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

Introduction

1 Introduction In the summer of 1983, I experienced a kind of intellectual conversion at the Newberry Library in a seminar on paleography taught by professors Armando Petrucci and Franca Nardelli. As we studied and analyzed , each day, different exempla of “Italian” handwriting from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, I learned to shift my interpretive focus from linguistic signs and their relation to “things” out in the world to graphic signs and their signification of social relations on the page. We learned that the various physical clothing in which language appears—including different types of handwriting, varying degrees of handwriting proficiency, and different kinds of margins or corrections to the text—could tell us something important about the social context of writing.1 It was as if, in the course of our observations, we ourselves began to participate in a narrative about the physical production of writing. The irregular margins and lack of spacing in a letter by Vittoria Colonna, for example, told us about the contrast between her cultural refinement and the qualities of her handwriting that showed she was self-educated. The inconsistent application of ink in a letter by Diomede Caraffa told us that he didn’t always draw enough ink from the inkwell. A letter by Boccaccio in mercantile handwriting reminded us of his story as a cultural figure who participated in several graphic cultures of his time. A manuscript page of Giovanni Villani’s Cronica written in mercantile hand told us a story of how his text was dis- 2 | Introduction seminated not only among humanistic readers but also among merchants and artisans. The physical appearance of a sixteenth-century diplomatic letter told us something about the literacy of its writer, the amount of time he had to compose his letter, and the relations of power in which he was working. These pages of writing were telling us stories about their own production, the relation of writing to society, the social position of writers, and dissonant registers and spaces that were opened up in the dissemination of the text. But how did “we” participate in these stories? And who were we, the participants? Were we a sum of scholarly egos trained to suppress our own stories (marked by gender, sexuality, race, and class) in the interest of knowing the past? Or did we (and our personal stories) change by virtue of our participation in these stories from the past? Did we change the stories by virtue of our participation in them? I became very interested in answering such questions, as I looked for ways to theorize and narrate my participation in stories from the past. In that seminar of 1983, Petrucci and Nardelli seemed to sketch possible epistemological connections between researchers and the writing they examine. We learned, for example, that the key to deciphering what might seem, at first, to be illegible script was to “become” the scribe, to practice forming the letters in any given style until comprehension became more habitual. By the same token, we learned that our research questions and interests did not emerge as disinterested ones, disconnected from the ways knowledge was actually organized in libraries and archives: “If you have become interested in a topic,” Petrucci commented, “it is because a trace of that history has reached you. There will be other traces to find and follow, a detective investigation , sometimes an obsessive one that will lead you to study documents that matter to no one but you.” Coming from a different kind of scholar, this talk about traces might have sounded phenomenological or metaphysical. But coming, as it did, from a historian of graphic culture , the term traces referred to the physical aspects of writing; I was especially interested to know what story might emerge if I followed the traces uncovered in my own detective investigations and made my self an active subject of the research materials I was collecting about Lorenzino de’ Medici. I became interested in Lorenzino de’ Medici’s assassination, in 1537, of his cousin Alessandro de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, many years ago when I was writing a dissertation on the representation of tyrannicide in classic texts of historiography and philosophy from Introduction | 3 Thucydides, Herodotus, and Aristotle to Livy, Suetonius, and Tacitus and the sixteenth-century historiographers Machiavelli, Giovio, Varchi , Nardi, Nerli, and Ammirato. Later I became curious to know if archival documentation might have represented this event differently, with...