The Manly Masquerade

“[H]er analysis of the relationship of masculinity to paternity in The Manly Masquerade reveals a range of ways masculinity was constructed in Renaissance Italian literature and thought.” - Katherine Crawford , Modern History

“[T]he questions that The Manly Masquerade poses are significant ones that need to be addressed in our discussions of sexuality, subjectivity, and representation in the Renaissance and early modern period.” - Marilyn Migiel , CLIO

“Addressing the fraught process of becoming a man in Renaissance Italy, this book is an important study of the ways that cultural and literary texts work together to give gendered metaphors purchase on physical bodies…. [Finucci’s] book will be of interest to scholars of early modern, medieval, and gender studies.” - Holly A. Crocker , Medieval Feminist Forum

"The Manly Masquerade is a marvelous book, a must for anyone interested in the early modern period or in the history of sexuality and reproduction." - Cristina Mazzoni , Annali d'Italianistica

"[A] detailed and informative study of the representation of masculinity in early modern Italian literature and drama. . . . Finucci's readings . . . are detailed and perceptive. . . . [Her] work remains both thought-provoking and highly informative-and crucial to anyone working on gender in early modern Italy and Europe." - Ian Frederick Moulton , Sixteenth Century Journal

"[T]his is a rich and rewarding book which effectively conveys the distance between Renaissance beliefs and our own." - Patricia Skinner , Medieval Review

"[This] is a book about the literary fantasies of sixteenth-century Italy that comments boldly and intriguingly on twenty-first-century scientific anxieties. Brava!"
- Rudolph M. Bell , Journal of the History of Sexuality

"Finucci's book is not only a stimulating read, but also an important scholarly contribution to the field of Early Modern gender and cultural studies, and to masculinity studies. . . . In her study, Finucci challenges our notions of gender, sex, paternity, and especially the power associated with procreation and reproduction, in ways that are both highly innovative and scholarly sound." - Martin Marafiot , MLN

"This is a bold and captivating book. To build her argument about the role of fatherhood in masculinity, Finucci deftly reaches across several different registers of cultural expression: medicine, law, comedy, poetry, and opera. In calling our attention to the growing importance, and instability, of fatherhood in the later Renaissance, she usefully complicates our understanding of masculinity and patriarchy." - P. Renee Baernstein, American Historical Review

"Valeria Finucci’s book questions the traditional concepts associated with the Italian Renaissance (harmony, spiritual perfection and beauty, etc.) and addresses much less ‘luminous’ aspects of sixteenth-century Italian culture." - Armando Maggi, author of Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology

”Valeria Finucci is at it again, patrolling and illuminating the unstable boundaries of sex and gender in early modern Italian culture and literature. Relating canonical literary texts to the medical and legal culture of their times, she explores the fascination that spontaneous generation, cuckoldry, the maternal imagination, androgyny, and the deliberate manufacture of castrati held for early modern Italians—and still hold for us.” - Walter Stephens, author of Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief