisms, the earth’s globe.27 Others are so fragile that the competing demands of conservation and fitness for use can only be met digitally. In the production of the digital surrogate much may be lost; and the horror stories recounted in Nicholson Baker’s classic Double Fold, concerning the microfilming of millions of pages of old newspapers and magazines in libraries around the world, in excessive haste and according to ill-conceived criteria, could just as well apply to massive digital scanning.28 There is no need here to go into detail regarding the badly sequenced images, the errors of focus, the visible hands, the misleading descriptions, and everything else that is the price willingly paid for increased access. Robert Darnton in “Paean to Paper” points out yet another problem: “Today we rely on digitization, even though digital copies are more vulnerable than microfilm to decay and obsolescence.” Where bookworms cannot crawl, bit rot sets in.29 “Where” in the digital realm is of course a tricky issue.30 As far as objects being in a place is concerned, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein on returning to the half-remembered Oakland of her childhood, “there’s no there there.” The bit

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stream (data sequence) must be instantiated with each new access, and in the age of cloud computing, there is sometimes no telling “there” from “here,” even in principle. Preservation depends on the long-term persistence of the bit stream on some form of hardware, along with the logical order that allows rendering for end-user readability. Much can happen on the way from the machine to the user, as well as from the present to the future. The physical disks, tapes, etcetera may be damaged; the software for rendering may become outmoded. Advances in the area of data storage promise to engineer permanence by migration to newer systems, by emulation of older software, or by attention to standards for “Persistent Object Preservation” (POP) and the like. The advent of guidelines for the creation of the objects themselves, in widely available formats, with accompanying metadata in agreed-upon schemes such as TEI, written in XML, also promise persistence. Only time will tell. So I decide to fling caution to the winds and build a monument so convincing, so compelling, so powerful, so true to the original, so comprehensive of all the necessary aspects of the literary, philosophical, historical, bibliographical, psychological, and scientific story involving Angelica and her book, that I will have fulfilled my obligation to it and to her, which I took upon myself the moment I freed the helpless book from one person’s power only to place it in my own. What shape that monument shall take can only be outlined here, since I am translating into one medium, that of the word on a page, from another, of the hypertext, the image, the pixel, the linked network of nodes allowing readers free nonlinear navigation, an integrated presentation package designed to consign my subjects to viewers who will find them interesting and perhaps informative, and to perpetual memory, or at least, as perpetual as can be, given the developing potentialities of the medium, and the limitations.31 And of that outline, this small book serves as an interim version.

Conclusion

I realize that I have left many stones in this inquiry still unturned. But it is time to bring together at least some of the disparate themes. I began with Robert K. Merton’s insight about accidental discovery, and I made a case for knowledge accumulation along an itinerary whose (not entirely) unexpected twists and turns appeared in view only as new insights suggested new questions. I also implied that discovery is a community enterprise: this I take to be at least one possible interpretation of the fraternal trio in the Princes of Serendip. True, the brothers can hardly be co-opted into an analogy for the innovative approach dubbed “Mode 2” in The New Production of Knowledge, except that their explorations occur in a community context, refer to problems of general interest, and result from sharing flashes of insight based on experience. If “Mode 1,” the dominant approach up to now, was hierarchical and proprietary, “Mode 2,” according to Nowotny et al., is decentralized, ad hoc and social.1 Perhaps such a common enterprise of investigation was already what Plato had in mind in his Seventh Letter, worth excerpting here: “After much effort, as names, definitions, sights, and other data of sense, are brought into contact and friction one with another, in the course of scrutiny and kindly testing by men who proceed by question and answer without ill will, with a sudden flash there shines forth understanding about every problem.”2 The individual investigator who manages to be present at this epiphany depends for his good fortune on the accumulated wisdom of his sources and the various disciplines deployed. Merton also argues that knowledge in the humanities is “less systematic” than in the sciences—not that it is more prone to serendipity, but that somehow research and results are less rigidly structured. Such a claim stands apart from the methodological considerations that have occasionally viewed humanities approaches as epistemologically infirm because they are less susceptible to inductive demonstration, which Hans-Georg Gadamer resolves by reminding us that any difference in approach may derive from a fundamental difference in intent—natural science normally tending to the establishment of covering laws, humanistic knowledge tending to the apprehension of a phenomenon in its

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individual concreteness—while the achievement of understanding is common to both.3 Philosophers of science have disagreed about just how “structured” scientific knowledge actually is. Herbert Butterfield, for instance, considered the hypothetico-deductive model of structured research to be the greatest of all human achievements, bar none. 4 Nonetheless, statements claiming that “the world is orderly, and can be explained by a small number of natural laws” (Edward O. Wilson) do not necessarily contradict the notion that “science is an anarchic enterprise” (Paul Feyerabend).5 Science as a well-organized body of knowledge may be the product and object of a widely diverse set of practices, not all of which (so Richard P. Feynman noted in his Nobel address) form part of the rhetoric of the standard scientific paper.6 Setting aside the yet unfulfilled dream of a unified approach to all inquiry, just how “unstructured” is humanities knowledge? Merton reverted to a simile suggested by Derek Price. The progressive accumulation in natural science was like knitting, or maybe more like spinning, joining each previous thread in the fabric with the next one in a more or less vast orderly scheme. Humanities knowledge by contrast resembled a random network, with the bits only loosely connected to each other.7 Admittedly, the concept Merton sought to explain, of new science forever chasing out the old, while literary and historiographical classics are still well used, does not perfectly suit the illustration. Sometimes in the humanities the disputes themselves, regarding classifications, definitions, methods, approaches, going back and forward in time, drawing from the authors of classic works of criticism or attempting to stand on their shoulders to see more of the terrain (“on the shoulders of giants,” echoed Merton, citing Isaac Newton), are part and parcel of the knowledge that the humanities disciplines deliver. Perhaps in a sense, the humanities were transdisciplinary from the start, by the need to justify their knowledge claims to one to another in the struggle for survival. The same urge to self-explanation suggests a form of exposition where the processes of discovery and analysis, the work behind the scenes, the research mode in conversation with the research made, belong as much to the results as do any definitive conclusions. Definitive conclusions, did I say? They are hard to come by in any of the knowledge-gaining enterprises; no wonder they are so highly prized. Intelligent conjecture is usually the best we get. But there is much at stake. Our fellowcitizens, including those with investments to protect, often have needs well in advance of what our methods can deliver. “You could literally spend a decade here studying this,” said Jeff Ransom, an archaeologist for Miami-Dade County,

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about supposed Native American settlements and other archaeological remains found at a site in downtown Miami in October 2013. Developers unable to wait so long move to the attack. “If you don’t have history, you have to invent one,” expostulates Eugene E. Stearns, a lawyer for MDM Development Group. “You have what I would say is imaginary conclusions of what was discovered.” The hotel-entertainment-convention complex planned for this site must therefore go ahead.8 While decisions are being made around them, concerning the future of a plot of land, the future of a nation and the future of the humanities, researchers stand in an ambiguous space between their evidence and their audiences. Patience is rewarded, but not much. The latest announcement on European funding under Horizon 2020, published in spring 2014, turns up the heat. Countries are facing numerous social, economic, and political challenges, it begins.9 Globalization, global conflict, and the economic conjuncture are complicating efforts to make good on promises regarding social welfare, democracy, justice, and peaceful development. Families are struggling. Young people, especially, are disillusioned. The very survival of the European Union is at stake. Academic research needs to be directed toward yielding beneficial results for broader constituencies and building confidence in the institutions. Historical assets need preservation, ways of life need protection. Proposals should address issues like resilience and competitiveness, cultural significance and distinctiveness. Let research thrive, the announcement goes on, which bears out the extraordinary unity within diversity of the member countries and the shared heritage that guarantees prosperity. Meanwhile the European parliamentary elections pit the Euroskeptics in each country against their local adversaries, with Italian public service announcements (and similar ones probably elsewhere) reminding about carefully selected portions of a cosmopolitan past, including Renaissance painting, Baroque palazzi, Romantic music, and almost compulsorily referring to the catastrophic twentieth-century events that motivated the preamble to the Treaty of Lisbon in the first place. How not to imagine that the orientation to European history must be reinvented too? According to another version, the humanities malaise is even more deeply rooted. To set at least one discipline on a path to greater relevance, David Armitage and Jo Guldi have called for a methodological reform.10 Adopting a longue-durée perspective on the study of history, they suggest that the crisis has been intermittent at least since Fernand Braudel attempted to shake things up in the 1950s with his demands for a closer look at ever vaster scansions of historic time. Now that short-term thinking has taken precedence in the public sphere,

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with grave consequences for policy-making and for citizens’ understanding, the authors argue, the time has come to reintroduce chronological awareness and retrospective knowledge on a broader scale. All the more so as the newer social sciences have failed to predict the challenges posed by overpopulation and under-distribution, ignorance and waste, violence and injustice. A rejuvenated historiography focused on big structures, large processes, and huge comparisons may break the impasse. Yet a view taking in the larger picture does not necessarily preclude a view from close at hand. To borrow a metaphor from some of the characters in my story, the macrocosm is contained within the microcosm; and moving a little ahead in time, the first microbiologists knew that telescope and microscope differed only in that one pans out, the other points in—both instruments look into the infinite. A similar idea must have occurred to Émile Durkheim, who from “one good experiment” carried out among the Arunta people in Brazil drew out the elementary forms of all religious life. Attempting to explore the culture of early modern reading, based on a single book, a single signature, I maintain, needs no excuse. What I get out of my example depends on what I put in—the questions I am asking and the array of existing research results I am able to deploy. The crisis of the humanities consists in the failure of the humanists to make their case; not the failure of the cases to withstand criticism. Try though they might, historians rarely succeed in separating themselves and their worlds entirely from their material. Maybe this is just as well. In the present instance, perhaps the tendency was inevitable, to look for the glimmerings of a more empowering, a more emancipated, a more inclusive, and a more tolerant society, even in epochs where the evidence is so scarce and the results are so ambiguous. An exercise in wishful thinking may yet yield some useful insights. Rereading the chapters in this book, I find that I have presented Angelica Baldachini as a possible protagonist in cultural change, an example within a context where new attitudes are emerging. Inspired by the work of many fine scholars who have contributed to the genre loosely named “cultural history,” and by casting my net among the disciplines as widely as I dared, I have drawn attention to the values orienting action within the rigid structures of economies, societies, and states; I have attempted to place due emphasis upon the overwhelming force of human thought.11 A story of agency in a world of institutions long ago brings to mind how vitally important a single person is, in the institutions of today. And the tortuous route our societies have taken to reach this result seems highlighted every time the latest millenarian murder cults call for the negation of the person to serve an ideology of destruction.12

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Rather than making some pretense of offering a definitive account, I avow that the research is current to June 2014; after that, I leave it up to the reader and those who attempt to follow in my tracks. There is a caveat, however. Years later, returning to the junk shop where I made the unexpected discovery that gave rise to this research, I still had some questions to ask about the book I had acquired and the furniture where it had been stored. I retraced my steps along Piazza dei Ciompi to the exact spot only to find an unfamiliar storefront. There was no assortment of curious items visible through the window, pieces of furniture, glassware, china, silver, and hat stands. The previous business had been replaced by another, which dealt in fine paintings. Neighbors informed that the shopkeeper I had known had sold out and would not be returning to this or any other kind of shop. There had been an illness. A portion of the material instruments on which my inquiry depended was now gone, leaving only my memories and conclusions. No other seekers would be allowed to travel exactly the same route as I had. There would be other junk shops and other finds, perhaps other kindly figures well-disposed to indulge the collector’s peculiar taste. But by definition, a serendipitous event is a one-off; it cannot be reproduced in a laboratory or anywhere else. Like the events recounted in any history, it occurs only once and then it is gone. And if we don’t catch it when it comes our way, we may get another chance—but it won’t ever be the same.

Notes Preface 1 Alain Corbin, Le Monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot. Sur les traces d’un inconnu (1798–1876) (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), p. 7. English translation by Arthur Goldhammer as The Life of an Unknown (New York City, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), here modified. Concerning the methodological implications of the work, I consulted also the interesting article by Hannu Salmi, “Cultural History, the Possible and the Principle of Plenitude,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 171–87. He points out that a somewhat analogous case could be made for the figure of al-Hasan al-Wazzan as explored by Natalie Zemon Davis in Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York City, NY: Hill and Wang, 2006). Corbin claims his project has some kinship with Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother (New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1975). On the larger issues, I found myself going back from time to time to Carlo Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006), chap. 1. 2 I am intensely aware that “material culture-based history,” is sometimes regarded as a “fleeting phenomenon, the flowering of an exotic annual plant in history’s otherwise hardy perennial garden of the written word,” as Harvey Green suggests, in “Cultural History and the Material(s) Turn,” Cultural History 1, no. 1 (2012): 61–82 (61), in spite of the impressive intellectual roots of such work. 3 Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1994), chap. 4.

Introduction 1 Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1557); English version, The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Serendip, translated from the Persian into French, and from thence done into English (London: for Will. Chetwode, 1722). Concerning the Persian origins, Renzo Bragantini, “The Serendipity of the Three Princes of Serendib: Arabic

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8 9

10 11 12

Notes Tales in a Collection of Italian Renaissance Short Stories,” Le répertoire narratif arabe médiéval: transmission et ouverture, Actes du Colloque International (Liège, 15-17 septembre 2005), ed. F. Bauden, A. Chraïbi, and A. Ghersetti (Liège-Geneva: Université de Liège-Droz, 2008), pp. 301–08. Letter to Mann, January 28, 1754, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–83), vol. 20, pp. 407–11. Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 1. Merton and Barber, The Travels and Adventures, p. 18. I compared this to Albert Einstein’s account in his article about induction and deduction in physics: “Induction and Deduction in Physics,” The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Translation Vol. 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 108–09, from Berliner Tageblatt, December 25, 1919. In 1990, I attempted to account for the considerable amount that had been done to that time in “Revisiting the Forgotten Centuries: Recent Work on Early Modern Tuscany: Historiographical Essay,” European History Quarterly 20 (1990): 519–50. Since then, the bibliography has continued to grow, and for a relatively recent state of the art, I could recommend the bibliography appended to R. Burr Litchfield, Florence Ducal Capital, 1530-1630 (New York: ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008), and especially the annual bibliographies being produced by the portal at www.storiadifirenze.org, which at the time of writing (2014) are now current to 2008. Statements here are based on Luigi Balsamo and Alberto Tinto, Le origini del corsivo nella tipografia italiana del Cinquecento (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1967). A particularly adventurous introduction to what is known about Straparola is Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). In addition, see the introduction by Donald Beecher to a modern edition of The Pleasant Nights, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), Vol. 1. Bottignheimer, Fairy Godfather, pp. 45–81. Gianfrancesco Straparola, Opera nova de Zoan Francesco Straparola da Caravazo, novamente stampata: Sonetti cxv, Strambotti xxxv, Epistole vii, Capitoli xii (Venice: Georgio de Ruschoni, 1508). Alfredo Cioni, entry in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani [=DBI] 10 (1968): 496–98. I translate from the original text reported in Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, p. 135. I translate from the text in Giuseppe Rua, Tra antiche fiabe e novelle. I. Le “Piacevoli notti” di messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: E. Loescher, 1898), p. 139.

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13 Rua, Tra antiche fiabe, p. 137, my translation. 14 An Anthology of Italian Poems 13th-19th Century selected and translated by Lorna de’ Lucchi (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), p. 85. The original: Lieti fiori et felici, et ben nate herbe che madonna pensando premer sole; piaggia ch’ascolti sue dolci parole, et del bel piede alcun vestigio serbe; schietti arboscelli et verdi frondi acerbe, amorosette et pallide viole; ombrose selve, ove percote il sole che vi fa co’ suoi raggi alte et superbe; o soave contrada, o puro fiume, che bagni il suo bel viso et gli occhi chiari et prendi qualita dal vivo lume; quanto v’invidio gli atti honesti et cari! Non fia in voi scoglio omai che per costume d’arder co la mia fiamma non impari. 15 Rua, Tra antiche fiabe, p. 137, my translation. 16 Concerning this work, I examined the useful study by Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chaps. 2–6. 17 The translation is modified from Talvacchia, Taking Positions, p. 211. 18 Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human Condition. De miseria humanae conditionis, ed. Donald R. Howard, trans. Margaret Mary Dietz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 6. 19 Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 223. 20 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Gli Asolani, Rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti, I classici italiani TEA (Milan: Tascabili Editori Associati, 1989), Asolani, bk. 2, chap. 21: “Perciò che ogni cosa naturale è buona, Amore, come quello che natural cosa è, buono eziandio è sempre, né può reo essere in alcuna maniera giamai.” 21 Ibid.: Ma passiamo, se vi piace, alla dolcezza d’Amore. Quantunque, o donne, grandissimo incarico è questo per certo, a volere con parole asseguire la dimostrazione di quella cosa che, quale sia e quanta, si sente più agevolmente che non si dice. Perciò che sì come il dipintore bene potrà come che sia la bianchezza dipignere delle nevi, ma la freddezza non mai, sì come cosa il giudicio della quale, al tatto solamente conceduto, sotto l’occhio non viene, a

144

Notes cui servono le pinture, similmente ho io testé quanto sia il giovamento d’Amore dimostrarvi pure in qualche parte potuto, ma le dolcezze che cadono in ogni senso e, come sorgevole fontana assai più ancora che questa nostra non è, soprabondano in tutti loro, non possono nell’orecchio solo, per molto che noi ne parliamo, in alcuna guisa capere.

22 Concerning the normativity of nature, I was inspired by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004), especially the editors’ introduction and the chapters by Laura Slatkin and Katharine Park. 23 I took account of the introduction by Sylvia Ferino-Pagden to Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Venice: Marsilio, 2008), pp. 15–28, as well as the chapter by Fernando Checa, “Titian’s Mythological Inventions and Poesie,” pp. 187–93. On the more general issues, I consulted Patrizia Castelli, L’Estetica del Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), chap. 8, “Eros e Venere,” pp. 175–95. 24 See the entry on Girolamo Parabosco by Daniele Ghirlanda and Luigi Collarile in DBI 81 (2014).

Chapter 1 1 By Parabosco, I diporti (Venice: Griffio, 1550); by Grazzini (called “Il Lasca”), Le cene (posthumous publication in Florence, 1743). 2 Boccaccio’s framing tale has been the object of intense study and controversy; for a basic introduction I looked to Thomas J. Stillinger, in Elissa Weaver, ed., The Decameron First Day in Perspective: Volume One of the Lecturae Boccaccii (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 29–58. Also, Lucia Marino, The Decameron “Cornice”: Allusion, Allegory, and Iconology (Ravenna: Longo, 1979), especially pp. 25–36. 3 For what follows I rely on the Introduction to Giuseppe Rua’s edition, Le piacevoli notti, vol. 1 (Bologna: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1899). 4 Giuseppe Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti, vol. 2 (Bologna: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1899–1908) gives the original five stories along with the two new stories, as does Donald Beecher, ed., The Pleasant Nights, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Magnini includes the two new stories as an appendix to the end of her volume. On the other hand, W. G. Waters, ed. and trans., The Nights of Straparola, vol. 2 (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1894), places the two new stories in night eight and adds the original replaced story to night nine, as a sixth story. Beecher thinks the two new stories are Straparola material; while Donato Pirovano considers them to be spurious, in Le piacevoli notti, vol. 2 (Rome: Salerno, 2000), p. 793. 5 Tiziana Sterza, “Paolo Manuzio editore a Venezia,” ACME: Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università degli Studi di Milano 61 (2008): 123–65. Still

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8

9

10

11

12 13 14

15

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suggestive is the work of Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), chap. 4. Now the object of a splendid study by Angela Nuovo and Chris Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa: nell’Italia del XVI secolo (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2005). For what follows I largely follow Donato Pirovano, “Una storia editoriale cinquecentesca: ‘Le piacevoli notti’ di Giovan Francesco Straparola,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana no. 580 (2000): 540–69. Concerning the development of the printers’ guilds, Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250-c. 1650 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1987), pp. 84, 117, 119, 183, 203. Compare Anna Giulia Cavagna, “Statuti di librai e stampatori in Lombardia: 1589-1734,” in Libri, tipografi, biblioteche. Ricerche storiche dedicate a Luigi Balsamo, ed. A. Ganda, E. Grignani, and A. Petrucciani (Florence: Olschki, 1997), I, 225–39, where the printers ask the Senate for approval; Maria Cristina Misiti, “Le confraternite dei librai e stampatori a Roma,” Rivista Storica del Lazio 7 (1999): 29–55; Norma Dallai Belgrano, “L’arte dei librai a Genova tra il 1450 ed il 1546,” La Berio 19 (1989): 5–48; G. Bertoli, “Librai, cartolai e ambulanti immatricolati nell’Arte dei medici e speziali di Firenze dal 1490 al 1600,” La Bibliofilia 94 (1992): 125–64, 227–62. Concerning the Venetian legislation, Mario Infelise, I padroni dei libri: Il controllo sulla stampa nella prima età moderna (Bari: Laterza, 2014), chap. 1. Still useful, especially for texts of the legislation, is Horatio F. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press: An Historical Study Based upon Documents for the Most Part Hitherto Unpublished (London: John C. Nimmo, 1891), pp. 79–84. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press, p. 86. On the early legislation particularly useful is Marino Zorzi, “La produzione e la circolazione del libro,” in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, vol. 7: La Venezia barocca, ed. Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1998), pp. 921–85. Paolo Veneziani, “La marca tipografica di Comin da Trino,” Gutenberg Jahrbuch 65 (1990): 162–73. In addition, Cristina Michielin, “Il processo a Comin da Trino e Andrea Calmo: Implicazioni e conseguenze di una sentenza su un testo ancora in tipografia,” Quaderni veneti 22 (1995): 28. Dennis Rhodes, entry “Comin da Trino,” DBI 27 (1982): 576–78. Concerning these practices, Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance (Leyden: Brill, 2013), especially chaps. 3, 7–9. An exhaustive account of the system is in Nuovo and Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa, chap. 4, distinguishing between the “privilegio letterario” and the “privilegio librario.” Venice, Archivio di Stato, Senato Terra 37, fol. 4v, dated March 8, 1550, cited in Pirovano, “Una storia editoriale cinquecentesca,” 545.

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16 Infelise, I padroni dei libri, chap. 1; Brown, The Venetian Printing Press, chaps. 9–10 and the document at p. 211. 17 Concerning these editions, I studied Donato Pirovano, “Per l’edizione de ‘Le piacevoli notti’ di Giovan Francesco Straparola,” Filologia e critica 26 (2001): 60–93. 18 For the insights below on sixteenth-century publishing, apart from the sources already mentioned, A. Quondam, “ ‘Mercanzia d’onore,’ ‘mercanzia d’utile.’ Produzione libraria e lavoro inteletturale a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in Libri, lettori e pubblico nell’Europa moderna, ed. Armando Petrucci (Bari: Laterza, 1989), pp. 51–104. Also see R. Hirsch in the same volume, “Stampa e lettura fra il 1450 e il 1550,” pp. 1–50; Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, “L’editoria veneziana fra ’500 e ’600, Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima,” vol. 6: Dal Rinascimento al Barocco, ed. G. Cozzi and P. Prodi (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1994), pp. 615–48; Infelise, I padroni dei libri, pp. 131–35. Concerning the methodologies of quantification, Furio Diaz, “Metodo quantitativo e storia delle idee,” Rivista storica italiana 78 (1966): 933–47; F. Diaz, “Le stanchezze di Clio,” Rivista storica italiana 81 (1972): 733–34. I also took account of Peter Burke, “Three Approaches to Book History,” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 2 (2008): 363–72. 19 Concerning this particular aspect, my “Printing and Entrepreneurialism in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” Journal of European Economic History 25 (1996): 569–97. 20 Ugo Rozzo, La letteratura italiana negli “Indici” del Cinquecento (Udine: Forum, 2005), pp. 166–67. 21 Matteo Bandello, Le novelle, ed. Gioachino Brognoligo (Bari: Laterza, 1928). 22 Concerning this whole matter, apart from the studies mentioned below, I drew from Marziano Guglielminetti, La cornice e il furto: studi sulla novella del ‘500 (Milan: Zanichelli, 1984), especially pp. 79–99. 23 The equivocation is mentioned in Gianni Villani, “Da Morlini a Straparola: Problemi di Traduzione e Problemi del Testo,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 159 (1982): 70. 24 Giuseppe Rua’s edition, Le piacevoli notti, vol. 2 (1908), p. 254. 25 Charlton Thomas Lewis and Charles Short, A New Latin Dictionary (New York: Harper’s, 1882), p. 1236. 26 Egidio Forcellini, Totius latinitatis lexicon, Vol. 4 (Prato: Aldiniano, 1848), p. 343. 27 I referred to the entry by Franco Pignatti in DBI 77 (2012). 28 John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, ed. Hermann W. Haller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), s.v. 29 Giovanni Francesco Straparola, The Pleasant Nights, ed. and trans. Suzanne Magnanini (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015), p. 438.

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30 Massimo Danzi, La biblioteca del Cardinal Pietro Bembo (Geneva: Droz, 2005) p. 108. 31 Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003); Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (New York: Routledge, 20033); Peter Burke, “Translating Knowledge, Translating Cultures,” in Kultureller Austausch: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung, ed. Michael North (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), pp. 69–77. 32 Beecher, ed., The Pleasant Nights, vol. 2, p. 570. 33 Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti, vol. 2, 255. 34 An example of his other work: Italian sculptors (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1911). 35 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 293. 36 Ibid., p. 257. 37 Concerning the practices of authorship, I found useful the overview by G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (Spring 1980): 1–32; more recently, on Renaissance authorship in general, Hall Bjørnstad, ed., Borrowed Feathers: Plagiarism and the Limits of Imitation in Early Modern Europe (Oslo: Oslo Academic Press, 2008), especially essays by Kathy Eden, Else Marie Lingaas, and Kristin Gjerpe. 38 Le Familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco (Florence, 1933–42), i.8.3-4. 39 The charges are summarized by Jack Zipes, “Sensationalist Scholarship: A Putative ‘New’ History of Fairy Tales,” Cultural Analysis 9 (2010): 129–55, reprinted in his The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), Appendix A, referring to Ruth Bottingheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). Concerning the earlier stages of the quarrel, I refer to Beecher, ed., The Pleasant Nights, 1 vol., pp. 5–8. 40 My interpretation here is based on Harold Neemann, Piercing the Magic Veil: Toward a Theory of the Conte de Fée (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999), “Introduction.” 41 Beecher, ed., The Pleasant Nights, 1 vol., pp. 38–64, explores the sometimes intense controversy regarding these issues. On the side of the originality of the “fairytale” genre in Straparola, there is Ruth Bottignheimer’s book, Fairy Godfather, and on the side of the popular and folk origins of the same tales, Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 157–74; Jan Ziolkowski, “Straparola and the Fairy Tale: Between Literary and Oral Traditions,” Journal of American Folklore 123 (2010): 377–97; Francisco Vaz da Silva, “The Invention of Fairy Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 123 (2010): 398–425; Dan Ben-Amos, “Straparola: The Revolution That Was Not,” Journal of American Folklore 123 (2010): 426–46. Ruth Bottigheimer responds in “Fairy Godfather, Fairy-Tale History, and Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Response to Dan Ben-Amos, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Francisco Vaz da Silva,” Journal of American Folklore 123 (2010): 447–96.

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42 Ziolkowski, “Straparola and the Fairy Tale,” 395. Cited also in Zipes, “Sensationalist Scholarship,” p. 132. 43 Reference is made to Ginzburg’s Il Formaggio e i vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500 (Milan: Einaudi, 1976). 44 This criticism of Ginzburg’s work was advanced by Paola Zambelli, “Uno, due tre mille Menocchio,” Archivio storico italiano 137 (1979): 51–90; to which Ginzburg replied in the English-language edition of his book, entitled The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 154–55. 45 Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: una decifrazione del sabba (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1989); translated by Raymond Rosenthal as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1991). Concerning this research, Perry Anderson, “Witchcraft,” London Review of Books 12, no. 21 (November 8, 1990): 6–11. 46 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35358487 (accessed January 22, 2016). 47 S. Graça da Silva and J. J. Tehrani, “Comparative Phylogenetic Analyses Uncover the Ancient Roots of Indo-European Folktales,” Royal Society Open Science 3 (2016): 1506–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150645. 48 Beecher, ed., The Pleasant Nights, 1 vol., p. 90. 49 Anne Jacobson Schutte and Thomas Kuehn, “Introduction,” in Time, Space and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Clarksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), p. xvi. More specifically in relation to women as custodians of family honor, Gabriella Zarri, Recinti: donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Editore Il Mulino, 2000), pp. 145–56; as well as Silvia Evangelisti, “Wives, Widows, and Brides of Christ: Marriage and the Convent in the Historiography of Early Modern Italy,” The Historical Journal 43, no. 1 (2000): 233–247. Concerning seduction and the consequences, mostly in the Kingdom of Naples but with reference to other contexts, Giovanni Romeo, Amori proibiti. I concubini tra Chiesa e Inquisizione (Bari: Laterza, 2008), especially chaps. 1 and 2. 50 I consulted I libri della famiglia, ed. Cecil Grayson (Bari: Laterza, 1960), p. 111. In general, concerning love and marriage, I draw on Brian Richardson, “Amore maritale: Advice on Love and Marriage in the Second Half of the Cinquecento,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 2000), chap. 12. 51 Lauro Martines, “Séduction, espace familial et autorité dans la Renaissance italienne,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 53, no. 2 (1998): 255–90. 52 Not without helpful guides: Vittore Branca, Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul Decameron (Florence: Sansoni, 1981); Lessico critico decameroniano, ed. R. Bragantini and P. M. Forni (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995); E. Menetti,

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Il Decameron fantastico (Bologna: Clueb, 1994); Giorgio Padoan, Il Boccaccio, le Muse, il Parnaso e l’Arno (Florence: Olschki, 1978); Pier Massimo Forni, Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 53 Of Boccaccio I used the edition by Mario Marti (Milan: Rizzoli, 1950); here referring to vol. 2: 735: “Conclusione dell’autore.” 54 Johann Fischarts, Geschichtklitterung (Gargantua), ed. A. Alsleben (Halle: Niemeyer, 1891), p. 6. 55 On this theme, I consulted the essays by Frantšek Graus, Albrecht Classen, and Sylvana Seidel Menchi in Peter A. Dykema and Heiko Augustinus Oberman, eds., Anticlericalism In Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leyden: Brill, 1993); as well as Ottavia Niccoli, Rinascimento anticlericale. Infamia, propaganda e satira in Italia tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Bari and Laterza: Roma, 2005), especially pp. 3–48, concerning the tradition of anonymous libels against ecclesiastics in general and the papacy in particular.

Chapter 2 1 Mario Infelise, I libri proibiti da Gutenberg all’Encyclopédie (Milan: Laterza, 2007), p. 23. 2 Index Auctorum et Librorum (Rome: Ex Officina Saluiana, 1559): “Boccatij Decades, seu Nouellæ centum, quæ hactenus cum intollerabilibus erroribus ipressæ sunt, & quæ in posterm cum eisdem erroribus imprimentur.” 3 Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti, vol. 2, p. 273. 4 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 458. 5 Ibid., p. 85. 6 Waters, ed. and trans., The Nights of Straparola, vol. 1, p. 275. 7 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 264. 8 Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 43. 9 The citation is to Guillaume d’Auvergne, Opera omnia (Venice: Zenaro, 1591), p. 283. 10 Adriano Prosperi, “La chiesa e la circolazione della cultura nell’Italia della Controriforma. Effetti involontari della censura,” in La censura libraria nell’Europa del secolo sedicesimo, Convegno internazionale di studi, Cividale del Friuli, 9–10 novembre 1995, ed. U. Rozzo (Udine: Forum, 1997), pp. 147–61. 11 Juan Luis Vives, De disciplinis libri xx (Lyon: Jean Frellon, 1551), Praefatio. 12 Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 118ff. 13 In general, concerning Borghini, G. Bertoli and R. Drusi, eds., Fra lo “Spedale” e il Principe. Vincenzio Borghini, filologia e invenzione nella Firenze di Cosimo

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16 17

18 19

20 21

22

Notes I. Atti del Convegno (Firenze, 21–22 marzo 2002) (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2005), especially the contributions by Mario Pozzi, Massimo Firpo, Antonio Sorella, Riccardo Drusi. Here and below, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (St. Louis: Herder, 1941), p. 275. Adriano Prosperi, “Censurare le favole. Il protoromanzo e l’Europa cattolica,” in Il romanzo, vol. I: La cultura del romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), pp. 71–106(73). Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, p. 275. Jesus Martinez de Bujanda et al., Index de Rome, 1590, 1593, 1596: avec étude des index de Parme, 1580—de Munich, 1582 et de Rome, 1590 (Quebec: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance, 1994), pp. 39–40. Concerning the indexes, I follow Gigliola Fragnito, Proibito capire: la Chiesa e il volgare nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), chap. 1. For what follows, Fingerprints = Empreintes = Impronte (Paris: Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes in association with the National Library of Scotland: 1984). In addition, Many into One: Problems and Opportunities in Creating Shared Catalogues of Older Books, ed. David Shaw (Rome and London: Consortium of European Research Libraries, 2006), contributions by Neil Harris and Brian Hillyard. Entry “Farri, Domenico” by Mario Infelise, DBI 45 (1995): 174–76. The edition is: Gianfrancesco Straparola, Le tredici piacevolissime notti di Giovanni Francesco Straparola da Carauaggio, divise in due libri, espurgate nuovamente da molti errori, & di bellissime figure adornate. Con l’aggionta di cento enigmi da indovinare (Venice: Marco Claseri presso Alessandro Vecchi, 1599). Adjoined is an edition of a work previously published as Notte sollazzeuole di cento enimmi, overo indovinelli piacevoli in ottava rima, con la tavola nell ultimo delle lor dichiarationi (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi, 1594). Francesco Sansovino, Cento novelle scelte da più nobili scrittori (Venice: De’ Vecchi, 1598).

Chapter 3 1 Fascinating reflections on the problem occur in Patricia Parker’s essay, “ ‘Rude Mechanicals’,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 43–84. 2 I was inspired, among much else, by Jacques Dupâquier, Alain Bideau, and MarieElizabeth Ducreux, Le Prénom. Mode et Histoire. Entretiens de Malher 1980 (Paris:

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11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23

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Éditions de l’EHESS, 1984); and the impressive work collected by J. -M. Martin and F. Menant, eds., Genèse médiévale de l’anthroponymie moderne: l’espace italien, special issues of Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Moyen Age 106, no. 2 (1994); 107, no. 2 (1995); and 110, no. 1 (1998). Florence, Archivio di Stato, Magistrato della Grascia, reg. 193, March 27, 1589. Brown University, Florence Catasto Project, http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/ catasto/newsearch/first_names.html (accessed January 16, 2016). Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, Archivio dell’Opera, reg. 2, fol. 14r. Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, Archivio dell’Opera, reg. 230, fols. 2v, 3r-v. Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, Archivio dell’Opera, reg. 230, fol. 14r. Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, Archivio dell’Opera, reg. 232, fol. 15v. Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, Archivio dell’Opera, reg. 230, fols. 1r, 2r-v, 4r, 5v, 6r. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Magistrato della Grascia, reg. 194, February 1626; DBI 65 (2005), entry by Luca Bortolotti. In addition, Lucilla Conigliello, “Alcune note su Jacopo Ligozzi e sui dipinti del 1594,” Paragone 41, no. 485 (1990): 21–42. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Magistrato della Grascia, reg. 195, November 1644. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 201–04. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Le Nom ‘refait’,” L’Homme 20, no. 4 (1980): 77–104. I draw here upon Francesco Zazzera, Della nobilta dell’Italia parte prima (Naples: Gargano & Nucci, 1615), pp. 200–01. Concerning what follows, I am especially indebted to Bruno Migliorini, Dal nome proprio al nome comune (Florence: Olschki, 1968, repr. of 1927 ed.), Part 1. Eugenio Gamurrini, Istoria genealogica delle famiglie nobili Toscane et Umbre, vol. 2 (Florence: Onofri, 1671), p. 263. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Decima granducale, reg. 3620, fol. 399v: “Pier Cammillo di Filippo Baldacchini, di Cortona, di nuovo messo a gravezza per la città per grazia di S. A. S. d. adì 30 maggio 1654 (scudi) 2 imposteli sopra la Testa no. 36.” The first notice I had of this association was in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ceramelli-Papiani fascicle 283. Gamurrini, Istoria genealogica, vol. 2, p. 266. G. M. Mazzuchelli, Gli Scrittori d’Italia, II, 1 (Brescia, 1758), pp. 93ff. DBI 5 (1963). Other sources on Baldacchini’s works include Girolamo Mancini, Contributo dei Cortonesi alla coltura Italiana (Florence: Carnesecchi, 1898), p. 35; and now, Matteo Largaiolli, “La Predica d’Amore: note sulla parodia sacra tra Quattro e Cinquecento,” Italique 11 (2008): 53–89. Prothocinio, nel quale si contiene stato d’amore, prieghi d’amore, sospetto d’amore (Perugia: Francesco Cartolaio, 1525). Ibid., fol. 96r. Ibid., fol. 100v.

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24 Dyalogo de patientia (Perugia: Baldassare de Francesco, 1525), signature Bii (r): “Chi sei tu che tanto superbamente si come de me veramente fussi patrone con impeto mi parli?” 25 Dyalogo de patientia, signature Di (r): “I canonici istituti a che altro vagliono che a pigliar le legitimamente institute persone in la chiesa de dio et de possessione cavarle per instituire in quella gente a reggere che recte continuo esser doveriano? Vedi tu altro fructo de quelli se non che I lupi a pasturare se danno l’infermo gregge?” 26 Prothocinio, fol. 99r. 27 Dyalogo de patientia sig. Di. 28 Ibid., Dii. 29 Rather than excerpting a very extensive bibliography, I only cite Massimo Firpo’s fundamental Riforma protestante ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento. Un profilo storico (Bari and Laterza: Roma, 1993); Philip Benedict, Silvana Seidel Menchi, and Alain Tallon, eds., La Réforme en France et en Italie: contacts, comparaisons et contrastes (Rome: École française de Rome, 2007); and Mario Biagioni, Matteo Duni, and Lucia Felici, eds., Fratelli d’Italia: riformatori italiani nel Cinquecento (Turin: Claudiana, 2011). 30 Valerio Marchetti, “Sull’origine e dispersione del gruppo ereticale dei Sozzini a Siena, 1557—1560,” Rivista storica italiana 81 (1969): 133–73. In addition, on this topic, Valerio Marchetti, Gruppi ereticali senesi del Cinquecento (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), pp. 51–128. Eric Cochrane puts a more positive spin on Cosimo’s operations in Florence in the Forgotten Centuries: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 519. 31 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo del Principato, reg. 211, fol. 103v, dated August 27, 1560, to the Fathers of the Holy Inquisition: Zelante del serv.o di Dio, et desideroso di satisfar alle SS. VV. Ill.me et R.me, ho fatto buttar le mani addosso a quel Don Florenzo ch’esse mi dimandano, per haverlo d’avanti alla S. Inquisitione: Io lo mando ben custodito a Cortona, et dì sarà condotto da’ ministri miei su li confini per consegnarlo al Bargello di Perugia, quando da esso sarà lor [canceled: ordinato che lo] deputato il giorno che lo debbono menare. Et con questo fine mi raccomando nella buona gratia di VV. SS. Ill.me alle quali prego ogni felicità. . . . 32 For what follows, I rely on the admirable study by Céline Perol, Cortona. Pouvoirs et sociétés aux confins de la Toscane, XVe-XVIe siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2004), pp. 84–95, with relevant bibliography. 33 In addition to Perol, here I utilized E. Fasano Guarini, “Centro o periferia, accentramento e particolarismo: dicotomia o sostanza degli Stati in età moderna?” in Origini dello Stato. Processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioevo ed età

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35

36

37 38

39

40 41 42

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moderna, ed. Giorgio Chittolini, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera (Bologna: il Mulino, 1994), pp. 147–76. Still relevant is Giorgio Giorgetti, “Per una storia della campagna Toscana nella seconda metà del Cinquecento,” in Capitalismo e agricoltura in Italia, ed. Giorgio Giorgetti (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1977), pp. 432–39. Concerning the pressures of Florentine provisioning, I consulted Anna Maria Pult-Quaglia, “Per provvedere ai popoli”: Il sistema annonario nella Toscana dei Medici (Florence: Olschki, 1990), pp. 43–92. An interesting take on the agricultural problem, with relevant bibliography, Rebecca Jean Emigh, “The Spread of Sharecropping in Tuscany: The Political Economy of Transaction Costs,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (1997): 423–42. Corbin in his Le Monde retrouvé. On the reception of this work among historians, apart from Hannu Salmi’s appraisal, mentioned above, in “Cultural History,” pp. 176–77, I was informed by Sabina Loriga’s review in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 57, no. 1 (2002): 240–42, and the brief exploration of Corbin’s own background in the review by Donald Reid, International Labor and Working-Class History 59 (2001): 145–49. The political aspects are the subject of John M. Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), chaps. 6 and 7. Perol, Cortona, p. 281. I was inspired by Peter Burke’s distinction between written and oral in P. Burke, “The Uses of Literacy in Early Modern Italy,” in Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy. Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 110–31; as well as Armando Petrucci, “Scrittura, alfabetismo ed educazione grafica nella Roma del primo Cinquecento: da un libretto di conti di Maddalena Pizzicarola in Trastevere,” Scrittura e civiltà 2 (1978): 163–207. Roger Chartier, “L’entrée dans l’écrit,” Critique 34, no. 377 (1978): 973–83. I considered also L. Braida, “Quelques considerations sur l’histoire de la lecture en Italie. Usages et pratiques du livre sous l’Ancien Regime,” in Histoires de la lecture: un bilan des recherches, Actes du Colloque des 29 et 30 janvier 1993, ed. R. Chartier (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homrne, 1995), pp. 23–49. François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 310. I was inspired here by certain remarks by Jack Goody in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 8–10, 15–17. On this topic, I consulted the entry “Letter Writing” by Sara Jayne Steen, Jane Couchman, and Ann Crabb in Diana Maury Robin, Anne R. Larsen, and Carole Levin, eds., Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), pp. 207–16; as well as Lisa Kaborycha,

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45 46 47

48

49

50

51

52 53

Notes ed. and trans., A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially the Introduction, pp. 1–30; the pioneering anthology of Gabriella Zarri, ed., Per lettera: la scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia: secoli XV-XVII (Rome: Viella, 1999), especially the essays by Adriana Chemello and Tiziana Plebani, respectively, pp. 3–42, 43–78; not to mention the general account by Martyn Lyons, in Roger Chartier and Guglielmo Cavallo, eds., A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 313–44. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 12. I got the Palmerston quote from Jane Caplan, “Illegibility: Reading and Insecurity in History, Law and Government,” History Workshop Journal 68 (Autumn 2009): 99–121 (107). Del buon secretario (Rome: Faciotto, 1594), bk. 2, chap. 1, p. 35. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 9, p. 30. La vera arte de lo excellente scrivere de diverse varie sorti de litere (Venice: per Giouanniantonio & i fratelli da Sabbio, 1524), mentioned in Grendler, Schooling, p. 325; I also consulted Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Teaching Adults to Read in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Giovanni Antonio Tagliente’s Libro Maistrevole,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 17 (1986): 3–16. Domenico Manzoni, “Dell’alfabeto doppio come deve esser fatto et ordinato,” appended to his Libro mercantile ordinato col suo giornale e alfabeto (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1564), fol. M2(r), translated in Grendler, Schooling, p. 327. In this regard, consider J. F. Schumaker, ed., Human Suggestibility: Advances in Theory, Research, and Application (New York: Routledge, 1991), especially the chapter by Vladimir A. Gheorghiu and Peter Kruse. There is a modern edition of the first Italian translation (1610): Della fisionomia dell’uomo, ed. Mario Cicognani (Milan: Longanesi, 1971). For present purposes, I utilized the initial edition, De humana physiognomonia Libri IV (Naples: Tarquinio Longo, 1602). Concerning Della Porta’s theory, see the articles in Giambattista Della Porta nell’Europa del suo tempo (Naples: Guida, 1990), especially those by Gioacchino Papparelli and Helène Vedrine; as well as Cosimo Caputo, “La struttura del segno fisiognomico (Giambattista Della Porta e l’universo culturale del Cinquecento),” Il Protagora 22 (1982): 63–102; also, Ian Maclean, “The logic of physiognomony in the late Renaissance,” Early Science and Medicine 16, no. 4 (2011): 275–95. On these studies, Elizabeth Cornelia Evan, Physiognomics in the Ancient World, Vol. 59, Part 5 of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1969). De humana physiognomonia, p. 53. Ibid., p. 51.

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54 Included in Camillo Baldi, De humanarum propensionum ex temperamento praenotionibus, De naturalibus ex unguium inspectione praesagiis et De ratione cognoscendi mores, et qualitates scribentis ex ipsius epistola missiva... tractatus tres (Bologna: ex Typis HH. Evangelistae de Duccijs, 1664). 55 The pseudo-Aristotelian text is edited in Scriptores physiognomonici Graeci et Latini, ed. Richard Foerster, Bibliotheca scriptorum graecorum et romanorum Teubneriana, Vol. 2 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1893); Baldi’s work is, In Physiognomica Aristotelis Commentarii (Bologna, 1621). 56 Camillo Baldi, Considerationi e dubitationi sopra la materia delle mentite (Venice: presso Bartolomeo Fontana, 1634), p. 1: Hebbero gli antichi Filosofi ferma opinione che l’huomo all’hora si potesse chiamar propriamente saper alcuna cosa, quando doppo l’haver considerato l’universale, si fosse esercitato nei particolari, acciocché la scienza, come un cerchio, dove principiava ivi fornisse; e che il vero ben fosse chiaro, quando insieme si conformavano il senso e l’intelletto. Et però non sarà fuor di proposito se doppo la consideratione universale fatta intorno alle mentite faremo ancora mentione di alcuni casi seguiti. . . .

57

58 59 60 61 62

63

64

The work is also cited in the entry on Baldi by Mario Tronti in DBI 5 (1963), pp. 465–67. The text was originally published as Camillo Baldi, Trattato come de una lettera missiva si conoscano la natura e qualità dello scrittore (Carpi: appresso Girolamo Vaschieri, 1622). I cite from the edition of Milan: Bidelli, 1625. The last quote is from chap. 1, p. 5; the earlier ones, chap. 5, p. 16. Baldi, Trattato, chap. 6, p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 20. A useful popular overview is Barry L. Beyerstein and Dale F. Beyerstein, The Write Stuff: Evaluations of Graphology—The Study of Handwriting Analysis (New York: Prometheus Books, 1992). Julie A. Spohn, “The Legal Implications of Graphology,” Washington University Law Review 75, no. 3 (1997): 1307–33; and Fritz A. Fluckiger, Clarence A. Tripp, and George H. Weinberg, “A Review of Experimental Research in Graphology: 1933—1960”, Perceptual and Motor Skills 12 (1961): 67–90. B. R. Forer, “The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (American Psychological Association) 44, no. 1 (1949): 118–23; and an update on Forer’s results, G. Claridge, K. Clark, E. Powney, and E. Hassan, “Schizotypy and the Barnum effect,” Personality and Individual Differences 44, no. 2 (2008): 436–44.

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65 Cesare Lombroso, Grafologia (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1895), p. 11. Recent appraisals of Lombroso include Emilia Musumeci, Cesare Lombroso e le neuroscienze: un parricidio mancato: devianza, libero arbitrio, imputabilità tra antiche chimere ed inediti scenari (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2012) and the insightful pages in Peter Becker, Verderbnis und Entartung: eine Geschichte der Kriminologie des 19 Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 291–304. 66 Lombroso, Grafologia, p. 176. 67 Ibid., p. 196. 68 Ibid., p. 177 69 Ibid., p. 43. 70 Ibid., p. 30. 71 Ibid., p. 74. 72 Pedro Mexía, Bartolommeo Dionigi, Girolamo Brusoni, and Theodoro Thesseri, Selva di varia lettione (Venice: Prodocimo, 1682), third part, p. 67. 73 Francesco Ascoli, Dalla cancelleresca all’inglese. L’avventura della calligrafia in Italia dal Cinquecento ad oggi (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2012), chap. 1. 74 Rhiannon Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340–1520 (London: Legenda, 2009), p. 89. 75 Consider Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, ms. Laurenziano XCI. inf. 2:56: Mcccclxvi // Questo libro si è di Fruosino di Lodovicho di Ciecie da Pragnio / et di sua mano et scritto del mese di febbraio et di marzo 1466 / e tratta di tutte le chanzone et sonetti e ballate e madriale / del famosissimo poeta messer Franciescho Petrarcha poeta / fiorentino et choxì anchora ci è scritto tutta la vita sua / e detto libro si chiama et è titolato Canzoniere di messer Franciescho. I found this noted in Paola Vecchi Galli, “Onomastica petrarchesca. Per Il canzoniere,” Italique 8 (2005): 27–44, parag. 26. 76 This expression is in La navigazione di San Brandano, ed. Maria Antonietta Grignani and Carla Sanfilippo (Milan: Bompiani: 1975), p. 29. 77 Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, I Codici Palatini della R. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Vol. II (Florence-Rome: Tipografia dei Fratelli Bencini, 1890), p. 16. 78 Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti d’Orlando Furioso (Venice: Giolito, 1549–50). Concerning this and the following examples, I was prompted by Axel Erdmann, My Gracious Silence: Women in the Mirror of Sixteenth-Century Printing in Western Europe (Lucerne: Gilhofer and Ranschburg, 1999), pp. 206–23. 79 Maddalena Casulana, included in Primo libro de diversi eccellentissimi autori a quattro voci, intitulato Il Desiderio (Venice: Scotto, 1566). 80 Paola Antonia Negri, Lettere spirituali. Vita della medesima raccolta da Gio. Battista Fontana de’ Conti (Rome: Aedibus Populi Romani, 1576). 81 Concerning these themes, Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2008), especially chaps. 4 and 5. Specifically regarding the publishing world, there is Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses,

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and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially pp. xvii–xxvi; and giving greater diffusion to the relative texts there is the series, “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe,” currently edited by Margaret King and Albert Rabil, Jr., and so far running to some sixty volumes. Beyond the bibliographies in Erdmann, My Gracious Silence; a list of women writers from the period is at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/ women/_generate/1501-1600.html (accessed January 1, 2016). 82 The standard study is still Vivian C. Hopkins, Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), where the relevant chapters are 4–6; but see Helen R. Deese, “A New England Woman’s Network: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Healey Dail and Delia Bacon,” Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers 13 (1991): 77–92; and concerning the authorship controversy, James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), pp. 81–150. 83 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home, edited by Fredson Bowers, Vol. 5 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970), pp. 90–119.

Chapter 4 1 Miriam B. Kahn, The Library Security and Safety Guide to Prevention, Planning, and Response (Chicago: American Library Association, 2008), chap. 1. 2 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 207. 3 Paolo Preto, Peste e società a Venezia nel 1576 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1976), pp. 52–54. Concerning the physician debates, the exhaustive treatment is Samuel K. Cohn, Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), where chaps. 6 and 7 are especially relevant here. 4 Giovanni Baldinucci, Quaderno: Peste, guerra e carestia nell’Italia del Seicento, ed. Brendan Dooley (Florence: Polistampa, 2001), p. xxi. 5 Diario Fiorentino di Agostino Lapini: dal 252 al 1596, ed. Giuseppe Odoardo Corazzini (Florence: Sansoni, 1900), p. 206. 6 Stefano Zuffi, “Un’epidemia del 1580 e due opere di Giulio Cesare Croce,” Anthropos & iatria 3 (1999): 36–40. 7 St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin Catherine of Siena, trans. Algar Thorold (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1907), p. 258. 8 Four Screenplays translated from the Swedish by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 138. 9 Beecher, ed., The Pleasant Nights, vol. 1, p. 639.

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10 William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 8. 11 Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 7; as well as M. Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Antonella Campanini, Disciplinare il lusso. La legislazione suntuaria in Italia e in Europa tra medioevo ed età moderna (Rome: Carrocci, 2003), especially the chapter by Giulia Calvi and the Introduction by Muzzarelli. 12 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 207. 13 On worldly goods and the relevant debates, I rely on Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Talese, 1996), chap. 6, not to mention, Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), chap. 1, as well as the critical observations of Lauro Martines, “The Renaissance Birth of Consumer Society,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 193–208 and the theoretical perspective of Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), chap. 4: “Conspicuous Consumption.” 14 Concerning Grazzini and Michael Cole, “Grazzini, Allori and Judgment in the Montauti Chapel,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 45, nos. 1/2 (2001): 302–12 (306). 15 Timothy Verdon, “Il vizio specchio deformato della virtù,” paper given at the conference “Malattia versus Religione tra antico e moderno,” Rome, excerpted in L’Osservatore Romano, May 28, 2010, published as “I vizi capitali: figure e allegorie,” in Io sono il Signore, colui che ti guarisce. Malattia versus religione tra antico e moderno. Atti del Convegno, ed. S. Isetta (Bologna: EDB, 2012), pp. 275–90. In addition, Timothy Verdon and Cristina Acidini, La Cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence: Centro Di, 1995). 16 Such are some of the issues covered in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia libri iii (Lyon [=Basel?]: Beringen, 1550). For this paragraph, in general, Allen Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), chaps. 1–3; and Brian P. Copenhaver, “Natural Magic, Hermetism and Occultism in Early Modern Science,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Robert S. Westman and David C. Lindberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 261–303; Brian P. Copenhaver, “Astrology and Magic,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 264–300; as well as Brendan Dooley, ed., A Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance (Leyden: Brill, 2014), Introduction, and chaps. by Wolfgang Hübner and William Eamon.

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17 Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471-1605) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), pp. 75–94. 18 Bernardino da Siena, Opera omnia, ed. J. De la Haye, vol. 3 (Paris, 1635), p. 477, cited in Prediche della Settimana Santa: Firenze 1425, ed. M. Bartoli (Milan: Paoline Editoriale Libri, 1995) p. 39: Al suono della sesta tromba infatti, e cioè in questo nostro tempo . . . vedrai sovvertito in tutto il mondo ogni ordine di giustizia e di buone opere e di costumi onesti e di pace e di quiete, e ogni genere di lussuria, di avarizia e di eresia essere presente nella Chiesa. . . . Rivolgi la tua attenzione alle guerre, che ci sono da cinquant’anni a questa parte, e quante città, quanti regni, quante abitazioni sono state distrutte, quante vendette, quanti incendi, omicidi e tradimebnti ci sono stati e ancora oggi dominano l’universo, sia in Italia che in Francia, in Inghilterra e in ogni parte del mondo. Allora vedrai che sono stati sciolti gli spiriti dell’inferno. 19 Prediche della Settimana Santa: Firenze 1425, p. 33. Also see Letizia Pellegrini, ed. Il Processo di canonizzazione di Bernardino da Siena (1445–1450). Analecta Franciscana 16, N. S., Documenta et Studia 4 (Rome: Frati Editori di Quaracchi, 2009). 20 Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 78, referring to testimony from Fra Giovanni Caroli. 21 Note the attribution in: Prediche de fra hieronymo sopra lexodo. Prediche diuinissime, a qualunque predicatore del uerbo di dio summamente necessarie, per auanti stampate molto corrotte, & per la mazor parte defectiue, ma al presente integre, & con tutte le soe additione, extracte dalli originali fiorentini, le qual prediche sono ultime in ordine di cinque sacri uolumi emanadi, & recolti dalla tromba di dio, & ueridico propheta frate Hieronymo sauonarola . . . (Venice: Caesare Arriuabene, 1520). 22 Weinstein, Savonarola, p. 137. 23 Ibid., p. 124. 24 Ibid., p. 125, n. 19, quoting from Prediche sopra Aggeo, ed. Luigi Firpo (Rome: Angelo Belardetti, 1965), p. 122. 25 Marion Leathers Kuntz, “Dionisio Gallo: Rector, Prophet and radical Reformer in the Sixteenth Century,” in Europa in der frühen Neuzeit, Vol. 7: Unbekannte Quellen. Aufsätze zu Entwicklung, Vorstufen, Grenzen und Fortwirken der Frühneuzeit in und um Europa, ed. Erich Donnert (Cologne-Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2008), pp. 55–71. 26 Kuntz, “Dionisio Gallo,” p. 210. 27 Ibid., p. 209.

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28 Jacopo Brocardo, Mystica et prophetica liber Genesis interpretatio (Leyden, 1584), fols. 156v and 158r. Concerning this writer, I consulted Bernard McGinn, “Reading Revelation: Joachim of Fiore and the Varieties of Apocalypse Exegesis in the Sixteenth Century,” in Storia e figure dell’Apocalisse fra ‘500 e ‘600, ed. Roberto Rusconi (Roma: Viella, 1996), pp. 11–35. 29 Vincent Foster Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (New York: Dover Publications, 2011), p. 102. 30 Jacopo Brocardo, The Reuelation of S. Ihon reueled or a paraphrase opening by conference of time and place such things as are both necessary, and profitable for the tyme present: Writen in Latine by Iames Brocard, trans. James Sanford (London: Thomas Marsh, 1582), fols. 92r–93v. 31 Francis Potter, An Interpretation of the Number 666 (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1642), especially the conclusions in chap. 29. I used also David Brady, The Contribution of British Writers Between 1560 and 1830 to the Interpretation of Revelation 13.16-18 (The Number of the Beast): A Study in the History of Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983), pp. 113–14. 32 Brady, The Contribution of British Writers, p. 115. 33 Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 55. 34 David L. Rowe, God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 2008), pp. 105–06; in addition, Anthony A. Hoekema, Seventh-Day Adventism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 15–16; and concerning Armstrong, Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 45–46. 35 Here and the next quote, D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 143–44. For background and bibliography, the Introduction by Mara Kalnins is very helpful. In addition, T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chap. 13. 36 Lawrence, Apocalypse, p. 97. 37 Ibid., p. 101. 38 Ibid., p. 148. 39 Concerning these aspects of Lawrence’s thought, there are also some insightful comments in Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: an Introduction (Hoboken: WileyBlackwell, 2005). pp. 258–60. 40 Here and below, Lawrence, Apocalypse, p. 93. 41 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 124.

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42 Alexandre Koyré, “L’apport scientifique de la Renaissance,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), pp. 38–40, passage translated by John M. Headley, “Tommaso Campanella and the End of the Renaissance,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 168–69, cited also in Brian P. Copenhaver, “Did Science Have a Renaissance?” Isis 83 (1992): 387–407 (391). 43 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1971), p. xv. 44 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 10. 45 Concerning the latter, I refer to my Introduction to Dooley, ed., A Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance. For the rest, good examples are in Peter Burke, “Rituals of Healing in Early Modern Italy,” in Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, pp. 207–22. An interesting update on the problem is in David Gentilcore, “Was There a ‘Popular Medicine’ in Early Modern Europe?” Folklore 115 (2004): 151–66. From another standpoint, concerning cultural levels, Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), chap. xxviii, “Le nostre Indie,” pp. 551–600. 46 On this topic, Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 11–61. 47 Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 107. 48 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 109. 49 Caso et miracolo grande successo novamente in Provenzza in una città adimandata Arli (Ancona: appresso Francesco Salvioni, 1588). 50 Horribile et maraviglioso mostro nato in Eusrigo Terra del novarese di una donna vecchia con sette teste et sette brace et le gambe da bestia et la testa principale ha uno ochio solo nel fronte, nato del 1578 nel mese di genaro (s.l.: all’Arca di Noe, 1578). 51 Joachim Heller, Il mostro nasciuto nela cita de Ven. de una judea nel getto alli 26 di magio 1575 (Venice, 1575). 52 Nel bresil di san Vincenzo nella citta di Santes appresso la casa di Giorgio Ferando e’ apparso questo mostro. . . Nicolo Nelli Ven[eziano] F[ecit] ([Venice]: 1565). A copy exists in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Res/Slg.Faust 135. 53 Pirovano, “Una storia editoriale cinquecentesca,” p. 554. 54 Bartolomeo Gamba, Delle novelle Italiane in prosa: bibliografia (Florence: Tipografia all’insegna di Dante, 1835), p. 141. 55 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697895/Now-rebel-commanderblamed-downing-MH17-says-bodies-aren-t-fresh-claims-corpses-dead-days.html (accessed July 21, 2014).

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56 For example, Bertrand T. Whitehead, Brags and Boasts: Propaganda in the Year of the Armada (Stroud: A. Sutton, 1994), passim; and Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada: Revised Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 245. Also useful was Charles Giry-Deloison, “France and Elizabethan England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004): 223–42 (240). 57 Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale, IV,4,2145, cited in Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 51. 58 Fioravanti’s phrase occurred in Dello specchio di scientia universale (Venice, 1583), p. 42; quoted in Piero Camporesi, “Cultura popolare e cultura di élite fra medioevo ed età moderna,” in Storia d’Italia, Annali, 4: Intellettuali e potere, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 87–88. 59 Much of what follows is closely based on Paul Grendler, “What Zuanne Read in School: Vernacular Texts in Sixteenth Century Venetian Schools,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 41–54. Concerning the basic themes of education, I compared Gian Paolo Brizzi, “Strategie educative e istituzioni scolastiche della Controriforma,” in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1: II letterato e le istituzioni, ed. A. Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), pp. 899–920. 60 Fiore de Virtù e Costumi nobilissimi utilissimo aciascaduno fidele Christiano (Venice: Bindoni, 1541) sig. iii (v). 61 A detailed account of the Instructio is in Chapter 5 of Giorgio Caravale, Forbidden Prayer: Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in Renaissance Italy (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013); also, Gigliola Fragnito, “La censura libraria tra Congregazione dell’Indice, Congregazione dell’Inquisizione e Maestro del Sacro Palazzo (1571-1596),” in La censura libraria nell’Europa del secolo 16.: Convegno internazionale di studi: Cividale del Friuli, 9-10 novembre 1995, ed. Ugo Rozzo (Udine: Forum, 1997), pp. 163–76. 62 Concerning the practicalities of book control, Mario Infelise, “Censura di stato” and “La pratica,” in his I padroni dei libri, as well as Antonio Rotondò, “Nuovi documenti per la storia dell’indice dei libri proibiti (1572-1638),” Rinascimento, n.s. 3 (1963): 196–98, and Vittorio Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice: La censura ecclesiastica dal Rinascimento alla Controriforma (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006). 63 Decameron, trans. George Henry McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), Proem, paras. 9–11. Here and below I make no pretense to have exhausted the much-discussed question of Boccaccio’s philogyny or misogyny, for which I redirect the reader to the interesting summary by Kristina Olson, “The Language of Women as Written by Men: Boccaccio, Dante and Gendered Histories of the Vernacular,” Heliotropia 8–9 (2011–12): 51–78.

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64 G. L. Passerini, ed., Le vite di Dante scritte da Giovanni e Filippo Villani, da Giovanni Boccaccio, Leonardo Aretino e Giannozzo Manetti (Florence: Sansoni, 1917), p. 24. 65 I refer to the excellent edition and translation by Virginia Brown, as Famous Women, I Tatti Renaissance library, 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 1. 66 I. Palumbo-Fossati, “Livres et lecteurs dans la Venise du xvie siècle,” Revue française d’histoire du livre 49 (1985): 482–513. Concerning this whole issue, I drew much from Xenia von Tippelskirch, Sotto controllo: Letture femminili in Italia nella prima età moderna (Rome: Viella, 2011) especially chap. 2. 67 Laura Minel, “Libri e lettori a Treviso (1550-1630),” BA thesis, Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1997. 68 von Tippelskirch, Sotto controllo, p. 47, exhumes this data from Christian Bec, Les livres des florentins: 1413-1608 (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1984), Appendix. In addition, I learned from Leandro Perini, “Libri e lettori nella Toscana del Cinquecento,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1983), I: 109–31. 69 The document is extracted in Bec, Les livres des florentins, p. 246. Concerning the reading of devotional works, I consulted Albrecht Burkardt, “Reconnaissance et devotion: les vies de saints et leurs lectures au debut du XVIIe siècle à travers les procès de canonisation,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 43 (1996): 214–33. 70 Leandro Perini, “Contributo alla ricostruzione della biblioteca privata dei granduchi di Toscana nel XVI secolo,” in Studi di storia medievale e moderna per Ernesto Sestan (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1980), pp. 571–668. The library list is in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Guardaroba medicea, 28. 71 Consider the testimony of Filippo Cavriani, quoted in Carmen Menchini, Panegirici e vite di Cosimo I de’ Medici tra storia e propaganda (Florence: Olschki, 2005), p. 203. 72 G. Henningsten and John Tedeschi, The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University of Press, 1986), p. 131: “If the Roman Holy Office was a victim of Napoleonic looting, other important provincial Inquisitions, in Florence, Milan, or Palermo, were victims of Jacobin riots or suppression of the religious establishments which housed them. The consequence was the largescale destruction or disappearance of their records.” I also consulted Modesto Rastrelli, Fatti attinenti all’Inquisizione e sua istoria generale e particolare di Toscana (Florence: Anton Giuseppe Pagani, 1782), where the implications of the introduction of the Index in Tuscany are discussed on pp. 130–40. Concerning the opening of the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (ACDF), see Adriano Prosperi’s Introduction to Volume 1 of Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo

164

73

74

75

76 77

78

Notes Lavenia, and John Tedeschi, eds., Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, 5 vols. (Pisa, Italy: Edizione della Scuola Normale, 2010); and the collective volume A dieci anni dall’apertura dell’Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede: storia e archivi dell’Inquisizione, Roma, 21-23 febbraio 2008 (Rome: Scienze e Lettere Editore, 2011). For the controversy regarding the relative freedom of Venice compared to other areas, I refer to Gaetano Cozzi, “Books and Society,” Journal of Modern History 51 (1979): 86–98; Rodolfo Savelli, “La biblioteca disciplinata. Una ‘libraria’ cinqueseicentesca tra censura e dissimulazione,” in Tra storia e diritto. Studi in onore di Luigi Berlinguer promossi dalle Università di Siena e di Sassari (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008), 2: 865–944. These episodes are noted in von Tippelskirch, Sotto controllo, pp. 106–09; concerning the Beneficio di Cristo I was particularly informed by Adriano Prosperi and Carlo Ginzburg, Giochi di pazienza: un seminario sul Beneficio di Cristo (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1975); while keeping in mind Philip McNair, “Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio, and the ‘Beneficio di Cristo’: A Developing TwentiethCentury Debate Reviewed,” The Modern Language Review 82, no. 3 (1987): 614–24. Among the many studies on marginalia, I was particularly inspired by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy,” Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 31–78, as well as Anthony Grafton, “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His Books,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91 (1997): 139–57; William H. Sherman, “What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 131. In addition, for a perspective, with bibliography, on the whole developing subfield of early modern marginalia studies (seen from the standpoint of English literature), Stephen Orgel’s The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1–29; as well as, in general, interesting observations here and there in Heather Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Rhiannon Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340–1520, Italian Perspectives 19 (Oxford: Legend, 2009). “Il presente libro e’di Michele di Ristoro Lippi el quale barattai chon 8 Marcho Fuochi et un altro libro el qual si chiama e libro della china questo di’ 28 daprile 1590 el quale libro avevo avuto da Mr dionigi Lippi proveniente (d)a Castel Fiorentini.” G. Cora and A. Fanfani, “Vasai del Contado di Firenze (Parte Seconda),” Faenza. Bollettino del Museo internazionale delle ceramiche in Faenza 73 (1987): 226–73 (253).

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79 Innocenzio Ringhieri, Dialoghi della vita, et della morte (Bologna: Giaccarello, 1550), where I refer to Dialogues 2 and 3. 80 Fastos magistratuum et triumphorum romanorum ab urbe condita ad Augusti obitum ex antiquis tam numismatum quam marmorum monumentis restitutos S.P.Q.R. (Bruges: Hubertus Goltzius, 1566). Pickering signed “W. Pykerynge, 1572” on the title page. 81 Blaise Monluc, The Commentaries of Messire Blaize de Montluc, Mareschal of France: Wherein are Describ’d all the Combats, Rencounters, Skirmishes, Battels, Sieges, Assaults, Scalado’s, the Taking and Surprizes of Towns and Fortresses, as also the Defences of the Assaulted and Besieg’d, with Several other Signal and Remarkable Feats of War (London: Printed by Andrew Clark, for Henry Brome, 1674). 82 Information is from the death notice in British Journal of Homeopathy 1 (1843): 517. 83 Concerning the role of books in seduction, I appreciate the deft treatment in von Tippelskirch, Sotto controllo, ch. 6. 84 My information here derives from R. Burr Litchfield, Florence, Ducal Capital, 1530-1630 (New York: ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008), p. 230. 85 Concerning this type of trade, Rosa M. Salzberg, “ ‘Selling Stories and Many other Things in and Through the City’: Peddling Print in Renaissance Florence and Venice,” Sixteenth Century Journal 42, no. 3 (2011): 737–59. 86 Anton Francesco Doni, I marmi (Venice: Marcolini, 1552), pp. 74–75. 87 Anton Francesco Doni, La seconda libraria del Doni: al signor Ferrante Caraffa ristampata novamente con guinta de molti libri (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1555), p. 6. Concerning this work, Alfredo Serrai, Storia della bibliografia, vol. 3: Vicende ed ammaestramenti della historia literaria (Roma: Bulzoni, 1991), pp. 109–20. 88 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 59–67. (Original title “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Eine Rede über das Sammeln,” which appeared in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, IV.I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), pp. 388–96.) 89 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo del Principato, 5050, fol. 91r, letter from Benedetto Blanis dated September 25, 1616: “I libri restono accomodati in quello scrittoio quadro che ha ordinato V. E. I. e ci stanno benissimo tutti per coltello con li bulettini impastati e non impediscano se non mezza la stanza, cioè il muro dirempetto alla porta e mezzo il muro di qua è di là con suoi scaffali e palchetti.” 90 Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 4. 91 Rowan Watson, “Some Non-Textual Uses of Books,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 480–92.

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92 The passage is recalled in Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 18–19. 93 Pliny the Younger, Epistles 2.1.5. 94 Jeffrey Todd Knight, “ ‘Furnished’ for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture,” Book History 12 (2009): 37–73 (50). 95 Thanks to Brian J. Dooley for supplying this thoughtful text on the basis of a careful reading of the available evidence.

Chapter 5 1 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 40–41. 2 The Letters of Machiavelli: A Selection of His Letters, ed. and trans. Allan H. Gilbert (Oakville: Capricorn Books, 1961), p. 142. 3 Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chaps. 1–3. 4 I find the episode analyzed from a different perspective by Sebastian De Grazia in Machiavelli in Hell (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), chap. 10. 5 I consulted the Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), where I found the chapters by Anthony Grafton and Michael D. Reeve particularly relevant; concerning retention, I have been inspired by Ann Blair, Too Much to Know, especially chap. 1. 6 Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 15501700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11–28 (20). 7 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 169. I make no pretense of settling the controversy regarding the Yates thesis, for which I refer the reader to an appraisal by Patrick H. Hutton, “The Art of Memory Reconceived: From Rhetoric to Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 371–92. Some contributions to the controversy are in Robert S. Westman, “Magical Reform and Astronomical Reform: The Yates Thesis Reconsidered,” in Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution, ed. Robert S. Westman and J. E. McGuire (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977), pp. 5–72, especially critical of the inferences regarding the occult. I am also well aware of Paola Zambelli, “Qualche interpretazione. Magia e ermetismo da Tocco a Corsano, da Yates a Ciliberto,” in her Magia bianca, magia nera (Ravenna: Longo, 2004), pp. 159–91. 8 Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 132. 9 Ibid., chaps. 9, 11, 13.

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10 For what follows, I am indebted to Cristiano Casalini, “Disputa sugli ingegni. L’educazione dell’individuo in Huarte, Possevino, Persio e altri,” Educazione. Giornale di pedagogia critica I, 1 (2012): 29–51. 11 Juan Huarte de San Juan, Essame de gl’ìngegni de gl’huomini: per apprender la scienze (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1590), p. 89. 12 Ibid., p. 348. 13 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 224; also, Rolf Engelsing, “Die Perioden des Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit,” in his Zur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Mittel- und Unterschichten (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1974), 112–54; and D. Hall, “Introduction: The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600-1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), pp. 1–47. 14 Petrarch, Seniles, xvii, 3, translated in H. Robinson and E. H. Rolfe, Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), p. 191. 15 Robert Darnton takes Kevin Sharpe to task on this aspect, in A Case for Books: Past, Present, Future (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2009), chap. 10. Sharpe’s conclusions were in Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 16 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin, 2010), chap. 1. 17 “Is Google making us stupid?” asks former Harvard Business Review editor Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), chap. 1. 18 For conclusions here I draw on Gino Roncaglia, La quarta rivoluzione. Sei lezioni sul futuro del libro (Bari: Laterza, 2010); as well as Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution. How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), to which I was directed by an intelligent article by Maurizio Ferraris, “Il caos calmo del digitale che rivoluziona la lettura,” in La Repubblica, July 24, 2014, p. 27. I was also informed by J. Coiro and E. Dobler, “Exploring the Online Reading Comprehension Strategies Used by Sixth-Grade Skilled Readers to Search for and Locate Information on the Internet,” Reading Research Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2007): 214–57. 19 Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 68; in addition, I consulted Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 1; and here and below, I used Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 3–20.

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20 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 119. 21 On this topic, I refer to my “Art and information brokerage in the career of Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” Your Humble Servant, Agents in Early Modern Europe, ed. H. Cools, M. Keblusek, and B. Noldus (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006), pp. 81–96; as well as “Narrazione e verità: Don Giovanni de’ Medici e Galileo,” Bruniana e Campanelliana 2 (2006): 391–405. 22 Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chaps. 1 and 2. 23 Carlo Di Stefano, La censura teatrale in Italia: 1600-1962 (Bologna: Cappelli, 1964), chap. 1 24 Paolo Sarpi, The History of the Inquisition, trans. Robert Gentilis (London: J. Okes, 1639), pp. 106–07. On this and other aspects concerning Sarpi, I follow Mario Infelise, in his “Conclusioni” to I padroni dei libri; as well as Infelise, “L’immagine dell’Inquisizione tra Sarpi e libertinismo,” Studia Borromaica 23 (2009): 313–26. 25 Di Stefano, Censura teatrale, chaps 2 and 3; as well as Anne Etienne et al., Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 26 J. M. Nash, “To finde the Mindes construction in the Face,” in Vermeer Studies, ed. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 61. For the discussion in the next pages, highly useful was the handbook of Fritz Nies et al., eds., Ikonographisches Repertorium zur Europäischen Lesegeschichte (Munich: Sauer, 2000). 27 Maddalena Spagnolo, “Correggio’s Reclining Magdalen: Isabella d’Este and the Cult of St. Mary Magdalen,” Apollo 48, no. 496 (2003): 37–45 (quote on p. 41); and her Correggio. Geografia e storia della fortuna (1528-1657) (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2005), pp. 23–34. Concerning the aspect of eroticism, I turned also to M. Ingenhoff-Danhäuser, Maria Magdalena: Heilige und Sünderin in der italienischn Renaissance. Studien zur Ikonographie der Heiligen von Leonardo bis Tizian (Tübingen, 1984), pp. 59–64. 28 I. Kuhnel-Kunze, “Zur Bildniskunst des Sofonisba und Lucia Anguissola,” Pantheon 20 (1962): 83–96; and Catherine King, “Looking a Sight: SixteenthCentury Portraits of Woman Artists,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58 (1995): 381–406; as well as Mary D. Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 556–622. 29 Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in SixteenthCentury Bologna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 150. 30 Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti, I, pp. 22–23. 31 Ibid., p. 67. 32 Ibid., p. 94.

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33 Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversatione: divisa in quattro libri (Brescia: Tomaso Bozzola, 1574), p. 13r (quote), 28v and ff. In general, concerning this author, the articles in Giorgio Patrizi, ed., Stefano Guazzo e la Civil conversazione (Roma: Bulzoni, 1990), especially texts by Patrizi, Emilio Speciale, Radiana Nigro, Daniela Frigo, and Maria Luisa Doglio; and the detailed entry by Giorgio Patrizi in DBI 60 (2003). 34 Scipione Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare (Venice, 1574), pp. 139–40. Concerning Bargagli, I took into account Nino Borsellino’s article in DBI 6 (1964): 341–43. On the more general issues, George W. McClure, Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), chaps. 1 and 3. 35 Bargagli, Dialogo, page misnumbered 274 in this edition. 36 Here again, I used the Marti edition of Boccaccio, 2: 411–13. I also refer to Francesco Sansovino, Cento novelle scelte da più nobili scrittori (Venice: De’ Vecchi, 1598), tale V, 4, pp. 177–78. 37 I consulted the entry by Ludovico Zorzi in DBI 16 (1973): 776. 38 I quote Calmo’s Lettere, book 4 (1556) in the version published by Vittorio Rossi as Le lettere di messer Andrea Calmo (Turin: Loescher 1888), pp. 346–47; and the note on p. 349 explaining the game. 39 I modified the translation in Ruth Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 49–53. I drew also upon Pirovano, “Una storia editoriale cinquecentesca,” p. 552. 40 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 38. 41 Ibid., p. 34. 42 In general, David Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade, 1480–1650,” in The History of Cartography, Vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 773–803. 43 Sebastian Münster, Cosmographie universelle (Basel: Henri Petri, 1556), p. 53. 44 Münster, Cosmographie, p. 52. 45 Matteo Bandello, La terza parte de le Novelle del Bandello (Lucca: Busdrago, 1554), Novella LIX: “Morte miserabile di dui amanti, essendo lor vietato di sposarsi da Enrico ottavo re d’Inghilterra.” The tale begins: Devete sapere che questo, che oggidí è re de l’isola de l’Inghilterra ed Enrico ottavo si noma, per qualche suo appetito è divenuto molto terribile e crudele ed ha sparso grandissimo sangue umano, facendo ogni dí mozzar il capo a questi e a quelli, e per la maggior parte annullando la nobiltá di tutta l’isola. Ha anco fatto decapitare due de le sue mogli in poco spazio di tempo.

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46 “La Relazione d’Inghilterra di Daniel Barbaro ambasciatore ordinario (1551),” in Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato. Tratte dalle migliori edizioni disponibili e ordinate cronologicamente, vol. I (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1965), pp. 237–86. 47 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 91. 48 Waters, ed. and trans., The Nights of Straparola, vol. II, p. 213. 49 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 99. 50 Lettere amorose di M. Girolamo Parabosco (Venice: appresso Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1545), fol. 4r. 51 Apart from the bibliography above, I would here add J. Jorgensen, “Innocent Initiations: Female Agency in Eroticized Fairy Tales,” Marvels 22, no. 1 (2008): 27–37. 52 Waters, ed. and trans., The Nights of Straparola, vol. 1, p. 200. 53 Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti, I, p. 113. 54 Ibid., p. 108. 55 Translation here and below is from Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, pp. 175–76. 56 On which, Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 142. The work in question was Dialogo del modo di tor moglie, published in the volume: Paraphrasi nella sesta satira di Giuuenale: nella quale si ragiona delle miserie de gli huomini maritati. Dialogo in cui si parla di che qualità si dee tor moglie, & del modo, che vi si ha a tenere. Lo Epithalamio di Catullo nelle nozze di Peleo & di Theti (Venice: per Curtio nauo e fratelli, 1538), of which there is a copy in the Biblioteca Marciana. Concerning the theme, Brian Richardson, “Amore maritale.” 57 For what follows, I am indebted to Christopher Nissen, Kissing the Wild Woman: Art, Beauty, and the Reformation of the Italian Prose Romance in Giulia Bigolina’s “Urania” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 44, 213–15; as well as Giulia Bigolina, Urania: A Romance, trans. and ed. Valeria Finucci (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially the translator’s Introduction. 58 Magnanini, ed. and trans., The Pleasant Nights, p. 74. 59 Ibid., p. 167. 60 Ibid., p. 122. 61 Ibid., p. 182. 62 Ibid., p. 95. 63 Dante, Divine Comedy: The Inferno, trans. Dorothy Sayers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 100–01. Concerning the subject, John Freccero, “The Portrait of Francesca. Inferno V,” Modern Language Notes 124, no. 5 (2009): S7–S38. 64 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 40–41.

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65 Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi (Venice: Farri, 1584), p. 217. Concerning Sabba, I was informed by Adriano Prosperi, Eresie e devozioni: la religione italiana in età moderna, vol 1: Eresie (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2010), pp. 217–30. 66 Montaigne, “Of Three Kinds of Society,” in Essays, trans. Michel de Zeitlin (New York: Knopf, 1935), 3:38, essay III, 3. The essays were translated into Italian as Discorsi morali, politici, et militari; del molto illustre sig. Michiel di Montagna, trans. Girolamo Naselli (Ferrara: Appresso Benedetto Mammarello, 1590). 67 Montaigne, Journal de voyage en Italie (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), pp. 95–66. 68 Montaigne, “Of Books,” Essays, X, 10, trans. Zeitlin, vol. 3, p. 71. 69 Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” Essays, I, 26, trans. Zeitlin, vol. 1, p. 142. 70 The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha, trans. John Ormsby (London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885), Chapter 1. 71 This is the context in which the passage is discussed by Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 210; and along similar lines, Anthony J. Cascardi, “Genre Definition and Multiplicity in Don Quixote,” Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 6, no. 1 (1986): 39–49. 72 Concerning the theme of immersion, Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Slyvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), chap. 1; see also Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), chap. 3. 73 Here I found useful the thoughts of A. Biermann, “ ‘Gefahrliche Literatur’: Skizze einer Theorie der literarischen Zensur,” Wolfenbutteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 13 (1988): 1–28. 74 Concerning the theme, I recommend Donal O Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland 1939-1945: Neutrality, Politics and Society (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996); and recent issues of the Annual Report of the Censorship of Publications Board. 75 I examine this theme and the relevant bibliography in “Keep this Secret: Renaissance Knowledge between Freedom and Constraint,” in Renaissance Now! The Value of the Renaissance Past in the Culture of Today, ed. B. Dooley (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 213–42. 76 Federico Cesi, “Del naturale desiderio di sapere,” in Narratori e trattatisti del Seicento, ed. E. Raimondi (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960), pp. 39–70. Translated in my Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 23–36.

Chapter 6 1 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 218. Also concerning print runs, Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), Chap 1.

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2 Maria Mannelli Goggioli, “La Biblioteca Palatina Mediceo Lotaringia ed il suo catalogo,” Culture del testo no. 3 (1995): 135–59; and idem, La Biblioteca Magliabechiana: libri, uomini, idee per la prima biblioteca pubblica a Firenze (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2000), chap. 5; as well as Emmanuelle Chapron, Ad utilità pubblica: politique des bibliothèques et pratiques du livre à Florence au 18. siècle (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2009), chap. 2. 3 Ambroise Alexandre Verschaffelt, New Iconography of the Camellias: Containing the Figures and the Descriptions of the Rarest, the Newest and the Most Beautiful Varieties of this Species, 1848-1860, trans. Edward Avery McIlhenny (Avery Island, LA: E. A. McIlhenny, 1945), p. 133. 4 Gianna Del Bono, Storia delle biblioteche fra Settecento e Novecento: saggio bibliografico: i cataloghi di biblioteca nella collezione Diomede Bonamici, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Florence: Vecchiarelli, 1995), p. 200. 5 [Eugenio Albèri], L’Assedio di Firenze illustrato con inediti documenti (Florence: Tip. e calcografia all’Insegna di Clio, 1840), p. 19. 6 Information about this firm can be found at the Hoboken Historical Museum, including a photograph of the founder, catalog number 2014.070.1501. 7 Degli Spiriti Generosi Passatempo Toscano, ciò è ingegniosi enimmi di M. Giovan Francesco Straparola da Caravaggio, addestati nuovamente dal sonno dell’oblivione e rimessi a bello studio sotto ’l torchio (Leipzig: Giovan Colero, 1679), sig. A2. 8 The Pleasant Nights, ed. and trans. Magnanini, p. 126. The original, in Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti, 1: 123: Mi vergogno di dir qual nome m’ abbia: Sì son aspra al toccar, rozza al vedere: Gran bocca ho senza denti, ho rosse labbia, Negra d’intorno e più presso al sedere. L’ ardor spesso mi mette entro tal rabbia, Che fammi gettar spuma a più potere. Certo son cosa sol da vil fantesca, Ch’ ogn ’un a suo piacer dentro mi pesca. 9 Nicola Francesco Haym, “Ai lettori,” Biblioteca italiana, o sia Notizia de’ libri rari nella lingua italiana (Venice: Angiolo Geremia, 1728), sig. D2. Concerning the culture wars at this time, I was inspired by Françoise Waquet, Le modèle français et l’Italie savante: conscience de soi et perception de l’autre dans la République des lettres (1660-1750) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989). Helpful on Haym is the entry by Antonio Rostagno in DBI 61 (2004): 667–70. 10 Haym, Biblioteca italiana, p. 141. 11 Johann Gottfried Herder, Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. Einige fliegende Blätter (Hamburg: Bode 1773), p. 12: “Wissen Sie also, daß je wilder, d.i. je lebendiger,

Notes

12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23

173

je freywirkender ein Volk ist, (denn mehr heißt dies Wort doch nicht!) desto wilder, d.i. desto lebendiger, freyer, sinnlicher, lyrisch handelnder müssen auch, wenn es Lieder hat, seine Lieder seyn!” In addition, Giuseppe Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe, trans. John N. McDaniel (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981), p. 170, and F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), p. 100. Recently, Vicki A. Spencer, Herder’s Political Thought: A Study of Language, Culture, and Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), chap. 3. Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, April, 30, 1818, article 69, pp. 681–82. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder und Hausmärchen, vol. 2. Auflage (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1822), pp. 271–76. I utilized the translation by Mrs. Alfred William Hunt, Grimm’s Household Tales, With the Author’s Notes (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1884), vol. 2, pp. 477–81. In general, Cocchiara, The History of Folklore, pp. 220–38; as well as Lothar Bluhm, Die Brüder Grimm und der Beginn der Deutschen Philologie: eine Studie zu Kommunikation und Wissenschaftsbildung im frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1997). Charles Perrault, Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Avec des moralités (Paris: Barbin, 1697), pp. 83–104. Franz Ziska and Julius Max Schottky, Österreichische Volkslieder mit ihren Singeweisen (Pesth: Hartleben, 1819), p. 12. The theme is discussed in Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Christa Buschendorf, Saturn und Melancholie: Studien zur Geschichte der Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 327 and n. 26. Plutarch, Lives, vol. 7, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), pp. 243–45. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Paul A. Scanlon (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), bk 2, chap. 12. The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, trans. S. W. Orson (London: Gibbings, 1901), Book 3. Cited in Chartier, Inscription, p. x. Concerning Galileo’s marginalia, an interpretation is given in Crystal Hall, Galileo’s Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), for present purposes, especially pp. 21–25. Consider for instance, David A. Bell, “The Bookless Future: What the Internet is Doing to Scholarship,” The New Republic, May 2 and 9, 2005. Also published as La biblioteca senza libri (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2013), trans. Andrea Girolani, with a reply by Riccardo Ridi. Blair, Too Much to Know, p. 267.

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24 Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording,” High Fidelity 16, no. 4 (April 1966): 46–63. 25 Compare Jay David Bolter, Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer, “New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12, no. 1 (2006): 21–39. I am also referring here to Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 332–73. 26 Consider Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1–26; and Ursula Frohne, “New Economies: The Surplus of Art,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 17 (2006): 10–34. 27 For instance, “Ancient Roman Man Hidden Beneath Famous Painting at the Louvre,” Science Daily, April 2013, American Chemical Society, www.sciencedaily. com/releases/2013/04/130410154622.htm (accessed May 9, 2014); Orla Murphy, “Virtual Archive of Inscribed Stones,” Visual Literacy in the University (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 214–22. 28 Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 2001). 29 Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), pp. 109–29. 30 For what follows, A. Smith, “Preservation,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, and J. Unsworth (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 576–91. Darnton, The Case for Books, p. 6. 31 Definitions from C. Keep, T. McLaughlin, and R. Parmar, “The Electronic Labyrinth,” http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html (accessed July 15, 2014).

Conclusion 1 The New Production of Knowledge, p. 3. 2 I was reminded about this insight by reading Carlo Rovelli, “Da Newton a Einstein. l’intuizione è sempre il conto che non torna,” La Repubblica, Sunday July 20, 2014. The translation is from The Dialogues of Plato / The Seventh Letter, trans. J. Harward (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990). Concerning the authenticity of the letter, I can only refer to the work by Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, The Seventh Platonic Letter: A Seminar, ed. Dominic Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 4–5.

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4 Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (London: Bell, 1949), p. viii. 5 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1988), p. 9; Edward O.Wilson, Consilience. The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 5. 6 Richard P. Feynman, “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics,” Science 153, no. 3737 (1966): pp. 699–708. 7 Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, ed. Piotr Sztompka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 24. 8 Frances Robles, “Miami’s Past and Future Clash at a Building Site,” New York Times, May 19, 2014. 9 Horizon 2020, Work Programme 2014-2015, European Commission Decision C (2013)8631 of 10 December 2013, Including correction of clerical errors following Corrigendum C(2014)1509. 10 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The work inspired me to look again at Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984). 11 I am encouraged by Donald Kelley’s remarks in “Intellectual History and Cultural History: The Inside and the Outside,” History of the Human Sciences 15 (2002): pp. 1–19. 12 An interpretation of Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass, trans. William McCants (Cambridge, MA: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, 2006), is beyond the scope of this essay.

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Index Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index 24, 25 Aeschylus 130 Alberti, Ignaz 10 Alberti, Leon Battista 25 Alexander the Great 130 Ambrose, St. 103, 104, 105 America 81 Angelico, father 74 Anguissola, Lucia 105 Anguissola, Sofonisba 106 Apocalypse 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80 Aquinas, Thomas 78 Aretino, Pietro 8, 117, 118 Ariosto, Lodovico 44, 61, 63, 65, 89, 99, 120 Aristotle 33, 41, 57, 83, 101, 114 Armeno, Cristoforo 1, 2 Armitage, David 137 Armstrong, Peter 79 Attellano, L. Scipione 16 Bacon, Delia 65 Bacon, Francis 56 Baghdad 46 Baker, Nicholas 133 Baldacchini, Anton Bernardino 51 Baldacchini family 46 Baldacchini, Federico 51 Baldacchini, Filippo 47, 48, 49, 50, 51 Baldacchini, Pier Camillo di Filippo 46 Baldacchini-Gargano 47 Baldassini, Angela di Francesco 43 Baldi, Camillo 57, 58, 59, 61 Baldini, Baccio 88 Baldinucci, Giovanni 63 Banchieri, Adriano 93 Bandello, Matteo 16, 25, 82, 102, 113 Bandinelli, Baccio 73 Barbaro, Daniele 114 Bargagli, Scipione 109 Barthes, Roland 97, 119 Barzizza, Gasparino 98

Basile, Giambattista 22, 129 Bassnett, Susan 19 Beauty and the Beast 24 Beecher, Donald 10, 71 Belli, Silvio 38 Bembo, Pietro 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 107 Benedetto da Mantova 89 Benjamin, Walter 94, 133 Bergman, Ingmar 70 Bernardino da Siena, father 76 Bigolina, Giulia 118 Bindoni, Alessandro 5, 16, 84 Bismarck, Otto von 61 Boccaccio, Giovanni 11, 16, 17, 25–7, 29, 30, 43, 51, 64, 86, 87, 89, 99, 101, 102, 109, 120, 128 Bodoni, Giambattista 3 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 13, 44 Bologna 69 Bonadio, Giovanni 14, 34 booksellers 34, 86, 87, 93, 126 Borges, Jorge Luis 81, 130 Borghini, Vincenzo 33 Bottigheimer, Ruth 5 Bracciolini, Poggio 17, 30 Braudel, Fernand 137 Brazil 84, 138 Brendan, St. 64 Brocardo, Jacopo 77 Brognoligo, Gioachino 16 Brucioli, Antonio 75 Brunelleschi, Filippo 43, 53, 72 Bruno, Giordano 99, 100 Burke, Peter 19 Burton, Richard 10 Butterfield, Herbert 136 Buzzaccarini, Francesco 90 Buzzaccarini, Maria Caterina 90 Cairoli, Adelaide 61 Callisto da Piacenza, don Calmo, Andrea 110

14

198 Calvin, Jean 89 Calvinists 52 Cambridge, MA 54 Cancelliere, Vincenzio 84 Cappello, Bianca 1, 2 Caravaggio, Michelangelo da 5 Carrara, Giovanni Battista 90 Carrère, John Merven 126 Carta, Giovanni Antonio dalla 12, 13 Carta, Orpheo dalla 12, 22 Castiglione, Baldassarre 107, 108 Castiglione, Sabba da 119 Casulana, Maddalena 65 Cateau-Cambrésis 52 Catherine II 61 Catherine of Siena, St. 34, 70 Celesta, PA 79 Cellini, Benvenuto 72 censorship 29–40 Ceramelli-Papiani, Enrico 47 Certeau, Michel de 54 Cervantes, Miguel de 120, 121, 130 Charlemagne 87 Charles VIII 77 Chartier, Roger 101 Chateaubriand, François-René de 61 Chaucer, Geoffrey 71 Chioggia 46 Cicero 17, 18, 104 Clement VII 47 Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. 69 Colonna, Prospero 16 Comin da Trino 4, 10, 12, 13, 14, 37, 42 Constantine 78 Corbin, Alain 53 Corday, Charlotte 61 Cortona 46, 47, 51, 52, 53 Cosimo I de’ Medici 33, 52, 72, 77, 88 Cosimo III de’ Medici 72, 125 Crick, Malcolm 19 Croce, Giulio Cesare 38, 69 Crollalanza, Giovanni Battista di 47 Cromwell, Oliver 79 Crusca, Accademia della 18 Curtius Rufus, Quintus 61 Daniels, Rhiannon 89 Dante Alighieri 30, 68, 88, 98, 119, 120 Danza family 13 Darnton, Robert 133

Index Della Porta, Giovan Battista 56, 57 Descartes, René 56, 82, 103 Des Guidi, Sébastien Gaeten-Salvador Dolce, Lodovico 117 Donatello 53 Doni, Anton Francesco 93 Drake, Francis 85 Dürer, Albrecht 130 Durkheim, Émile 138 Elizabeth I 61, 91 Engelsing, Rolf 101 Ergograph 60 Este, Isabella d’ 105 Evans-Pritchard, Edward

19

Farri, Domenico 14, 37, 38, 120, 129 Ferrara 77, 120 Ferrara, Francesco Cieco di 89 Feyerabend, Paul 136 Feynman, Richard P. 136 Ficino, Marsilio 99 Fielding, Henry 130 fingerprints (bibliographical) 35–7 Fioravanti, Lionardo 85 Firenzuola, Agnolo 87 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 121 Floerke, Hanns 10 Florio, John 18 Fontana, Lavinia 106 Forcellini, Egidio 17 Foucault, Michel 81 France 59, 91, 92 France, Anatole 94 Fregoso, Battista 30 Frezza, Giovanni Girolamo 40 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 135 Galen 56, 69, 101 Galilei, Galileo 56, 104, 131 Gallo, Dionisio 77 Gamba, Bartolomeo 84 games 32, 93, 109, 110, 111 Gamurrini, Eugenio 46, 47 Garzoni, Tommaso 85 Gastaldi, Giacomo 112 Genoa 68 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 53 Ghislieri, Michele 33

92

Index Giappichelli, Barbara 51 Gigli, Giorgio de’ 34 Giglio, Domenico 14 Ginzburg, Carlo 23, 24 Giolito de’ Ferrari, Gabriele 12 Giolito de’ Ferrari family 13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 80, 128 Gonzaga family 107, 108 González de Mendoza, Juan 90 Gould, Glenn 132 graphology 57, 59, 60, 61 Grazzini, Antonfrancesco 11, 25, 72 Greece 98, 103 Greenaway, Peter 94 Gribben, Crawford 75 Grimm, Jacob 23, 129 Grimm, Wilhelm 23, 129 Guarino da Verona 98 Guazzo, Stefano 108 Guidi, Camillo 99, 100 Guido da Pisa, father 64 guilds 13, 53 Guldi, Jo 137 Gutenberg, Johannes 5 Hahnemann, Samuel 92 Haltrich, Josef 129 Handel, George Frideric 127 handwriting 55, 59, 61, 67 Hastings, Thomas 126 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 65 Haym, Nicola Francesco 127, 128 Hemingway, Ernest 121 Henry VIII 113 Herder, Johann Gottfried 128 Hermes Trismegistus 9 Hippocrates 56, 69 Homer 51, 130 Houghton Library 91 Huarte, Juan 100 Hughes, Edward Robert 10 Hugo, Victor 61 humoral theory 69, 84, 101, 114 hypothetico-deductive model 136 Index of Forbidden Books 24, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 38, 75, 86, 120 Ingegneri, Angelo 55 Inquisition 23, 38, 52, 77, 86, 89 Internet 103

199

Iron Man 24 Iser, Wolfgang 111 Israelites 78 Jerome, St. 33 John of Patmos 79 Johnson, Samuel 91 Judea 46 Juvenal 50 Keller, Adelbert von 10 Kenny’s Bookshop 94 Koyré, Alexandre 81 Lapini, Agostino 69 Latour, Bruno 81 Laurentian Library 64 Lawrence, D. H. 79, 80, 81 Leibig, Justus von 61 Leningrad Library 132 letter-writing 104, 115 Levi, Giovanni 94 Ligozzi, Jacopo 43 Lincoln, Abraham 79 Lippi, Michele 90 Lombroso, Cesare 60, 61, 62, 63 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 19 Lorenzini, Francesco 14 Lorraine dynasty 124 Louis XVI 92 Louveau, Jean 10 Lucchi, Lorna de’ 7 Luther, Martin 77 Machiavelli, Niccolò 30, 97, 98, 100, 128 McLuhan, Marshall 133 Macrobius 21 Magliabechi, Antonio 95, 124, 125 Magnanini, Suzanne 10, 18, 20, 127 Maintenon, Mme. de 61 Mann, Horace 1, 2 Manutius, Aldus. See Manuzio, Aldo Manuzio, Aldo 3, 12, 38 Manuzio, Paolo 12, 38 Marmi, Antonfrancesco 72, 125 Marmi, Diacinto Maria 125 Martin, Henri-Jean 77, 103 Martines, Lauro 25 Mazarin, Cardinal 61 Mazzucchelli, Giammaria 47

200 Mazzuoli, Giovanni 88 Medici, don Giovanni de' 63, 94, 104 Medici Archive 3 Medici dynasty 1, 44, 46, 53, 77, 97, 124 Merton, Robert K. 1, 2, 3, 135, 136 Miami, FL 137 Miller, William 79 Monluc, Blaise de 91 Montaigne, Michel de 120 Morata, Olympia Fulvia 65 Morlini, Girolamo 17, 18, 19, 30 Münster, Sebastian 112, 113 Murano 11, 107 Muratori, Lodovico Antonio 128 Murphy, Caroline P. 107 Muschio, Andrea 91 Mussolini, Benito 126 names and naming 41, 43, 45, 46 Naples 47, 92 Negri, Paola Antonia 65 Nencini, Giovanni 124, 125 Neoplatonism 9 news 24, 69, 84, 93 newsletters (avvisi) 85 Newton, Isaac 136 Nogarola, Isotta 94 Nowotny, Helga 135 orality 23, 98, 105 oratory 99, 100, 117 Orsi, Giovan Gioseffo 128 Ortelius, Abraham 112 Ottoman Turks 79 Ovid 94, 98, 120 Padua 24, 90, 93 Palladio, Andrea 69 Palmerston, Viscount 55 Parabosco, Girolamo 11, 25, 26, 115 Paris 77, 131 Paul IV 29, 30, 75 Pelagius 89 Pellegrini, Paolo 63 Perrault, Charles 22, 129 Perugia 47, 52 Petrarch, Francis 7, 8, 21, 49, 64, 88, 98, 99, 101, 102, 120, 131 Pickering, William 91 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 9

Index Pinagot, Louis-François 53 Pirovano, Donato 14 Pisani family 46 Pitti Palace 124, 125 Pius IV 52 plague 68, 69 Plato 4, 41, 56, 74, 101, 104, 135 Plutarch 130 Poliziano, Angelo 18 Possevino, Antonio 101 Pratolini, Vasco 116 Price, Derek 136 Prosperi, Adriano 33 Pryse, James 80 Ptolemy 114 Pupilli, Magistrato dei 88 Quevedo, Francisco de Quintilian 104

103

Rabelais, François 27, 120 Ranke, Leopold von 89 Ranters 79 reader-response criticism 111 Renaldini, Panfilo 13 retina 103 Revelation 75 Revenoldo, Andrea 34 Rialto 14 Riformatori dello Studio di Padova Robins, John 79 Romano, Giulio 8 Rome 5, 77, 78, 89, 90, 126 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 130 Rufus, Virginius 94 Ruschoni, Georgio di 5 Sacchetti, Franco 25 Sacchini, Antonio 98, 99 Salicato, Altobello 14 Salò 14 Sand, George 61 Sansovino, Francesco 16, 39, 109 Santa Croce, basilica 76 Santa Croce, quartiere 93 Santa Maria del Fiore 72, 73 Santa Maria Novella 41, 46 Santissima Annunziata 43 Santos, Brazil 84 Sardinia 68

15

Index

201

Sarpi, Paolo 104 Sassetti family 94 Savonarola, Girolamo 76, 77 Schmidt, Friedrich Wilhelm Valentin 128 Schottky, Julius Max 129 Scotland 85 Sculteti, Gabriel 126, 127 sealing vision 75 Senate, Venetian 14, 38, 114 Seneca 21, 50, 124 Sercambi, Giovanni 25 Servetus, Michael 131 Sforza e Bentivoglio, Ippolita 16 Sforza, Ottaviano Maria 11 Shakespeare, William 7, 8, 41, 65, 66, 85, 94, 103 Shatter, Alan 121 Siena 52, 109 signatures 54, 60, 131 Sirens 4 Sixtus V 34 Socinianism 52 Solomon's House 99 Sozzini, Fausto 52 Spagnolo, Maddalena 105 Stanhope, Philip Dormer 91 Stein, Gertrude 133 sumptuary laws 72 surnames 43, 45, 46

Torresani, Bernardino 38 Trent, Council of 33, 34, 38, 73 Treviso 87 Tuscany, Grand Duchy of 69, 120

Tagliente, Giovanni Antonio 55, 61 talismans 94 Tambour Sphygmograph 60 Tasso, Torquato 99 Tehrani, Jamshid J. 24 Tennyson, Baron Alfred 19 Titian 10

Yates, Frances

Udine 23 Ulloa, Alfonso Ulpian 50

16

Valla, Lorenzo 33 Vasari, Giorgio 1, 2, 72, 73, 88 Vecchi, Alessandro de’ 38, 39, 40 Venice 1, 3, 5, 10–16, 22, 24, 29, 38, 46, 63, 68, 69, 77, 87, 89, 93, 99, 110, 113, 114 Venturi, Franco 132 Verdi, Giuseppe 61 Verdon, Timothy 73 Vermeer, Johannes 105 Vernazza, Livia 63 Verrocchio, Andrea del 53 Veyne, Paul 82 Vives, Juan Luis 33 Walpole, Horace 1, 2 Weber, Max 80 William of Auvergne 33 Wilson, Edward O. 136 women’s reading 97–122 Woolf, Virginia 66 99

Zeno, Apostolo 128 Ziolkowski, Jan 23 Ziska, Franz 129 Zuccari, Federico 72, 73 Zuichemus, Vigilius 99