Repurposing Marfisa: The Female Warrior Grapples with Gender and Genealogy in the Cinquecento Epic
At the mid-way point of my examination of gender, genre and disease in sixteenth-century Italian court culture (specifically that of the dynasty of Federico II Gonzaga, first duke of Mantua), this chapter represents a bridge between the macro-level assessment of emergent French Pox in Western art and literature of the sixteenth century in chapter one and the micro-level examination of the functions of art and literature in the treatment of socio-political and physical disorder at the Mantuan court of a sufferer of French Pox and important patron of Renaissance art, Federico II Gonzaga, in chapter three. In chapter one, I situated the outbreak and subsequent pandemic of French Pox as a cataclysmic event at the end of the fifteenth century, leading to widespread social disruption and change throughout the sixteenth. Viewing the emergence of Pox as an existential and epistemological crisis across all forms of social institutions, reveals a critical oversight in scholarship dealing with sixteenth-century art and culture, that tends to minimize the impact of this critical moment in medical, philosophical and religious discourses.1
The historical ‘neglect’ afforded by scholars past and present results largely from what I see as the indelible effects of the stigmatization of ‘venereal disease’ – an ongoing process of marginalization begun in the sixteenth century and continuing into the present day – but also from the way in which discipline-specific scholarship has, until recently, been produced, maintained and contained. Fearing to stray from our areas of expertise – lest we speak out of turn or make incorrect assumptions – scholars have remained siloed in our various fields of interest, avoiding the vulnerability of working outside the limits of our specialized training. We can rest there, comfortably working within the contexts we know
1Here I do not mean to infer that sixteenth-century French Pox has been wholly ignored or overlooked in scholarship of the period,
only to express, that its universal impact (for the disease spared no class or creed) has largely been, and continues to be, under- emphasized. Particularly for the early sixteenth century (during its initial phase of absolute mortality and extreme virulence), French Pox was a much-feared force of social disruption, and its ‘modernizing’ effects have been traced through various medical and cultural studies. Medical, social, and cultural historians have examined Pox in relation to the developments of the ‘institution’ of modern medicine, as well as modern medical theory and practice, and systems for public health. Additionally, Pox has been central to studies of the evolution of disease (and history of modern ‘syphilis’), as well as Early Modern epidemics, medical theories and practice related to the diagnosis and treatment of contagious disease.
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best, and occupying a position of relative intellectual authority that gives more weight to our assertions, or we can think about our work in more holistic terms.
By adopting a vision that connects Renaissance literary studies to contemporary life, our work becomes increasingly relevant beyond the page upon which it is written, and offers a wider audience more information about the human experience: its universalities and particularities. Many scholars are already exploring the possibilities for working across disciplines,2 a shift that requires dynamism and a
movement beyond the limits of our established reputations – to borrow from those who know more, and to lend to those who know less. In chapter one, I attempted to eschew a priori assumptions about what I can and cannot do with my training as a critic of literature, in order to stake my claim to historical pox, to its aesthetic legacy – artistic and literary alike – and to the social and philosophical context in which it was first apprehended. Amateur (at best) in the fields of art and medical histories, I return now to my intellectual patria, the text and textual analysis (but not only!).
The present chapter narrows the focus of my study to a single literary genre: Cinquecento Epic. This point of entry stems from the broad discourse that I established in chapter one, as I assessed the treatment of Pox in early modern medical theory and practice along with its manifestations in art and literature, in order to expand upon the intellectual-philosophical framework of Derrida’s Pharmakon, revealing the text itself as both medical tool, and agent of corruption or infection. As an interpretational system, the Pharmakon provides the language and underlying conceptual structure, by which to enter into a now ‘defunct’ form of textual consumption, that I call textual healing. Chapter three provides the
analysis of textual healing in action, as I consider the pharmakon at work within Federico II Gonzaga’s art and literary patronage – and the relationships that surround, embed and encode it. In order to apply textual healing to Federico II Gonzaga’s malady, I must first identify an aesthetic marker by which to trace its effects – physical, conceptual or otherwise. The Chivalric Epic of the Cinquecento will lay this
groundwork.
2I do not mean to assert that there is no place for highly specialized, discipline-specific study in Renaissance scholarship today, only
to stake my own claim otherwise. As an early-career scholar, my survival entails securing a future for the ever-imperiled Humanities, in a culture where such pursuits are increasingly devalued. The push that I make to promote Interdisciplinarity opens the field to new waysof thinking about texts and contexts, and removes barriers to making our expertise available to the broadest possible
audience. The critical distinction, for me, has to do with expanding accessibility, and not gate-keeping our highly specialized disciplines out of existence.
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While I do not believe it has been noted elsewhere – and certainly not remarked upon at length – the Cinquecento Epic, in its purest dispensations3 came into being and took its earliest forms alongside
the incomprehensible and all-corrupting Pox.4 The major figures at play upon the “world’s stage” (read
clearly from a decidedly Western perspective) are reading Boiardo and Ariosto as they debate the fate of Christendom, assailed by the “Turkish threat” to the East, and Lutheranism to the North; navigate shifting political borders, further complicated by changes in warfare technology, expanding colonialism and the “discovery” of the New World; and race to resolve the great equalizing force of uncontained and untreatable contagious disease. Excepting the latter-most (contagious disease), these are among the many salient topics that critics have used as tools to better understand the function of varying ideologies within the Cinquecento Epic, and to situate the narrative in its socio-political historical context. I essay to open the conversation further, to turn our attention to the fifteen-foot poxy gorilla in the room, to consider our historical figures – whether they be dukes or emperors, popes or cardinals, courtiers or ladies of the court, or physicians or artists or ambassadors or poets (or some mashup thereof, for we must not forget this is the time of renaissance men!), in their basest forms: i.e. as human animals, susceptible to physical ailment and disease, and to the psychological impact of bearing witness to the unmaking of human lives.
In this context, War comes immediately to mind, and we do well to record that – at least in literature and art – war does not always mean War.5 And, ah!, we have arrived at epic signification, and
the endless cycle of meaning making that necessarily occurs within a constellation of open-ended, loosely linking works such as epic poems. No epic, then, can be understood in a vacuum, and epic studies proceed most convincingly when closely situated, amongst “similar” works and across time periods: a necessary first step in any critical approach to epic literature. The messiness of assigning meaning to epic
3I say this with more than a hint of irony, as epic literature and the epic narrative form, more generally, are characteristically
derivative. Catherine Bates asserts that “it is a quintessential if not defining characteristic of epic to refer back to and revise what went before”, describing the epic as “a literary tradition [within which individual works] at once constitute, continue, and change” the legacy of which they are a part (ix). Traceable always to a remote and distant past, and couched in formulaic representations of narrative elements such as setting, action and character – much of the underlying meaning behind these texts is generated through the interplay of the author’s various deployment of literary tradition and innovation.
My comment above reflects the overarching tendency toward canonization which characterizes the formal study of art and literature, and the irony here is both multivalent and intentional. It will be addressed further, in short order.
4In her discussion of Ariosto and Tasso, Günsberg makes no mention of French Pox, historically contextualizing the former
according to political and social disorder resulting from “the most fraught, middle years of the Wars of Italy which raged from 1494 to 1559” (173). Tasso’s writing, on the other hand, she associates with the increasingly restrictive, Post-Tridentine religious climate, and tensions resulting from conflicts with the hostile Ottoman and Turkish forces to the “East” (ibid).
5In her treatment of ideology in Cinquecento epic, Wofford quotes from Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations: “All efforts to render politics
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figuration, and the sheer open-endedness – ad infinitum, which characterize the genre are attended to by scholars in a number of ways, but they must necessarily be considered.
Approach
Confronting Epic
The interpretation of epic, then, is both intertextual, as well as intercontextual; and occurs as the process of finding correlations among the irreducible and dynamic interplay of highly subjective terms. Shemek describes the interpretational morass of the Furioso thusly: “[it] asserts the world’s disheartening complexity, its irreducibility to any single, clearly presentable story or perspective” (Ladies Errant 81). The characteristic “lack of closure” and the attendant threat of “interpretative chaos” are mediated by epic authors through a re-directed “focus for interpretation,” taking into account how the author has used the epic model as the basis for particular instances of “transformations, substitutions, and suppressions necessary to arrive at a given literary resolution” (Wofford 13). Taking a more expansive view, Wofford sums up the epic struggle of locating signification within the genre, stating simply: “Epic poetry in
particular resists [the] tendency to sum up the narrative in one meaning because of the ways in which the narrator must negotiate its encyclopedic scope and give it a cultural coherence and naturalness, while representing it as something distant and “other”” (ibid). The “encyclopedic scope” to which Wofford is referring, is the historic and cultural legacy attached to epic, that is, its “literary precedents” and antecedents, all of which operate recursively to generate patterns and systems for interpreting and receiving epic content (Günsberg 179).
It is this interplay of trope and ideology which characterizes the genre as an excellent medium by which to study the function of ideology in literature, by exposing:
the role of topos in transmitting value systems, such as that which perpetuates the gender hierarchy. Sheer repetition creates a topos, resulting in the building up of an automatically receptive and conditioned response, thereby reinforcing what have become received values, in a sort of ideological fait accompli. (ibid)
Viewed in this way, Epic literature becomes an aesthetic lens by which to expose and examine the function of ideology in the perpetuation of all kinds of social issues, and presented across varying
contexts. Considering how an Epic perspective on social issues might be limiting, Toohey reminds us that epic literary production is both vast and diverse. “What isn’t epic,” he questions. The response is
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from antiquity, there remains very little that has not been covered in one way or another, by one form of epic literature or another (Bates 31).
[As]one of the most transportable of narrative genres and one of the easiest to experience, whether through public or private performance or recitation, or simply through reading oneself or being read to. So it is that we find that epic narrative becomes the major and most popular purveyor of narrative within most periods of the ancient world […] (34)
Flashing forward to the sixteenth century, the epic form persists and manifests according to new social and historical contexts. For Renaissance scholars, as for scholars working within the Classics, the
epistemological value of the epic form comes from its lasting popularity, its diversity, and the way in which imposed narrative order and tropological patterning function in opposition, and in tandem, to generate and communicate ideological information.
Enter: the female warrior archetype and her specific – and varied – deployment(s) in Cinquecento epic, and things get interesting. Trope, meet the ideology of gendered hierarchy; meet, also, the
(thoroughly destabilized) context of pox-afflicted, and politically divided, northern-Italian principalities at the start of the sixteenth century. Who we are talking about, and why, adds an additional layer of ideological consideration: that of the restrictive process of canon-formation and perpetuation. This time, our critical interpretational focus requires the adoption of a long-view on the generation and transmission of hierarchies within forms of aesthetic production, and we must, once again, look beyond the specific epic literature being interpreted, to consider the work’s reception and critical treatment across time and cultural contexts.
This brings us back to the point made earlier, regarding the “purest forms” of Cinquecento epic, and the irony inherent in the seemingly inconsequential deployment of such ideologically laden phrasing when discussing epic types and themes. Before ever contacting a given text, by nature of its very existence, the “Canon of Literature” has already influenced our reception thereof. Because there is a canon within which we may operate, we are thereby bound to participate in its principal function: ideological transmission. Whether we mean to or not, when we work within the system of canonization, our criticism necessarily bears the mark of our original literary sin: we are guilty by our association to the field in which we work. Even such an off-hand device for the categorization of subgenres, functions as an ideologically-laden assertion hinging upon the assumption of truth and authority and influencing how the text will be read and understood – or if it will be read at all.