Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern I PDF

Publications of the
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
Essays and Studies, 22
Series Editor Konrad Eisenbichler
Victoria University
in the
University of Toronto
The Poetics of Masculinity
in Early Modern Italy and Spain
Edited by
Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus
Toronto
2010
CRRS Publications
Victoria University in the University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1K7, Canada
Tel: 416/585–4465 Fax: 416/585–4430
Email: crrs.publications@utoronto.ca Web: www.crrs.ca

© 2010 by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
All Rights Reserved
Printed in Canada
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cover illustration: Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino) (1483–1520), “Self Portrait with a Friend” (oil
on canvas). Louvre, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
Typesetting, cover design, and production: Iter Inc.

Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Illustrations 8
Contributors 9
Introduction
Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus 13
1. Pederastic Insemination, or Dante in the Grammar

Classroom
Gary Cestaro 41
2. Epic’s Endless Deferral: Vernacular Masculinities in the

Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici
Jane Tylus 75
3. Loving the Other: Masculine Subjectivities in Early Modern

Europe
Carla Freccero 101
4. Castiglione: Love, Power and Masculinity

Ian Frederick Moulton 119
5. The Poetics of Modern Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century

Spain
Leah Middlebrook 143
6. Performing Masculinity in the Land of the Man-Killing

Women
Mary-Michelle DeCoste 169
7. Proving Masculinity Before Women: Laura Terracina and
Chiara Matraini Writing on Warfare
Gerry Milligan 185
8. “Quanto concede la guerra”: Epic Masculinity and the

Education of Desire in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata
Marc David Schachter 213
9. “Templa, pequeño joven, templa brío”: Pretty Boys and

Queer Soldiers in Miguel de Cervantes’s Numancia
Harry Vélez Quiñones 241
10. In Earnest and in Jest: Disciplining Masculinity through

Narration and Humour in The Spanish Galateo
José A. Rico-Ferrer 267
11. Performing Masculinity, Nationalism, and Honour in

Early Modern Spain: Calderón de la Barca’s El pintor de su
deshonra
Dian Fox 293
12. Of Pretty Fops and Spectacular Sodomites: El lindo don

Diego and the Performance of Effeminacy in Early Modern
Spain
José R. Cartagena-Calderón 317
13. Men with Style. Sprezzatura, Costume, and Movement for

Men in the Spanish Comedia
María M. Carrión 351
14. Epilogue
Josiah Blackmore 381
Index
Jessica Goethals 385
Acknowledgments
This collection of essays originated from four panels on masculinity organ-

ized at the 2007 Renaissance Society of America conference. We owe a debt
of gratitude to Konrad Eisenbichler for his initial interest in the book and
then for his sound guidance throughout the publication process. We would
like to thank Jesús Alcántara and The Newberry Library for permissions to
reproduce photographs of the theatrical production of El lindo don Diego
and a page of Agostino Dati’s Elegantiolae. The thoughtful comments of two
anonymous readers helped make the diverse chapters more coherent. The
Introduction was vastly improved by Michael Armstrong, whose comments
on an earlier draft reminded two Italianists that often discussions of national
literary traditions bear a bias that is difficult to shed. Our deepest gratitude
goes to Dr. Joseph Connors, director of the Harvard Center for Renaissance
Studies (Villa I Tatti), for support offered through the generous Lila Acheson
Wallace-Reader’s Digest Publications subsidy and to the I Tatti grant admin-
istrator Amanda Dale Smith. We would also like to thank the Villa I Tatti
fellows (2007–08) and staff who graciously enabled our discussions during
Gerry Milligan’s year at the Villa, and in particular Michael Rocke, Holly
Hurlburt, and Cynthia Klestinec, all of whom read parts of the manuscript.
On this side of the Atlantic, we would like to acknowledge our wonderful col-
leagues at the College of Staten Island-CUNY and New York University who
have provided us with continual inspiration. And finally, we thank Ben Med-
ley and Bill Klein for their continuous support and encouragement through-
out the project.
Gerry Milligan Jane Tylus

College of Staten Island —CUNY New York University
7
Illustrations
1. Joos van Gent (Joos van Wassenhove, fl. 1460–75) (also attributed
to Pedro Berruguete). “Federigo da Montefeltro and his son Guido-
baldo.” Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy / Giraudon / The Bridgeman
Art Library.
2. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488–1576). “Allegory of the Battle of

Lepanto, 1573–1575” (oil on canvas). Prado, Madrid, Spain / Photo
© Boltin Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library.
3. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488–1576). “The Emperor Charles V

(1500–58) on the Horseback in Muhlberg, 1548” (oil on canvas). Pra-
do, Madrid, Spain / The Bridgeman Art Library.
4. Agostino Dati (1420–1478) Elegantiolae, Venice: Giovanni Battista

da Sessa, 1491. Photo Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chica-
go, INC 5272.9 fol. 1r.
5. Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1497) “St. Augustine Taken by his Parents to

the Grammar Teacher at Tagaste” (Sant’Agostino, San Gimignano).
Photo Credit: Scala/ Art Resource, NY.
6. Fernando Conde as the figurón in El lindo don Diego (Festival de Te-

atro Clásico en la Villa del Caballero, Olmedo Clásico 2007). Photo
Credit: Jesús Alcántara.
7. Fernando Conde as don Diego and Alejandra Torray as doña Inés in

El lindo don Diego (Festival de Teatro Clásico en la Villa del Cabal-
lero, Olmedo Clásico 2007). Photo Credit: Jesús Alcántara.
8. Fernando Conde as don Diego engaging the mirrors in El lindo don

Diego (Festival de Teatro Clásico en la Villa del Caballero, Olmedo
Clásico 2007). Photo Credit: Jesús Alcántara.
8
Contributors
Josiah Blackmore is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Por-

tuguese at the University of Toronto. He is co-editor of Queer Iberia (Duke,
1999), and author of Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disrup-
tion of Empire (Minnesota, 2002) and Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and
the Writing of Africa (Minnesota, 2009).
María M. Carrión is Professor of Spanish and Women's Studies at

Emory University and Professor of Translation at The University of Puerto
Rico, Río Piedras. She specializes in the cultural and literary production of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, with a particular focus on gender
and sexualities, dramatic theory and performance, legal writings and practic-
es, and architectural theory and practices. Author of two books and a variety
of essays, she has most recently published Subject Stages: Marriage, Theatre,
and the Law in Early Modern Spain with The University of Toronto Press.
José R. Cartagena-CalderÓn is Associate Professor of Romance

Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. He is the author of Masculini-
dades en obras: el drama de la hombría en la España imperial (2008) and of ar-
ticles on the literary and cultural production of Spain and the Americas from
the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. His research addresses
the need in literary and cultural studies for more elaborate understandings of
the relations of various masculinities to power, empire, ethnicity, class, and
sexuality in historically specific contexts.
Gary Cestaro is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of

Modern Languages at DePaul University, Chicago, where he also directs the
LGBTQ Studies Program. He is the author of Dante and the Grammar of the
Nursing Body (Notre Dame, 2003) and Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian
Literature and Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004). His essay “Is Ulysses Queer?
The Subject of Greek Love in Inferno 15 and 26” will be published in the forth-
coming Dante’s Plurilingualism: Authority, Vulgarization, Subjectivity.
Mary DeCoste is Associate Professor of Italian in the School of Lan-

guages and Literatures at the University of Guelph. Her book, Hopeless Love:
9
10 The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain
Boiardo, Ariosto, and Narratives of Queer Female Desire was published by the
University of Toronto Press in 2009.
Dian Fox is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Women’s and Gender Stud-
ies at Brandeis University. She has published books on political expression in
seventeenth-century Spanish drama and a bilingual critical edition of Cal-
derón’s El médico de su honra, along with numerous articles on gender and
social issues in early modern Spanish poetry, prose, and theatre. She is cur-
rently working on Hercules and the Half-Blood Prince: Icons of Masculinity in
Early Modern Spain.
Carla Freccero is Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and His-

tory of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she
has been teaching since 1991. She also directs the UCSC Center for Cultural
Studies. She has published books and articles on early modern European con-
tinental texts, critical theory, feminist and queer theory, and popular culture.
Her most recent book is Queer/Early/Modern (Duke, 2006), and she is at work
on a book tentatively titled Animate Figures, about animality and figuration.
Leah Middlebrook is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Imperial Lyric: New Poetry
and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (Pennsylvania State, 2009) as well
as of essays on early modern Spanish poetics and on comparative issues in
Spanish and French theatre. She is currently working on questions of poiesis,
modernity and the digital universe.
Gerry Milligan is Assistant Professor of Italian at the College of Staten

Island—CUNY. He has published several articles on issues of masculinity in
the Courtier, Machiavelli and Gli ingannati. He is currently finishing a book
project on gender and war in Italian Renaissance literature which he began
during his fellowship year (2007–08) at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti.
Ian Frederick Moulton , Head of Interdisciplinary Humanities and

Communication in the School of Letters and Sciences at Arizona State Uni-
versity, is a cultural historian and literary scholar whose research focuses on
the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern literature. He is the
author of Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Ox-
Contributors 11
ford, 2000), and editor and translator of Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria, an

erotic and political dialogue from Renaissance Italy (Routledge, 2003). He is
currently writing a book on four influential texts dealing with love and sexu-
ality in sixteenth century Europe.
José Antonio Rico-Ferrer is Assistant Professor of Spanish at

Wayne State University. A specialist in early modern Spanish literature, he is
the author of a several articles on issues of masculinity, rewriting, and Other-
ness. He is currently working on his book project, entitled Anatomy of the
Courtly Writer: Self-Fashioning, Masculinity, and Homosociality in Early Mod-
ern Spanish Treatises of Conduct.
Marc David Schachter is author of Voluntary Servitude and the

Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Ash-
gate, 2008). His research tends to combine an interest in questions of sexual-
ity and gender with philology and book history. He is currently a fellow at
Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies,
where he is working on a second book project entitled “The Uses of Desire:
Philology, Epistemology, Politics.”
Jane Tylus is Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Humanities

Initiative at New York University. Her recent work includes Reclaiming Cath-
erine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others (Chicago, 2009),
and her translation of the complete poetry of Gaspara Stampa is forthcom-
ing from the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a book
entitled Imagining Siena, as well as on a collection of essays, Early Modern
Pastorals: From Poliziano to Poussin.
Harry Vélez Quiñones is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the Uni-

versity of Puget Sound. He has written many articles on masculinity and
sexuality in Spanish theatre. He is the author of Monstrous Displays: Repre-
sentation and Perversion in Spanish Literature (1999), and his current book
project is titled What Matters are Loose Ends: Reading Lope de Vega in the
Twenty-First Century.
Introduction
In the famous double portrait of the Duke of Urbino and his son painted
around 1477, Federico da Montefeltro sits in full armour, draped by a mantle
reminiscent of a juridical robe, reading a large book that bears the seal of his
vast ducal library (fig. 1). Guidobaldo, his sole male heir, stands beside him,
gazing into the distance. The pose purports to be a candid moment of father
and son. Yet, the elaborate if not unlikely costumes remind us that this is not
a glimpse of daily life but rather an idealized representation of, among oth-
er things, elite masculinity. In this stylized world of the Italian Renaissance
court, arms, letters and power are inseparable from manhood itself.
Far from pretending to offer a candid glimpse of everyday life is
another double portrait from almost exactly a century later, that of King
Phillip II of Spain and his infant son, Don Fernando (fig. 2). Painted by the
aging Titian, “The Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto,” as it is sometimes called,
is primarily a testament to the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in a decisive
battle in 1571 by the united forces of Spain, the papacy, and Venice. But it
also attests to Phillip’s potency as “father”, as he lifts the young Fernando
toward the winged figure of Victory to celebrate the dual accomplishments
of military trounce and paternity (fig. 2). Defeated manhood is exhibited in
the part of the portrait closest to the spectator, the half-nude Turk who lies in
chains while Philip and Fernando turn their gaze elsewhere.
The present volume, The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy
and Spain, considers the gendered discourses raised by the two portraits by
tackling the “poetics” of masculinity in its double sense.1 That is to say, the
articles in this volume address not only how masculinity is represented in
literary texts, but how the different representational strategies in such texts
produce masculinity. Ours is by no means the first work to grapple with
questions of early modern male identity, though most studies have been formed
in primarily historical and social terms. Most notably Richard Trexler, Guido
Ruggiero, David Gilmore, Julian Pitt-Rivers, and Mar Mártinez Góngora
have all explored the anxieties of early modern Italian and Spanish men in
1
The editors would like to thank Leah Middlebrook for allowing us to borrow our
volume title from her essay included within.
13
the context of Renaissance social normativizing forces.2 Anthropologists have

also taken an interest in defining masculinity not merely for the elite, but for
lower-class and peasant men.3 Not insignificantly, much of the work that has
been done in what is still a relatively small field has emerged from within
sexuality and queer studies, often grounded on demographic research, as is
Michael Rocke’s seminal work on Florence or Federico Garza Carvajal’s study
of Andalucia and Mexico.4
Spanish medieval and early modern studies in particular have
benefited from the collection of essays found in Queer Iberia edited by Josiah
Blackmore and Gregory Hutcheson (Duke University Press, 1999). This work,
which has done much to nuance our understandings of sexuality in medieval
and early modern Spanish history and literature, has been a springboard
for research on Spanish masculinity, as well as for the volume Queer Italia
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004). As is evident from the bibliographies of the
articles in the present volume, masculinity has also become a critical lens
through which to study early modern literature, especially Spanish Golden
Age theatre. Sidney Donnell’s Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain,
Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity along with groundbreaking
works by authors of the articles in this book attest to the broadening of
research on the Spanish comedia.5 In Italian studies, Valeria Finucci’s Manly
Masquerade is one of the few monographs devoted to the subject of early
modern masculinity6, but studies on effeminacy in the Renaissance court
2
Trexler, Sex and Conquest; Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love; Gilmore, Misogyny: The
Male Malady; Gilmore, Manhood in the Making; Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem; and
Martínez Góngora, El hombre atemperado.
3
Thus Stanley Brandes’ 1980 Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian
Folklore has been a model for more recent work such as that of Alyson Poska, who con-
tends that the economically and socially disenfranchised peasants of early modern Spain
had to find mechanisms for asserting their manliness very different from those of their
elite counterparts; see Poska, “A Married Man is a Woman.”
4
Rocke, Forbidden Friendships; Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn.
5
On Spanish theatre in particular see Cartagena-Calderón, Masculinidades en obras
and Vélez Quiñones, “Deficient Masculinity.”
6
For works on masculinity in Renaissance Italian art and literature, see Levy, Re-
Membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence; Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini; and Saslow,
Ganymede in the Renaissance.
Introduction 15
have long characterized scholarship on the prescriptive literature of Italy,

where the Cortegiano has dominated.7
This volume, however, proposes that we consider early modern
masculinity from a somewhat different angle. It not only poses the question
of what seminal literary and dramatic texts of the period from these two
Catholic countries might tell us about masculinity, but asks how issues of
masculinity may have shaped literary form itself. That is to say, what forms did
the expression of masculinity take in a period whose cultural achievements
so often hinge on the definition of what it meant to be a “man” on a newly
global stage? The volume as a whole offers a new way of thinking about
literary histories, while the articles stand on their own as local reflections
on the relationship between gendered meanings and the sophisticated, self-
conscious, representational form of language called literature. Or as Carla
Freccero suggests, the literary can be a kind of language that “is odd, strange,
aslant,” and thus poised to ask provocative and unsettling questions.8
Yet, to begin our foray into matters of literary masculinity we choose
not to start with a text, but to return to the two double portraits invoked at the
beginning of this essay. Separated by a century, they epitomize on the one hand
with the portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and his son an Italy still defined
by autonomous cities and courts. On the other hand, Titian’s work of Phillip
II and Don Fernando alludes to a unified Spanish kingdom pre-eminent in
the Mediterranean world. Both paintings, completed by artists foreign to
their subjects, attest not only to the fluid exchange of masculine ideals across
national borders, but to the modes by which masculine representations,
Spanish and Italian, codify elite manliness. In engaging these justly famous
images for what they might tell us about the constitution of Spanish and
Italian masculinity in its most elite version, we can begin to assess the ways in
which the martial, religious, and paternal were interwoven in early modern
Europe and how they shaped the dynamics of artistic form. At the same time,
they do so in a way that depicts a manhood which is essentially unobtainable.
Both Titian and the unknown artist of Federico and Guidobaldo’s portrait
produced models calibrated not only to inspire their male spectators but
to haunt them in their efforts to acquire masculinity. By poignant twists of
7
Milligan, “The Politics of Effeminacy”; Richards, “‘A Wonton Trade of Living?’”;
Quint, “Courtier, Prince, Lady”; Trafton, “Politics and the Praise of Women”; and Kelly,
“Did Women have a Renaissance?”
8
Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 5.
fate, the two works also remark on those models’ vulnerabilities to historical
forces beyond their subjects’ — or artists’ — control.
***
The double portrait of the condottiere Federico da Montefeltro and his son
Guidobaldo is a public staging of a private scene, as the reflection of the
courtyard on the helmet might suggest.9 Painted by either a Spanish or Flem-
ish hand10 during the years the enormous ducal palace at Urbino was being
built, it too is a careful construction — one with high stakes, since the state
and the image of the Renaissance prince who governed it were virtually in-
terchangeable. Given this relationship, the attributes of male power seen in
the portrait are also reflective of the power of the duchy itself. Prominently
displayed are Federico’s sceptre and mantle, suggesting that his rule is tem-
pered by justice, while the posed helmet and donned sword demonstrate both
the peace necessary for intellectual pursuits and the wartime readiness to be
protector of a people.11 But there is a religious dimension as well, as the aged
ruler seems engaged in a process of spiritual development by reading Pope
Gregory I’s manual on Christian life.12
One of the most important rules of young boys’ educations is that
boys be surrounded by men and manly endeavours and that they should avoid
effeminacy, as Leon Battista Alberti, Juan Luis Vives, Antonio de Guevara and
9
Simonetta, “Double Portrait,” 104; see also Charles Rosenberg, who argues that the
portrait was to be placed in a public room of the ducal palace, “The Double Portrait,”
213–222.
10
There is much debate on the attribution of the double portrait, with scholarship
falling along two lines, attributing it to the Flemish painter Joos van Ghent or to the Span-
ish Pedro Berruguete. For a review of pro-van Ghent criticism, see Lavalleye, “Les primi-
tifs flamands,” 116–123; for a review of those in the Berruguete camp see Dal Poggetto,
“Pedro Berruguete,” 28–36.
11
The portrait thereby seems to confirm what George Mosse has argued is the great-
est difference between modern and early modern masculinity: the medieval and early
modern emphasis on adornment rather than the modern focus on the male body itself;
The Image of Man, 5: “[In the second half of the eighteenth century] the importance of the
actual structure of the human body became equal to — if not greater than — the impor-
tance of its adornments. The stereotype of masculinity was conceived as a totality based
upon the nature of man’s body.”
12
The book is convincingly identified as Pope Gregory I’s Commentary on the Book of
Job, a “manual of Christian life”; Simonetta, “Double Portrait,” 106.
Introduction 17
others caution in their various fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuals.13

Thus it should come as no surprise that the painting displays a number of
images central to the representation of Renaissance masculinities: helmets,
weapons, books, wealth, fertility, intelligence, and of course the father himself.
The focus of this gender pastiche is arguably the two contrasting bodies,
one representing supple youth, the other weathered adulthood. Between
these two bodies, a narrative unfolds, as the viewer is invited to share in the
duke’s desire for a reproductive dynasty14 and asked to imagine the young
Guidobaldo growing into the pearl-encrusted hat that rests on the shelf above
him, so signifying his eventual inheritance of Federico’s power and fortune.15
But the painting is also about the hardships of becoming a man, a trajectory
that moves us from the boy’s bejewelled robe to the man’s armour, the rosy
cheeks to a face lined with battle scars. The injured nose and scarred face
of the duke, repeatedly shown in his portraits, are metonymic for the man
himself, and they reflect an aesthetic of virile beauty. As Alberti wrote, there
are two types of manly ideals, the bellezze of the fighting man as well as that
of the prudent and reasonable elder. Federico displays both.16 These manly
13
See, for example, Alberti: “Voglionsi adunque e’ garzoni dal primo dí usarli tra gli
uomini ove e’ possino imparare piú virtú che vizio, e fino da piccioli cominciarli a fare
virili usandogli ed essercitandogli in cose quanto nella loro età si possa magnifice e ample,
storli da tutti i costumi e maniere femminile. […] Chi da piccolo sarà allevato nelle cose
virili assai, e nella prima adolescenza piú quasi avere forza che in tutte l’altre. [ …] Si vuole
cominciare usare e’ fanciulli in cose laboriose e ardue, ove con industria e fatica cerchino
e sperino vera laude e molta grazia;” I libri della famiglia, Book 1, 58 (“Young boys should,
from the first day of life, be accustomed to life among men. There they can learn virtue
rather than vice. From early childhood they can be made virile by activities as noble and
grand as are possible for their age. They should be segregated from all feminine activities
and habits….Boys should be set from the beginning, therefore, to do arduous things and
to win praise and great honor by their industry and exertion” (trans. Watkins, 62–63).
14
For a discussion of the problematic artistic representation of male fertility in the
Montefeltro dynasty see Eisenbichler’s article on the codpiece in “Bronzino’s Portrait of
Guidobaldo II della Rovere.”
15
Marcello Simonetta suggests that the hat is a papal one since Federico was chief
commander of the papal army (“Double Portrait,” 102), while Charles Rosenberg cites
Jacques Lavalleye to show that the hat was in fact a gift from the Persian ambassador of the
Shah Uzun Hasan (220).
16
“Le bellezze d’un uomo essercitato nell’armi paiono a me, quando egli arà presen-
za di fiero, membra di forte e atti di destro a tutte le fatiche. Le bellezze di uno vecchio
stimerò siano nella prudenza, amorevolezza e ragione delle sue parole”; Alberti, I libri della
famiglia, Book II, 134 (The beauty of a man accustomed to arms, it seems to me, lies in his
ideals of beauty will shift in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the
contributions by Cartagena-Calderón and Carrión argue in this volume. But
for fifteenth-century Urbino, the hardened body of the father signified the
beauty of at least one idealized version of manhood, prophesying the boy’s
gendered identity and with it the security of the realm.
Unbeknownst to the painter as well as his two subjects, this foretelling
of Guidobaldo’s idealized manhood would be broken by the un-idealizing
narrative of history, for the son and heir of the great duke would fail in
nearly all ways to grow into his father’s over-determined role. As Baldassarre
Castiglione would write in the preface to his Cortegiano, the period’s most
famous conduct manual and one set in the court of Urbino, at twenty years
of age, Guidobaldo fell ill and “one of the fairest and ablest persons in the
world was deformed and marred at a tender age”: “così restò un dei più belli
e disposti corpi del mondo deformato e guasto” (I.3). The real body of the
new duke, according to Castiglione, failed at every trial of manhood. He was
a success neither on the battlefield, where he lost all of his campaigns, nor in
bed, as his impotence became a public matter humiliating the duke, his wife,
and their court.17 The fate of Guidobaldo’s body in turn became emblematic
of the decline of Montefeltro power, as Urbino passed to the Spanish Borgia,
the Ligurian della Rovere family, briefly to the Medici, and then back to the
della Rovere. The Cortegiano is important not only for what it tells us of the
Montefeltro dynasty, but for its central role in crafting the notion of ideal
courtly masculinity throughout Europe. Moreover, the work emphasizes in its
conversational dynamic what can only be hinted at in the double portrait, the
extent to which ideal notions of masculinity are always being negotiated with
a material reality. In fact, this negotiation may be one of the most pervasive
tensions in the Cortegiano, set during a severe bout of Guidobaldo’s crippling
illness. The fact that ideal manhood is the topic of conversation while the
titular head of the castle is bedridden reveals a gender crisis at the heart of
having a presence betokening pride, limbs full of strength, and the gestures of one who
is skilled and adept in all forms of exercise. The beauty of an old man, I think, lies in his
prudence, his amiability, and the reasoned judgment which permeates all his words and
his counsel,” trans. Watkins, 115)
17
“Parea che ciò che incominciava, e nell’arme e in ogni altra cosa o piccola o grande,
sempre male gli succedesse”; Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, I.3; “it seemed that what-
ever he undertook always succeeded ill with him whether in arms or in anything, great or
small” (trans. Singleton, 14). For an account of the “fame” of Guidobaldo’s impotence see
Mazzanti, Battista Sforza Montefeltro.
Introduction 19
the discussion, as the interlocutors struggle to adapt the modes of a refined

courtly society to a tradition of chivalric virile masculinity. The impossibility
of reconciling various modes of masculinity are often the cause for humour
in the Cortegiano, just as Giovanni Della Casa’s later Galateo, the subject of
an essay by Rico-Ferrer, humorously acknowledges the gap in its Spanish
translation between ideal masculinity and the flawed behaviour of the ‘real
masculinity’ of the narrator.
Central to the comparative dimension of this volume is the fact that
Castiglione spent five years as a diplomat in the court of Emperor Charles
V, and that he frequently lauded the Spanish court as the real source of the
courtly “gentility” his interlocutors seek to portray: “Guardate i Spagnoli, i
quali par che siano maestri della cortegiania”(II,21): consider the Spanish, who
certainly seem to be masters of courtiership — a “cortegiania” no doubt very
different from that of the rugged and impetuous Federico da Montefeltro. And
Charles V would call Castiglione “uno de los mejores caballeros del mundo”
(Introduction, 9) shortly after Castiglione died in Toledo in 1529. Castiglione
not only provides us with an example of the vexed issue of influence, as Spain
becomes the origin of a sprezzatura and grace deemed to be fundamentally
Italian, but serves as an effective bridge between two countries and courts.
He may well have returned Charles’ compliment, for few exemplified learned
courtliness better than the cultured Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and
Isabella, King of Spain, and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Philip II,
who had long been groomed in the art of statecraft, inherited Spain and its
Italian and American lands from his father Charles when the latter abdicated
in 1556. Philip’s cultivation of the famed Venetian painter Tiziano Vecelli
(Titian) as of the late 1540’s gave the artist ample time to familiarize himself
with the young prince’s classical tastes — inclining to the erotic topics of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses and other Latin texts — as well as with his image; he painted
several full-length portraits of Philip after 1548.
Titian’s final portrait of Philip, however, painted when the artist
was in his nineties, is the portrait with Don Fernando, born in the months
following Lepanto (fig. 2). In this image, father and son perform what seems a
ritualistic offering to a descending angel as the battle of Lepanto rages behind
them. The angel hands the delighted child the palm as a symbol of what is
made to seem a joint conquest, and carries the laurel wreath in its other hand.
“Consigned to the same level as Philip’s pet,” who arches aggressively against a
column, the Turk writhes around to glance at his displaced turban and toward
the spectator, his dark skin contrasting with the stark-white nudity of the
child.18 Hemmed in by the small table that doubles as an altar, the discarded
shield and other battle spoils, and a series of classical columns, the Turk is
pushed into the foreground while Philip and his son are conjoined with an
otherworldly realm that literally reaches out to embrace them. The witnessing
angel is at once a symbol of the Catholic faith that conquered Islam (and
that Philip II increasingly advocated in its orthodox, Counter-Reformation
version) and the pagan figure of winged Victory. Victory’s unfurling banner
“maiora tibi” — may you do [even] greater [deeds] — goads Don Fernando
with a fame and success that will outshine that of his father. In so offering
his son to Victory, Philip places both son and himself within a confident
narrative of ever more illustrious achievements.19
Yet, this celebratory work poses several interesting questions. One is
that Philip, dressed in his short and stylish armour, was actually not present at
Lepanto, perhaps a fact that Titian slyly references by having the battle happen
behind him, and thus without him. Spain’s naval fleet indeed participated in
the fight and was decisive for its victory, but without the presence of a king
who fourteen years earlier had taken part in the campaign against France. For
another thing, the scene with a suddenly-descending angel and a father who
assumes what one critic has called the “sacerdotal” role of a priest20 appeals
not to a classical or Christian antecedent but to an Old Testament one:
Abraham’s ritual offering of his son Isaac at God’s command, to be prevented
at the last moment by the sudden appearance of an angel who conveniently
supplies a ram to be sacrificed instead. Here the Turk serves as the convenient
sacrifice to avert the threatened infanticide. The recollection of the moment
from Genesis gives an odd twist to the painting, however. Philip may be the
obedient Abraham, ready to do anything God asks of him, but there is also
the lingering sense of a sacrificial murder in which Turk and future king are
interchangeable.
18
The reference is that of Angus Konstsam and Tony Bryan in their Lepanto 1571, 81.
19
This was a tall order, for Philip’s achievements were not insignificant; Thomas Dan-
delet writes that “Philip could justifiably claim his role as defender of the faith, having
defeated the Moors in Granada in 1564, the Protestants in their ongoing rebellions in
Flanders, and the Turks at Malta and Lepanto in 1565 and 1571, respectively”; Spanish
Rome, 74.
20
Frieder, Chivalry, 99, “Philip raises his son in an elevation that recalls the host at
Mass, casting the king in a role that is both military and sacerdotal.”
Introduction 21
Last but not least, Don Fernando died in 1578 at the age of six, the
promise of “greater deeds” unfulfilled. Despite the prince’s premature death,
the painting was apparently a favourite of the royal family. Within forty years
of its composition, the size and format of the original painting were expanded
to match those of a work Titian painted for Philip’s father, one of his most
famous: the 1547 painting of Charles on horseback, fresh from his victory
over the Protestants at Mühlberg (fig. 3). Both paintings were then placed
in the Hall of Mirrors in the Alcázar, the enormous room that dominated
the princely palace in Madrid, “so that Titian’s two grandiose portraits
celebrating victories for the Catholic faith could face one another at either
end.”21 Thus juxtaposed, the paintings present the awed spectator with three
generations of Spanish princes: the emperor straddling his horse in the one
instance, dominating a natural landscape at sunset; king and child in the other,
dominating a stage-set splayed with war trophies, a captive, and a window
onto a battle-scene happening elsewhere. The formidable presence of Philip’s
father wielding his lance, riding confidently off to battle — or returning from
its chaos — is balanced by the somewhat less formidable presence of Philip
himself, part of a narrative that seems not as much one of his own making
as that of the figure who magically falls from the sky.22 If Charles emerges
as the archetypal, seemingly self-made man who was quintessentially pan-
European in his role as emperor and his multilingual upbringing — the
cultured version of a Federico da Montefeltro, who perhaps portrays some
anxiety about not his lack of military expertise, but his lack of learning —
Philip, the son who spoke only Spanish and rarely left Spain, is quite different,
subject to forces outside himself, one of which took his son from him before
he reached maturity.
***
The gap between idealized portraits and living men and boys raises the issue
of the ideological project involved in the production of masculinity. The two
paintings of fathers and sons expose masculinity as a process and, in so doing,
reveal the spectre of masculine gender failure — possibly one of the differenc-
21
Humfrey, Titian, 192.
22
Critics have suggested that the design should be accredited not to Titian, who had
not been in Spain for some time, but to a Spanish painter who worked in Philip’s court. The
portrait also arguably attests to the sway of the new baroque style.
es, as Elisabeth Badinter has shown, between masculinity and femininity,23

as the young Guidobaldo and Fernando seek to become their overly-orna-
mented fathers, each of them caught in a process of demonstrating, proving,
and acquiring masculinity.24 In what ways is such a spectre discernible else-
where in early modern culture, particularly literary culture, and what makes
early modernity — roughly the period between the early fifteenth century
and the late seventeenth — such a rich moment of experimentation? What,
moreover, bound Italian and Spanish versions of masculinity together in this
period, and how did they influence one another? More broadly, which artistic
languages and genres were gendered as masculine? Who bestowed masculin-
ity upon the subject: the artist or the public? Finally, what were the stakes
of constructing and depicting masculinity in a time of intense transition for
Catholic Europe generally, and Italy and Spain more specifically?
The historical span separating the two portraits marked a period of
cultural and political encounter between Italy and Spain. When the portrait
of Federico and Guidobaldo was painted, neither country was yet a nation,
but a cluster of city-states on the one hand and kingdoms on the other. By
the time Titian painted Philip and his infant son, the maps of both countries
had significantly changed. Spain not only became unified after Isabella’s
and Ferdinand’s consolidation of their regimes and the defeat of the Moors
in Granada, but eventually emerged as the centre of the Habsburg Empire
with Charles V’s assumption of the Spanish crown in 1516 and his election
as emperor in 1519. Northern and central Italy largely went from being a
vibrant — if often fraught — collection of small principalities and republics
to consisting of several key duchies in the north and domination by the
23
“Being a man is expressed more readily in the imperative than in the indicative. The
order so often heard — ‘Be a man’ — implies that it does not go without saying that manli-
ness may not be as natural as one would think … Being a man implies a labor, an effort
that does not seem to be demanded of a woman. It is rare to hear the words ‘be a woman’
as a call to order, whereas the exhortation to the little boy, the male adolescent, or the adult
male is common in most societies”; Badinter, XY, 1–2.
24
The Duke himself was fraught with anxiety over his ability to achieve the great-
ness of other men. Claudia Wedepohl quotes Francesco Prendilacqua (ca.1420–after 1483)
who wrote that as a boy Federico was distraught by the models of masculine military
greatness he read about: “While reading the life of [Scipio] Africanus, however, knowing
that he became commander at a very young age, it is said that he [Federico] initially be-
came quite sad … [Federico] said ‘will there come a day, when I will be able to contemplate
my own deeds?’” “Condottiere and Humanist,” 142.
Introduction 23
presence of Spain in the south. As early as 1503, what Thomas Dandelet and
John A. Marino call “the Spanish conquest of southern Italy” was complete,
as the large Kingdom of Naples fell into the hands of Ferdinand to join
Sicily and Sardinia; the Duchy of Milan would soon come under Spanish
control as would a cluster of once-autonomous towns.25 The historical fate
of the two regions had intertwined in a way that makes discernment of the
two increasingly difficult. A number of articles in this collection take into
account this relationship, one marked by Spain’s dominance over a politically
weakened Italy. Titian’s painting of the equestrian Charles reflects the energetic
expansion of Spain into the ne plus ultra of the New World and the familiar
terrain of the Old World alike, or as the poet Manuel Machado would write
of the portrait three centuries later, “recorre su dominio, el Mundo entero, /
Con resonantes pasos, y seguros.”26 Not even the heavy financial expense of
running the world’s largest bureaucracy — an imperial project that overtaxed
the resources of Castile — was enough to slow his or his son’s ambitions.
One other tie between Italy and Spain, of course, was their Cathol-
icism, strident at times in the face of the Reformation. After the return of the
papacy to Rome in 1377, Italy again became the spiritual and physical home
of Roman Catholicism, and over the course of the fifteenth century Rome
and its popes enhanced their political influence on the continent as well. But
Spain had always been seen as Europe’s staunchest defender of the faith —
at least from the time of El Cid, Spain’s earliest “nationalist” epic. Not to be
dismissed, Charles V’s grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, were lauded by
their contemporaries (and by themselves) as the “most Catholic” kings. The
dominant expression of elite Spanish masculinity as the sixteenth century
began was the Christian knight, committed to purifying the nation of Jews
and Muslims following the 1492 expulsions. Such a project was emboldened
by the feminization of this non-Christian Other, a phenomenon discussed in
the articles by Fox and Cartagena-Calderón. Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme
liberata, the focus of Marc Schachter’s contribution, is a late sixteenth-century
Italian version of this commitment to Christian and masculine “purity,” one in
25
Spain in Italy, 1.
26
Cited in Persin, Getting the Picture, 48 who notes that the final line of the sonnet
— “En este panto lo pintò el Tiziano” — has the effect of pointing to the “existence of the
frame that separates art from reality.” Marie Turner, Last Descendant of Aeneas, 113, notes
that this painting with its claim to Charles’ “infallible power to unite the empire” looks
back to the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio, Rome’s ancient and
modern seat of government.
which the weeping Muslim pederast, Solimano, is juxtaposed with the virile
Christian warrior. And Ignatius Loyola, who died in Rome after founding
the international order of the Jesuits, is perhaps best envisioned as a mystic
who never left his days as a knight behind him as he embodied what Ulrike
Strasser has called a “reimagined clerical masculinity that other men wanted to
emulate.”27 Nation-building and fervent Catholicism were connected in other
ways too. Machiavelli applauded the Spanish Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo de
Borja y Doms, and his illegitimate son Cesare Borgia for consolidating the
papal states and furthering the cause of Italian unity on the peninsula. For
Machiavelli, both pope and duke served as excellent examples of real men
who could beat lady Fortuna into submission. And in the wake of Charles V’s
march on the holy city in 1527 that forced the Medici Pope Clement VII into
the Castel Sant’Angelo for months, the Italian papacy and Spanish monarchy
formed a commingled modus operandi that would serve both well in years
to come — or sometimes not so well, as when Pope Gregory XIII had to
reluctantly concede that Philip II after Lepanto deserved in perpetuity the
three papal graces of “subsidio, cruzada, y excusado” (Dandelet, 74).
What did such upheavals, regional as well as global, mean for the
period’s expressions of masculinity? Matters of empire, autonomy, and war
seem to produce texts rich with gender-focused arguments, and many of the
texts considered in the articles are products of times of cultural unrest. The
great literary works of sixteenth-century Italy — Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,
Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, the poetry of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna,
Gaspara Stampa — were written when Italy was witnessing its decline and
loss of autonomy to invading foreign forces, and the analogy of the defeated
state and the effeminized one was commonplace. There is a notable amount
of Italian literature that identifies Italy as a miserable woman, but there is also
a more stinging corpus that describes her men as effeminate sycophants or
even as sodomized inhabitants of an occupied land; such a characterization
is epitomized by Pietro Aretino, who after the Sack of Rome, called the once
“caput mundi” the new “coda mundi.”28
Yet, while politically weak, Italy at times served as Spain’s cultural
model, much as a conquered Hellenistic culture had done for late republican
27
Strasser, “`The First Form and Grace,’” 46.
28
Natalia Costa-Zalessow traces the motif of Italy as the miserable woman in “The
Personification of Italy.” For a discussion of Aretino’s comment see Raymond Wadding-
ton’s “Introduction” to the English translation of Aretino’s Cortigiana, 7–49.
Introduction 25
and imperial Rome. Indeed, Italy was the conduit through which pagan
antiquity effectively reached the rest of Europe, thanks to the energetic activities
of Petrarch, the humanists who followed him, and the wealthy patrons who
supported them all — the Visconti of Milan, Cosimo the Elder de’ Medici, the
battle-scarred Federico da Montefeltro. The sixteenth century saw Italian artists
fêted at the greatest courts in Europe, including Paris, London, and Madrid.
Titian’s ten great works painted for Philip II between 1552 and 1562 represent
just a fraction of the output of this single artist in the service of a foreign crown.
How Europe in general — and Spain in particular — felt about this influence
is another matter. Italy was also fodder for the policing of masculinity in Spain,
where sodomy was called “the habit of Italy,” 29 and the stock character of an
Italian on the Spanish stage was often a sodomite. The fact that so many of
these cultural “borrowings” were over-laden with a vocabulary of masculinity,
effeminacy, and feminization suggests how keenly gendered the practice of
nationalizing one’s culture was.30 As Leah Middlebrook’s contribution to this
volume notes, Boscán’s mid-century Italianate reform of Castilian poetry was
greeted with harsh resistance by Herrera and others, who claimed that the
Italian form represented an effeminate “affectation” threatening to erase a virile
Spanish history. Paul Julian Smith has noted that Juan de Valdés defended the
Spanish language as purer than Italian (while a century later, Gracián would
defend the presence of copia in the Spanish language, “the variety of agudeza,
its multiple diversity”).31 It would be interesting to consider the extent to which
insofar as culture is associated with Italy, it risks being seen as effeminate
given Italy’s political weakness — perhaps an association that Lorenzo de’
Medici tried to forestall in his attempts to insist that Florence’s literature was
invigorated by “manly” concerns, as Jane Tylus suggests in her article.
At the same time, Italy on occasion looked askance at works arriving
from Spain — such as the Amadís, which prompted Italians to associate
the Spanish with a form of romance not their “own” even as they borrowed
extensively from it. Hence Bernardo Tasso’s enormous but incomplete
Amadigi and Ludovico Dolce’s Palmerino and Primaleone. In his Discorso
29
Perry, “The ‘Nefarious Sin,’” 67–8.
30
A practice that goes back at least to the Greeks’ identification of the barbaros as the
weak, effeminate “other,” or to the African king Iarbus’s deriding of the Eastern, Trojan
Aeneas as another Paris with “chin and perfumed locks bound with a Lydian turban”;
Aeneid 4:215–16.
31
Smith, Writing in the Margin, 29.
intorno al comporre dei romanzi, the playwright and critic Giovambattista

Giraldi Cinzio speaks scathingly of the frequent fainting spells that occur
during the furor of battle of the Spanish Amadís and how Amadis himself,
during hand to hand combat, would see his beloved Oriana and fall “like
a dead man, and stay in that position as if he were a girl or a tender young
boy, something that [the Italian] Ariosto would never want to imitate in his
romances.”32 The statement is ironic given that Ariosto, the same author who
would “never” imitate the effeminate Spanish epic, was in turn received in
Spain with some hesitation precisely around the issue of the fear that his
poetry weakened the martial with the erotic.33 To triangulate matters, the
effeminizing or edifying role of continental romances came to a head just
as England drifted to war with Spain at the end of the sixteenth century, as
moralists such as Stephen Gosson warned that Italian poetry had effeminized
and weakened Englishmen in their battle against Spain.34 National pride
aside, the Spanish Juan Luis Vives — though he spent most of his life abroad
— would damn all romances in his Education of a Christian Woman and his
De causis corruptarum artium.35
Such interaction among cultures, greeted positively or not, belies
the myth of a Renaissance centred securely in Italy and certainly dispels
any notion of a singular model of ideal masculinity. As the articles and
introduction to Queer Iberia make clear, Spain had long been the land of the
“other” with its own remarkable Renaissance that took place in the richly
interreligious climate of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when Toledo was
32
In Giraldi Cinzio, Scritti critici, 65. Giraldi continues: “[a Ariosto] parve che se
forse quelle cose convenivano o alla nazione o al tempo, nel quale fu scritto l’Amadigi, non
convenissero elle a’ suoi tempi ne’ alle genti da lui nei suoi romanzi introdotte.” The first
part of the citation is also found in Benedetto Croce, La Spagna nella vita italiana durante
la Rinascenza.
33
The reception of Ariosto was unfavourable among moralists such as Juan de Mal
Lara. See Maxime Chevalier, L’Arioste en Espagne, 92–99.
34
Ian Frederick Moulton, “Arms and the Women,” especially pages 114–115.
35
Vives states regarding the chivalric epics: “The Spanish Amadis and Florisander, the
French Lancelot and Knights of the round table, the Italian Orlando: these are otiose fabri-
cations, full of lies and without a jot of learning in them. … when men read them they’ll
find their wits corrupted by laziness and indulgence, no different from what happens to a
delicate stomach when it’s been fed nothing but sweets and honey, and becoming so used
to this fare it rejects afterwards all solid food”; De Causis corruptarum artium, book II, ch.
VI; cited in Orígenes de la novela, ed. Menéndez y Pelayo, 1:441.
Introduction 27
a major centre for translation and study. The literary genre of the picaresque,
with its plucky hero who begins with nothing and makes his way through
an indecipherably pluralistic society, owes little if anything to classical or
“foreign” texts. And Daniel Eisenberg has argued that Cervantes’ inimitable
Don Quixote drew precious little inspiration from Tasso and other Italian
models.36 In fact, as Henry Kamen has recently remarked, “Spaniards went to
Italy in the tens of thousands, lived there and worked there, borrowing all the
while from Italian art, music and science. But the movement of literature was
overwhelmingly one-way, from Spain to Italy.” Kamen’s evidence for this is the
wealth of translations of Spanish writings into Italian. As Franco Meregalli
has noted, in the early sixteenth century, ninety-three Castilian works were
translated into Italian, and in the later part of the century, over 700; there was
no corresponding enthusiasm for translation of Italian texts into Spanish,
and Kamen goes on to observe that imported books tended to be in Latin
more than in any other language.37 While several articles in the volume briefly
point to the question of Spanish influence on Italian literary culture, it is the
case that they more frequently cite the impact of several key Italian texts —
Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Della Casa’s Galateo, and of course, the ubiquitous
rhymes of Petrarch — on Spanish writers. There is much work that needs to
be done before we can undo Croce’s claim early in the twentieth century that
“Spanish literature could not have a great impact in a country such as Italy,
which had arrived at a full spiritual maturity not achieved by Spain.”38
***
To turn finally to the individual articles in more detail, the issue of translation
on both sides nonetheless offers a provocative and important point of entry for
this volume. Much of the dialogue that takes place in early modern works is a
36
Eisenberg, “Cervantes and Tasso,” 305–317.
37
Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power 1492–1763, 338–342; the
citation to Meregalli’s work, Presenza della letteratura spagnola in Italia (Florence, 1974),
is on page 339. Kamen’s argument needs to be considered in light of Paul Julian Smith’s
insistence that after 1492 Spain tended to suppress its rich cultural origins and reach out-
ward to other cultural models. On translations into and from Spanish, Peter Burke’s “Lost
(and Found) in Translation” offers a modest overview.
38
Croce, La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza, 155. For an interest-
ing essay on Croce’s varying stance on Spanish influence on Italian literature, see Benito
Brancaforte.
dialogue with the ancients, who had very different systems of education and
expressions of manhood from those of late medieval and Renaissance Europe,
as Gary Cestaro discusses in his article on pedagogy and pederasty. Yet, as sug-
gested above, the Italian and Spanish texts discussed in this volume also refer
to contemporary cross-cultural works in the vernacular. To this extent, almost
all the articles take up the project of translation in one or more guises, and as a
result, they offer keen insights into the particularities of national texts.
As Giraldi Cinzio’s dismissive comment on the Spanish Amadís
suggests, issues of translation and imitation throw into relief the emergence
of national narratives during the sixteenth century. Both national traditions
exhibit the need to retell old myths of chivalry and honour in order to adapt
new definitions of masculinity to a changing world. Particularly in Spain, the
theatre offered a suggestive place from which to address these changes, as
María Carrión and José Cartagena-Calderón discuss in their articles on the
emergence of the new figure of the lindo onstage.39 A focus on translation can
also reveal a story more synchronic in nature. Thus José Rico-Ferrer shows
how Della Casa’s Galateo — the “conduct manual” most influential in Italy
after Castiglione’s Cortegiano — changes once put into Spanish “dress.” The
Spanish translation substitutes the Italian aristocratic context with a bourgeois
one, and thus comes to be central in fashioning what Rico-Ferrer calls an
“urban masculinity” toward the close of the sixteenth century, enabled in part
by the strong authorial presence of the translator himself. Other discussions
of the displacements that happen in the course of translation include Leah
Middlebrook’s article on Petrarch in sixteenth-century Spanish verse,
and Maria Carrión’s assessment of the role of Castiglione’s sprezzatura for
playwrights and actors of the Spanish stage.
Even as the essays plumb the nature of masculine identity, it is
critical to note that the word “masculinity” did not technically exist in
Italian or Spanish in early modernity. Carrión explains that the Spanish
word masculinidad first appears in the eighteenth century, while the Italian,
mascolinità, is more problematic; even today, the term would not be likely
to appear in the title of an academic study on literature. The essays confront
this challenge by grounding their analyses in the language of the period.
Not surprisingly, several key words reappear throughout the articles such as
39
In “Ideal Men,” Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt suggests that in the face of Spain’s economic
troubles of the mid-seventeenth century, the aristocracy failed to come up with new ways
of rethinking masculinity, resorting largely to out-dated stories of honour and chivalry.
Introduction 29
“effeminate”, “virile,” or the Spanish specific lindo. José Cartagena-Calderón

points out that these terms are often found in the early modern vernaculars,
noting that in one early modern dictionary, “afeminado” is defined as a “man
with a womanish condition, predisposed to do womanly things.”40 While the
sexuality of men and women was of chief concern, lexical terms indicating
erotic desire, whether homo- or heterosexual, were less stable. References to
Sodom and Ganymede were constant ways to indicate male same sex relations,
but as the articles demonstrate, the language of love was vast and varied over
time and across cultural boundaries. Dian Fox reminds us that a concept
such as “honour” was most telling of how men defined their gender. As Spain
began to develop into a nation state, the stakes were raised, for honour and
manhood became a public matter: “a subject’s honour or dishonour, and by
implication, his virility, had become a matter of official concern and national
consequence.” Thus while it situates itself within a twenty-first-century
discourse of masculinity, this volume is grounded in those very Renaissance
words of honour, virtue, shame, and servitude.
As one reads with an eye to gender, it becomes apparent how
frequently these key words are turned to describe the obverse of masculinity, a
point not missed by modern theorists of masculinity.41 Prescriptive literature,
as well as much narrative of the period, stages the shaming of the effeminate
male and suggests that if he does not act according to the norms he will be
either condemned to hell — as in Spanish sermons by Fray Pedro de León —
or in more secular tracts, enslaved to the enemy or to women (as implied in
works written by women themselves and discussed by Milligan in his article).
Thus, men must perform manliness or risk losing their soul, their autonomy,
and ultimately their identity. What constitutes so-called “virile” behaviour is
open, however, to radical differences in interpretation, changing in response
to historical context, race, class, religion and what we loosely call “culture.”
Likewise, determining the limits of effeminacy may be just as difficult as
pinning down masculinity. Since modern notions of effeminacy are often
40
It is curious that Mosse finds that the word “effeminate” enters into frequent usage
in European vernaculars only in the eighteenth century (Image of Man, 8). For an interest-
ing discussion of the relationship between effeminacy and homosexuality in ancient Rome
see Williams, Roman Homosexuality.
41
For a discussion of how masculinity is often described through its opposites, see in
particular Gilmore, Honor and Shame, 9.
bound to culturally specific modes of dress, comportment, and aesthetics,

they are of little help in interpreting early modern materials.
Other issues such as sexuality, which has often been linked to gender
in the modern mind, are not necessarily clear ways to determine Renaissance
masculinity or effeminacy, as a comparison between Spanish and Italian
cultures can reveal. For example, as Michael Rocke’s work on homosexuality
in Florence explained more than a decade ago, homosexuality in the Italian
Quattrocento was not considered “effeminate” per se. Even the sixteenth-
century’s greatest critic of effeminacy, Machiavelli, does not associate
homosexuality with the effeminati who receive so much of his attention.42 Thus
in Italy, the alignment of effeminacy and homosexuality seems fairly limited,
with Della Casa’s Galateo serving as a possible exception, while in Spain, the
situation may have been different. Garza Carvajal’s historical study argues that
effeminacy was considered to be a sign of homosexuality in Andalucia and
Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Likewise, Spanish Golden
Age theatre stages gender with a much different set of rules than those found
on the Italian stage, especially in regard to effeminacy and masculinity.
But the rules of a culture are not the only ones that regulate the
ideology of gender. Genres, too, bind literary expression to traditions that
are often charged with nuances of gender. The Renaissance as we know it
expressed itself through literary forms that explore the nature of masculinity:
epic, Petrarchan lyric and its aftermath, conduct manuals, and theatre. The
articles in this volume reveal some fascinating priorities regarding genre
in early modern texts, while also showing how the constraints of genre can
lead to surprising, at times discomfiting, assumptions about subjectivity and
gender. As Tylus notes in her article, the Florentine circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici
sought to defend the vernacular tradition of lyric love poetry with respect to
ancient epic, and thus the very notion of “Italian” risked seeming somehow
effeminate in the shadow of classical precursors. The artists and writers of
Renaissance Florence articulated this defence as a struggle between autonomy
and dependence that would have ramifications for the notion of identity itself.
Furthermore, the genres of the prescriptive dialogue and treatise
claimed an ever-growing authority over individual subjectivity, partly
because this was a period that had enormous faith in literature’s utility as
well as in the ability of new secular forms to shape and influence the creation
42
For a discussion of homosexuality and effeminacy in Machiavelli see Milligan,
“Masculinity and Machiavelli,” 149–172.
Introduction 31
of both male and female subjects. Todd Reeser has written of the importance
of Aristotle’s “mean” for the pedagogical literature of the sixteenth century,
such as that of Erasmus.43 In this volume, Ian Moulton’s discussion of
Neo-Platonic sublimation in that highly prescriptive work, Castiglione’s
Cortegiano, offers specific suggestions as to how the text itself can “train”
its readers. Whereas the courtier is frequently subjected throughout the
dialogue to feminine norms — as Moulton notes, “A perfect courtier is not
simply a perfect warrior. He is in some ways a perfect servant. He is, in
some ways, feminine” — the closing monologue by Bembo unequivocally
makes of “ideal, elite masculinity” a form of temperance. In Moulton’s
phrase, Castiglione thus assumes far more of a Machiavellian dimension
than generally acknowledged — a Machiavelli who had stated that it was the
influence of Christianity that made the world “effeminate.”
It is perhaps not surprising that at the dawn of the bourgeois era,
these works and their literary offspring tend to reveal a preoccupation with
what Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality, and in a manner
that often associates heterosexuality with fertility and fruitfulness and its
homoerotic “other” with sterility.44 As Gary Cestaro notes, this connection
can be found in Dante’s Inferno in his canto on the sodomites. It forms part of a
larger discourse that attempts to distance contemporary forms of education
from both ancient and early Christian ones, ultimately undermining
pederasty as a stepping-stone to enlightenment. Marc Schachter’s article
explores the reproductive utility of desire in Tasso’s epic poem, Gerusalemme
liberata, drawing our attention to the similarities between the pederastic
couple of the Muslim King Solimano and his page, and the problematic
yet heterosexual pairing of Armida and Rinaldo. Tasso condemns both
relationships for their loss of self-mastery and non-productivity, although
by the end he recognizes the virility of the now mature Rinaldo, who learns
to redirect his desire to martial and reproductive ends. In his article on
El lindo don Diego, Jose Cartagena-Calderón observes that the “bizarre”
eponymous character is connected to the sterile mule, example of a non-
43
Reeser, Moderating Masculinity. The emphasis on “moderation” in part develops
in reaction to the revival of Greek literature — not just Plato’s works, but those of Hom-
er, Euripides, and other poets who offered at-times troubling windows into the Greeks’
norms of aggression, warfare, and ritual. Hence, as Reeser puts it, the need to “moderate”
these ancient images of excess.
44
See Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
reproductive sexuality, while Harry Vélez Quiñones’s article on Cervantes’s

Numancia offers an example of the clash between early modern materialistic
expression of pederasty and the idealizing discourse of male-male love and
homoerotic sexuality. The fact that Cervantes would put the language of
courtliness and seduction into the mouth of a Roman general and direct
this language toward a boy suggests that the Romans, legendary enemies
of the Numantians and thus of their descendants, the Spaniards, had a fatal
flaw. Cervantes suggests that the Spanish are intrinsically and historically
superior to — and hence more masculine than — the soldiers of that other
great empire, Rome. The Roman hero Scipio, famous for his moderation,
becomes the effeminate pederast, while his young “prey” commits suicide
like a true Roman hero.
When effeminacy becomes a categorical identity we are reminded
that masculinity is vulnerable to slippage, to becoming its other, the feminine.
Likewise, women too could perform in such a way as to be characterized as
masculine, a quality that is usually conferred as praise in the early modern
period. Two essays in the volume focus on women, either as characters
who attempt to perform masculinity, or as authors concerned with policing
identities of gender. Mary-Michelle DeCoste’s article pits gender limitations
against the limits of narrative form, as Ariosto’s woman warrior Marfisa
excels on the battlefield, but is not allowed to get to the point where she will be
asked to perform as a knight in the bedroom. For even as Marfisa might have
outperformed her male companions with the sword by day, Ariosto severs
the narrative knot that he has created before we can see how she might have
tried penetrating maidens by night, thereby leaving the question of female
masculinity unanswered. DeCoste thus neatly outlines the two poles of early
modern masculinity, warfare and sexuality, staging woman’s entrance into
both realms and the problematic ramifications of this entrance for the male
characters in the poem. If the fictional Marfisa offers an intriguing example
of a female warrior, Gerry Milligan addresses historical women and their
writings on war to show the extent to which Laura Terracina and Chiara
Matraini made contemporary readers uncomfortable with their realistic
assessments of the necessary, even glorious, world of warfare. In taking up
the lyric topoi of blame and praise, Terracina and Matraini alike establish
norms of “correct” masculinity during times of crisis for Italian cities, such
as expansionist wars and the Turkish threat. Both DeCoste’s and Milligan’s
essays make amply clear that women’s role in the construction of masculinity
Introduction 33
is a complex one. While the Duchess of the Cortegiano may exert some
control over the discussions in Urbino as a largely silent observer, once
women take on the role of agents and writers they become far more powerful
— even, perhaps insidious — as indices of an aggressive masculinity they
cannot embody themselves.
The theatrical tradition in Italy, a genre that has received less
attention in gender studies than has Spanish theatre, may not be the subject
of any of the articles in this volume,45 but as María Carrión’s contribution
shows, the Spanish theatre was directly engaged with costume and
movement inherited from Italy’s courtly literature. At the same time, the
Italian tradition of the commedia dell’arte had an impact across Europe, as
its stock set of characters, ranging from coy and often innocent lovers to
scheming servants, became stereotypes for both male and female personae.
The Italian capitano — the boastful, swaggering military man — takes his
cues from the ubiquitous Spanish troops in Italy after 1527 and finds a more
sobering presence on the Spanish stage in the proud husband who takes
offence at what he imagines to be his wife’s infidelities. Dian Fox focuses
on the obsession with honour in Spanish plays as another way of defining
manhood, while suggesting how the early modern stage provided a critique
of “ideological constructions of manliness” in Spain’s attempt to wrestle with
national identity. Two articles in this volume address the capitano’s “other”
on the Spanish stage, the lindo, as both Maria Carrión and José Cartagena-
Calderón ask how both late seventeenth-century productions and modern
revivals of El lindo don Diego “confuse the lines of definition of what is
expected of a man’s character on- and offstage.”
What kind of “new” literary history might be said to emerge from this
account? While most of the articles isolate aspects of individual texts, several
offer a more diachronic view. Leah Middlebrook imaginatively sketches a
history of Spanish poetry that moves from notions of Homeric greatness and
power to more constrained achievements that reflect the actual role of the
courtier/poet in sixteenth-century politics.46 Similarly, Jane Tylus’s article
45
For a monographic study on gender and Italian theatre see Günsberg, Gender and
the Italian Stage.
46
Another fascinating example of this kind of adaptation is Alison Weber’s recent ar-
ticle, “Lope de Vega’s Rimas sacras,” in which she examines Lope’s attempts to manipulate
the rhetoric of servitude within a system of patronage in which relationships of dominance
between groups of men were highly codified.
on two of Renaissance Florence’s greatest poets, Lorenzo de’ Medici and

Angelo Poliziano, details the different visions of Italian poetry that emerged
from fifteenth-century Tuscany. One sought to connect the poet and his age
with the raw power of the ancients, while the other nervously embraced
the vernacular’s preoccupation with love poetry. What Middlebrook
characterizes as a “Spanish search for a modern poetics of masculinity” that
evolves over time is shown in its fifteenth-century Florentine version as a
search already marked with political and cultural tensions. As Florentines
sought to establish an “Italian” literary canon and identity, they were faced
with the question of what to do with the fact that most of the evidence for
such a canon “seemed to be about the loss of manly thoughts and liberty
itself?”
As reflected in Lorenzo’s concerns about his native language and
its literary productions, early modern Italian and Spanish texts express
considerable uncertainty about masculine subjectivities. Carla Freccero’s
article nicely reveals a tension that begins to mark itself by the mid sixteenth
century in the light of both the Reformation and New World explorations.
In moving from Leon Battista Alberti’s Libri della famiglia, with its self-
sufficient, authoritative male subject, to the Calvinist Jean de Léry’s Histoire
d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, she engages with two very different
settings (a Florentine mercantile family; the tribe of the Tupi Indians on the
Brazilian coast) and two very different images of masculinity. On the one
hand, we see the emergence of a “masculine triumphant” that defines itself
through conquest and domination; on the other, a counter-masculinity
that resists coercive designs. Here, too, issues of genre are relevant. If,
as Freccero speculates, Alberti’s musings on economy and exchange in
which women are always the object have a correlation with epic, Léry’s
destabilizing text assumes the characteristics of lyric, as a potentially
“voyeuristic scene of conflict” dissolves into marvellous spectacle, inspiring
not fear but “ravishment.”47 What might the implications for a masculine
ethos of surrender be in the new early modern order? And to move beyond
the scope of this volume and to an area Freccero’s article introduces, what
might the implications for a masculine ethos of surrender be in the new
world in which Spain was such a vital presence?
47
For discussions of this phenomenon in another new world context, see Greene,
Unrequited Conquests.
Introduction 35
***
Although Alberti may have identified two manly ideals, the young soldier
and the wise elder, there is clearly a much broader and richer spectrum of
men who populated Renaissance texts. The gap between such ideals and the
reality of human experience is taken up by the contributors to this volume.
“Abrasions” between ideal men and their real counterparts were prone to ex-
ist in two cultures seeking to define themselves in the terms Alberti, Vives,
or Guevara expressed, establishing an Italian or Spanish esprit through epic
tales of honour and theatrical characterizations of male temperance.48 That
these ideals are often borrowed from classical precursors or from each other
makes them only more fascinating as they are translated and dressed in pa-
triotic vernaculars. Italy constantly measured itself against an ancient glori-
ous past; Spain borrowed from and contrasted itself with a culturally promi-
nent Italy as well as with the rich Jewish and Islamic traditions that had once
been part of the peninsula. As they inherited the constant process of bor-
rowing and appropriation fundamental to humanism, how did poets, dram-
atists, and artists make something alien their own in an era when autonomy
was viewed as the sine qua non to manliness and vigorous national identity?
Like the maturing son who seeks independence from paternal identity, these
writers and the texts they produced were caught up in numerous uncertain-
ties and contradictions.
The articles in this collection look back to similarly complex
representations that embed hopes and expectations about masculinity in a
wide variety of textual forms, ranging from dialogues such as the one that
transpired at Urbino without Guidobaldo’s guiding presence, to love poetry,
epic, sermons, pageants, tragedy, and Spanish comedia. In a field that tends to
be dominated by an emphasis on twentieth-century texts and contemporary
exempla, these articles are an important addition. At the very least, we hope
that they will encourage those engaged in studies of masculinity to return to
a moment after the medieval era and before the modern — or at least to a
moment when the “modern” as we know it was identified with the struggles
of Italian and Spanish male subjects attempting to separate themselves
from troubled and troubling pasts. Whether early modernity succeeded in
48
See David Rosen’s comment on the “abrasion between the masculine ideal and the
surrounding world,” and his argument that men incur “role stress” as they seek to fulfil
ideals of manhood that they have inherited; Rosen, Changing Fictions, xiii.
making that separation, and whether the contours of its creation are still
recognizable today, are the questions this volume raises and hopes in some
small way to answer.
Gerry Milligan Jane Tylus
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Publications of the

Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies

Essays and Studies, 22

Series Editor Konrad Eisenbichler

Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Typesetting, cover design, and production: Iter Inc.

1. Pederastic Insemination, or Dante in the Grammar

2. Epic’s Endless Deferral: Vernacular Masculinities in the

3. Loving the Other: Masculine Subjectivities in Early Modern

4. Castiglione: Love, Power and Masculinity

5. The Poetics of Modern Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century

6. Performing Masculinity in the Land of the Man-Killing

8. “Quanto concede la guerra”: Epic Masculinity and the

9. “Templa, pequeño joven, templa brío”: Pretty Boys and

10. In Earnest and in Jest: Disciplining Masculinity through

11. Performing Masculinity, Nationalism, and Honour in

12. Of Pretty Fops and Spectacular Sodomites: El lindo don

13. Men with Style. Sprezzatura, Costume, and Movement for

This collection of essays originated from four panels on masculinity organ-

Gerry Milligan Jane Tylus

2. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488–1576). “Allegory of the Battle of

3. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488–1576). “The Emperor Charles V

4. Agostino Dati (1420–1478) Elegantiolae, Venice: Giovanni Battista

5. Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1497) “St. Augustine Taken by his Parents to

6. Fernando Conde as the figurón in El lindo don Diego (Festival de Te-

7. Fernando Conde as don Diego and Alejandra Torray as doña Inés in

8. Fernando Conde as don Diego engaging the mirrors in El lindo don

Josiah Blackmore is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Por-

María M. Carrión is Professor of Spanish and Women's Studies at

José R. Cartagena-CalderÓn is Associate Professor of Romance

Gary Cestaro is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of

Mary DeCoste is Associate Professor of Italian in the School of Lan-

Carla Freccero is Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and His-

Leah Middlebrook is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Gerry Milligan is Assistant Professor of Italian at the College of Staten

Ian Frederick Moulton , Head of Interdisciplinary Humanities and

ford, 2000), and editor and translator of Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria, an

José Antonio Rico-Ferrer is Assistant Professor of Spanish at

Marc David Schachter is author of Voluntary Servitude and the

Jane Tylus is Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Humanities

Harry Vélez Quiñones is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the Uni-

the context of Renaissance social normativizing forces.2 Anthropologists have

have long characterized scholarship on the prescriptive literature of Italy,

others caution in their various fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuals.13

the discussion, as the interlocutors struggle to adapt the modes of a refined

es, as Elisabeth Badinter has shown, between masculinity and femininity,23

intorno al comporre dei romanzi, the playwright and critic Giovambattista

“effeminate”, “virile,” or the Spanish specific lindo. José Cartagena-Calderón

bound to culturally specific modes of dress, comportment, and aesthetics,

reproductive sexuality, while Harry Vélez Quiñones’s article on Cervantes’s

on two of Renaissance Florence’s greatest poets, Lorenzo de’ Medici and

Gerry Milligan Jane Tylus

Croce, Benedetto. La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza. Bari:

Kelly, Joan. “Did Women have a Renaissance?” pp. 175–202 in Becoming

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