Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought

Acknowledgments

xiii Acknowledgments This book has taken way too long to complete, but at a certain point it took on a life of its own, and I couldn’t find a way to hurry the pace. Finally, at project’s end, I have the opportunity to thank and appreciate my teacher Paolo Valesio. From the first, he encouraged me to take intellectual risks. When he wisely advised me many years ago not to mix my research on Lorenzino with my newer projects, I didn’t follow his advice. Now, however, I am satisfied that this book is a better tribute to all that I learned from Valesio . . . a stylistic expansiveness, a sense of critique, an interest in theorizing practice and practicing theory, and an ability to connect with my sources through writing. Thank you, Paolo, for giving me the tools I would need on this journey. I have been blessed with many more teachers, colleagues, friends, and family members who have generously supported and encouraged my work along the way and to whom I am deeply grateful: Leonard and Florence Jed, Erica Jed, John Freccero, Hayden White, Margaret Brose, Mary-Kay Gamel, Harry Berger, the Galassi Beria family, the Majnoni family, Luciana Siddivò and family, Maurizio Sabini, the Calitri/Bagatella family, Teresa de Lauretis, William Tay, Margit Frenk, Jaime Concha, Page duBois, Roy Harvey Pearce, Cecilia Ubilla, Armando Petrucci, Franca Nardelli, Grazia Peduzzi, Alberto Rollo, Vittoria Salierno, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Marta Sanchez, Rosaura Sanchez, Andrew Wright, Susan Kirkpatrick, Lori Chamberlain , Julie Hemker, Lisa Lowe, Bett Miller, Jennifer Robertson, xiv | Acknowledgments Maria Teresa Koreck, Michael Meranze, Robert Westman, Randolph Starn, Carlo Ginzburg, Paula Findlen, Luce Giard, Susan Larsen, Nicole Tonkovich, Kathryn Shevelow, Pasquale Verdicchio, Adriana De Marchi Gherini, Michael Davidson, Winnie Woodhull, Jorge Mariscal, Roddey Reid, Todd Kontje, Don Wayne, Louis Montrose, Oumelbanine Zhiri, Seth Lerer, John Marino, Janet Smarr, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Marguerite Waller, Richard Terdiman, Albert Ascoli , Barbara Spackman, Carla Freccero, Natalie Zemon Davis, Jane Newman, Jane Tylus, Dianella Gagliani, Luciano Casali, Lorna Hutson , Deanna Shemek, Michael Wyatt, Gianni Celati, Watson Branch, Heather Fowler, Michelle Stuckey, Lisa Vernoy, and Mary Eyring. I am grateful to the following institutions and people who provided financial, institutional, and editorial support for my work: the Fulbright Program, for supporting the beginnings of this research; the Academic Senate of the University of California–San Diego, for numerous travel grants and research support; the National Endowment for the Humanities, for supporting my participation in 1983 in the very important and influential paleography seminar taught at the Newberry Library by professors Petrucci and Nardelli; my colleagues at the Newberry Library, for their hospitality and support of my work in 1983 and beyond, especially John Tedeschi, Mary Beth Rose, and Paul Gehl; the archivists and staff at the Archivio di Stato in Milan, especially Maria Pia Bortolotti, who warmly welcomed and generously supported me as a novice archival researcher, and the director of the Archive, Dr. Maria Barbara Bertini, for granting permission to publish the letter of Giovanni Antonio, “il sarto”; the archivists and librarians at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan and the Archivio Storico Capitolino and the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, for the special courtesies they extended to me; Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari for inviting me to participate in the 1988 conference they organized and the volume they edited, Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1991); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, for inviting me to contribute to their volume The Violence of Rhetoric (Routledge, 1989); Kirstie McClure, for inviting me to participate in the Pembroke Center Roundtable on Resistance and Revolution in 1989 and for posing important questions that informed the conceptualization of this book; Jonathan Crewe, for inviting me to participate in a 1990 NEH-sponsored symposium and in a volume he edited, Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism (Bucknell University Press, 1992); the editors of the Lies of Our Times, Acknowledgments | xv for inviting me to write a column of media criticism entitled “The Other Coast” that helped me critique the sixteenth-century “media” I had found in Milan; Lorna Hutson, for the invitation to participate in the London Renaissance Seminar of 1990; Albert Ascoli, for the invitation to participate in a 1993 NEH summer institute at Northwestern University; Marta Sutton Weeks and my colleagues and friends at the Stanford Humanities Center, especially Mary Jane Parrine, Patricia Parker, Clifton Crais, Hillary Schor, Wanda Corn, Michael...