
Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy, ed. Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll, and Katherine A. McIver
This new book, co-edited by UCC Lecturer in Music and Marie Curie Fellow, Dr Melanie Marshall, with Linda L. Carroll and Katherine A. McIver, explores how the arts shape the erotic and the sexual. Taking medieval and early modern Italy as its focus, the authors follow a wide cross-section of subjects as they imagine, experience and strive to regulate the sensual in fields as diverse as religion, painting, literature, acting, musical performance and humour.
The result sheds light on a world very like our own: as economic, religious and political upheaval coalesced into a new European social order, the foremost artists, musicians and playwrights rubbed shoulders (and more) with cross-dressing actors, pimps, moralists and papal reformers. Sexual autonomy was sought, celebrated and veiled, subverted and sold, satirized and sentimentalized.
In a period before the emergence of formal definitions that encourage us now to perceive homosexuality and heterosexuality through a lens of difference, early-modern Italian culture makers like Titian, Giorgione, Vecchi, Boccaccio, Ruzante, Castellino, and even distinguished patrons and reformers like Pope Leo X and Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, were engaged in creating fluid and stimulating representations of human love and lust, capturing in their art the full realities of the sexual activity they themselves knew. Their realisations can inform our perspectives today on both early modern Italian art and culture and on modes of contemporary sexual expression.
Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy, edited by Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll and Katherine A. McIver is published by Ashgate.
ISBN: 978-1-4094-6468-6. Regular price €60, website price €54. http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409464686