The Court and Its Critics: Anti-Court Sentiments in Early Modern Italy(Toronto Italian Studies)

Anti-courtly discourse furnished a platform for discussing some of the most pressing questions of early modern Italian society. The court was the space that witnessed a new form of negotiation of identity and prestige, the definition of masculinity and of gender-specific roles, the birth of modern politics and of an ethics based on merit and on individual self-interest. The Court and Its Critics analyses anti-courtly critiques using a wide variety of sources including manuals of courtliness, dialogues, satires, and plays, from the mid-fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. The book is structured around four key figures that embody different features of anti-courtly sentiments. The figure of the courtier shows that sentiments against the court were present even among those who apparently benefitted from such a system of power. The court lady allows an investigation of the intertwining of anti-courtliness and anti-feminism. The satirist and the shepherd of pastoral dramas are investigated as attempts to fashion two different forms of a new self for the court intellectual.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. The Courtier 2. The Lady 3. The Satirist 4. The Shepherd Afterword Bibliography

About the Author :
Paola Ugolini is an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo.

Review :
" The Court and Its Critics is an outstandingly well-researched and engagingly written monograph, revealing a new analytical purchase on Cinquecento politics. While offering the kind of intricate textual analysis that is the hallmark of a literary critic, Paola Ugolini toggles deftly between text and context, considering reception as well as wider social, economic, and political settings." --Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Department of History, Boston College "Paola Ugolini's is the first major study to offer a systematic examination of anti-court discourse written largely by courtiers themselves, in a remarkably wide range of genres. We know pieces of the textual tradition she traces in this study, but Ugolini puts this mosaic together to form a whole, adding to the corpus of anti-courtly texts by such major authors as Sannazaro, Ariosto, Aretino, Tasso, and Guarini, and a massive collection of lesser-known writings by more minor figures. The result is a discursive landscape in which something that has always been present becomes visible in its full contours, where the trees become a veritable forest of anti-courtly sentiment."--Deanna Shemek, School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine