Gouwens2015 - Emasculation As Empowerment - Lessons of Beaver Lore For Two Italian Humanists

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Emasculation as empowerment: lessons

of beaver lore for two Italian humanists
Kenneth Gouwens
Department of History, University of Connecticut, StorrsCT,

United States
Published online: 29 Jul 2015.
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To cite this article: Kenneth Gouwens (2015) Emasculation as empowerment: lessons of beaver lore
for two Italian humanists, European Review of History: Revue europenne d'histoire, 22:4, 536-562,
DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2015.1028339
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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire, 2015

Vol. 22, No. 4, 536562, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2015.1028339
Emasculation as empowerment: lessons of beaver lore for two

Italian humanists
Kenneth Gouwens*
Department of History, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT, United States
(Received 24 July 2014; accepted 9 March 2015)

In the sixteenth century, two Italian humanists, Paolo Giovio and Giovanni Bernardino
Bonifacio, included in their imprese (personalised emblems) a portrayal of a beaver
gnawing off its testicles. Since the impresa was intended to express something
distinctive about its bearer, their choice of the beaver suggests that they conceived of
their own masculinity in ways that seem counterintuitive. The present essay traces the
story of the beavers sacrifice to Antiquity, both classical and early Christian, and
surveys the diverse interpretations of it up through the early-modern period. It details
the wide constellation of meanings attached to the beaver in influential compendia of
knowledge written around the time that Giovio and Bonifacio flourished, including
Conrad Gesners History of Quadrupeds and Pierio Valerianos Hieroglyphica.
Finally, it assesses how the appropriation of the beaver may have made particular
sense, for different reasons, to Giovio and to Bonifacio. While these cases exemplify
how animals served as enabling devices for portraying ones masculinity, the
appropriation of the beaver in particular challenges historians today to reconsider what
constituted acceptable masculine performance in early-modern Europe. It also serves
as a caution against attributing a constant gendered meaning to even the most
quintessentially male of organs.
Keywords: animals; beavers; Bonifacio; Giovio; castration; emblems; Ovid; Pliny;
Reformation; imprese
In the early sixteenth century, the humanist, historian and physician Paolo Giovio (1486
1552) selected as his impresa, or personal device, an image of a beaver gnawing off its
testicles. Above the image and complementary to it is the motto NECESSITY (Figure 1).
Since Giovio was an expert on such devices, inventing a number of them for friends, his
personal selection of the beaver obeying necessitys dictates is unlikely to have been made
casually. Nor, surprisingly, was it unique: for, another learned Italian, Giovanni
Bernardino Bonifacio (1517 97), would have the unfortunate beaver stamped on the
reverse of his portrait medal (Figures 2 and 3). Such self-identification with an act of
castration looks bizarre when viewed through the lens of recent historical scholarship on
masculinity. Patricia Simons, in particular, has demonstrated convincingly the extent to
which early-modern theories of male sexuality articulated a celebratory and even
triumphant image of testicles.1 [A]s producers or repositories of semen, she writes,
testicles were believed to be more vital to a mans virility than any other genital part.2
The rhetorical move that Giovio and Bonifacio made, invoking excision of the key site of
manhood, thus stands out all the more starkly. Surely we must not overplay the historical
significance of two isolated examples. That they could occur at all, however, does invite us
to think expansively about the boundaries of what constituted acceptable masculine
*Email: kenneth.gouwens@uconn.edu
q 2015 Taylor & Francis
537
European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire
Figure 1. Gabriele Simeoni (1509 1575). Le sententiose imprese / di monsignor Paulo Giovio, et
del signor Gabriel Symeoni, ridotte in rime per il detto Symeoni (Lyon: Gulielmo Roviglio, 1561),
detail from p. 126: Del Vescovo Iovio. (The poem is Simeonis addition.) Folger Shakespeare
Library Shelfmark: PN6349.S5 1561 Cage. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
performance in early-modern Europe. When analysed in their particularities, these

Renaissance appropriations of beaver lore may serve to caution historians against
investing any male body part with a constant let alone transcendent meaning.
The present essay will explore what these case studies may reveal both about how
these individuals understood themselves as men and about how under certain
538
K. Gouwens
Figure 2. Medal with the bust of Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio. Reverse. q The Trustees of the
British Museum. Used by permission.
Figure 3. Medal with the bust of Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio. Obverse. q The Trustees of the
British Museum. Used by permission.
539
circumstances they could deploy an image of auto-emasculation as social currency. Their

identification with the beaver indicates, first of all, a presentation of self in which
metaphorical significance outweighs physicality: evidently, in their view, appropriating an
image of self-castration did not diminish their status as men. Second, and crucially, by
using personal emblems to express the conceit, they limited their audience to a learned
elite that prided itself on being able to penetrate a devices obscurity to appreciate its
deeper meaning. When read in this context, Giovios and Bonifacios imprese attest the
remarkable scope available for asserting ones manhood in Renaissance humanistic
culture.
The genre of the emblem

To unlock the meanings of Giovios and Bonifacios imprese requires background on the
symbolic meanings ascribed to animals and, in turn, what it meant to identify oneself with
a particular animal. The intelligibility of their choice depended first of all upon a ready
stock of beaver lore. Although anthropomorphising stories about animals had appeared
routinely in medieval bestiaries, the revival of ancient literature in the Renaissance vastly
enhanced the range of available accounts that were perceived as having authority. By the
mid-sixteenth century this lore was detailed systematically in encyclopaedic compendia,
ranging from compilations of what were thought to be hieroglyphs with universal
significance, to collections known as natural histories. In the latter, in theory, one could
find everything that mattered about an animal including not only its observed
behaviours and physical characteristics, but also its symbolic meanings and the stories that
had been told about it. Thus, for the learned, ones conception of beaver encompassed a
complex web of associations. These associations did not always harmonise. Despite
possible contradictions, however, they were believed to be deeply meaningful.
A second prerequisite for the appropriation of the beaver image was the invention of
imprese personalised emblems or devices which became fashionable in sixteenthcentury Italy. Emblems themselves were hardly new: symbolic images had appeared since
Antiquity on shields and helmets and did so subsequently in coats of arms. With the
publication of the Emblemata of Andrea Alciati in 1522, however, the emblem book
emerged as a distinct genre, and the structure of the devices themselves became
standardised.3 For Alciati and his many imitators, an emblem consisted of three elements:
a short motto (often only a word or two); an image; and an epigram. Only when combined
would these elements illustrate a complex concept or a clever conceit that one with
sufficient learning could grasp in a sudden burst of insight. Imprese (devices) were more
personalised. Like Alciatis emblems, they combined mottos and images in a somewhat
mysterious way that would be opaque to the vulgar but intelligible, with some effort, to
the educated elite.4 They differed from emblems, however, in being particular to the
individuals for whom they were devised: as a visual symbol about which to group
perceptions of the life, works, and character of an important historical personage, the
impresa encapsulated and displayed to others something of the essence of its bearer.5
Giovio himself became the leading authority on the subject: his Dialogue on Military and
Amorous Devices (1555) circulated widely in Italian and was soon translated into English,
French and Spanish.6
While the accumulated lore about animals, the vogue of emblems and the invention of
imprese were preconditions for the kind of self-representation that Giovio and Bonifacio
deployed, there remains the puzzle of why they chose the self-castrating beaver. In order to
tease out the meanings of their devices, one needs to consider each case individually,
540
K. Gouwens
setting it in the context of what each humanist wrote about it and considering how it may
have reflected, at least in the bearers own mind, a truth particular to him. Paradoxically,
by glossing themselves with a vivid exemplum of auto-emasculation, they asserted
themselves as men in a way that could resonate powerfully and positively in the rarefied
world of Renaissance European learned culture.
The beavers backstory
Giovios and Bonifacios representations of the beaver were rooted in a story already
proverbial in Antiquity. In its simplest form, it appeared in a fable attributed to Aesop:
A beavers genitals serve, it is said, to cure certain ailments. So when the beaver is spotted and
pursued to be mutilated since he knows why he is being hunted he will run for a certain
distance, and he will use the speed of his feet to remain intact. But when he sees himself about
to be caught, he will bite off his own parts, throw them, and thus save his own life.7
The lesson attached to the tale makes clear its human analogue: Among men also, those are
wise who, if attacked for their money, will sacrifice it rather than lose their lives.8 Cicero, in
his oration on behalf of Scaurus, made passing use of the story in order to ridicule a certain
Aris who, Cicero said, had sought to secure his own safety by flight, just as beavers, so we
are told, ransom themselves from the hunters by that part of their body on account of which
they are chiefly hunted.9 Two centuries later, Apuleius and Juvenal would both use it to
humorous effect. Among the metamorphoses in Apuleiuss Golden Ass, a witch and
sometime innkeeper named Meroe is said to have changed one of her lovers into a beaver,
because when that animal is afraid of being captured it escapes from its pursuers by cutting
off its own genitals, and she wanted the same thing to happen to him since he had intercourse
with another woman.10 Juvenal invokes the beavers story to somewhat more edifying
effect in his twelfth satire, where he describes the plight of a wealthy man named Catullus
who found himself caught in a storm at sea. As his ship filled with water, he resolved to
compound with the winds, and jettison cargo thus imitating the beaver, / that makes itself
eunuch when cornered, in its urge to escape surrenders / its balls: so precious the drug, it
knows, in its groin.11 His terror overcoming even his outsized avarice, he cast overboard his
luxurious possessions, including an elaborate silver service.
The beavers sacrifice was also described in detail, albeit without a moralising gloss, in
Pliny the Elders (c.23 79 CE) Natural History, a work that Giovio knew intimately and
cited frequently. After telling of how alpha hyenas supposedly maintain dominance in part
by gelding their male offspring, Pliny continues: The beavers of the Black Sea region
practise self-amputation of the same organ when beset by danger, as they know that they
are hunted for the sake of its secretion, the medical name for which is beaver-oil
(castoreum).12 Also in the first century CE, the Greek physician Dioscorides explained
how the animals testicles could be processed so as to serve variously as an abortifacient,
as a remedy for convulsions, and as a cure for snakebite.13 Dioscorides, however,
dismissed the self-castration story: It is a vaine report, that this beast when it is pursued,
doth bite off his stones and cast them away, for it is impossible that hee should touch them,
being knit under, as those of a Boare.14 In fact Pliny himself, in another book of the
Natural History, had cited Sextiuss description of the medicinal use of castoreum from
the beaver, which had similarly pointed to the inaccessibility of the testicles, and thus the
impossibility of the animal castrating itself.15 The discrepancy evidently did not, however,
bother Pliny. And, for centuries to come, many would treat the lore as credible.
A more detailed account of the beavers self-castration, including both zoological
description and a parallel drawn to human behaviour, would be presented as fact by
541
the Greek rhetorician Aelian (fl. late second century CE) in his On the Characteristics
of Animals, with which Giovio was also well acquainted. The passage merits quotation
in full:
The Beaver is an amphibious creature: by day it lives hidden in rivers, but at night it roams the
land, feeding itself with anything that it can find. Now it understands the reason why hunters
come after it with such eagerness and impetuosity, and it puts down its head and with its teeth
cuts off its testicles and throws them in their path, as a prudent man who, falling into the hands
of robbers, sacrifices all that he is carrying, to save his life, and forfeits his possessions by way
of ransom. If however it has already saved its life by self-castration and is again pursued, then
it stands up and reveals that it offers no ground for their eager pursuit, and releases the hunters
from all further exertions, for they esteem its flesh less. Often however beavers with testicles
intact, after escaping as far away as possible, have drawn in the coveted part, and with great
skill and ingenuity tricked their pursuers, pretending they no longer possessed what they were
keeping in concealment.16
Thus, as in Aesop and Juvenal, so too in Aelian the beavers sacrifice resembles that of a
human who casts off riches in hope of saving his life. In the added lore, however, the
creature proves capable of a prudent dissimulation that may allow it to escape harm
altogether.
At least by the late fourth century CE, a Christianised version had appeared first in
Greek and then in Latin in the anonymous tract known as the Physiologus, a
collection of stories mostly about beasts, stones and trees that would exercise great
influence in the millennium that followed.17 The Physiologus included elements drawn
from Egyptian wisdom and from classical sources including Aelian, but its lasting
contribution to beaver lore was its glossing of the animals sacrifice as a Christians
casting off of sin:
O, and you who behave in a manly way (viriliter), O citizen of God, if you have given to the
hunter the things which are his, he no longer approaches you. If you have had evil inclinations
toward sin, greed, adultery, theft, [then] cut them away from you and give them to the devil.
The Apostle said, Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, honor to whom
honor is due, and so on. Let us first throw the disgraces of sins which are within us before the
devil, for they are his works, and let us give to God the things which are Gods, prayers and the
fruit of our good works.18
Thus the beaver has behaved not only prudently, but manfully, and men do well to imitate
the animals virile action by themselves metaphorically casting off their genitalia the
beasts sexual organs standing for human inclinations toward sin and rendering these to
the devil, to whom they belong.19 During the Middle Ages, the beaver would gnaw its way
into numerous bestiaries, where its sacrifice would similarly be glossed with an explicitly
Christian moral, often drawn verbatim from the Physiologus.20 Frequently, in an
illustration accompanying the text, the animals testicles appear inordinately large and
manlike. Among the most graphic is an image in British Library MS Harley 4751 that
includes two representations of the beaver: the first, in the act of self-mutilation; and the
second, after having parted with its testicles which appear, outsized, in the avulsed
scrotum that one of the hunters displays to the viewer (Figure 4).21
Meanwhile, the story of the beavers method of avoiding capture was on occasion
invoked and elaborated without any Christianising gloss. In the Hieroglyphica attributed
to the Alexandrian scholar Horapollo (fifth century CE), a collection that briefly described
the allegorical meanings of images, the beaver represented a man who harms himself.22
Isidore of Seville (c.560 636), in his influential Etymologies, asserted that the Latin word
castor (beaver) derived from the word castrando (castrating) a claim that Albertus
Magnus (1193? 1280) would repeat as fact, but that early-modern authors would take
K. Gouwens
542
Figure 4. British Library MS Harley 4751 fol. 9v, detail. q The British Library Board. Used by
permission.
pains to refute.23 The beavers tale was invoked in literary works, too, including Bernard
Silvestriss allegorical poem, the Cosmographia (mid-twelfth century), and Guillaume de
Lorriss Romance of the Rose (c.1230).24 A particularly detailed version appeared in the
travel accounts of Gerald of Wales (c.1146 c.1223), who used the presence of beavers in
the Teifi River in his homeland as a jumping-off point for a survey of the animals
543
characteristics and behaviour. Although he makes no mention of the dissimulation that

Aelian described, he does note specifically of beavers in the East that one who has
sacrificed his testicles will escape capture on a later occasion by lifting a leg to make clear
to the hunter that the prize he seeks is gone.25
By the fifteenth century, the recovery of classical texts prompted further retellings of
the beavers tale that lacked any explicit Christian referent. Three prominent Italian
humanists Guarino Guarini of Verona (1374 1460), Ermolao Barbaro (1410 1471)
and Lorenzo Valla (1407 1457) each included a version of Aesops beaver story in his
own Latin translation from the Greek.26 Their renditions differ in diction and syntax
(Vallas being by far the most eloquent) but draw much the same conclusion: for Guarino
and Barbaro the beavers sacrifice exemplifies prudence ( prudentia), and for Valla the
moral of the story is that prudent people ( prudentes) must view property ( fortunae) as of
no account when their safety is at stake.
Subsequently a fourth humanist, Niccolo` Perotti (1429 1480), who had studied under
Guarino in 1445 46, found a manuscript of fables that had been Latinised in Antiquity,
evidently by Phaedrus (d. c.50 CE). That manuscript does not survive, but some of the
fables are preserved in the humanists version, known as Perottis Appendix, which
glosses the beavers tale at some length:
Many might live on if they would, [in order] to save their lives, make small account of their
fortunes. / When the beaver (fiber) finds himself unable to escape from the dogs they say he
bites off and casts aside his own testicles, because he is aware that it is on their account that he
is pursued. (The Greeks, who have words for everything and take pride in their extensive
vocabulary, call this animal castor, thereby giving it the name of a god.) That there is
something godlike that prompts the beavers act I cant deny; for the hunter, as soon as he has
found his medicine, ceases to pursue the animal itself and calls off the dogs. / If men could
bring themselves to consent to forfeit their property they would live in safety thereafter; no
one would set snares for a naked human body.27
Once again, as so often in classical Antiquity, the beaver exemplifies how safety can result
from willingly parting with wealth: in its case, the family jewels.
The emblematic beaver
Already in its first edition, Alciatis Emblemata (1522) included a woodcut of the beavers
sacrifice, superintended by the motto AERE QVANDOQVE SALVTEM REDIMENDAM (Sometimes money must be spent to purchase safety).28 From the beavers
example, he writes: You will learn not to spare material things, and to give money to
enemies in order that you may ransom your life.29 The exemplum would recur in others
collections of symbols and emblems. Thus the German humanist and natural scientist
Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534 98) portrayed the animal along with the motto
provided that life remains (modo vita supersit), albeit without specifying money or
possessions: Just as the beaver itself amputates its testes, so also you, once youve cast off
things that are harming you, will be safe.30
In his Iconologia (1593) a detailed glossing of images rather than an emblem
book per se the Perugian humanist Cesare Ripa (1560 1645) presented the beaver
tale under the rubric, peace.31 Out of self-love, says Ripa, the beaver must steel
itself to the loss of something that in itself is both good and useful. But he proceeds
to put the animals sacrifice to a more specifically political use, relating it to a letter
from Shapur II the Great (r.309 79), King of the Sassanid Empire, to the Emperor
Constantine, in which the king exhorted the Roman ruler to give up his claim to part
of the Asian kingdom so as to live in peace. Here, Ripa cites the example of the
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K. Gouwens
beaver, which obtains tranquillity by severing from itself that member which is
causing it distress.32
Ripa did not need to do much research to come up with the story of Shapur and
Constantine: it had appeared two generations earlier in the magisterial Hieroglyphica
(1556) of Pierio Valeriano.33 In 58 chapters, each dedicated to a friend or patron,
Valeriano sought to provide an encyclopaedic understanding of a range of hieroglyphs:
symbolic images inherited from Antiquity that were thought to be universally meaningful.
While he made extensive use of Horapollos Hieroglyphica, which had been published in
Greek along with Aesops fables by the Aldine Press in 1505, he strove to include as well
every parallel he could find in classical Roman and Greek literature and imagery.34
Valerianos compendium is massive the first edition comprises 424 folio pages yet the
entry on the beaver is relatively brief, appearing in a chapter that also includes the rabbit,
fox, mole, weasel, mouse and cat.35 For Valeriano, as subsequently for Ripa, Shapurs
letter to Constantine shows a beaver-like sacrifice of property for the sake of peace.
Valeriano gives primacy, however, to a markedly different reading: the beaver can
symbolise the penalty for wantonness ( petulantiae supplicium). The priests of Ancient
Egypt, he writes, had used it to signify a man caught in the act of adultery, who would be
punished by castration.36
In sum, both in emblem books and in compendia that explained the meanings of
hieroglyphs genres that we may subsume under the rubric of emblematic thinking the
beavers self-mutilation could represent how one might obtain safety or tranquillity
through parting with something valuable. As Valerianos entry makes clear, however, a
particular emblem could have other meanings as well, teaching divergent moral lessons.
When the beaver was appropriated for personal devices, it would thereby gain new
specificity. Yet because of the emblems multivalence, these appropriations would not
have to be uniform.
Representing masculinity in imprese
No one knew more about imprese than Paolo Giovio. By his own definition, an impresa
must first of all include both a motto and an image, which must be visually arresting.37 Its
meaning had to require learning to grasp, but not be so obscure that almost nobody could
get it. In addition, the motto was to be in a language not native to the bearer. It must not use
the human form.38 Above all else, it had to be specific to the individual for whom it was
designed: it was an outward display of the bearers inner truth.39 Because of that very
specificity, it was also a vital site for the celebration of how a particular individual stood
out in manly excellence.
The imprese Giovio designed for two military commanders Alfonso Piccolomini,
Duke of Amalfi, and Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino celebrated distinct
styles of performing masculinity. Piccolomini had requested of Giovio a device to put on
his military standard when he took command of the light horse in Emperor Charles Vs
army in northern Italy. The duke wanted something to show vigilance: the quality of not
being taken by surprise, and conversely, of catching ones enemy off-guard. Thus Giovio
designed for him a crane with its left foot aloft, holding a small stone, accompanied by the
motto OFFICIVM NATVRA DOCET (Nature teaches ones proper task).40 The
meaning would be unintelligible to anyone ignorant either of Latin or of lore about cranes
watchfulness, for example, as detailed by Pliny:
At night time they have sentries who hold in their claws a stone which, if drowsiness makes
them drop it, falls and convicts them of slackness, while the rest sleep with their head tucked
545
under their wing, standing on either foot by turns; but the leader keeps a lookout with neck
erect and gives warning.41
While the story of the crane had specific military significance, the performance that
Giovios impresa for Piccolomini depicted also resonated with an ideal described in
contemporary Hausvater literature: household managers were similarly enjoined to show
vigilance in their responsibilities.42 Thus a wider conception of vigilance, which
flourished in sixteenth-century Italy, could help to define appropriate masculine behaviour
both in warfare and in civil society.
Again drawing upon Pliny for material, Giovio celebrated a quite different mode of
masculine performance in the impresa he designed for the renowned commander
Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Driven from his state in 1516 17 by the
armies of Pope Leo X, Della Rovere reclaimed it after the popes demise (1521) and found
himself offered the military post of Captain General of Florence.43 The device shows a
palm tree weighed down by a block of marble suspended from it, accompanied by the
motto: INCLINATA RESVRGIT (Having been bent low, it springs upright again).44
Giovio drew the moral that although the dukes manly prowess (virtu`) had been assailed by
Fortunes fury, it had subsequently returned to its former condition.45 Whereas
Machiavelli in The Prince illustrates the forceful action that he enjoins with the image of a
young man battering Lady Fortune, the exercise of masculinity here celebrated consists in
resilience. Taken together with the impresa for Piccolomini, this example suggests the
latitude of early-modern conceptions of martial manhood: it encompassed a range of
practices and qualities, not all of them congenial to conceptions that flourish today.
Giovio and his impresa
Giovios curious selection of the beaver for self-representation exemplifies how complex
playing the man could be in non-martial contexts. In the book on devices, he writes only
briefly about the incident that precipitated the choice: Being smitten by love as a youth in
Pavia, in order not to provoke even worse for myself I was forced to pursue a damaging
course to save my life.46 This would appear to be the same incident that he describes
elsewhere, in a dialogue on Notable Men and Women, as having led him when he was
feverish with the passion of youth to write a tract entitled Anterotica.47 Giovios modernday biographer notes that from the choice of the beaver, the episode acquired certain
Abelardian tones.48 And yet, the two instances of castration could hardly be more
different: whereas that of Peter Abelard (1079 1142) was literal and involuntary, an
action performed upon him by thugs, Giovios was metaphorical and was self-inflicted,
thereby serving as an assertion of will, however attenuated that assertion might be.49 In the
passage from the Dialogo delle imprese, the association of emasculation with
empowerment plays out through the juxtaposition of necessity with virtu`, the quality
that Machiavelli, in The Prince, had set against fortuna (fortune).50 Thus, just before
glossing the beaver image, Giovio says of his own motto, FATO PRVDENTIA MINOR,
that Fate, which is nothing other than the divine will, has greater force than human virtu`
and craftiness, and deceives it.51 Nonetheless, Giovios beaver illustrates a degree of
agency which, paradoxically, is gendered as masculine not only because castration is an
option available only to men, but also because of the animals aggressive self-assertion, its
seizing of a modicum of control under extreme duress.
Whatever the incident that precipitated Giovios self-identification with the beaver,
there is no evidence of his having had a physical crisis of masculinity. It is extremely
unlikely that he was castrated: on the contrary, in letters to his friend Federico Gonzaga da
546
K. Gouwens
Bozzolo, he vaunted his love affairs with women, and he may have fathered an
illegitimate son.52 The significance that he explicitly attributed to his impresa, that is, the
representation of a painful suppression of desire, is surely one of its intended meanings.
It would be mistaken, however, to read this as the casting off of sin represented by the
beaver in the Physiologus and in medieval bestiaries. Giovio makes no reference here to
the devil (nor in general was he wont to do so). More likely, the image meant to him in part
the triumph of reason over youthful desire, a Platonic topos with currency in Renaissance
Italy, and quite possibly the central motif of his lost Anterotica.53 But there remains the
issue of its abiding significance for him. Its appearance in the dialogue on imprese meant
that it circulated widely, first in manuscript and then in print, among the learned. What
else, then, might his choice of the beaver reveal about his conception of himself as a man,
and about what he wished to communicate about it?
The question is complicated by the fact that elsewhere in his writings, Giovio follows
Renaissance convention in treating testicles as the quintessential synecdoche of masculine
assertiveness. For example, when Spanish troops were besieging Florence in 1530 on
behalf of Pope Clement VII (Giulio de Medici), Giovio punned not only on the pontiffs
name but also on the palle (balls) in the Medici coat of arms, when he predicted that those
defending the city would bend the neck to the soft yoke of the most clement palle;
otherwise they will feel what pain of the testicles is, because the army . . . is ready to
indemnify itself for the privations of a whole year with a lucrative sack . . . 54 This was,
certainly, a commonplace usage. To give but one other example, in the early 1520s an
anonymous Roman pasquinade traduced soon-to-be Pope Adrian VI as a Jew whom an
incompetent mohel had accidentally castrated.55 How, then, could Giovio imagine his
impresa to cast him in a positive light?
It is helpful to keep in mind the prominence that Giovio gave to necessity by making
it the motto in the conceit: self-assertion had to be understood in light of the scope
available for its expression. Perhaps the impresa had poignancy because of his being a
courtier at a time when, in his view, that position was losing significance in Italy.
Frequently he commented upon benefactors not having remunerated him adequately for
his talents and accomplishments.56 Thus when expressing hope for a modest stipend from
Pope Paul III to assist him in finishing his Histories, Giovio heaped scorn upon the
memory of his late patron, Clement VII, describing him as a bungler who wished me to
have to stay in bed while my stockings were being repaired for lack of another pair.57 His
disappointment extended beyond the financial to the professional (for example, to his
dismay, his quest to be named Bishop of Como came to naught), and to an inability to be
heard with respect to the formation of policy. Thus, in his dialogue on contemporary men
and women, his eponymous interlocutor portrays himself as having offered good counsel
that his superiors proceeded to ignore.58 In presenting himself as a close observer of
politics whose talents were unrecognised and whose advice went unheeded, Giovio
strongly resembles Machiavelli: in both cases, a sense of personal powerlessness runs
parallel to the perceived collective impotence of the Italians in the face of foreign
domination.59
And yet, also in both cases, an author has contrived a way to display virtu` within the
limited scope for action that was available to him. For Machiavelli, as Albert Ascoli has
demonstrated, The Prince by its own internal logic gives the lie to its authors selfassertion and self-promotion as potential advisor: it is highly unlikely that a prince of the
sort that Machiavelli imagines would have hired someone like Machiavelli.60 Still, if his
book on principalities failed to gain him a post as advisor to a prince, its abiding capacity
to influence readers attests to its having had more impact by far than anything that its
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politically and militarily powerful dedicatee, Lorenzo de Medici (d.1519),

accomplished.61 For Giovio, on the other hand, the force of necessity was too great
even to attempt to influence current politics through his writings. Instead, a metaphorical
self-emasculation was the only meaningful exercise of agency that lay open. Giovio offers
little hope for the kind of redemption for Italy about which Machiavelli rhapsodised at the
end of The Prince. Instead, like many other early sixteenth-century Italian authors, for
example Francesco Guicciardini, he saw the political and cultural strengths of the Italians
ebbing in the period of foreign invasions and increasing Spanish hegemony. In Notable
Men and Women, Giovio has an interlocutor advise the Italians to practise a patient
dissimulation:
I think we need to live in the manner of wary and honest slaves who, with a humble and
cunning ingenuity, disguise their status in such a way that, with a submissiveness that is not
sullen but eager, they await liberty in good time.62
Thus they must cultivate an ambiguous persona, endure their current condition stoically,
and be ready to take action only on some unspecified future occasion when doing so might
yield positive results.63 Like Aelians ingeniously deceptive beavers, who convinced
subsequent hunters that they had already sacrificed their manhood, Giovios Italian
patriots, through an act of concealment, a temporary masking of virtu`, could to some
degree preserve it, with an eye to there being a future opportunity for potent action.
For Giovio, finally, scholarly activity counted as potency (and, conversely, he derided
its absence in some contemporaries in gendered terms). A comment he made in passing
regarding Giorgio Vasaris frescoes in the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome may invoke
both a capacity for masculine assertiveness and for literary productivity. In 1546, when
Giovio was supervising the work on behalf of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, he decided to
include three humanists in the background of the painting of Pope Paul III Farnese
Awarding Benefices, and he described these three, Pietro Bembo, Reginald Pole and
Jacopo Sadoleto, as not eunuchs.64 This gnomic turn of phrase has been interpreted
variously as expressing Giovios sense of artistic decorum, as a reference to the courage of
these humanists, as showing more specifically their lack of servility to the pontiff, or as
displaying their intellectual virility.65 While the claim that the remark concerned artistic
decorum lacks foundation, the meanings of courage and lack of servility are certainly
possible. Most likely, however, Giovio was invoking their prodigious literary production,
inasmuch as he was given elsewhere to ridiculing unproductive scholars as either sterile or
as eunuchs. Thus, in Pierio Valerianos dialogue On the Ill Fortune of the Learned, an
interlocutor speaks dismissively of those who wrote nothing and had been going to write
nothing, who (as our friend Giovio used to say with his usual wit) took with them to the
grave the seeds already long dead in their loins.66 And, in a letter to Marcello Cervini
(later Pope Marcellus II), Giovio noted that in his book on illustrious men (Elogia virorum
illustrium), which included profiles of humanists, he celebrates those among the deceased
who were not eunuchs.67 Unlike Plinys beaver, whose masculine self-assertion
consisted in self-mutilation, the learned who did not produce writings lacked even that
degree of power.
Giovio certainly did not count himself among the scholarly eunuchs: he wrote
prolifically in a variety of genres, including biography, dialogue, chorography and letters,
and he placed particular hope for enduring fame upon his voluminous Histories.68 Indeed,
one contemporary, the humanist secretary Girolamo Negri, commented on Giovios
competitiveness with another scholar whom he believed to be writing history.69
Composing the definitive book on imprese, too, was a way of staking a claim to cultural
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turf.70 This brings us back to the issue of the projection of oneself to a particular audience.
Crucially, Giovio was writing for a learned elite that knew the importance of looking
beyond surface meanings of imprese. The tensions within his appropriation of the beaver
do not resolve neatly, but evidently he believed that the image could communicate
something positive to the cognoscenti. Bette Talvacchia has argued that Renaissance elites
saw themselves as capable of reading erotic texts responsibly in a way that, they believed,
the masses could not.71 Perhaps, within their rarefied world, they similarly approached
Giovios impresa with a conviction that being able to privilege literary allusiveness over
literal meaning was a sign of erudition and of good taste.
Bonifacio and the safety of exile

A generation later Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacios impresa, stamped on the reverse of
his portrait medal, highlighted different aspects of the beavers tale. Instead of stressing
the force of necessity, as Giovios did, it emphasises what the beaver has purchased
through his sacrifice: the motto SIC VIVERE TVTVS (thus living as one safe) appears
above the image. Thus Bonifacio invokes the classical meaning of jettisoning property in
order to save ones life. Yet as in Giovios case, the metaphorical unsexing of himself
constitutes, paradoxically, a form of masculine self-assertion that has been severed from
its corporeal basis. Cryptically, below the hunting scene on the medal appear the initials
O.T.E.S. The portrait of Bonifacio on the obverse strongly resembles a woodcut of him,
aged 50 (in 1567), of which he had several copies made to distribute to friends and in
that portrait, too, one finds the letters O.T.E.S.72 To understand the impresa fully, one
needs to determine how this abbreviation combines with the motto and the now-familiar
image of the unhappy beaver in order for its deeper meaning to become manifest.
The letter combination O.T.E.S. is sufficiently obscure that Bonifacios modern
biographer, Manfred Welti, devotes several pages to recounting the lengths to which he
had to go to discern its origin and unravel its significance.73 It turns out to be an
abbreviation of a quotation from Ovids Metamorphoses in which Pythagoras describes
himself as having fled his native Samos and, out of a hatred of tyranny, having become a
voluntary exile (odioque tyrannidis exsul sponte, hence O.T.E.S.).74 This provides a key
to unlocking the impresas meaning; Bonifacio, who had left southern Italy for northern
Europe in the late 1550s, had a fraught relationship with his homeland, and especially with
the way that ecclesiastical authorities used their political clout in efforts to separate him
from his patrimony.
Born into a noble family in the Kingdom of Naples and given a humanist education,
Bonifacio became Marquis of Oria (in Apulia) following his fathers death in 1536.75 Over
the ensuing decade, he appears to have enjoyed the life of the gentleman scholar; in this
period he amassed much of his library and was in frequent contact with literati throughout
Italy. Thereafter, however, various of his prerogatives were challenged from within his
family (for example, in 1549 52 a sister sued for some of the property he had inherited),
by his constituents, and by the Imperial Viceroys court in Naples. Meanwhile, his
religious orthodoxy was being called into question: among other things, he was said to
have frequented meetings of evangelicals in the circle of Juan de Valdes (1509? 41), a
Spanish reformer who spent the last half-decade of his life in Naples, where he had taught
such subversive doctrines as justification by faith alone. It would appear that some
combination of political, religious and familial factors prompted Bonifacios decision in
late 1556 or early 1557 to leave his homeland. By the summer of 1557 he was in Basel,
Switzerland, which had officially become Protestant in 1529, and while in residence there
549
he enjoyed the friendship of the prominent jurist and humanist Boniface Amerbach
(1495 1562), a close friend of Erasmus. Bonifacio participated actively in transalpine
learned culture, and although his personal religious beliefs are difficult to pin down,
among his friends he counted Philipp Melanchthon, Luthers foremost protege.
Bonifacios self-described exile had begun of his own volition, but a return to his
homeland soon became impossible. Already in October 1557 the Inquisition in Naples
began investigating him, and various parties including members of the family of Pope Paul
IV (Gian Pietro Carafa; pope, 1555 59) scrambled to lay claim to his properties. The
following July, while he was in Venice, the Inquisition there denounced him for heretical
practices. Friendship with a senator made possible his escape, but although he returned to
Venice briefly in the spring of 1560, thereafter he moved from place to place in northern
Europe, including the town of Lorrach (near Basel), where he spent the decade 1565 75
on a property that the late Boniface Amerbachs son Basilius (1533 91) had provided for
him. After further peregrinations, he would live out his final years in Gdansk, where he
gave his books to the civic library on the condition that they not ever be allowed to fall into
the hands of the Jesuits.
What, then, of the impresa? The minting of the portrait medal probably took place
around the time of the woodcut with the inscription O.T.E.S., which in turn was not long
before he sent an unconventional present to a key patron. On 8 October 1567 he gifted
Basilius Amerbach with a Polish beaver fur, accompanied by a 12-line poem recounting
the animals sacrifice:
When a beaver catches sight of the dogs nearby in hot pursuit, the poor fellow is afraid of
being captured right away and torn apart, and he espies no safety, no route by which he might
escape. He considers that carrying with him that which they seek is the cause of his death.
Immediately he tears off his testicles with his own teeth, flings them down, and goes away
safe reckoning, correctly, that it was giving precedence to the whole body to have cut off a
single part of it. Would you, Amerbach, say that we have acted foolishly if we, too, have done
likewise?76
Basilius Amerbachs letter of thanks for this present has not survived. Evidently he
attributed a religious significance to the gift, for in response Bonifacio clarified that he had
meant it to convey something less elevated:
How beautifully you have redirected toward the divine that which, in the common manner,
I alluded to concerning the beaver, with reference to the goods that I left in my homeland. Its
no wonder if those who are worldly, as am I, see and feel and speak on the human level. But
those who are moved by the divine will, see, feel and speak as do you.77
Taken together, the disparate interpretations of Amerbach and Bonifacio indicate the
ambiguity of the beaver as signifier. Amerbach may well have construed it as illustrating
the Christians casting off of sin, as in the Physiologus and in the bestiary tradition. For
Bonifacio, in contrast, it had a classical meaning, the sacrifice of valuables to secure ones
safety. More speculatively, one wonders if perhaps Bonifacios appropriation of the motif
for his own narrative of exile was influenced by Filippo Fasaninis Latin translation of
Horapollo, which had appeared in 1517. While faithful to the Greek texts emphasis on the
creature representing men who harm themselves, Fasanini reads that harm as specifically
related to exile in a way that the more widely circulated Latin version by Bernardino
Trabazio does not. Thus Fasanini writes: Those wishing to signify a man whose peculiar
deceit has brought ruinous banishment upon him, and who harms himself by his own
flight, portray a beaver.78
Bonifacios distancing of himself from religious motivation may at first seem odd
when one considers his tirades against Paul IV. Upon receiving news of the popes death in
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1559, he wrote a parody in hexameter distichs of Psalm 123 [new Ps. 124] in which he
likens the late pontiff to Goliath. In addition, the poem celebrates how the people of
Israel praise God for having freed them from this exceedingly impious, foolish, and cruel
Antichrist.79 Yet the poem admits to a non-religious reading that may belie its overt
content and model: one must keep in mind that Bonifacio held Carafa partly responsible
for his having to sacrifice his estates and titles.
His impresa, on the other hand, emphasises his own agency: of his own volition, in
keeping with the example of Ovids Pythagoras, he had gone into exile, leaving tyranny
behind. For Bonifacio, playing the man did not mean fighting to the death against
insurmountable odds in defence of what was his, or springing back vigorously from the
blows of Fortune. Nor did it mean obeying necessitys dictates and patiently awaiting a
future opportunity for self-assertion. Instead, the style of masculinity Bonifacio performed
placed a premium upon autonomy, the freedom to move about and to express himself as he
wished. It is poignant that he found a kindred spirit in Ovid, who in his Tristia (Sorrows)
had lamented his permanent exile from Rome. In light of the parallels, an anecdote in an
admittedly hostile account of Bonifacio may in fact resonate more deeply than his
adversaries realised. According to an anonymous report on the mission of the Jesuits
Nicholas Bobadilla and Alfonso Salmeron to Naples in 1540, Bonifacio had at one point
been caught reading during mass a copy of Ovids Tristia, which had been bound in such a
way as to look like a missal.80
The disintegration of the emblematic world-view
At its outset, this article emphasised how exceptional Giovio and Bonifacio were in
choosing to represent themselves with devices that centred on a self-castrating beaver.
While there may be other instances of men self-identifying in this way, it is unlikely that
any postdate the mid-seventeenth century for, by that time, the assumptions underlying
emblematic thought were giving way to new conceptions of how meaning was constituted
in nature. With respect to emblems and imprese, one can only argue from silence; both
genres fell from favour in the 1600s. Although their decline in popularity may be owed in
part to superficial changes in fashion, by the mid-seventeenth century the clusters of
associations that comprised emblematic thought were no longer viewed as intrinsically
meaningful.
Ironically, this change may have resulted from precisely the kind of exhaustive
synthetic work on universal hieroglyphs that Valeriano had done. Like fifteenth-century
Platonists including Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and more
proximately like Alciati, Valeriano held that a learned elite could unlock deeper meanings
that were consistent across cultures. Yet by juxtaposing so many associations to a given
hieroglyph, Valeriano laid bare just how contradictory and even mutually exclusive those
associations could be.81
The contradictions within the emblematic world-view became most obvious and
pressing in the comprehensive natural histories that appeared from the mid-sixteenth
through the seventeenth centuries. Scholars including Conrad Gesner (1516 65), Ulisse
Aldrovandi (1522 1605) and Edward Topsell (1572 1625) combined detailed physical
description of animals with an itemisation of the associations linked to them. Thus,
descriptions of physique and behaviour sat alongside etymologies, depictions in
mythology, proverbs and adages, and claims regarding a particular animals place within
human culture.82 While entries in these compendia incorporated new data drawn from
present-day observation, they synthesised or, more often, simply juxtaposed that
551
information with a store of knowledge gleaned from wide reading in texts from Antiquity
and the Middle Ages.
As historian of science William Ashworth has written, in order to understand these
compendia, we have to capture the entire web of associations that inextricably links
human culture and the animal world a task that requires us to think adagially,
allegorically, and analogically.83 Once having made that move, we can understand that
nature comprises a complex matrix of seemingly obscure symbols and hidden meanings,
which can suddenly become clear in a burst of illumination, if only you view it from
enough different angles.84 In effect, one cannot understand the beaver in full unless one
knows the associations and lore that have been attached to it. The beaver stood in
meaningful relationship to the human, but the meanings that connected them were
manifold. Thus, it was possible for Giovio and Bonifacio to invoke an image of selfcastration without a physical unmanning being the main point of the story. Instead, the
emblematic beaver, conceived as a totality, had intrinsic significance that far transcended
what was known of the physical creature itself and that allowed for a range of
interpretation and appropriation.
A brief summary of Gesners entry on the beaver in On quadrupeds (1551) may
exemplify not only the encyclopaedic ambition of the work but also its internal
contradictions and the precariousness of its comprehensive approach.85 He begins with
etymology, surveying words for the animal in several languages. Then he proceeds to its
physique, which he compares to that of other animals, and he relates stories about its
horrendous bite.86 He explains how beavers propel themselves on land and in the water,
describes the dens in which they live, and marvels at their sophisticated methods of
deforestation. A geographical survey indicates how beavers differ from place to place.
Gesner describes a variety of ways that their flesh is prepared and cooked for human
consumption, the tail being a delicacy. He goes into special detail on the preparation of
castoreum, with its wide-ranging medicinal applications, including the treatment of
maladies as varied as snakebite, epilepsy and gonorrhoea.87 He also describes how to
identify the real thing in a market flooded with counterfeits (indeed, it had recently been
asserted that the beaver testicles sold today look much too large to be those of a genuine,
bona fide beaver).88 He presents the conflicting views of various past authorities (for
example, Pliny, Dioscorides, Andromachus, Horapollo, Aelian and Albertus Magnus)
regarding the beavers supposed self-castration. Albertus comes last; Gesner does not
indicate where he himself stands on the issue.89
In any given entrys final section, labelled H, Gesner roams farthest from what is the
common ground of scientific works of natural history today: it seems instead a grab-bag of
similitudes and stray observations. In analysing the final section of the entry on the fox, for
example, Ashworth provides a list of its epithets (crafty, cunning, deceitful and so on)
glossed with quotations from classical authorities; a lexicon of the meanings of the
adjective foxy; the fox as metaphor, including in Scripture; and proverbs about foxes.
The entry ends with a direct quotation from Alciatis four-line glossing of the fox in his
Emblemata, which Gesner lets stand without further comment. According to Ashworth,
Section H of these entries attests most fully to the emblematic world view as manifested
in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century natural histories. Knowledge of animal
symbolism, he writes, was considered an essential aspect of natural history; Gesners
was an age that delighted in the allegorical and the adagial and that regarded symbolic
meanings as anything but inconsequential.90
Compared with Gesners entries on other animals, in which Section H is often the
longest subdivision, that regarding the beaver is surprisingly brief, but in structure it
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follows the same pattern. Gesner notes opinions on the associations often made to the
words fiber and castor, discusses particular uses of their adjectival forms (for example,
hunters dogs in general being referred to as castorias vel castorides canes), considers why
the beaver has been called a river dog, and comments on the extent of its likeness to an
otter, to the Egyptian ichneumon, and to a fish. In closing, just as in the case of the fox, he
quotes in full the text that appeared underneath the beavers image in Alciatis Emblemata
that is, on how the beaver teaches by example to give ones purse to thieves in order to
save ones life but provides no further comment.91
By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the kind of information that Gesner included
in section H no longer counted as meaningful evidence. Thus, Jan Jonstons Historiae
naturalis (1650) eschewed the wider web of metaphorical associations.92 Michel Foucault
viewed this encyclopaedic work as a watershed, and Ashworth substantially agrees.93 He
finds apposite Franc ois Jacobs pithy observation regarding the wider transformation:
Living bodies were scraped clean, so to speak. They shook off their crust of analogies,
resemblances and signs, to appear in all the nakedness of their true outer shape . . . What was
read or related no longer carried the weight of what was seen . . . What counted was not so
much the code used by God for creating nature as that sought by man for understanding it.94
Already in the second line of his entry on the beaver (castor), amid a discussion of
etymology, Jonston inserts the tale of self-castration only to counter it, explicitly calling
those who believe it ridiculi (buffoons).95 Later, he goes into greater detail: the source of
castoreum is not the testicles (which, as Gesner said, are small and difficult of access) but
instead the swellings (tumores) astride the genitals.96 His account has nothing resembling
Gesners Section H. And, while he cites numerous modern authorities (for example,
Rondelet), he does not mention Alciati let alone quote from him.
Unlike Jonston, whose dismissal of much beaver lore was emphatic but incidental, and
who was silent about emblematic meanings, Thomas Browne (1605 82) in his
Pseudodoxia Epidemica set out to cleanse what he considered legitimate scientific
knowledge of nature from the encrustations of legend and foolishness.97 Among his
enquiries into vulgar and common errors is a section specifically on the beavers
supposed self-castration. He traces this conceit to Antiquity, speculating that it was in
origin hieroglyphical, then mythical for the Greeks, next being perpetuated by Aesop, and
by process of tradition, [it] stole into a total verity, which was but partially true, that is in
its covert sense and Morality.98 He finds nothing wrong with the story if it is used simply
to teach a moral lesson for example, that instead of trying to preserve everything, one
should sit down in the enjoyment of the greater good, though with the detriment and
hazard of the lesser for in this manner, the story conveys a real and useful Truth.99 He
is insistent, however, on severing the symbolic from the physical description. Like
Jonston, he asserts that the glands that contain the salutary castoreum are not testicles, but
rather are found in both sexes (though of greater size in the males), and have nothing to do
with procreation. Among the supposed authorities who had erred on this point, the most
inexcusable of all, he says, is Pliny; who having before him in one place the experiment
of Se[x]tius against it, sets down in another, that the Beavers of Pontus bite off their
testicles . . . 100 It is tolerable to term these bodily parts testicles if one is speaking
metaphorically, but that usage must not impinge upon anatomical analysis: Our discourse
hath overthrown his assertion, nor will Logick permit his illation; That is, from things
alike, to conclude a thing the same; and from an accidental convenience, that is a
similitude in place or figure, to infer a special congruity or substantial concurrence in
nature.101 Thus metaphorical connections do not reveal occult truths that a hieroglyph
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could encapsulate; instead, the associations are merely ornamental. In short, as the learned
came to view nature instrumentally and functionally rather than analogically and
poetically, qualitative associations built upon tradition and upon common-sense
perception of similarities no longer counted as evidence.
Of beavers and men
In sixteenth-century learned culture, the story of the beavers self-mutilation engendered a
wide constellation of meanings, some drawn from classical Antiquity and others from
early Christian writings and from the Middle Ages. The associations, which often did not
dovetail, ranged from the sacrifice of property to secure ones safety, to the confrontation
of necessity, to wilful self-harm, to paying the penalty for sin. The incorporation of the
story into a personal device perforce circumscribed the possibilities: when illustrated with
a carefully chosen image and combined with a particular motto, the lore gained specificity
so as to convey something of the essence of the bearer. That essence, as the emblematic
beaver exemplifies, could include the capacity to assert ones manhood under duress an
exercise of personal agency even as the animal portrayed at its centre was conspicuously
sacrificing the organs that, in early-modern Europe, most defined the male sex.
And yet, the impresa remained a multivalent signifier. For Giovio, its immediate
referent was a youthful experience in which he suppressed what was evidently an erotic
impulse. In the final decade of his life, he still identified with the beavers prudence in
dramatically sacrificing private parts for the good of a whole that remained male in gender
despite being drastically less so in its sex. By combining the image with the word
necessity, he gestured toward his own preferred motto, which he never managed to
incorporate into an impresa: Prudence is lesser than Fate. Both mottoes may speak in
turn to his perception of how historical events were unfolding in Italy within his lifetime,
and to his acute awareness of the contingency of his position as a courtier; circumstances
were narrowing the scope for meaningful action. In retelling and framing the beavers tale,
Giovio would appear to have conceived of prudence in a way that resembles how
Machiavelli had defined it in chapter 21 of The Prince: as knowing how to recognise the
qualities of the inconveniences and choosing the less bad as if it were good.102
Meanwhile, for both, the act of writing was itself a masculine form of self-assertion, of
making ones virtu` evident (if in a coded form) to those whose opinions really mattered.
That audience, in turn, was expected to be able to grasp meanings that extended far and
wide, below and beyond the literal interpretation. Informed, responsible reading was
essential for the device to project its authors essence effectively.
At least according to his own testimony, Bonifacio may have chosen the image of the
beavers sacrifice in a spirit of jest (alludebam), perhaps lightly mocking himself and the
sacrifice of possessions that his departure from Italy had entailed. The motto Thus to Live
as One Safe, while consonant with longstanding interpretations of the beavers story,
had added poignancy because of the danger that the Inquisition had posed to his life,
on account of which he had relinquished cherished possessions. Inclusion of the cryptic
O.T.E.S. inscription further deepens the meanings of the impresa.103 Effectively, the
beaver does not just teach a moral lesson: it represents something essential about
Bonificio, and its meaning forms in juxtaposition with the invocation of Ovids
Pythagoras, who similarly conceived of his exile from tyranny as voluntary, as somehow
a potent assertion of his will.
The gift of the beaver pelt and its accompanying poem to Basilius Amerbach served a
dual purpose. First, it was a decorous way of showing appreciation to ones patron:
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Bonifacio was presenting him with both a luxury commodity and an example of the
literary skill whose development Amerbach had facilitated. At the same time, the double
gift served to remind his learned friend of Bonifacios wit and erudition, and of his
belonging in the republic of letters. That Amerbach mistook just what Bonifacio had
intended by invoking the beavers sacrifice is beside the point: for their interchange
regarding its meaning both exemplified and perpetuated the learned dialogue that both
valued so highly. Like the portrait medal, copies of which would be given only to a choice
few, the poem accompanying the pelt was not only an expression of humanistic culture but
also an assertion of its creators prowess and of his membership in the learned elite.
For both humanists, finally, the choice of the beaver entailed a severing of sex from
gender: the animals prudent self-assertion literally consisted in desexing itself. Whereas
Giovio mitigated that fact by pointing to its sacrifice as an exercise of virtu` the capacity
for manly action Bonifacio tried to create an ironic distance from the story, both through
the whimsical gift of the pelt and through making light of his own sacrifices. For both men,
metaphorical emasculation was actually empowering, a way of exercising a modicum of
control within the constraints of circumstance, and of creating a space for self-assertion.
Despite the Europe-wide hegemony of a discourse in which male sexuality centred on and
emanated from the testicles, Giovio and Bonifacio managed to appropriate a tale of
castration in diverse ways that allowed them to gender themselves discursively as men.
By so doing, in words, emblems, and even so unlikely a semiophore as a beaver pelt, they
endowed castration with meanings that may have been as unexpected then as they would
be today.104
Few if any scholars now long for a return to faith in the universal harmonies
represented by emblems in sixteenth-century European thought. It is worth noting,
however, that the still-dominant tendency to view metaphor as merely ornamental, as
Browne did, is now vigorously contested. In particular, cognitive literary theorists and
linguists treat what they call conceptual metaphor not as epiphenomenal or decorative
but as constituting thought itself.105 Insofar as our minds do not compartmentalise discrete
images according to established categories of knowledge, metaphors in various realms of
thought may be in meaningful, creative dialogue with one another. And, inasmuch as that
dialogue is contingent and non-purposive, it has the potential to lead to new constellations
of meaning that present orthodoxy cannot grasp. Perhaps in time it may once more be
possible for a castrated beaver to scurry about in the discursive field of gender with its
male honour intact.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Brendan Kane and Laurie Nussdorfer for their generosity and for their
thorough and insightful vetting of drafts of this article. A short-term fellowship from the Folger
Shakespeare Library greatly facilitated the research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1.
Simons, Sex of Men. For other recent scholarly contributions that address the meanings
associated with testicles in the early-modern period, see especially Finucci, Manly
Masquerade. See also the essays in Hairston and Stephens, Body in Early Modern Italy and
Vigarello, Histoire de la virilite.

2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
555
Simons, Sex of Men, 291. The penis was relegated more or less to the status of a delivery
mechanism. Its erection, in fact, was medically explained in terms of semen (ibid., 14).
More generally: Sexual metaphors tended to be grounded in an understanding of the adult
male bodys fluids, heat and projective more than penetrative capacity (ibid., 3). On how a
Freudian reading of phallus as exclusively the penis has distorted the understanding of premodern sexuality, see ibid., esp. 66 72.
On the probability that Alciati and Giovio had earlier discussed emblems while in Pavia, see
Minonzio, Emblemistica pavese? with discussion of the beaver emblem at 165 7. On
Alciatis establishment of the genre of the emblem book and on the books subsequent
proliferation, see Gehl, Humanism.
Imprese, unlike Alciatis emblems, did not need to include an epigram, but in the hands of
some authors they did so. Thus in his expansion upon Giovios dialogue on imprese, Gabriele
Simeoni glossed Giovios device of the beaver with his own four-line poem: Poi chil castor
de i fugitivi piei / Sente i nervi doler, mancar la lena, // Di quel si priva, challa morte il mena.
/ Necessita` constringe huomini & Dei.
Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 247 9, quotation at 248.
Giovio, Dialogo dellimprese, in Opera, 9: 351 443. In 1551 Giovio dedicated the work to
Cosimo I de Medici, Duke of Florence. The printer of its first edition (1555), Antonio Barre,
significantly underestimated demand: According to Girolamo Ruscelli, not a single copy
could be found in Venice, not even at a price of ten scudi, for the entire Rome press run had
been exhausted in only a few months. Nuovo, Book Trade, 110.
Aesop, Complete Fables, 113 (no. 153). On the problems of dating the origins of these fables
with precision, see the translators notes in ibid., ix xli. Herodotus, Histories, 4.109, claims
that beavers testicles are useful for healing diseases of the womb, but does not tell the story of
the beavers self-castration.
Ibid., 113.
Cicero, Speeches, 271 (Pro Scauro, frag. 2.7).
Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 21 (1.9).
Juvenal, Sixteen Satires, 94 (12: 34 6); imitatus castora, qui se / eunuchum ipse facit
cupiens evadere damno / testiculi; adeo medicatum intellegit inguen.
Pliny, Natural History, 79 (8.109).
Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, 99 (2.26). I follow the English translation of 1655 by John
Goodyer. For the Latin, see Dioscorides, De medicinali materia, 159 60 (2.22). Where the
former has stones, the latter reads testes.
Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, 99 (2.26).
Pliny, Natural History, 32.13.
Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals, 54 (6.34). The Greek words rendered by Scholfield
as great skill and ingenuity have somewhat wider resonances: respectively, pano sophos
(with great skill) can also mean very cleverly, and panourgos (with ingenuity) might also be
rendered adept in every action.
See the discussion of the texts authorship, place of origin (probably Alexandria), and date of
composition in Physiologus, trans. Curley, x xxi.
Physiologus, trans. Curley, 52. For the Latin, see the critical edition of the Y text (the best
surviving version) in Physiologus, ed. Carmody, 101 34, at 128 9. The apostle cited is
Paul, at Romans 13:7.
Some manuscripts omit the passage that characterises the animals sacrifice as manly
(viriliter): see, for example, Physiologus, ed. Heider, 34 5. According to Michael J. Curley,
in the Physiologus the details of the ancient legend are left largely intact, and so in this
particular case (unlike those of the descriptions of several other animals) the allegory has
simply been appended to a pagan model rather than actively integrated into it: Physiologus,
trans. Curley, xxiii. The beaver story does not appear in the verse version of the Physiologus
by Theobaldus (c. eleventh to twelfth centuries) as edited by P. T. Eden: Theobaldus,
Physiologus.
Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 85.
Ibid., 86. Hassig suggests that the distortion of scale may serve to emphasise how major a vice
lust was, but notes that the subject matter also provided artists with a rare opportunity to
depict genitalia prominently. There remained leeway for interpretation even in the fairly
homogenous genre of the bestiary, as one sees in the Bestiaire damour of Richard de
556
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
K. Gouwens
Fournival (1201 60): in this case, the female object of desire is enjoined to give up her
heart (here a euphemism for virginity) just as the beaver does its testicles, and is assured that
I am pursuing you only for that. Ibid., 92; and, for the passage itself, see Richart de
Fournival, Bestiaire, 396.
Horapollo, Hieroglyphics, trans. Boas, 85 (bk. 2, 85). On the probable identity of the author,
Horapollo Niliacus, with the Alexandrian scholar Horapollo the Younger (c.450 500 CE),
see Curran, Egyptian Renaissance, 23. Boas translates from a 1727 edition of the
Hieroglyphica. It may be that a variant in that edition (which I have not had the opportunity to
examine) explains his specifying the self-harm as being suicide.
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, book 12, 2: 21 (Isidore explicitly cites the passages in Cicero
and Juvenal detailed above); Albertus Magnus, Man and the Beasts, 90 (bk. 22, 39). Unlike
Isidore, Albertus specified that hunters, not beavers, performed the castration from which the
name supposedly derived.
Bernard Silvestris, De Mundi universitate, 22 (1.3.228 9): Prodit item castor proprio de
corpore velox / Reddere quas sequitur hostis avarus opes. On Guillaume de Lorris, see
Friedrich, Insinuating Indeterminate Gender, which also discusses (at 26472, 275)
other medieval instances of the trope of beavers self-castration. According to Delcorno,
La tradizione, 552, the classical stories and medieval bestiary lore became intertwined in
the encyclopaedias of Isidore of Seville, as well as of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Vincent of
Beauvais (both twelfth-century); but as noted above, Isidores account of the beavers
sacrifice is strictly classical in sources and tone.
Gerald of Wales, Journey, 176 (1.3).
Galli, First Humanistic Translations, 55 (Guarino), 100 (Barbaro) and 176 (Valla).
Babrius and Phaedrus, Fables, 413. Accame, Note scite, came to my attention too late for
inclusion in the body of this article. At 45 48, Accame describes the comments on beavers
that survive in the notes of the Roman humanist Pomponio Leto (1428 98). These include
both critical analysis of classical texts (for example, he assesses particular uses of the words
fiber and castor) and the recollection of what he himself had seen when travelling in the Black
Sea region (for example, he identifies three classes among fibri that are distinct both in
appearance and in social role, and he notes that the locals often raise and keep them in the
house).
Alciati, Emblemata, 165: Aere quandoque salutem redimendam. Around the same time,
Ludovico Ariosto invoked the self-castrating beaver in his Orlando furioso, XXVII, 56: 3 8;
57: 1 4. See Delcorno, La tradizione, 551.
Alciati, 165: Huius ab exemplo disces non parcere rebus, / Et vitam ut redimas, hostibus aera
dare.
Camerarius, Symbolorum et emblematum centuriae tres, pt. 2, 186 87, no. CXIII (MODO
VITA SVPERSIT): Ut vivat Castor sibi testes amputat ipse, / Tu quoque, si qua nocent,
abjice / tutus eris. The Latin phrase modo vita supersit is drawn from Virgil, Georgics,
3.10. Camerarius goes on to cite Giovios glossing of the device with the Greek ANAGKE
(necessity), and he concludes the entry with the maxim Dura est necessitas.
Ripa, Iconologia. Although this book glosses numerous emblems, the 1593 edition lacks
illustrations altogether.
Ibid., 471: questo animale irragionevole il quale per privarsi di sospetto, si taglia quel
membro, che lo fa state inquieto. In this edition (1645) of the text, the beavers image
appears on a page adjacent to another emblem for peace that portrays the mythical halcyon
bird, which lays its eggs on a floating nest when the sea has been calmed.
Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (1556). For a brief biography of Valeriano (1477 1558), see
Gaisser, Pierio Valeriano, 1 23.
See the summary by Anthony Grafton in Horapollo, Hieroglyphs, xix. The first printed edition
is Horapollo, Hieroglyphica (1505). The text had earlier been translated into Latin by one of
Valerianos teachers, Georgio Valla (1447 1500). Valerianos uncle and mentor, Fra Urbano
Bolzanio (1442 1524), had helped to popularise the study of Horapollo and hieroglyphs in
northern Italy: see Gaisser, Pierio Valeriano, 270; and Sider, Horapollo, 17.
Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, 94v 102r ( Book 13).
Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, 98v: Nam & adulteri eadem affici poena solent, ut deprehensi
praesectis testibus dimmitantur. He also notes that the beavers resemblance in front to a land
557
animal, and in back to a fish, makes it for some an embodiment of the distinction between
days of feast and those of fasting, when meat could not be eaten.
37. Unlike Alciatis emblems, Giovios imprese did not include the third element of an epigram.
38. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 249, close paraphrase. On occasion Giovio violated his own rule
about not including the human form.
39. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 248 9, quotation at 248.
40. Giovio, Opera, 9: 438.
41. Pliny, Natural History, 331 32 (10.30).
42. See Frigo, Il padre; and the essay in this issue by Laurie Nussdorfer, who writes that
phlegmatic, exacting, tactful, and patient vigilance was the predominant characteristic of the
model patriarch in prescriptive literature for maestri di casa. Nussdorfer, Masculine
hierarchies in Roman ecclesiastical households.
43. He declined the offer.
44. Giovio, Opera, 9: 396. For his source, see Pliny, Natural History, 23: 26 50; 16: 222 23.
45. Giovio, Opera, 9: 396: Inclinata resurgit; alludendo all virtu` del Duca, la quale non aveva
potuto opprimere la furia della fortuna contraria, benche per alcun tempo fusse abbassata.
46. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 10; transl. from Giovio, Opera, 9: 419.
47. Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 225. Giovios Anterotica is not known to have survived.
Like his composition of the impresa of the beaver, it very likely dates from his sojourn in
Pavia in 1506 11. Evidently it participated in a tradition of literary remedies for unrequited
love. See Franco Minonzios comments in Giovio, Dialogo, 2: 545 46 n. 48. Minonzio gives
particular attention to the Anterotica, sive de amoris generibus of Pietro Edo (c.1427 1504),
written in 1492, which discusses love as an illness of youth, and around half of which draws
closely upon Ovids Remedia amoris.
48. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 10.
49. The goons who castrated Abelard had been employed by his beloved Heloses uncle, who
was avenging what he perceived as Abelards dishonouring of her and, thereby, the males of
her birth family.
50. On the seeming instability in Machiavellis use of the word, see for example Kahn, Virtu`.
Translators solutions have ranged widely. At one extreme, Bill Connell consistently renders
virtu` as virtue, carefully explaining however that Machiavelli uses it to refer to a persons
or a things intrinsic and essential strength, regardless of whether this is morally good or bad.
Machiavelli, Prince, trans. Connell, 41n5. Mark Musa, in contrast, renders virtu` with 12
different English words, as he explains in Machiavelli, Prince, trans. Musa, x xv.
51. Giovio, Opera, 9: 419: il fato, che non e` altro che volunta` divina, la quale ha piu` forza che la
virtu` e solerzia umana e linganna molto. The beavers sacrifice, a literal emasculation,
lessens the hunters scope for displaying prowess, but at the same time can empower others,
inasmuch as the testicles have molta virtu` in medicina.
52. See the analysis in Gouwens, Meanings of Masculinity. Testicular injuries, however, were
not uncommon, and could be treated through orchidectomy (surgical excision of the testes).
See Wailes, Potency in Fortunatus, 7.
53. On the popularity in the Renaissance of the topos of reason triumphing over youthful desire,
see Milligan, Masculinity and Machiavelli, 166 7, esp. 167n44.
54. Letter to Marco Contarini, trans. in Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 117.
55. Pasquinate, 1: 31112 (no. 314). In contrast, Giovio himself at one point referred to Paul III
(pope, 1534 49) as having a good pair of balls (un bon paro di coglioni).
56. For example, on his disappointment at not gaining a substantial pension from Charles V at
Bologna in 1530, an incident recounted by Juan Gines de Sepulveda, see Zimmermann, Paolo
Giovio, 155 6. Most infamously, Giovio wrote to Rodolfo Pio of Carpi in 1535 that [a] man
cannot be expected to rack his brains at his own expense. Trans. in ibid., 136. See also
Giovios juxtaposition of Clements ill fortune with his lack of liberality (implied but not
stated) in Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 95.
57. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 163.
58. Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 93 5: Though during this entire deadly war I often
outspokenly condemned some points of wrongheaded counsel or lax administration that
I foresaw would lead to this lamentable outcome, I do not on that account think that the popes
plans, which were generally very reasonable, ought to be disparaged. Though expressed
diplomatically, the sense that his advice has been ignored is clear. Later in the dialogue (ibid.,
558
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
K. Gouwens
353) he laments that the pontiff was too swayed by the authority of men whose spirit had
long ago been rendered unmanly by fatal avarice. (ibid., 352: aliquorum etiam quorum
animus exitiali avaritia iam pridem erat effeminatus).
Note in particular Ascoli, Machiavellis Gift, 251 2, with somewhat different emphasis:
The image of Fortuna as a woman just waiting to be raped, usually assumed to be
prototypically Machiavellian, is instead the sign of a total exclusion of prudence, and hence of
Machiavellis vision, from the historical domain of politics, and can even be said to dramatise
in the most brutal terms the authors sense of his own vulnerability to princely violence.
Compare Giovios motto: FATO PRVDENTIA MINOR.
Ascoli, Machiavellis Gift, 248.
This is Lorenzo de Medici the Younger, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519), the grandson of Lorenzo
the Magnificent de Medici (d. 1492). According to a later sixteenth-century account by
Riccardo Riccardi (1558 1612), Machiavellis presentation of his manuscript to this prince
was upstaged by anothers gift of two hunting dogs: Lorenzo gave greater thanks and
responded in a friendlier way to the man who had given him the dogs than to [Machiavelli].
Machiavelli, Prince, trans. Connell, 142.
Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 169.
Muscettolas advice here calls to mind Lucio Paolo Rosellos comment in his Ritratto del vero
governo del principe dallesempio vivo del gran Cosimo de Medici that the prudent man is
compelled by necessity . . . and accommodates himself to the times, now concealing, now
revealing, as circumstances allow. See Martin, Myths, 52, in the context of a nuanced
discussion of prudential rhetoric in the Cinquecento.
Giovio, Opera, 2:38, lett. no. 158 (15 August 1546).
Spagnolo, Giovios Puns, 521.
Gaisser, Pierio Valeriano, 165 7.
Giovio, Opera, 2: 28 29: son celebrati i boni omini eccellenti morti, quali non son stati
eunuchi.
See, for example, Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 13 17.
Lettere di Principi, 99v (Girolamo Negri to Marcantonio Michiel, 1 March 1523): Harei
salutato il Giovio . . . E` in rotta con lAlcionio [Pietro Alcionio], perche gli e` stato detto, che
lAlcionio scrive historia, la quale impresa egli non vuol cedere ad alcuno.
Cf. the reference in the preceding note to history-writing as something Giovio regarded as his
impresa (here, in the sense of undertaking), possibly a pun on Negris part.
Talvacchia, Taking Positions.
The woodcut portrait is reproduced in Bonifacio, Miscellanea hymnorum, fol. N3r. In the
woodcut he is described as in the fiftieth year of his life, in the year 1567.
Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 111 15.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15. 61 62; trans. mine.
The following two paragraphs draw upon Caccamo, Bonifacio; Church, Italian Reformers,
273 303; and Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio.
Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 113: Castor sequentes quum canes prope aspicit, /
Iamiam capi et discerpier // Miser timet, nullamque qua evadat viam, / Nullam salutem
respicit. // Portare secum cogitat quod expetunt, / causam esse mortis id suae. // Scindit sibi
tum dentibus testes suis, / Hos proiicit, tutusque abit. // Ratus bene hoc cessisse toti corpori, /
Quum sola pars abscissa sit. // Fecisse stulte dixeris, AMERBACHI, / Si fecimus nos sic
quoque? Trans. mine.
Ibid.: Quam pulcre illud quod communi more ego de castore ad bona, quae in patria reliqui,
alludebam, tu id ad divina retorsisti! Qui sunt mundani, quemadmodum et ego, non est mirum
si humano more et videant et sentiant et loquantur. At qui divino aguntur motu, ita vident,
sentiunt et loquuntur, quemadmodum et tu. Trans. mine.
Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, trans. Fasanini, chap. 64: [quomodo] hominem cui propria fraus
perniciosam relegationem attulerit, cuique fuga sua noceat significare volentes, castorem
pingunt[?] English trans. mine. Cf. Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, trans. Trebazio, 41:
Hominem sibi ipsi damna ferentem cum volunt dicare, castorem pingunt. hic enim
venatoribus insequentibus testiculos suos demordens, abiectos relinquit. On the former
translation of Horapollos text, see Drysdall, Filippo Fasanini.
Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 119: impiissimi, stultissimi et crudelissimi
antichristi Ioannis Petri Caraffae alias Pauli paparum quarti.

80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
559
Ibid., 117. According to Church, Italian Reformers, 277, the anecdote was deployed in this
anonymous Jesuit text as evidence of Lutheran leanings.
Thus George Boas writes in the introduction to his edition of Horapollo that Valerianos
great weakness, which was a weakness of all the Neoplatonists also, lay in the assumption
that the ancient myths had an allegorical meaning which could be made consistent, that the
names of the gods were univalent, and that Orphic and Neoplatonic interpretations of their
meanings were correct. Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, trans. Boas, 26.
Ashworth, Emblematic Natural History, 20.
Ibid., 35, 36.
Ibid., 22.
Gesner, Historiae animalium, 1: 336 44.
Here (ibid., 337) he relates the story from Pliny and Solinus that one bitten by a beaver can
only be cured by hearing the crashing of the animals teeth, but immediately notes Albertus
Magnuss dissenting opinion.
Ibid., 340.
Ibid., 340: Castoris testiculos qui hodie venduntur, longe maiores esse, quam ut genuini &
veri castoris videantur . . .
Ibid., 338.
Ashworth, Emblematic Natural History, 20 2; quotations at 21 and 22.
Gesner, Historiae animalium, 344.
Jonston, Historiae naturalis, 1: 102 4.
Foucault, Order of Things, 128 30. See also Ashworth, Natural History and the Emblematic
World View, 317, and 330n41 on Foucaults sloppiness in mistaking the 1657 Amsterdam
edition of Jonston for the first printing, which in fact dates to 1650.
Jacob, Logic of Life, 28. In contrast to Jacob, however, Ashworth downplays the importance
of Bacon and Descartes in favour of the difficulties of incorporating into wide-ranging natural
histories those animals newly discovered in the Americas, which lacked the apparatus of
similitudes.
Jonston, Historiae naturalis, 1: 102.
Ibid., 1: 103.
Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
Ibid., 144 (Book 3, chap. 4, Of the Bever, comprises 144 7).
Ibid., 145.
Ibid., 146.
Ibid., 147.
Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Connell, 111 (in chap. 21). Compare ibid., 88 (in chap. 15).
Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 111, emphasises the separation of the letters from the
motto, and notes how in the woodcut portrait of 1567 the initials took the place that in an
earlier image had been held by his identity as marquis of Oria (Oriae Marchio). On the medal,
however, the initials appear immediately below the image of the self-masticating beaver: they
are, in my view, integral to the entire conceit.
It is difficult to imagine the motif of self-castration having currency in academe today, even in
those instances where its metaphorical resonance might be uncannily appropriate. For the
definition and significance of semiophores, see Pomian, Histoire culturelle; Paul, Poetry in
the Museums, 184, offers a pithy summary. For a recent deployment of Pomians theories, see
Ago, Il gusto.
Notable contributions include Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think; George Lakoff,
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things; and Lakoff and Johnsons accessible primer,
Metaphors We Live By.
Notes on contributor
Kenneth Gouwens is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, USA. His
publications include Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome,
(Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1998); and a critical edition and translation of Paolo Giovio, Notable Men
and Women Dialogus de viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus (I Tatti Renaissance Library
Series, no. 56) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
560
K. Gouwens
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Gouwens2015 - Emasculation As Empowerment - Lessons of Beaver Lore For Two Italian Humanists

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire, 2015

Emasculation as empowerment: lessons of beaver lore for two

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(Received 24 July 2014; accepted 9 March 2015)

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire

performance in early-modern Europe. When analysed in their particularities, these

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire

circumstances they could deploy an image of auto-emasculation as social currency. Their

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The genre of the emblem

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire

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characteristics and behaviour. Although he makes no mention of the dissimulation that

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire

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politically and militarily powerful dedicatee, Lorenzo de Medici (d.1519),

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Bonifacio and the safety of exile

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire

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European Review of HistoryRevue europeenne dhistoire

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