Cultural Non-Conformity in Early Modern Florence (review)

Domenico Zanrè follows the development of the Accademia Fiorentina as it moved from an informal congregation of intellectuals to an association that the Medici set out to control and shape according to their ideological and political aims. More precisely, Zanrè studies four male authors who saw themselves as writing outside the fringe either because they were non-conformists or because they did not belong to the social elite. He adds to the mix a woman poet who belonged to no academy because of her sex and her profession. The book is interestingly written, with concepts explained clearly, good supporting documentation, and a knack for telling a good story. The relationship between the academicians and the authority is also convincingly recreated and intellectuals forgotten by literary history finally receive some critical attention. But the book is also marred, at least in the more literary chapters, by an authorial unwillingness to dig deeper into the material at hand and advance more sweeping hypotheses on what the collusion of mind and power, freedom of thought and political need for control — the subject of this book after all — meant for Renaissance Florentine culture.

The first two chapters recreate the political and intellectual situation in Florence soon after the Medici reestablished their hegemony after a brief period in which the city was held as a republic. On coming to power, Cosimo I moved swiftly to legitimate his rule (by marrying, for example, the Spanish Eleonora da Toledo) and increase his power. He also tried to control the intellectual life of the city. Thus, he had a small academy, the Accademia degli Umili, thoroughly infiltrated in a matter of years by intellectuals duly appreciative of his benevolence. The renamed Accademia Fiorentina soon saw its membership revised to insure that the official line was represented. Local authors writing in Tuscan were encouraged and an official press was created.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 center on academicians who use the burlesque form to express their dissent. Antonfrancesco Grazzini (called Il Lasca) was an anti-conformist poet and novella writer expelled from the academy because he repeatedly complained of outside infringements. Grazzini had to wait thirty years to be reintegrated, all the while hoping for a position of authority by courting men in power, especially young noblemen. This courting took often the form of a frankly erotic, male-to-male poetry. Zanrè does not sponsor the common view that Grazzini inscribed in his work his homosexuality. Rather, he prefers to describe Grazzini as homosocially bent. But by looking at the sheer number of pages in his work offering images of castration, sexual defilation, longings à la Michelangelo, and obsessive figurations of Ganymede, Narcissus, and Adonis, one senses that Zanrè's argument in favor of homosociality is blatantly tame. The Fiorentina was by constitution already homosocial, (no women were admitted, for example) and Grazzini's images and choices cannot be explained, I submit, by saying that he was simply espousing a rhetoric of friendship in his work.

Girolamo Amelonghi, the next Fiorentina's member examined, was a writer on the fringe of the academy. Most of his work has not survived and he was repeatedly accused of plagiarism. Zanrè invokes Bakhtin as he concentrates on the fantastic, the excessive, the gargantuan, the scatological, and the obscene in Amelonghi's burlesque epic. These excesses are then linked to the author's desire to challenge the established order of the Accademia.

Alfonso de' Pazzi, a prolific writer whose work is still mostly in manuscript form, allows Zanrè to recreate the virulent debate in the Fiorentina between supporters of an old fashioned Petrarchan paradigm à la Pietro Bembo and a vociferous local faction arguing for a modern sixteenth-century Florentine vernacular. The vituperative exchanges in burlesque form that de' Pazzi addressed to another famous member of the academy, Benedetto Varchi, give us a glimpse of the depth of discord among Tuscan scholars on the topic of the "questione della lingua...