Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914 ed. by Valeria P. Babini, Chiara Beccalossi, and Lucy Riall (review)

The editors of this volume point out rightly that many of the finest historians of sexuality in Italy appear to have been drawn more to the study of ancient and early modern times than to the nineteenth century, which was of course the period identified by Foucault as the crucial one in the making of modern knowledge practices about sexuality (1). This collection sets about filling that gap with a range of well-documented studies. Having announced somewhat disquietingly at the outset that “there is little that cannot be included in this field,” the editors have in fact produced a collection of essays that are held together nicely by shared intellectual style and topical insistence. One recurrent theme is that of the national stereotyping of Italians through travel writing. Cicisbeism, the apparently decadent practice of allowing women of distinction to be escorted by a cavalier servente, is analyzed with particular care by Roberto Bizzocchi in the first chapter and is regularly referred to by other contributors. The stereotypical notion that Italian men were effeminate is taken up in detail by Chiara Beccalossi and referred to elsewhere in the volume. The metaphorical representation of the making of national unity through the practice of conjugal virtue becomes a compelling theme in a number of the best pieces. Another general feature of these histories is that they draw their material from a wide range of genres. Legal and personal archives, literary texts, journalistic writing, and travel narratives all serve as documentary sources, often in nicely conjugated ways. That is particularly true of Katharine Mitchell’s piece on literary and epistolary figurations of female desire and of Ross Balzaretti’s on British women travelers. The most general feature is perhaps the richness of historical detail, bespeaking a commitment in Italian-based historiography to the representative use of well-chosen individual histories. The disciplinary backbone of this collection is provided by a series of detailed studies of just that kind: Silvia Chiletti on infanticide and the conceptual difficulties it presented for Italian law in maintaining the distinction between the corrupted woman and the honest one; Chiara Beccalossi on male homosexuality and British tourism in southern Italy; Sean Brady on John Addington Symonds and Horatio Brown’s lasting friendships with gondoliers in Venice; and Ross Balzaretti on British women travelers and their perceptions of marriage in Italy.

The best pieces in this collection are of a very high standard indeed. They are not only well documented but also carefully framed. Valeria Babini’s contribution is about three “new women” with quite different life stories and trajectories: novelist Sibilla Aleramo; doctor, educationist, and political campaigner Maria Montessori; and accused husband-killer Linda Murri. Babini’s chapter is a highly sophisticated piece of intellectual history. It does not take time out to explicate low-level assumptions; instead, it proceeds to offer a precise analysis of divergent tendencies and ongoing conceptual tensions within the Italian women’s movement at the end of the nineteenth century. She shows in effect what it might have meant in that historical context to consider the personal as closely bound together with the political. In Montessori’s case, Babini argues persuasively, the maternal role was entrusted with the responsibility of modernization itself. While continuing to emphasize intellectual and institutional constraints, Babini thus makes room for the encounter of the psychological and the semiotic, the biographical and the institutional. One of her key themes is the difficulty Italians had with female sentimental complexity, or indeed of giving any account of it at all. Linda Reeder’s piece on the making of the Italian husband in nineteenth-century Italy, which closes the volume admirably, is comparable to Babini’s for the manner in which it works back and forth between the private and the public, albeit with a different gender focus. Having noted that marriage was endowed in Italian nationalist political discourse with the...