The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (review)

Most of us grew up listening in wondrous fascination to stories about the beautiful girl who kissed an ugly frog and turned him into her Prince Charming, releasing him from a wicked witch's spell, cast eons earlier. If our wiser parents assured us that this was only a fairy tale, not really true, then they spoiled the magic and failed to accept the advice of leading-edge post-World War II child psychologists on how to nurture imaginative children. A far smaller number of readers of this review are scientists working actively on cloning new replicas of the sheep Dolly or perhaps marginally involved in such pursuits by working as ethicists thinking about the implications of the latest asexual reproductive techniques available to us moderns. But everyone knows that it no longer takes two to tango when it comes to making babies, and there is a huge and expensive profession, in fact several of them, devoted to assisting men and women understand how their genders may be deconstructed or constructed, depending on individual desire. Today, concerning sex and reproduction, we routinely do nearly all the weird and absurd things that Renaissance Europeans seldom achieved but nonetheless resolutely claimed were possible. In an ironic sense, then, this book is about long-dead futurists who anticipated our contemporary accomplishments and anxieties. At several key points, as in the discussion of Baby M in chapter 2, Finucci wholeheartedly asserts the contemporary relevance of her findings.

One might also, with equal cogency, argue precisely the reverse—that the book imposes modern ways of thinking about sexuality onto poems, short stories, laws, court proceedings, and church edicts created by people who would have been baffled by the very notion of gender. After all, when the Bible bars men with crushed testicles from entering the temple (Deuteronomy 23), maybe the regulation has only one primary intention: limiting access to power-and-might to "real" men capable of reproduction—actually, one of Finucci's key conclusions about Renaissance mentalities—and has no intended implications concerning gender transgression, neither now nor twenty-five centuries ago. Still, other specific Old Testament concerns, such as sex with animals or with near-human relatives (Leviticus 18), haunt us no less today than they did five centuries ago. But can anything be categorized as universal? Just who are Adam's descendants? Do they include men with nothing to swear by? Are men emasculated by the lasciviousness of their women?

Finucci's book is something of a romp, a playful yet erudite recounting of all sorts of nonsense published in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has read a lot, jotted down copious notes, restructured everything into a clear theoretical framework, and then let the bits and pieces fall where they may. In the introduction and first chapter, which set forth the book's themes and explore them in wonderfully imaginative ways, there is little concern for numbers of editions, or readership, or history-of-the-book issues. Masters of the word such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Niccolò Machiavelli are served up on the same platter with Giuseppe Liceto and Giovanni Marinello, deservedly obscure authors of advice manuals who lacked both literary grace and common sense. We have a sparkling sense of the bewildering variety of ideas floating around somewhere on the peninsula but little grasp of whatever it may be that the common man thought about his sexuality. At the most general level, it certainly seems to be the case that Renaissance men were deeply troubled about their manliness, but when has that not been true? Is this the universal truth we seek to prove?

The pearls hidden in the copious, self-indulgent paragraphs of this book merit the effort of discovery. We learn from Paracelsus that New World peoples cannot have traveled so far from the Garden of Eden and still have been descendents of Adam and Eve. They must...