The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain (review)

The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain is an engrossing collection of essays that adroitly examines the ways in which literary culture demonstrates, proves, and fashions masculinity in both Italy and Spain during the early modern period. Through thirteen essays that seamlessly explore case studies pertaining to both Italian and Spanish literatures, scholars study what models bound Italian and Spanish ideals of masculinity together and how they influenced one another.

The interconnections between Spain and Italy during the sixteenth century are well known. The fate of the two regions had meshed through centuries of military and cultural exchange. Both territories experienced periods of political and cultural unrest that produced gender-focused arguments about empire, autonomy, and personhood. The analogy of a weakening nation and effeminacy dominated the political, cultural, and literary discourses of early modern Italy and Spain.

The six essays on Spanish poetry, courtesy manuals, and theater included in this book focus on the impact that Italian cultural borrowings had on the policing of masculinity in Spain. Authors ponder how the shift from the medieval ideal of the Castilian unruly and brave warrior to the elite masculinity of the courtier brought about conflicting ways to understand manliness. Leah Middlebrook studies how the incorporation of Italian forms in poetry went hand-in-hand with the emergence of modern varieties of Spanish masculine identity. She argues that the Italian model was most appealing because it helped mediate the changing relationships to authority that the rise of empire brought about. Modern heroes belonged to and were inserted in a strict hierarchy that encompassed not only court life but also the matters of a global monarchy. Authors such as Garcilaso, Hernando de Acuña, and Fernando de Herrera sought in the Italian verse the means to represent the modern courtier. Yet, disappointments with the imperial regimen led to reflections about how Italian letters may contaminate Spain's language and weaken its men. Garcilaso, for instance, called attention to the subjection of the courtier. Herrera, on the other hand, worried that linguistic contamination would weaken Spanish manliness.

Italian conduct manuals had a great influence in early modern Spain. Boscan's translation of Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (1528) was published in 1534. Then followed Lucas Gracián Dantisco's El Galateo español (1593), the Spanish translation of Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo (1558). José A. Rico-Ferrer studies Dantisco's Galateo against the original in order to show how Dantisco proposes "a masculine self-fashioning where humor is an important ingredient of social exchange" (284). In the Spanish version, the use of jest and humor is determined by the increasing importance and value of social interaction over military virtue.

In the seventeenth century, moralists and playwrights alike looked back to a glorified past of conquest, even though its heroes no longer seemed to be relevant to either the urban class or the soldiers of the feared Spanish tercios. Courtiers and soldiers who smelled nice and dressed to kill were motive of worry, scorn, and diversion. These concerns were ubiquitous even in such nationalistic foundational myths as Numantia. Harry Vélez-Quiñones studies two poignant moments in Cervantes's Numancia (1580): Scipio's address to the Roman troops along with the general exchange with the Numantine boy Bariato. The concern about effeminacy and sodomy cannot be ignored, especially if Scipio's words are read in the context of the historical sources of the play, such as Antonio de Guevara's famous Epístolas familiares (1539-42), the military culture of the period, the language of courtly love, and finally the well-known Ganymede myth.

The controversial popularity of fashionable men attested also to the urgent need of fortifying masculinity. Diana Fox argues that, on the stage, these efforts resulted not only in regulations against male actors in drag, but also the use of the language of honor as an antidote against effeminacy...