Fairy-Tale Science : Monstrous Generation in the Takes of Straparola and Basile [1 ed.] 9781442688087, 9780802097545

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FAIRY-TALE SCIENCE

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SUZANNE MAGNANINI

Fairy-Tale Science Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

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© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9754-5

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Magnanini, Suzanne Fairy-tale science : monstrous generation in the tales of Straparola and Basile / Suzanne Magnanini. (Toronto Italian Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9754-5 1. Straparola, Giovanni Francesco, ca. 1480–1557? – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Basile, Giambattista, ca. 1575–1632 – Criticism and interpretation. Monsters – Folklore. 4. Fairy tales – Italy – History and criticism. 5. Literature and science – Italy – History. 6. Monsters in literature. 7. Italian fiction – 16th century – History and criticism. 8. Italian fiction – 17th century – History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PQ4165.M34 2007

398.20945′0903

C2007-906680-1

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Science Fictions 1 Facts and Favole

3

10

2 Wonder Tales in the Age of the Marvellous

19

3 ‘Con l’uno e l’altro sesso’: Gender, Genre, and Monstrosity in Straparola’s Frame Tale 48 4 ‘Per far vere le favole’: Manipulating Maternal Desire in Basile’s Frame Tale 70 5 Bestiality and Interclass Marriage in Straparola’s ‘Il re porco’

93

6 Foils and Fakes: Manufactured Monsters and the Dragon-Slayer 117 7 Fertile Flatulence: Monstrous Paternity in Basile’s ‘Viola’ Epilogue

163

Notes 171 Bibliography Index 215

199

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Acknowledgments

Like the protagonist of a fairy tale, I had the good fortune to find many generous helpers along my path. Fairy-Tale Science had its earliest beginnings at the University of Chicago and my dissertation director Elissa Weaver can be considered the fairy godmother of this tale. She has been an extraordinarily wise and encouraging mentor over these many years. Rebecca West taught me much about close reading, while Paolo Cherci revealed a number of the secrets hidden in early modern printed texts. Michael Sherberg, who taught me some of my first words of Italian, saw me through with good humour while his own prose served as a model of clarity. Daria Perocco offered valuable insights on both Straparola and on how to navigate Venetian libraries. Armando Maggi posed challenging questions in the final stages of writing. My thanks to all of the members of the graduate student collettivo; they were among the first to listen to my ideas on fairy tales. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support I received from the Fulbright Commission to conduct research in Italy during the academic year 1997–8. At the University of Bologna, Claudia Pancino welcomed me as a colleague and generously shared her vast knowledge of early modern midwifery and birthing practices. Giuseppe Olmi supplied me with books and advice related to collecting and manufactured monsters. A generous fellowship from the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation when I returned to Chicago in 1999 permitted me to focus full-time on writing. The metamorphosis from dissertation to book required a number of years and in that time I have benefited greatly from ongoing conversations with diverse groups of scholars. In 2001, I attended a NEH Summer Institute on early modern women writers organized by Al Rabil. Since then I have continued to explore issues of gender with Laura McGough,

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Liz Horowdowich, Julie Kisacky, Lori Ultsch, Julie Campbell, and Maria Galli Stampino. Our encounters at various conferences and libraries have led me to a more nuanced understanding of the construction of gender in early modern Italy. During the 2005–6 academic year, I received a fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and Arts here at the University of Colorado, Boulder to participate in a seminar on the powers of wonder. My thanks to all of the seminar participants for sharing their own marvels with me. They will surely recognize chapter 2 as the offspring of our discussions. Perhaps most importantly, a number of years ago, Sue Bottigheimer invited me to join group of scholars of the fairy tale known as the Stonybrook Seven. Yearly meetings with Elizabeth Harries, Holly Tucker, Jennifer Schacker, Christine Jones, and Sophie Raynard-Leroy have deepened my understanding of the fairy-tale tradition beyond Italian borders. I have come to count on them for challenging questions and engaging collaborations. I am grateful to my home institution for granting me funds and research leaves at key points in the project. As department chairs, Chris Braider, Warren Motte, and Andy Cowell advocated for my research. A Junior Faculty Development Award allowed me to explore new material int he Marciana Library in Venice during the summer of 2002. During a release from teaching in spring 2003, I spent three peaceful and productive months at the Newberry Library in Chicago funded by an Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Fellowship. I thank Ms Lumsden-Kouvel not only for the fellowship, but for her sage insights regarding women and the academy. As the book went to press, the Department of French and Italian at the University of Colorado provided a generous and much appreciated contribution toward the subvention for publication. My thanks to Andy Cowell for making that possible. Since my arrival in Boulder in 2000, my Italian colleagues have gone out of their way to provide encouragement, advice, and good cheer. They have made Colorado feel like home. Special thanks to Priscilla Craven, Pamela Marcantonio, and Valerio Ferme. Early versions of three chapters were printed elsewhere and I am very grateful for the suggestions and queries from editors and anonymous readers which shaped my work in positive ways. A portion of chapter 4 appeared as ‘Le voglie materne nelle fiabe’ in the volume Corpi: storia, metafore, rappresentazioni fra Medioevo ed età contemporanea (Marsilio, 2000) edited by Claudia Pancino. A somewhat different version of chapter 5 was published as ‘Animal Anxieties: Straparola’s “Il re porco”’ in The Italian Novella (Routledge, 2003) edited by Gloria Allaire. A condensed version of chapter 6 titled ‘Foils and Fakes: Manufactured Monsters in

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Acknowledgments

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Giambattista Basile’s “Lo mercante”’ appeared in Marvels and Tales 19.2 (2005). From my very first inquiry at the University of Toronto Press, Ron Schoeffel has provided kind encouragement and guidance. I especially thank him for finding three thoughtful readers for the manuscript. Their comments helped me to see my arguments with fresh eyes. I thank Anne Laughlin and Judy Williams for their careful attention to the preparation of the book. As always, I counted on my family to cheer me on through the many stages of research and writing. I am especially grateful my parents’ unflagging support over the years. Finally, my greatest debt is to my husband, Marco, who never tired of hearing about fairy tales and monsters, whether over dinner or on the trail. This book is dedicated to him.

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FAIRY-TALE SCIENCE

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Introduction: Science Fictions

The first two collections of literary fairy tales published in Europe teem with monsters and marvels. On the pages of Giovan Francesco Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti (1551–3) and Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (1634–6), valiant lads slay dragons and hydras, women give birth to animals, a young girl sprouts a penis, and an ogre believes that his flatulence possesses reproductive powers. Such monstrosities represent just one sort of wonder in these tales. Fairies, necromancers, and enchanted animals transform themselves and others into beasts and plants. Marvellous liquids revive the dead and magic herbs restore amputated limbs. Seemingly ordinary nuts contain amazingly lifelike automatons that can sew or sing. For Straparola’s and Basile’s earliest public, these fantastic phenomena distinguished Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti from countless other collections of realistic novellas written in imitation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, while likening them to the wide variety of texts and cultural practices that formed a broad discourse on the marvellous. While occasionally Boccaccio’s characters encounter the marvellous in the form of ghosts or necromancers, they move through landscapes bereft of the sorts of monsters and marvels found in fairy tales.1 Dragons do not cross their paths; ogres do not threaten their lives. Such monstrosities lurked elsewhere: they inhabited the pages of scientific treatises on medicine, natural history, wonders, and prodigies. In non-fiction texts of the period it was possible to read of a woman from Avignon who gave birth to a dog in 1543, of ‘memorable stories of women who have degenerated into men,’ of the debate surrounding the theory of the reproductive power of the wind to impregnate Spanish mares, and of a Hydra purchased by Venetian merchants in Turkey and

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sent to the king of France.2 Treatises on demonology explained how diabolical illusions might make it appear as though a man had transformed into a horse.3 In Italian piazzas, charlatans amazed crowds as they gulped poisons and endured snake bites only to then save themselves by imbibing the magic elixirs they peddled. In their cabinets of curiosities, princes displayed cherry stones and nutshells that opened to reveal astoundingly minute and intricate carvings, while natural philosophers collected hydras and basilisks for their museums. The literary fairy tale was born at a time when marvels were not relegated to fantastic fictions, but swirled around the courts, academies, churches, and public squares of Europe. Straparola (1480–1557) and Basile (1575–1632) lived and wrote during the Age of the Marvellous (1550–1700), a period in which Europe was awash in wonder.4 New World expeditions brought exotic flora, fauna, and ethnographic artefacts to European shores which then travelled throughout the Old World on the pages of printed books. Telescopes and microscopes brought other ‘new worlds’ into view as natural philosophers discovered heavenly bodies and minute organisms never mentioned in the learned tomes of the ancient authorities. Advances in engineering permitted the construction of lavish palaces, elaborate fountains, and astounding automatons. The religious upheavals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation focused attention on the role of the supernatural in Christian life. The Catholic Church sought to certify true miracles and unmask false saints, while Catholic and Protestant leaders alike condemned witchcraft, a perceived source of diabolical wonders. As a substantial body of recent scholarship has shown, in the face of all of these marvels, early modern Europeans came to articulate more fully scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic theories of wonder. In Marvelous Possessions, Stephen Greenblatt demonstrates that while aesthetic and philosophical theories of wonder had existed since classical times, ‘the frequency and intensity of the appeal to wonder in the wake of the great geographical discoveries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries helped (along with many other factors) to provoke its conceptualization.’5 As the geographical expeditions brought marvels to European shores, the place of wonder in natural philosophy and related fields such as medicine shifted from the margins to the centre of inquiry. In the writings of sixteenth-century Italian physicians and natural philosophers we find ‘a new ambition and a new confidence’ as they contemplated the marvels of nature. In their sweeping study Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park note that ‘[t]hese men

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Introduction: Science Fictions

5

not only reclaimed wonder as a philosophical emotion, but also rehabilitated wonders as useful objects of philosophical reflection.’6 For sixteenth-century men of letters, it was the discovery of Aristotle’s Poetics that brought questions of the literary marvellous to the centre of aesthetic debates.7 Aristotle’s call for both mimesis and the marvellous in poetry led writers to theorize wonder as they sought to articulate the definition, causes, effects, and proper role of the marvellous in literary texts. It was truly a wonderful world. So it is surprising that the literary fairy tale, a genre distinguished from other forms of prose fiction in part by the presence of marvels, did not take root in its native soil. Apart from Straparola and Basile, to my knowledge only two other early modern Italians would publish fairy tales during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Lorenzo Lippi inserted three of Basile’s tales into his epic poem Il malmantile racquistato (1676); and Pompeo Sarnelli, an early editor of Lo cunto de li cunti, published five tales in Neapolitan dialect entitled Il posilecheata (1684). A few other authors would write prose tales that contained fairies and enchanted objects but these were not fairy tales; they did not tell of story of the protagonist who overcomes various obstacles through the use of enchantment in order to reach a happy ending.8 The failure of the fairy tale appears even more perplexing if we consider that early modern Italian readers warmly embraced Straparola’s and Basile’s texts. Le piacevoli notti enjoyed exceptional editorial success in the first fifty years after the editio princeps: it was reprinted some twenty times in Italy and quickly translated into French and then Spanish.9 Although written in Neapolitan dialect, a fact that would seem to restrict its circulation, Lo cunto de li cunti earned Basile the praise of his peers in Venice and Rome and saw six reprintings during the seventeenth century.10 Yet neither Straparola’s editorial success nor the praise bestowed upon Basile inspired throngs of imitators. Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti would have to travel abroad to find enthusiastic disciples. The genre would flourish in France at the very end of the Age of the Marvellous, during the last decade of the seventeenth century. There women in Parisian salons and men such as Charles Perrault wrote and published fairy tales in great numbers. Recently, Kathryn A. Hoffman has argued persuasively that the same cultural obsession with the marvellous that ‘fed court tastes in collection and display, made fairground display of people with corporeal anomalies profitable, put mermaids into medical treatises, and posed stuffed basilisks and dragons on the shelves of early museums’ sparked the creation of hundreds of fairy tales in seventeenth-century France.11 Oddly, although the same

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vogue for the marvellous swept through Italy, the power of wonder was not strong enough there to inspire others to engage the genre. In part, Fairy-Tale Science represents an attempt to explain the lack of success of the literary fairy tale in Italy by analysing Straparola’s and Basile’s tales in the broad social-historical context of the discourse on the marvellous. In chapter 2, I characterize Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti as wunderkabinette, storehouses for an array of marvels prized in the period, a characteristic that guaranteed the genre’s popularity among readers. The normative literary theory produced in Italian academies and universities, however, constituted the literary marvellous in ways which served to devalue fairy-tale wonders, even though they might seem to us to differ little from the enchanted rings, enchantresses, and monsters of the canonical chivalric epic. While in this period no treatise was dedicated specifically to the literary fairy tale, the few extant discussions of tales of ogres, witches, and fairies consistently denigrated this type of narrative by defining it as appropriate only for young girls or old crones. For the literary establishment, the fairy tale was an anomalous genre excluded from the canon. The birth of the literary fairy tale was, then, a monstrous birth, and like all anomalous parturitions of that time, it was greeted with a combination of horror, pleasure, and repugnance.12 For this reason, I argue that among all the marvels which fly fast and furious through Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti, Straparola and Basile grant the monster a privileged position. They clearly understood their fairy tales to bear a stigma, for as chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate, both authors inscribed scientific theories of monstrous generation into meta-literary frame tales through which they elaborated the parameters of the genre to which they gave birth. At its heart, then, Fairy-Tale Science is an exploration of the ways in which the monster, the fairy tale, and the emerging New Science intertwined in early modern Italy. I argue that the monstrous body came to function as a nexus where the literary fairy tale and the emerging New Science met in a mutually defining contiguity. Natural philosophers, physicians, and clergymen penning treatises on monstrosities often disagreed on which monsters were to be accepted as biological realities, but they shared the discursive strategy of relegating those creatures whose origins could not be explained by scientific theories to the realm of fairy tale and myth. Through these distinctions, they positioned the fairy tale in opposition to science, fixing it as a negative pole in a binary system that served to define both a new type of scientific inquiry based on observation and experimentation, and the nascent literary genre.

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Introduction: Science Fictions

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In the chapters that follow, I uncover the dense network of intertextual references that binds the first literary fairy tales to scientific descriptions of five types of monstrous generation: spontaneous female-to-male sex change (chapter 3); the power of the maternal imagination to deform the fetus in utero (chapter 4); the birth of animal-human hybrids (chapter 5); the manufacture of artificial monsters (chapter 6); and the power of the wind to impregnate animals and plants (chapter 7). While chapters 3 and 4 explore the ways in which the authors themselves defined the literary fairy tale, in the remaining three chapters I provide new interpretations for what are today considered classic tale types through social-historical readings of the monstrous generations on their pages. In chapter 5, I demonstrate that Straparola’s animal-bridegroom tale ‘Il re porco’ [The Pig King] speaks more to the very particular anxieties surrounding interclass marriage in Venice than to issues of sexual maturation, which literary critics adopting a psychoanalytic approach have most often associated with this tale type. Chapter 6 shows that Basile incorporates images of manufactured monsters gleaned from natural histories in his dragon-slayer tale ‘Il mercante’ in order to rewrite the hero-monster dynamic. Rather than serve as a suitable foil to the hero, a role formalist critics have assigned this monster, the hydra in this tale comically undermines all faith in the protagonist’s valour. In her study of representations of birth in early modern French fairy tales entitled Pregnant Fictions, Holly Tucker demonstrates that women writers utilized their tales to reaffirm the value of midwifery at a moment when male surgeons were replacing female practitioners at the birthing bed. For these women writers, the fairy tale became a means of entering into the medical debates of their day from which they were excluded and reminding readers that the ‘“facts” of childbirth may indeed contain their own fanciful fictions.’13 In Fairy-Tale Science, I show that from its origins the literary fairy tale functioned as a locus for the contestation or affirmation of scientific theory and practice. In the final chapter, I read Basile’s tale of an ogre who believes that his flatulence possesses reproductive powers as a commentary on the emerging methodologies and technologies for scientific inquiry proposed by natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. As is evident by the variety of monstrosities to be considered here, I define ‘monstrous generation’ broadly to include a variety of acts which produce a monster, the monster created by such efforts, and abnormal modes of reproduction that result in normal offspring. As for the term ‘science,’ I adopt a definition that is akin to the early modern Italian ‘sci-

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enza,’ a word which in its least restrictive meaning simply meant a field of knowledge. As Steven Shapin has observed, in early modern Europe ‘science’ referred to ‘a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics.’14 While zoology, medicine, and astronomy were ‘scienze,’ so too were alchemy, physiognomy, and astrology. By the midsixteenth century, the monster had become a central preoccupation in these diverse fields of inquiry. As a consequence, this study compares Straparola’s and Basile’s fairy-tale representations of monstrous generation to non-fiction depictions of similar phenomena gathered from many different genres including natural histories, prodigy and wonder books, medical and anatomical treatises, academic lessons, and books of secrets. In doing so, Fairy-Tale Science turns away from the psychoanalytic and formalist methodologies which characterized so much of twentiethcentury fairy-tale scholarship. Science Fictions Both psychoanalytic and formalist approaches to the fairy tale tend to argue for a cross-cultural uniformity through a reduction of the narrative to the most basic elements, thus stripping the work of its details and peculiarities – what Italo Calvino calls ‘la polpa storica sul nocciolo morfologico’ [the historical fruit around the morphological pit].15 By removing the historical fruit, however, such analyses discard those portions of the work that betray its ties to the cultural milieu in which it was written. Instead of searching for common traits that make possible universalizing claims about the genre, the social historical approach that I employ in the following chapters ‘stresses the historical relativity of meaning: textual variants of tales reflect the particular cultural and historical contexts in which they are produced.’16 Literary critics adopting this approach have already begun to tentatively reassess the role of the monster in these first literary fairy tales as well as the genre’s relation to learned discourse. Scholars of Straparola’s tales have argued that the monsters in Le piacevoli notti cannot be dismissed as mere fictions because in early modern Italy witches and dragons were thought to be materially real beings.17 The leading scholars of Lo cunto in North America and Italy, Nancy Canepa and Michele Rak, have characterized Basile’s tales as hybrid texts that fuse high and low culture, popular proverbs and citations from Petrarch, domestic tools and scientific instruments.18 Fairy-Tale Science continues down this recently blazed critical path. For it is only by shifting

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Introduction: Science Fictions

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the critical gaze from the morphological to the historical that we can view these first literary fairy tales as science fictions. Like many early modern teratological treatises, Fairy-Tale Science is to some extent an act of reclassification, for I redefine Straparola’s and Basile’s fairy-tale monsters as ‘science fictions.’ In using this term, I am not suggesting that Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto should be considered precursors of that genre or mode which began to flourish in the nineteenth-century with the publication of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Straparola’s and Basile’s tales do not embody Kingsley Amis’s definition of science fiction as ‘that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin.’19 Nor do their early modern fairy tales ‘ease the willing suspension of disbelief of its reader by utilizing [an] atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculation in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.’20 Instead, Straparola’s and Basile’s depictions of monstrosities can be considered science fictions because they weave learned theories of monstrous generation into a genre that was understood by their contemporaries to contain only fictions and nonsense. In any taxonomy, a given category is defined in relation to contiguous categories. The value of the new taxonomic label ‘science fictions’ resides in its power to reconfigure the cultural landscape of early modern Italy in such a way as to situate the literary fairy tale in proximity to cultural practices – natural history, medicine, anatomy – previously viewed as unrelated to the genre. Rather than view these fairy tales solely as an anomalous offshoot of the novella tradition, or as literary variations on popular oral tales, we can use the label ‘science fictions’ to perceive them as actively engaged in dialogue with the scientific tradition. While a number of studies have considered the interrelationship of early modern teratological treatises and canonical literary texts, Straparola’s and Basile’s tales have not been considered in this light.21 Viewing their fairy tales as science fictions also permits us to recuperate the intertextual references inextricably binding these first literary fairy tales to scientific discourse. Once these links are recovered, it becomes clear that no study of the early modern monster or marvellous can be considered complete if it does not consider the fairy-tale monstrosities found in Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti.

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1 Facts and Favole

Descriptions of monstrous births proliferated on the pages of scientific treatises published during the same years as Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti. Indeed, we can think of the Age of the Marvellous as experiencing a boom in teratology, or the study of monsters. This chapter prepares the way for the analysis of Straparola’s and Basile’s tales by describing the origins and sketching the contours of the teratological canon, which encompassed works on medicine, philosophy, prodigies, theology, and natural history. My intention here is to highlight in these texts the persistent juxtaposition of what were thought to be facts with what were known to be fictions in order to argue for a fluidity among academic disciplines that is unknown today. The permeability of the boundaries separating what have become today distinct methods of inquiry meant that accomplished men of letters, like Straparola and Basile, could competently engage scientific theories on the monstrous. The Boom in Teratology On the first two Sundays of July 1548, the renowned humanist Benedetto Varchi stood before the Florentine Academy and presented a lesson on the generation of monsters. Varchi’s speech served as a sort of inaugural address for what was to become a veritable boom in teratology. Following the rules of inquiry set forth by Aristotle in the Analytica posteriora, Varchi constructs his lesson to answer the questions ‘Cosa siano [i mostri]? Onde nascano? Perché si generano?’ [What are monsters? Whence are they born? Why are they generated?] in order to make sense of the ‘incredibile confusione’ [incredible confusion] that surrounded the subject of monstrosity.1 He begins by defining his terms, stating that the

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Facts and Favole 11

‘voce Mostro è detto dal mostrare, ciò è significare, quasi che egli dimostri, significhi, ed annunzi alcuna cosa futura o buona o rea che ella sia’2 [term Monster is said to come from to demonstrate, that is to signify, almost as if it demonstrates, signifies, and announces some future event, regardless if it be either good or bad]. Although he recognizes the monster’s role as a portent, Varchi quickly furnishes his public with a second definition of the term, one more philosophical than philological. He holds monsters to be all those things which occur outside the normal course of Nature, as well as all natural or manufactured things which were formed contrary to the will or intent of their creator. Under this broad banner, Varchi assembles a dizzying array of monstrosities for scrutiny: those born blind, deaf, or lame; dwarves and hunchbacks; the Plinian monstrous races; examples from his own day of conjoined twins and a caninehuman hybrid; giants; satyrs and centaurs; mermaids and mermen; pygmies; the phoenix; and tales of women who spontaneously sprouted penises and transformed into men. He considers Aristotle, Michelangelo, and Pietro Bembo to be monsters because of their prodigious talents in philosophy, art, and literature, while the Romans Nero and Caligula merit this label for having surpassed all other rulers in malice and wickedness. Finally, Varchi recalls for his public a few famous literary monsters: Virgil called both Fame and Polyphemous monsters, while Petrarch wrote of his beloved Laura, ‘O delle Donne altero, e raro mostro’3 [Oh, among women, high and rare monster]. Varchi found monsters wherever he looked, in literature and history, in nature, in the piazza, and even among his peers. Varchi lived during an age of great turmoil in which what had seemed stable categories in the collective consciousness underwent revision and many ‘facts’ were challenged. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has written that the monster is the ‘harbinger of category crisis,’ and that which shows that ‘fact’ is subject to constant reconstruction and change.4 Cohen’s thesis helps us understand why the Age of the Marvellous was also the Age of the Monstrous, by seeing the proliferation of monsters in this period as a cultural by-product of the steady erosion of the ‘facts’ on which early modern European society founded various beliefs. The certainties that the Church and classical authorities once offered no longer seemed to exist, for as the historian Paula Findlen notes, ‘in the wake of the political and religious upheavals of the Reformation era that called into question other forms of authority, the “old” no longer had the security of meaning it had enjoyed.’5 New World discoveries, while bringing marvels to European shores, also challenged the ancients’ geographical, anthropologi-

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cal, and biological assumptions and proved to be doubly destabilizing. First, explorers brought back from their travels plants and animals which were considered monstrous inasmuch as, like all monsters, they defied categorization in existing taxonomies and threw ‘doubt on life’s ability to teach us order.’6 Second, many monsters that classical authorities had placed at the margins of civilizations, such as the Plinian monstrous races, were never found, thus leading early modern authors to reassign what had previously been considered materially real creatures into the realm of the fantastic. In this way, the discourse of the monstrous registered the initial stirrings of the epistemic shift during which observation and experimentation, two of the hallmarks of the emerging New Science, began ever so slowly to displace the textual authority of the ancients. In short, this was a period of many monsters in part because the very category of the monstrous came under revision. In the decades following Varchi’s lesson, philosophers, physicians, natural scientists, and clergy would wrestle with the three simple questions posed by the Florentine humanist: What are monsters? Whence are they born? Why are they produced?. With their varied responses to these questions, they created a canon of teratological literature. In recent years, historians of science and literary critics have reconstructed this corpus of texts and documented its contours.7 The teratological canon was not created ex novo, but like most scientific writings of the period was founded on the writings of classical authorities: Cicero and Julius Obsequens presented monsters as portents in their works on divination; in Pliny’s Natural History monsters became marvels and wonders; Aristotle explained monsters to be aberrations of nature.8 Early modern prodigy books, medical treatises, wonder books, treatises on the aesthetics of monstrosity, natural histories, and travel literature belonged to the canon. In these diverse texts and the related cultural practices of collecting and displaying monsters, the historians Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park discern a tripartite division of early modern monstrosity. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, Daston and Park describe ‘three separate complexes of interpretations and associated emotions – horror, pleasure, and repugnance – which overlapped and coexisted during much of the early modern period.’9 As they had in antiquity, monsters continued to be viewed as terrifying prodigies, pleasurable marvels, or Nature’s unsightly mistakes. The fact that many of the authors of teratological texts were polyglots, literate in Latin and at least one vernacular tongue, a growing market for vernacular translations, and advances in print technologies that made books affordable for a wider reading

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public all facilitated the flow of texts across geographical, political, economic, and linguistic boundaries.10 Facts and Favole in the Teratological Canon At first glance, it might appear that Straparola’s and Basile’s fairy tales must be far removed from the medical, natural history, and philosophical texts which form the greater part of the discourse on the monstrous in this period. Indeed, to date their fairy tales have not figured in historical studies of the early modern monster. But to assume such a distance is to impose our own worldview on their age. Certainly today no one would expect a scientific article on the genetic causes of hermaphroditism to include a review of literary representations of hermaphrodites. And yet many early modern scientific texts did just that. For example, Konrad Gesner’s Historia animalium (1551–87) contains illustrated entries for a great number of species indigenous to Europe (the ox, the rabbit, the deer), more exotic non-European species (the elephant), and a number of fantastic beasts (the unicorn, the satyr), all arranged in alphabetical order. In the entry for each species, Gesner organizes his information in subsections with the first four dedicated to an etymological and philological analysis of the creature’s name; its anatomy and habitat; its physiology; and its sympathies and antipathies with other species. The subsequent two sections discuss the practical uses of the animal for humans as food and an ingredient for medicines. In the final section, Gesner examines the animal’s role in the cultural imagination. The first of these subsections includes ‘historias tum veras tum fabulosas’ [both true and fabulous stories], while the other four discuss the animal’s symbolic function as a portent, in religious texts, in proverbs, and in emblems.11 In his early modern encyclopedia, Gesner juxtaposes anatomical descriptions and fictional stories; he places his own observations alongside legends. A similar juxtaposition of what was thought to be fact and what was known to be fiction could be found in early modern museums. The late sixteenth century witnessed an increase in the number of natural history collections and cabinets of curiosities across the European continent. In their earliest incarnations, these museums possessed rather eclectic holdings that mixed together naturalia and artificialia: specimens of wellknown European, and more exotic New World flora and fauna, antiquities, art, and manufactured marvels such as automatons.12 Paula Findlen has attributed this eclecticism to the collector’s acceptance of broad def-

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initions of nature derived from classical authorities. ‘Building upon Pliny’s encyclopedic definition of nature as everything in the world worthy of memory and the narrower view of such writers as Dioscorides and Galen, who defined natural history as the study of objects useful in medicine, collectors brought ordinary and exotic nature into their museums ... From the imaginary to the exotic to the ordinary, the museum was designed to represent nature as a continuum.’13 The museum of the Bolognese collector and natural philosopher Ulisse Aldrovandi fitted this description quite well. In fact, his collection can be considered a physical extension of his many encyclopedic tomes on natural history; for Aldrovandi, ‘the encyclopedia was located neither in the text nor in the object alone; rather it was the dialectic between res and verba that fully defined the universality of his project.’14 Like Gesner, Aldrovandi ‘included fabulae as an important category of description for any natural object.’15 On the shelves of his museum he displayed specimens of wellknown species next to what he knew to be fake or artificial monsters, dragons crafted by charlatans from the skins of skate and counterfeit monstrous fish purchased from mountebanks and sent to him by gullible colleagues.16 The fact that real species stood beside fraudulent specimens in museums and that both were discussed in natural histories does not mean that no one sought to distinguish between facts and fictions. Many naturalists, physicians, and philosophers dedicated fair portions of their treatises to separating the ‘mostri veri’ [true monsters] from the ‘mostri finti’ [fake monsters]. While sixteenth-century naturalists possessed a deep respect for the ancient authorities, they nonetheless began to note the inadequacies of classical descriptions of both quotidian natural phenomena and monstrosities. When an author determined that a given monstrosity did not exist in nature, he reassigned it to the category of the fabulous, to the realm of the favoloso and the favola, a space of fictions in which the fairy tale was also located. In his guide for midwives La comare (1596), the physician Scipione Mercurio dedicated an entire chapter to specifying which classical monsters were to be considered veri and which were to be considered favolosi.17 In this chapter, Mercurio argued that ancient stories of sirens seducing sailors were favole, a word that meant fairy tale or fable, as well as nonsense or fiction. He argued that ‘[l]e Sirene, che col canto addormentano i Naviganti fu favola; vero è che le meretrici con gli allettamenti loro acciecano i miseri mortali’ [the Sirens who put sailors to sleep with their singing was a fiction; it is true that prostitutes with their seductive

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acts blind the miserable mortals].18 The Jesuit collector Athanasius Kircher would have disagreed with Mercurio’s denial of the existence of sirens. Kircher believed that ‘[t]here can be no doubt that such a creature exists, for in our museum we have its bones and tail.’19 The ‘incredibile confusione’ lamented by Varchi at the beginning of his lesson on the generation of monsters grew in part from a lack of consensus on which monsters existed in nature and which were solely figments of the imagination. While some naturalists furnished allegorical interpretations of myths, others were busy arguing for the biological tenability of these fantastic fictions. Men of Letters as Men of Science Today it would be difficult to find a contemporary author who incorporates into his or her fairy tales scientific theories or physical phenomena elaborated on the pages of academic publications like Science or the Journal of the American Medical Association. Nor is it easy to imagine a professor of literature sauntering across campus to critique the latest experiments carried out by his or her colleagues in the Department of Molecular Biology. Despite the recent flowering of interdisciplinary studies, science and literature are today perceived to be two distinct fields of study, and for all intents and purposes mutually exclusive paths of inquiry. This modern notion makes it difficult to imagine fairy tales and scientific texts participating in a single cultural debate on the monstrous. Yet, we must heed the historian Anthony Grafton’s warning concerning the dangers of interpreting the past through this contemporary experience of the specialization, and resulting isolation, of academic fields. He warns that ‘[w]e have allowed the divergent forms of scholarship that we now recognize and practice delude us into reconstructing a past culture as fragmented as our own.’20 Such anachronistic projections have served only to blind us to the fluidity that existed centuries ago among what are today distinct academic disciplines. In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy the investigation of the physical world did not require the highly specialized knowledge or the mastery of complex technologies that it does today. From the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century, scholars formulated explanations of physical phenomena based on theories and evidence contained in the works of recognized authorities such as Aristotle or Pliny. One described and comprehended the natural world through what had been written in ancient texts, and what one observed outside the door of the study was

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greatly conditioned by what one had read. As natural philosophers were confronted with diverse natural phenomena never described in classical texts, they slowly ventured forth to gaze at the world with fresh eyes. Galileo pointed his telescope skyward and what he saw contradicted the Ptolemaic cosmology inherited from the ancients. Similarly, those who took to the fields to study the flora and fauna of the Old and New Worlds found that some of their observations challenged what was written in the classical texts stacked on their shelves. Yet, these contradictions did not lead to an abrupt dismissal of all of the ancient authorities, and for many scholars ‘doing science’ still meant assembling the relevant citations from the great classical authors regarding the natural phenomenon under discussion. Although it is still a commonplace to speak of the seventeenth century as experiencing a ‘scientific revolution,’ today historians of science do not speak of the epistemic shift from a practice of science founded on the philological mining of ancient texts to one based on a scientific method as a swift, cataclysmic event.21 Thus, in the period in which Straparola and Basile penned their tales, scientific study still required the navigation of ancient texts; men of science had to be, to some extent, humanists, or men of letters. At the same time, scholars were not confined to toil in a narrow field of inquiry, and many of Straparola’s and Basile’s contemporaries became ‘intellectual omnivores’ devouring with equal relish texts from an array of disciplines.22 A curious scholar could roam through fields as diverse as astronomy, poetry, and biology, without being accused of dilettantism. Many of those men remembered today for their contributions to the development of New Science, such as Johannes Kepler, avidly pursued literary interests and philological investigations.23 Alongside his astronomical studies, Galileo wrote treatises on great Italian poets such as Dante and Ariosto. In Basile’s home city of Naples, Giambattista Della Porta developed optical instruments that rivalled Galileo’s telescope; he studied alchemy and botany; but, he also wrote a number of comedies. Like Basile, Della Porta was a member of the literary Accademia degli Oziosi; like Galileo, he belonged to the first Italian scientific academy, the Accademia de’ Lincei.24 Conversely, a number of the early modern authors that I present here as authorities on topics that today would be studied in the fields of comparative anatomy, human reproduction, and zoology figured more prominently in the literary and philosophical debates of their day. Varchi, whose lessons to the Florentine Academy I discuss at greater length in chapter 5, lectured authoritatively on Dante’s poetry as well as on the generation of monsters. A well-read man of let-

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ters who had studied the ancient authorities could confidently enter into a scientific debate. Straparola and Basile were such men. Even a cursory overview of their lives and literary careers demonstrates that these two authors were capable men of letters. Little is known for certain about Straparola’s life (1480?–1557?), in part because his surname, which translates as the ‘babbler,’ is most certainly a pseudonym. Born in Caravaggio, he most likely travelled to Venice as a young man to seek work as a hired pen.25 His extant works prove that he knew the dominant literary models of his day, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, well enough to create successful imitations. Besides Le piacevoli notti, he published a collection of Petrarchan verse in 1508 which enjoyed a second printing in 1515. While the details of Straparola’s life remain obscure, the intellectual career of the Neapolitan courtier Giambattista Basile is well documented, in part because he belonged to many of the great literary academies of his day. Apart from two brief sojourns in Venice and Mantua, Basile spent his life in his native city of Naples. Like many early modern writers, Basile divided his adult life between what we might term his official occupation – be it soldier, governor, or court administrator – and his literary endeavours. Born in Naples, or perhaps nearby in Posillipo, in 1575, Basile left his native city in 1600 to seek his fortune.26 In 1603, he enlisted in the army of the Venetian Republic and was stationed on the island of Crete. It was there, as a member of Andrea Cornaro’s Accademia degli Stravaganti, that he wrote his first poems. After returning to Naples in 1608, Basile held various posts in the outlying provincial courts and began to build his reputation as a capable poet with the publication of a various literary works in Italian, including poems, dramas, and madrigals which were set to music.27 He would leave Naples once more toward the end of 1612, to join his sister Adriana, a much-celebrated soprano, at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, where he would reprint his Italian verse under the title of Le opere poetiche (1613). Upon returning to his native city less than a year later, Basile established himself as a prominent member of the Academy of the Oziosi and later proved his philological mettle by publishing editions of the poetry of Pietro Bembo, Giovanni Della Casa, and Galeazzo di Tarsia. In these same years, he also wrote a number of lighter works intended mainly as entertainment for the court.28 We can say that Basile led a literary double life. As Giambattista Basile he garnered a modest fame through his verse and drama written in Italian and his carefully annotated editions of the works of sixteenth-century poets. Using the pseudonym Gian Alessio Abbattutis,

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he wrote poetry and prose in Neapolitan dialect. While in the 1640s the Venetian Academy of the Incogniti would recognize Basile’s literary accomplishments in both the vernacular and dialect, at the time of his death in 1632 only a few of his Neapolitan compositions had been published as paratexts for his good friend Giulio Cesare Cortese’s poem La vaiasseide (1612).29 His other major dialect works, the collection of eclogues Le muse napoletane and Lo cunto de li cunti, would be published only posthumously and under his pseudonym. Ironically, we remember Giambattista Basile today primarily for the fairy tales penned in Neapolitan dialect by his alter-ego Gian Alessio Abbattutis. We should not assume that, because neither Straparola nor Basile ever authored a scientific treatise, they were far removed from the scientific debates of their day. On the contrary, their considerable knowledge of the prevailing theories of monstrous generation is inscribed in their fairy tales. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, this process of inscription permitted Straparola and Basile to enter into the debate on the status of the monster.

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2 Wonder Tales in the Age of the Marvellous

The Italian meraviglia, like the English ‘wonder,’ signifies both a marvellous object and the emotional response it engenders. This chapter examines the ways in which early modern Italians constituted and regulated literary meraviglia, as both object and emotional response, in order to explain both the editorial and critical success of Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti and their failure to inspire imitators in Italy. Although commonly referred to as fairy tales, Straparola’s and Basile’s fantastic narratives do not all include fairies. Instead, what all of these tales do share, and what distinguishes them from the realistic novella tradition, are wonders of all kinds. In Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti magic waters bring the dead to life; speaking animals bestow metamorphic powers on humans; donkeys, geese, and dolls defecate gold; monsters of all sorts – ogres, dragons, sirens, wild men – help or hinder the protagonists in their quest for a happy ending. For this reason, some scholars have argued that the genre to which Straparola and Basile gave birth might be more appropriately called ‘wonder tales.’1 In the first half of the chapter, I characterize Straparola’s and Basile’s collections of wonder tales as literary wunderkabinette, or storehouses for marvels of all sorts in vogue in this period. Both texts enclose an array of marvels and elicit wonder in the reader through techniques similar to those at work in wunderkabinette. The presence of these many meraviglie guaranteed the success of the works with readers and critics during the Age of the Marvellous. In the second half of the chapter, I examine the influence of the great literary (re)discovery of the sixteenth century, Aristotle’s Poetics, on the theoretical articulations of the literary marvellous. Created in the wake of the Council of Trent, many of the treatises that participated in this debate on the literary marvellous called for the use of marvels which conveyed alle-

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gorical (Christian) truths. I demonstrate that in this same period, tales of ogres, witches, and fairies were most often associated with old crones and simple young girls, narrators who were perceived to be intellectually incapable of veiling moral truths behind their fantastic fictions. The faults of the tellers came to taint the tales, for by the end of the sixteenth century it was the genre, not the gender (and presumed intellectual inferiority), of the narrator that was thought to resist allegory. Meraviglie and Meraviglia Not all early modern meraviglie were created equal, and this chapter explores that diversity. Wonders sprang from the realms of the divine, the natural, and the artificial.2 They fell from the Heavens and emerged from Hell, were born on the Earth and in the Sea, and were crafted by the hands and minds of men. The unusual, the bizarre, the exotic, and the foreign were all sources of wonder, but so too were extreme virtuosity or verisimilitude when found in artistic creations. The gigantic and the miniature also mesmerized at a moment when perceptions of scale and distance were being reconfigured by advances in optics. Multiplicity was marvellous, as when an observer confronted an astounding variety of objects or materials. Mixed or composite beings, objects, or texts – hybrids – were similarly sources of wonder.3 In other instances, wonder arose from a juxtaposition of two distinct and seemingly dissimilar objects that revealed a previously unperceived relationship between them. Juxtapositions could also excite wonder by bringing into sharper focus the objects’ intrinsically marvellous characteristics, as when giants and dwarves were displayed alongside each other.4 The very monstrousness of the giant and dwarf, their transgression of the boundaries of the normal, was of course also a source of wonder.5 The emotional response of wonder has been described as arising from a simultaneous attraction-repulsion excited in an observer who stands before an object that momentarily resists appropriation or assimilation in existing epistemological schema.6 Close kin of both horror and the sublime, wonder springs from opposing forces, the twin desires of possession and flight, which provoke the momentary suspension, the sharp intake of breath, the widening of the eyes, and the opening of the mouth so often depicted as the physical effects of this psychological state.7 In the Western tradition this emotion has also long been considered a primary catalyst for the production of knowledge. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle asserts, ‘It is through wonder that men now begin and originally

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began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about greater matters too, for example about the changes of the moon and the sun, about the stars and about the origins of the universe.’8 Seventeenth-century Italian astronomers, biologists, and geologists would have agreed with the ancient Greek philosopher, for in their scientific writings they often depicted themselves as experiencing meraviglia in the face of new discoveries.9 The power of wonder, however, was not completely benign, particularly when it was experienced as a sort of paralysing awe. In the Middle Ages, Avicenna, echoing Aristotle, extolled the virtues of wonder in intellectual pursuits; however, others, such as the twelfth-century scholar Adelard of Bath, deemed wonder to be an emotion particular to ignorant, rather than learned, individuals. In his Quaestiones naturales, Adelard took aim at ‘the Augustinian tradition, which elevated wonder at the mighty works of God above the causal exploration of natural phenomena ... that wonder prevented Christians from inquiring further, in the manner of Aristotle, Plato, and the Arabs, and consigned them to backwardness and intellectual sloth.’10 He associated wonder ‘not with piety and reverence, but with ignorance and superstition – what he called confusion.’11 Similarly, the Scholastic philosophers shunned wonder as the emotion particular to inferior intellects: ‘the ignorant, the non-philosopher, the old woman, the empiric, all of whom were only one step up, as [Roger] Bacon indicated, from children.’12 This medieval ambivalence toward wonder, rooted in the recognition of its potential to overwhelm the intellect, persisted in various forms through the Age of the Marvellous. Even Descartes, who would declare wonder the first among all passions, was wary of the effects of an overabundance of this emotion. He referred to this sort of wonder as astonishment and felt it to be harmful because it froze the observer in an amoral, unreasoning state.13 In this power to stupefy, early modern Europeans recognized one potential danger of the marvellous. If wonder could suspend rational thought, then one might purposefully elicit this emotion in others with the intent to manipulate them. Rather than spur one to know, wonder could facilitate deception especially in those who lacked a discerning intellect. While the same types of marvels permeated both popular and elite spaces in early modern Europe, the elite classes constructed their relations to these marvels in a way so as to distinguish themselves from the common folk and those of lesser wit. The stuffed dragons that charlatans

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held up in city squares and at country fairs also appeared on the shelves of the naturalist’s museums. In that learned space, however, the manufactured monster functioned in a very different way by serving as an injoke that elevated competent natural philosophers above the credulous fools who did not recognize the hoax and became themselves the joke.14 More generally, learned men ‘separated themselves from the vulgar in their physical access to marvels, in their knowledge of the nature and properties of these marvels, and in their ability to distinguish things that were truly wonderful from things that were not.’15 Ironically then, for many learned men the proper reaction to an encounter with the marvellous was to reason – to classify, to analyse, to explain – in order to displace wonder with knowledge. In Wonder and Science, Mary Campbell demonstrates that men who advocated new methodologies to guide scientific inquiry, such as Francis Bacon, subjected the natural wonders that fell under their gaze to intense scrutiny. In reporting their findings, they described the preternatural with a restrained rhetoric that often served to rob natural marvels of their wonder. As Campbell observes, ‘[a] thing might be wonderful and also true. It would have to be ‘severely examined,’ and then re-described in the “chaste” language proper to science – it would have to be translated into the plain vernacular of Truth. But by then it would no longer be a wonder.’16 This same desire to differentiate among the plethora of wonders and marvellous phenomena found in nature informed treatises aimed at dispelling folk beliefs and superstitions, a genre that gained popularity in this same period. In texts of this sort printed in Italy, France, and England, the credulous masses were castigated both for believing in false marvels and for rejecting as impossibilities the true wonders of nature.17 As early modern theoreticians of wonder sought to establish the truth value of various natural, holy, and literary wonders in their midst, they simultaneously sought to regulate the powerful, and perhaps potentially dangerous, emotions that arose from their contemplation. Wonder Tales as Literary Wunderkabinette One physical manifestation of the early modern obsession with the marvellous was the creation of wunderkabinette, ornate chests of drawers that housed diminutive versions of early museums. Cabinets permitted aristocrats to pursue the pleasures of collecting on a smaller scale – most could fit on a table top – than that of princes who filled entire rooms, wunderkammern, with their collections of natural history specimens, artwork, scien-

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tific instruments, and antiquities. Storehouses of natural and manufactured marvels constructed from precious and exotic materials, wunderkabinette had variegated exteriors that reflected the wonders enclosed within their doors. Complex inlays of wood and marble on both the exterior and interior surfaces of some cabinets combined with painted miniatures representing biblical, mythological, and historical scenes that encouraged reflection on virtues and vices. Mirrors allowed for the owners to contemplate their own visages.18 The multitude of drawers hidden behind the cabinet doors enclosed an astounding array of curiosities. A very large cabinet given to the King of Sweden in 1632 contained ‘Chinese antiques, exotic animals and plant specimens, perfume flasks, a lice comb, a thong of human skin, the mummified claw of a long-tailed monkey, a miniature theater, distorting mirrors, anamorphic paintings, a toiletry set with silver caskets and boxes for cosmetics, and an Italian spinet on which the accompanying music scores can still be played.’19 Many cabinets also contained a drawer for writing supplies. The wunderkabinett functioned simultaneously as a utilitarian storage space for objects related to the owner’s toilette, as a desk, and as a container of marvels assembled from the realms of the supernatural, the natural, and the artificial. The marvels ‘would have lain hidden within the numerous drawers and compartments of the cabinets, waiting to be brought out singly and studied or displayed with one another in a myriad of combinations.’20 In this case, the production of wonder depends upon the ingegno or wit of the observer who discerns unexpected connections uniting the elements displayed. Straparola’s and Basile’s texts can be considered literary wunderkabinette, for they are constructed from a variety of literary materials, both aulic and exotic, and enclose an array of marvels. Although both are containers for marvels, each is quite unique in its structure and content. The Wondrous Variety of Le piacevoli notti Craftsmen constructed wunderkabinette from an array of precious materials – ebony, marble, lapis, enamels – whose very multiplicity became a source of wonder. Le piacevoli notti is a similarly variegated construction assembled from diverse literary genres. Straparola builds his frame tale, the exterior of his literary wunderkabinett, from prized, if well-worn, material. In the opening pages of Le piacevoli notti, he paints a muted copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the model par excellence for Italian novellieri. It is localized political unrest stirred up by feuding relatives, however, not an

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international epidemiological catastrophe, that drives Straparola’s protagonists Ottavianomaria Sforza and his widowed daughter Lucrezia Gonzaga from their native city of Milan. Unlike the universal suffering brought about by the plague, their travails are personal and of short duration. Gathering together the few jewels and money left in their possession, father and daughter escape the reach of their bellicose relatives by relocating to Venice where they are hosted by Ferrier Beltramo, a merchant from Treviso. Careful not to overstay their welcome, the two find a permanent safe haven not at an idyllic family estate, but in a rented villa on the island of Murano. Lucrezia then assembles a sort of court about her, hosting nightly festivities attended by ten graceful damigelle, or young maidens, whose beauty is described in terms that recall both Boccaccio’s Decameron and Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The wise matrons Chiara Guidiccione and Veronica Orbat, as well as a multitude of learned and noble gentlemen, add a respectable presence to this young company. Seated closest to Signora Lucrezia are men who wield power in the political and cultural life of Venice: the bishop and poet Pietro Bembo; Giambattista Casale, the English King Henry VIII’s ambassador to Venice; and bishop Evangelista Cittadini. Men of letters – although not the most renowned of the day – also serve as Lucrezia’s courtiers and will prove able narrators on the few occasions they are called upon to tell a tale. Among their numbers we find the poets Bernardo Capello and Bernardo Trivigiano, as well as the actor and multi-lingual poet Antonio Molino.21 The nobleman, Antonio Bembo, cousin of Pietro, and Lucrezia’s former host Ferrier Beltramo round out the company. Lucrezia presides over this merry band directing the ‘dolci e dilettevoli intertenimenti’ (1:11) [sweet and delightful diversions], activities which include singing, dancing, and other courtly pastimes. As the Carnival celebrations are drawing to a close, Lucrezia suggests that each member of the group propose a game to play together, but those present unanimously decide to accept the amusement of Lucrezia’s choosing.22 She proposes that for the rest of the carnival season they begin each evening by dancing, after which five of the damigelle sing a song.23 The names of five young women are then drawn by lot and Lucrezia commands each of the chosen to narrate a tale followed by a riddle in verse. This frame narrative symmetrically divides the first volume of Le piacevoli notti (1551) into five evenings of five tales each. The second volume (1553) sheds this symmetry when Lucrezia invites all present – men and women – to enter the narrative circle on the thirteenth night of carnival

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with a brief tale: evenings 6–12 consist of five tales each while ten tales are told on the thirteenth and final night.24 In this frame tale, Straparola assembles a lieta brigata in which the diverse literary endeavours of the historical personages reflect the heterogeneous nature of Le piacevoli notti. In fact, contemporary literary critics have described the frame as a mirror of the great variety of literary theories and genres that abounded in mid-sixteenth-century Venetian culture. On the one hand, Pietro Bembo and his faithful disciple the poet Bernardo Capello represent the literary establishment invested in creating a vernacular canon founded on the great fourteenth-century authors Boccaccio and Petrarch. The fact that Bembo and Capello attend these carnival festivities cannot be understood, however, as Straparola’s pledge of allegiance to the norms that the pair endorse, because ‘l’implicito riferimento alle Prose contrasta con le scelte linguistiche e stilistiche delle Piacevoli notti’25 [the implicit reference to [Pietro Bembo’s] Prose contrasts with the linguistic and stylistic choices of the Piacevoli notti]. The dialect poet and playwright Antonio Molino, who figures as a much more lively and engaged member of Lucrezia’s domestic court, can be seen as emblematic of Straparola’s interest in the linguistic experiments that were being carried out by writers in the Veneto.26 Like early modern wunderkabinette that relied on multiplicity to create wonder, Le piacevoli notti astounds through the presentation of an overwhelming variety of prose genres. As we might expect from a sixteenthcentury novelliere, Straparola wrote many tales which resemble the different types of narratives found in the Decameron: stories of the adventures of merchants; tragic love stories reminiscent of Day IV; and beffe, or practical jokes, used to unite lovers, swindle fools, and carry out vendettas. To this mix Straparola adds other prose genres not found in Boccaccio’s masterpiece. There are fables in which all the protagonists are animals; stories of stupid farmers, a genre which enjoyed popularity in the second half of the sixteenth century; and, providing linguistic rather than thematic variety, two tales in dialect, one in Bergamasque (V.3) and the other in pavano (V.4). And of course, there are the marvellous fairy tales which are the focus of this study. Undoubtedly, this eclecticism contributed to the editorial success of Le piacevoli notti.27 As the wunderkabinette did for their owners, Le piacevoli notti offered Straparola a space in which both to collect and to write. He practises the art of riscrittura: he rewrites and/or translates the tales of others into his own text without acknowledging his sources. Among the forty-eight tales in the second volume, Straparola places twenty-three volgarizzamenti,

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unacknowledged translations from the Neapolitan humanist Girolamo Morlini’s Latin Novellae (1520), as well as two tales taken from the Decameron.28 Another of his tales in the first volume (II.4) bears a striking resemblance to Machiavelli’s misogynistic tale of Belfagor, the devil who found the fires of hell more pleasant than married life. Although riscrittura was a particularly widespread practice during the second half of the sixteenth century, its use did not go uncontested. Straparola defended himself against critics in the prefatory letter to his readers in volume 2 by claiming to have written down all of the tales exactly as they were told.29 While in the Decameron each day of storytelling closes with a canzone, in Le piacevoli notti each evening opens with the singing of a song. Here, too, Straparola prefers variety to uniformity in his choice of metric forms: the merry band sings madrigals, canzoni, and canzonette before they begin to tell tales. As mentioned above, at the conclusion of each tale, the narrator proposes an enigma, in the form of an octave. Le piacevoli notti is also a collection of riddles that become a source of wonder for Lucrezia and her guests as well as the reader.30 In some cases, this wonder arises from the fact that the solutions to the riddles are fantastic creatures – a basilisk (V.1), a unicorn (XIII.1), a catoblepas (XIII.7) – described in Pliny’s Natural History and contemporary natural histories.31 More often, however, the enigmas hold a different sort of surprise: seemingly obscene riddles are resolved with absolutely banal and, judging from the reaction of the company, completely unexpected solutions. Owing to their absolute novelty, the fairy tales in Le piacevoli notti surely must have amazed early modern readers. Many of Boccaccio’s novellas depict urban protagonists who weather the vicissitudes of fortune and overcome obstacles by dint of their own wit to achieve their amorous or economic goals. In other tales, characters are thwarted in their strivings or tricked by others through their lack of intelligence. When marvels appear in the Decameron, they are often fakes, ordinary objects passed off as marvels and displayed by tricksters as a part of the elaborate beffe, or practical jokes, they set in motion for their own profit or amusement.32 In Fairy Godfather, Ruth Bottigheimer distinguishes two types among the fairy tales in Le piacevoli notti: the restoration tale, in which a character of noble class loses and then regains his or her social position through magic; and the rise tale, in which through the intervention of a magic object or being an impoverished protagonist enters a ennobling marriage and then acquires wealth.33 While the restoration tale had existed in different forms in the medieval literary tradition, the poverty-magic-

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marriage-wealth formula was Straparola’s innovation. Through these tales Straparola offered his readers a fantasy of upward social mobility via interclass marriage which was unthinkable in the rigid caste system of the Venetian Republic in which he wrote.34 Straparola’s rise and restoration tales contain all of the supernatural marvels we now associate with fairy tales. Fairies, enchanted animals, and magic objects permit the protagonists to overcome the constraints of both civil and natural law, defeat their enemies, and live as economically stable, married adults by bringing about physical, social, or economic metamorphoses. We need only think of Straparola’s most famous tale, Costantino Fortunato (XI.1), to understand this function of the marvellous. The earliest version of Puss-in-Boots, this tale tells of a cat who transforms a mange-ridden pauper named Costantino into a handsome young man by licking him clean. Through a series of skilfully organized interactions with a king, the cat arranges Costantino’s marriage to the princess and provides the newlyweds with a sumptuous castle to call home. Once the couple arrive at the castle, no more mention is made of the cat and when the king dies Costantino ascends the throne. While, on occasion, the enchantments in the tales engender wonder in the characters who experience them, this surprise does not become an Aristotelian catalyst to inquiry. Straparola’s characters might marvel when encountering fantastic phenomena but they do not investigate its causes, they simply react to its effects. Such is the case in tale V.2 in which an enchanted doll purchased by Adamantina, the younger of two orphaned sisters, defecates a mountain of money. On seeing the riches, Cassandra, the older sister, stares ‘stupefatta’ [1:348]. When a neighbour, curious as to how the sisters have improved their economic situation, hears of the doll’s capacity to defecate gold and silver, she resolves to steal it. Once in her home, however, the enchanted toy produces only fetid excrement that befoul the thief’s best linens. Her husband throws the stinking doll out the window and it is carried out of the city with other refuse. After emptying his own bowels, a king on a hunting trip asks his servant to bring him something with which to clean himself; the servant hands him the doll. The doll bites down on the royal buttocks and refuses to let go. Hearing of the king’s proclamation to richly reward anyone who can alleviate his suffering, the poor sisters present themselves at the palace, where the doll quickly jumps into Adamantina’s arms. Grateful to be relieved of such pain, the king takes Adamantina as his wife and marries off her sister. Seeing that her work is done, the enchanted doll simply vanishes at the end of the tale. Her disappear-

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ance, like that of Costantino’s cat, underscores the role of enchantments as mere catalysts for the protagonists’ rise or restoration. Of course, marvellous monsters of the sort found in treatises on natural history and displayed in scientific collections also abound in Straparola’s literary wunderkabinett, where they most often function as foils to the hero or heroine. By outwitting or destroying the satyrs, sirens, dragons, and basilisks that threaten themselves and others, the protagonists of Straparola’s tales demonstrate their valour and earn riches as well as respectable marriages. The representations of these monsters, and the ways in which they engage the scientific tradition, will be discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters. Basile’s Cunti: Wondrous Hybrids Basile’s literary wunderkabinett also depends on variatio, or variety, to generate wonder in its readers; however, unlike Straparola, Basile does not adopt a multiplicity of genres. Instead, Lo cunto de li cunti exhibits homogeneity of genre.35 Basile circumscribes the fifty individual tales that comprise Lo cunto de li cunti with yet another fairy tale. When melancholy Princess Zoza is finally moved to laugh by an old woman’s misfortune, the old woman curses her to marry Prince Tadeo of Camporotondo, who lies in an enchanted sleep. The spell can be broken only when the jar near the prince is filled with tears. Zoza falls asleep just before completing the task and a black slave named Lucia finishes the job, wakes the prince, and becomes his bride. An enchanted automaton that Zoza received from a good fairy during her seven-year journey to Camporotondo breathes the desire to hear stories into the pregnant slave’s ear. In order to satisfy the slave’s craving, Tadeo invites ten old women to the palace to spin one yarn each for four days. The first four days of storytelling conclude with Tadeo’s servants reciting an eclogue that comment upon the foibles of seventeenth-century court society.36 On the fifth day Zoza replaces the tenth narrator and, by recounting her own adventures, reveals the slave’s trick. Outraged when he learns of the slave’s deception, the prince kills her and marries Zoza. The wonderful variety in Lo cunto is found within, rather than among, Basile’s tales. The frame narrative and every tale it circumscribes are all wondrous hybrids, pieced together from elements drawn from all corners of seventeenth-century Neapolitan culture. That Basile, writing some eighty years after Straparola, privileged this sort of hybridity in his tales is hardly surprising. As discussed in chapter 1, those years witnessed

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a continual challenge to and erosion of the scientific and religious beliefs that had been the foundations of early modern society. In the face of scientific and geographic discoveries, yesterday’s facts founded on the writings of the ancient authorities quickly became fictions. The arrival of new information constantly altered the vectors of a given field of study.37 The continual development of new theories, coupled with a flood of new biological and literary forms, made it increasingly difficult to produce stable definitions for natural and literary phenomena. The protean nature of knowledge led to the Baroque obsession with hybridity and metamorphosis, both of which are characteristic of Lo cunto. Through techniques Michele Rak calls ‘manipulation’ and ‘remake,’ Basile creates not only a new literary language, but an entirely new kind of marvellous literary text.38 The textual hybridity of Basile’s fairy tales undoubtedly figures as a source of their wonder. In Lo cunto, the boundaries that had separated learned and popular culture dissolve. The names of learned figures from antiquity like Zoroaster and Heraclitus precede an enumeration of Neapolitan street performers. Verses from Virgil’s Aeneid stand in proximity to allusions to works performed in the puppet theatres of Naples. The remedies of respected medical authorities such as Galen and Hippocrates and the elixirs peddled by charlatans are both used to cure the sick. The cunti are constructed through a sort of sophisticated literary engineering in which Basile blends material gathered from a wide array of genres including myths, exempla, proverbs, legends, cronache minime (broadsheets), and cronache massime (histories), as well as from canonical literary texts.39 He also mines other aspects of his culture, including the emerging Neapolitan dialect tradition; popular culture including games, songs, and dance; the courtly traditions of entertainment and conversation; and Baroque rhetoric when creating the elaborate similes and metaphors that proliferate around the simple fairy-tale plots.40 In Lo cunto, we find all of those marvels and monsters introduced into the genre by Straparola: fairies, enchanted animals and objects, and monsters of all sorts. As in Le piacevoli notti, these marvels often function as a help or hindrance on the protagonist’s journey toward a happy ending. Basile appears to have consciously conceived of his collection of tales as a wunderkabinett and he packs many more marvels into Lo cunto than we find in Le piacevoli notti. Alongside the fairy-tale marvels typical of the genre, Basile inserts the wondrous objects housed in cabinets of curiosities of his time. In her illuminating study From Court to Forest, Nancy Canepa notes that in a number of places in Lo cunto Basile

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replaces the magic objects typical of the fairy-tale genre with an early modern mechanical marvel, automatons.41 The same might be said of the new technology of the telescope, which permits the protagonist of Il corvo [The Crow] (IV.9), Iennariello, to measure ‘cento miglia de destanzia co dui parme de cannuolo’ (822) [a distance of one hundred miles with two feet of telescope] as he scans the horizon in search of safe place to drop anchor during a storm.42 Here it is a seventeenth-century invention rather than a magic object that aids the protagonist in overcoming a perilous moment. Like an early modern wunderkabinett, Basile’s collection of tales also contains ethnographic artefacts, but they are more often the wonders of local, rather than exotic cultures. The geographic expeditions that Stephen Greenblatt identifies as the primary impetus for the conceptualization of wonder in this period also sparked a new interest in European folk culture. The discovery of strange cultures in foreign lands led to a reconsideration of those ‘strange cultures’ dwelling in Europe which had yet to be examined by the learned classes.43 A proto-ethnographer of Naples, Basile collects and displays, often in the form of lengthy enumerations, the popular culture of his day. References to various forms of street theatre and famous performers, children’s games, and popular Neapolitan songs and dances fill the frame narrative and tales.44 These are not the only marvels to be found. Inside Basile’s literary cabinet of curiosities, a king purposefully works to engender wonder in others by manipulating the forces of nature in order to create a natural marvel that would be readily welcomed in a wunderkabinett. In the tale ‘La Polece’ [The Flea] (I.5), the king places a flea in a glass bottle and feeds it each night with his own blood. Once it has grown to immense proportions he kills it and tans its hide. In doing so, the king practises natural magic, an occult branch of scientific inquiry. Basile’s fellow Neapolitan Giambattista Della Porta described natural magic as a ‘sublime science’ that ‘undertakes the knowledge of things and causes, and while it considers and investigates the arcana of nature, it brings forth not only vulgar works ... but certain marvels and monsters.’45 A miniature rendered gigantic, the flea skin is just such a marvellous monstrosity. Della Porta advised his fellow practitioners of natural magic to hide the natural forces at work in their experiments in order to make the results appear more marvellous to onlookers.46 In ‘La Polece,’ the king appears to follow Della Porta’s advice, issuing a proclamation declaring that only the person capable of deciphering the enigma of this strange skin by naming the creature to which it belonged

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is worthy of his daughter Porziella’s hand in marriage. By sniffing the hide, an ogre guesses correctly and marries the girl. The marriage will not last, for the cultural differences between the ogre and the princess are too great: like a New World cannibal, he brings home quartered men for her to prepare for dinner. One day Porziella describes her plight to an old woman, who promises to summon her seven sons, each of whom possesses a marvellous talent. The first son hears clearly all that occurs in a thirty-mile radius, the second can spit a sea of soap, the third can conjure a field of razors, the fourth can make a thick wood spring spontaneously from the ground, the fifth can produce a rushing river from a drop of water, the sixth can build a tower by throwing a stone, and the seventh is a sharpshooter. In an exciting escape scene, the seven brothers combine their powers to throw a series of obstacles in the ogre’s path and finally murder him. The king admits his folly and arranges a more suitable second marriage for Porziella. For their efforts, the brothers are rewarded with riches. In this tale wonders are piled upon wonders: fairytale monsters and astounding virtuosity mix freely with a natural wonder produced intentionally to generate marvel in those who view it. In Lo cunto de li cunti wonder arises at both the diegetic and extradiegetic level of the tales: it is generated by marvellous objects and phenomena as well as by marvellous metaphors.47 As Nancy Canepa observes, ‘In Lo cunto the central fairy-tale theme of metamorphosis not only coincides with the Baroque sense of the constant interplay between appearances and essences and the instability of the “real,” but also extends to the figural level, where Basile’s exuberant use of metaphor reworks the familiar language of literary tradition into a marvellous “new” literary language.’48 By the end of the seventeenth century, exciting wonder had become the primary purpose of literary endeavours. The greatest poet of Basile’s day, Giambattista Marino, asserted that ‘è del poeta il fin la meraviglia’49 [the poet’s aim is to create wonder]. As in the previous century, exotic and rare subject matter continued to cause readers to marvel; however, seventeenth-century poets and literary theorists privileged the verba over the res as the locus for the production of this emotional response. In one of the most influential seventeenth-century treatises on literary theory, Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1654), Emmanuele Tesauro defined the literary marvellous as follows: ‘Il mirabile consiste in una rappresentazione di due concetti quasi ’ncompatibili e perciò oltremirabili’ [The marvellous consists in a representation of two almost incompatible concepts, and therefore, ultra-wondrous].50 To this end, the poet or author utilized his ingegno, or wit, to bind together in

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metaphors two seemingly disparate objects or concepts in an unexpected way. Because Baroque poets wished their tropes to evoke marvel, the type of metaphor they favoured ‘tends toward the conceit, witticism, or metafora ingegnosa: extravagant metaphors in which the distance between vehicle and tenor is exaggerated, uniting in the metaphor what seem to be vastly dissimilar objects or phenomena.’51 At work in such tropes is the sort of witty juxtaposing practised by the owners of wunderkabinette as they placed dissimilar objects side by side to elicit wonder. To illustrate Basile’s use of marvellous metaphors, let us examine the tropes that he uses to describe the quotidian risings and settings of the moon and sun. As many critics have noted, the sun and the moon never rise or set in the same way in Lo cunto de li cunti.52 Instead, these daily events become micro-narratives (micro-racconti) embedded in the fairy tales.53 Through Basile’s skilled use of metaphor, the setting sun transforms into a child playing with golden balls that roll down West Street (II.2), and into a fisherman baiting his hook with light and fishing for the shadows of the night (II.4). By way of metaphor, the morning moon becomes a schoolteacher of shadows who dismisses her students for the sun holiday (IV.5). At times the tropes themselves recreate miniature museums of the marvellous, as when in the tale Le tre corone [The Three Crowns] (IV.6) the sun invites the hours of the day to take a look at the pygmies from the Antipodes. Through these metaphors Basile explores the Baroque obsession with time while reworking in ingenious ways the tropes of sunrise and sunset typical of early modern literature to produce an astounding example of variatio.54 These metaphors become the literary equivalent of the miniature theatre found in the King of Sweden’s wunderkabinett, for the tropes of temporality present minute spectacles constructed from an astoundingly small amount of material: usually less than twenty words. Taken together, these metaphors form a teatro delle meraviglie in which the celestial bodies perform an array of scenes that permit Basile to draw from linguistic fields related to human endeavours as diverse as painting, business, law, sex, games, self-adornment, theatre, food, agriculture, war, medicine, domestic life, and street life.55 In Lo cunto, the meraviglia – and comedy – also arise on the extradiegetic level from surprising juxtapositions of high and low literary culture. In certain moments, the grotesque hags who narrate the tales speak as if they had carefully studied the works of the poets Petrarch and Giambattista Marino. In other moments, they construct inventive sexual metaphors and highly ornate obscenities. They are capable of articulating

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with equal ease popular proverbs and linguistically complicated puns.56 For example, in Basile’s tale Lo scarafone, lo sorece e lo grillo [The Cockroach, the Mouse, and the Cricket] (III.5), a cockroach becomes a living, entomological purgative in order to disgrace his master Nardiello’s German rival in the eyes of Milla, the daughter of a wealthy Lombard king. At the beginning of the tale, Nardiello’s father turns him out of the house for having purchased a guitar-playing cockroach, a dancing mouse, and a singing cricket at the fair, rather than livestock. The three tiny creatures – marvels themselves – first win melancholy Milla’s hand for their master, making her laugh. Dismayed at marrying his daughter to a common fool, the king stipulates that Nardiello must consummate the wedding in three nights or be thrown to the lions. The king drugs Nardiello’s wine each night and the lad ends up in the den where, in a generous gesture, he frees his three animals. They then decide to avenge their master by sabotaging the efforts of Milla’s new German bridegroom. The narrator Popa describes the excremental excess provoked by the cockroach in one of these forays as follows: Lo scarafone, che ’ntese lo gronfiare de lo zito, se ne sagliette chiano chiano pe lo pede de la travacca e remorchiatose sotto coperta se ’nficcaie lesto lesto a lo tafanario de lo zito, servennolo de soppositario ’n forma tale che le spilaie de manera lo cuorpo, che potte dicere co lo Petrarca d’amor trasse indi un liquido sottile. La zita, che ’ntese lo squacquarare de lo vesentierio, l’aura, l’odore, il refrigerio, e l’ombra, scetaie lo marito. Lo quale, visto co quale sproffummo aveva ’ncenzato l’idolo suio, appe a morire de vregogna ed a crepantare de collera ... (546). [The [cockroach], when he heard the bridegroom’s snores, crawled quietly up the corner of the four-poster and, working its way into him, served him as a suppository in such a manner and uncorking his body in such a fashion that one might say with Petrarch: d’amore trasse indi un liquido sottile. The bride, when she heard the rumbling of such a dysentery, l’aura, l’odore, il refrigerio e l’ombra,

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The use of verses plucked from poems in Petrarch’s Canzoniere to describe a highly scatological scene engenders wonder and surprise in the reader, while at the same time eliciting laughter. Here again the generation of wonder depends on the ingegno, or wit, of both the author and the reader. Wonder is produced by means of the creator masking meaning in the text and the interpreter of the text unmasking it.58 Basile’s tales required readers or listeners to actively engage their own wit to first identify the myriad citations and references in order to comprehend the clever nature of the intertextual remake. This process, in turn, revealed the author’s ability to fit these disparate fragments into an original and often surprisingly incongruous new context. Undoubtedly, the swirl of marvels spinning through Straparola’s and Basile’s collections of tales assured some degree of success for Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti. As a genre surprising in its novelty and bursting with supernatural, natural, and artificial wonders, the literary fairy tale was perfectly adapted to satisfy the period’s thirst for the marvellous. In order to comprehend why the production of similar literary wunderkabinette did not markedly increase in the wake of the publication of Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti, we must examine how the literary establishment constituted wonder in this period. Literary Theories of the Marvellous The rediscovery, translation, and wide circulation of Aristotle’s Poetics in the first half of the sixteenth century shook literary culture as much as New World encounters shook the scientific world.59 This textual discovery precipitated a period of intense literary debate in Italian academies, universities, and courts, as well as the publication of a multitude of treatises examining all aspects of literary theory.60 A highly condensed, difficult work, the Poetics came to Renaissance readers as an incomplete text full of references to ‘a [Greek] literature very imperfectly known.’61 For this reason it demanded extensive exegesis.62 While commentaries on the Poetics in Latin and Italian continued to be published throughout the sixteenth century, scholars were soon applying Aristotle’s theories to the analysis of contemporary literary texts and genres. These literary discussions took on different guises, from academic lessons on how to com-

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pose novellas to quarrels over the merits of key texts in the burgeoning Italian canon. The importance that Aristotle granted the marvellous in the Poetics ensured that wonder and wonders would figure prominently in the literary debates of the day. Certainly, other classical authorities, and indeed even other texts by Aristotle readily available at the beginning of the Cinquecento, had underscored the central role of wonder in both intellectual and artistic endeavours. In the Natural History, Pliny purported that works of art could be considered wonders, particularly when the mimetic skill of the painter deceived the viewer into mistaking art for nature.63 As we mentioned above, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics wonder serves as the stimulus for all philosophizing. The Poetics, however, moved the marvellous to the centre of literary debates, for in this text Aristotle combines a mimetic or imitative principle governing artistic creation with a call for the marvellous in poetry. Aristotle observed that ‘mimetic artists represent people in action.’64 Because he examines narrative forms of poetry – tragedy, epic, and comedy – these actions are necessarily the doings of men in the world. Unlike the historian who records what has actually happened, the poet should represent what may happen, ‘the kinds of things which it suits a certian kind of person to say or do, in terms of probability and necessity.’65 At the same time, tragedies and epic poems must contain marvels to delight the audience. In regard to these marvels, Aristotle urged the poet to favour ‘things probable though impossible’66 over ‘possible but implausible.’67 In Marvels and Commonplaces, Baxter Hathaway defines all of the criticism written in this period as attempts to reconcile these seemingly contradictory requirements. Hathaway sees in the period’s theoretical writing a battle waged between the demand for realism or the verisimilar and the demand for the marvellous.68 While this is certainly a reductive vision of what is a vast corpus of theoretical texts, the simplification helps us to understand why wonder figured prominently for more than one hundred years in a diverse array of literary arguments. As we begin to analyse how these debates on the marvellous shaped the fortunes of the literary fairy tale, it is important to recall that all of these discussions unfolded in the long shadow of the Council of Trent (1545–63). As Protestants attacked the miraculous doctrines which formed the bedrock of Catholic belief, the Church sought to strengthen faith in the miraculous through both the doctrinal affirmations of the Council and the regulation of representations of the Christian marvel-

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lous. As men of science did in their treatises, the Church sought to separate what it held to be ‘true’ marvels from those only apparently so. While the seventeenth century witnessed this affirmation of the miraculous in Catholic culture, the period also saw concurrent efforts by the Inquisition to identify and denounce false saints whose counterfeit miracles threatened the truth value of those sanctioned by the Church. In fact, the Italian Inquisition investigated numerous cases of individuals who claimed to have had ecstatic visions, suffered holy afflictions, or been tormented by the devil, only to find them guilty of a pretence to sainthood, of counterfeiting the miraculous.69 This regulation extended to representations of the Christian marvellous in art and literature. In post-Tridentine Italy, ‘the reformed Catholic church sponsored the production of images that vividly illustrated the central mysteries of the faith: it encouraged the search for holy relics, and it promoted a new iconography that stressed the lives of the saints, especially their visions, ecstasies and mystical raptures. An unprecedented number of paintings showing these orthodox miracles were produced in the course of the seventeenth century.’70 In print culture, the creation of the Index of Prohibited Books served to ensure verbal, rather than visual, orthodoxy. This concern with verbal representations of the miraculous carried over to the literary debates on the marvellous. For some theorists writing during the Counter-Reformation, embracing the Christian marvellous required both the expulsion of superstitions and folk beliefs that ran counter to Church doctrine and the depaganization of literature and art. For example, as he engaged in debates over the merits of Dante’s Divine Comedy during the 1580s, Bellisario Bulgarini argued in favour of the use of marvels that were ‘incredible possibilities,’ wondrous scientific facts which were rejected by the vulgar masses such as the Copernican view of the universe, over the ‘credible impossibilities’ of superstition and folk belief. For this reason, he dismissed as inappropriate for Christian authors the sorts of marvels typical both of the chivalric epic and the fairy tale, including ‘the fables of the gods of the Gentiles in their time, and in ours the strange adventures and marvellous prowess of the Knights of the Round Table, the Paladins of France, the fable of the Orco (from Ariosto), and infinite other matters that come to be told about fairies and necromancers, as of Alcina, of Morgana, of Falerina, of Malagigi, of Pietro d’Abano, of Cecco d’Ascoli, and of other perfidious enchanters and wicked enchantresses.’71 Defenders of Dante and the epic tradition were quick to counter such attacks by arguing in favour of the creation of a Christian marvellous.

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In his Discorsi del poema eroico (1594), Torquato Tasso would rehabilitate for a Christian audience the same marvels condemned by Bulgarini. Tasso theorized an epic poem that was at once verisimilar and marvellous, based on historical events, and informed by Christian beliefs. In such a poem, all of the supernatural marvels would spring from the Divine Will. Tasso explains, Let the poet attribute certain actions that far exceed human power to God, his angels, to demons, or to those granted power by God or by demons, such as saints, magicians, and fairies. These actions, if considered in themselves, will seem marvelous – indeed they are even called miracles in common parlance. But if these same actions are regarded from the viewpoint of the efficacy and power of [Him] who brought them about, they will be judged verisimilar.72

The magicians and fairies denounced by Bulgarini as folk superstitions become for Tasso Christian figures whose astounding powers ultimately derive from God. For Tasso, this sort of Christian marvellous provided licit delight for readers while resolving the tension between the verisimilar and the marvellous. A similar discursive move was employed to justify the use of fantastic myths in Christian writing. For example, Bulgarini argued that Dante’s invention of the Old Man of Crete (Inferno 14) was both an impossibility and contrary to Christian doctrine. One of the great sixteenth-century defenders of Dante, Jacopo Mazzoni, countered that Christian poets could invent such myths on the condition that they could be readily understood to be fictions that must be interpreted allegorically.73 In this recourse to allegorical interpretations to justify the use of non-Christian myths, Mazzoni sounds much like the first Humanists, who defended the study of the texts of pagan antiquity on similar grounds. As I show below, Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century defence of the study of classical texts in the Genealogia deorum held that the great poems of antiquity hid allegorical truths that were pertinent to Christian readers. Throughout the sixteenth century, the presence of allegorical, moral truths would be invoked repeatedly to protect marvellous classical texts from condemnation. For example, for Tommaso Campanella, writing at the end of the sixteenth century, it was the presence of such moral truths that justified the use of the pagan supernatural and the enchantments typical of the epic poem. Campanella felt that both the Orlando Furioso and the Gerusalemme liberata were ‘much too involved in magic, enchantments, and the

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pagan supernatural for [him], but his belief in moral truth is such that, if the moral is strong enough, he can even tolerate Atalanta’s palace, Falerina’s garden, the dream of an earthly paradise, hippogriffs, Astolfo’s horn, the giant Orrilo, Angelica’s ring, Melissa’s invocation, Merlin’s prophecies, Homer’s Polyphemus, and Dante’s many fictions.’74 Because today we often think of fairy tales as children’s literature, we view the genre as providing young readers with an explicit moral to the story. As such it would seem to conform perfectly to the demands of the Christian marvellous. Yet, as I demonstrate below, stories of fairies, ogres, and witches were consistently depicted as resisting allegorical interpretation. For this reason, they failed to offer readers an acceptable form of the literary marvellous. It is no surprise, then, that few Italian authors sought to imitate the fairy tales of Straparola and Basile. ‘Pazzarelle vecchiacciule’ and ‘semplici fanciulette’: The Denigration of the Fairy Tale Criticisms of favole telling of ogres, fairies, and witches – a description which could readily apply to the fairy tales recounted by Straparola’s damigelle and Basile’s hags – appeared in Italy as early as the fourteenth century in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, a handbook of mythology. In the Genealogia, Boccaccio sought to organize the many disparate stories about the classical gods and heroes that had survived in an array of ancient texts in order to create a coherent map of the complex set of relationships binding each of these mythological figures to the others. The work enjoyed a renewed popularity in the mid-sixteenth century with Giuseppe Betussi’s Italian translation, published in 1547 by Comin da Trino, the same printer who first printed Le piacevoli notti.75 In the final two books of the treatise, Boccaccio mounts a protohumanist defence of literature intended to validate the study of pagan authors and mythology by Christian readers. At the core of this defence lies a theory that views the creation of all texts that are worthy of contemplation as an allegorical endeavour. As a consequence, all interpretation can be viewed as an effort to peer beneath the literal surface of a text, what Boccaccio refers to as the ‘corteccia’ or bark, in order to discern this allegorical significance. Employing the method of figural interpretation in wide use during the Middle Ages, Boccaccio explains at the beginning of the Genealogia that every text can be read on four levels: the literal, the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogical. So, for example, Boccaccio claims that the myth of Perseus’s triumph over the Gorgon

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and subsequent victorious flight can be understood not only literally, but also as illustrating the moral message of the defeat of vice. Allegorically, the story of Perseus represents the religious man who refuses to partake in worldly delights and turns his mind to the heavens. Anagogically, Perseus’s victory over the Gorgon symbolizes Christ’s defeat of Satan and his ascension into heaven.76 This process of allegorization uncovers valuable truths buried in pagan tales which render them utili [useful] as well as dilettevoli [delightful] to a Christian readership. In Book XIV of the Genealogia, Boccaccio examines the different types of fictions with which authors have cloaked the truths they wish to communicate to their readers. He begins by defining the favola as ‘una locutione essemplare, overo dimostrativa sotto fittione, da cui levata la corteccia, è manifesta la intentione del favoleggiante’77 [an exemplary locution, which, under guise of fiction, illustrates or proves an idea; and when its superficial bark is removed, the meaning of the teller is clear]. The bark with which the author encases his or her message can assume one of four forms. The first type is the Aesopian fable, in which the literal level involves completely marvellous occurrences, as when animals and inanimate objects speak. The second type is the mythological story, in which the ancient poets recounted the actions of gods and men mixing fiction and truth, as in the story of the daughters of Minyas, who were turned into bats for having scorned the religious sacrifices to Bacchus. The epic, exemplified by the works of Virgil and Homer, figures as the third type, which resembles history more closely than fiction. Boccaccio’s description of these three types of favole parallels the classical categories of the fabula, argumentum, and historia that had been incorporated into medieval rhetoric. The fourth type of favola, however, Boccaccio initially dismisses as unworthy of consideration because ‘non ha punto di verità in se né in apparenza né in nascosto, essendo inventione delle pazze vecchierelle’78 [it has no trace of truth in it, either superficial or hidden, since it is the invention of crazy old women]. It is this fourth type of favola that most closely resembles the fairy tales of Straparola’s and Basile’s female narrators. Although he initially discounts the favole of these crazy old women, as he continues his defence of poetry Boccaccio admits that such tales possess an allegorical significance – albeit a modest one. He challenges the ignorant critics of his humanist endeavours by arguing that if even a feeble old woman spinning yarns attempts to communicate a message veiled by her words, then surely the illustrious authors of antiquity must convey an allegorical truth through their poems. He writes,

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Fairy-Tale Science Tacciano adunque questi cianciatori ignoranti, et i superbi, se possono, ammutiscano, essendo da credere, che non pure gli huomini illustri nudriti dal latte delle Muse, et allevati nelle habitationi della Filosofia, et in sacri studi, habbiano locato profondissimi sensi ne i suoi poemi, ma etiando non essere alcuna così pazzarella vecchiacciula, d’intorno il fuoco di casa, che di notte vegghiando con le fantesche racconti alcuna favola, dell’Orco, o delle Fate, e Streghe, dalla cui spessisime volte finta, et recitata sotto ombra delle parole riferite non vi senta incluso secondo le forze del suo debil intelletto qualche sentimento alle volte da ridersi poco, per lo quale vuole mettere timore a i picciolini fanciulli, overo porgere diletto alle donzelle, overo farsi beffe di vecchi, o almeno mostrare il potere della fortuna.79 [Let the ignorant gossips be silent, and let the haughty be mute, if they can, since it is believable that not only illustrious men nourished with the milk of the Muses and raised in the houses of Philosophy and religious studies have placed profound significance in their poems, but not even the craziest old crone keeping vigil around the hearth with the young serving girls and telling some fairy tales about the Ogre, Fairies, and Witches, which have been recited many times, thinks that she is not including some serious sentiment – to the degree that her feeble intellect permits – with which she wants to frighten the small children, or delight the young ladies, or make fun of the older folks, or at least show the power of Fortune.]

Boccaccio locates tales of ogres, fairies, and witches in a domestic setting among the servant class. Both the narrator (the crazy old crone) and the public composed of serving girls, children, and the elderly appear to lack the intellectual acuity, literary talent, and schooling expected of men, or even women, of letters. In short, narrators of this fourth type of favole seem the inversion of the great classical poets that Boccaccio seeks to defend here. In Boccaccio’s assessment, the defects of the genre seem to lie more in the teller than in the tale. This vision of the fairy tale as inferior to other types of fiction was shared by Straparola’s Venetian contemporaries. In a letter addressed to the courtesan Signora Frondosa published in the fourth book of his Lettere (1556), Andrea Calmo discusses the fairy-tale genre when he describes the activities she will enjoy should she choose to abandon her other clients and join him for a few days of fishing, feasts, and evening entertainments. These latter closely resemble the activities enjoyed by Lucrezia and her companions in Straparola’s frame tale. Calmo explains

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to Signora Frondosa that after being served a delicious dessert of cooked pears, the storytelling and recitations will begin: e torna tutti a sentar digando le pi stupende panzane stampie, e imaginative del mondo, de comare ocha, de Fraibolan, de osel bel verde, de statua de legno, del bossolo della fade, di porceletti, de l’aseno che andete remito, del sorzeche andete in pellegrinazo, del lovo che se fese miedego; e tante fanfalughe che no besogna dir; e quei che ha pi sal in zucca recita la historia de Ottinelo, e Giulia, e quella de Maria per Ravena, el contrasto de la Quaresema, e di Carneval, Guiscardo, e Gismonda, de Piramo e Tisbe ...80 [everyone returns to his seat recounting the most stupendous, charming, and imaginative yarns in the whole world: of Godmother Goose, Fraibolan, the beautiful green bird, the wooden statue, the fairy’s alms-box, the little pigs, the ass who became a hermit, the mouse who went on a pilgrimage, the wolf who became a doctor, and so many other nonsense tales that I shall not mention; and those who have more salt in their gourds will tell the story of Ottinelo and Giulia, Maria from Ravenna, the dialogue between Lent and Carnival, Guiscardo and Ghismonda, Pyramus and Thisbe ...]

Although it is almost impossible to prove on account of the brevity of Calmo’s references, literary critics have long suggested that two of the tales mentioned in the letter, the story of the beautiful green bird and the donkey who became a hermit, are references to Straparola’s tales IV.3 and X.2.81 Calmo never specifies the sex of those who would narrate such ‘stupende panzane,’ but it is clear that he little esteems the narrators of this type of tale, deeming them to have ‘meno sal in zucca’ [less salt in their gourd] than those who opt for the more noble ‘historia’ about Maria from Ravenna, the ‘contrasto,’ a dialogue between the personified figures of Carnival and Lent, or Boccaccio’s tragic novella of the young lovers Guiscardo and Ghismonda. Calmo’s letter reveals that in the same years that Straparola was publishing his tales a sort of hierarchy of genres was beginning to take shape in which the fairy tale occupied one of the lowest positions. This taxonomy of brief narrative forms would reach its fullest articulation only two decades after the first printing of Le piacevoli notti in a dialogue entitled Dialogo de’ giuochi written by Girolamo Bargagli, a member of the renowned Sienese Accademia degli Intronati.82 Bargagli’s dialogue recreates the academic meeting that marked the reopening of the

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Intronati after a hiatus brought about by political unrest in Tuscany. The academy members discuss the merits of the different games to be played at the veglie or evening entertainments organized by the academy and attended by the noblewomen of Siena. Containing explicit rules for some 130 games, the dialogue reads like an encyclopedia of Renaissance amusements.83 After discussing the rules of play for the 130th game, Marcantonio Piccolomini, a founding member of the Intronati referred to in the dialogue by his academic moniker ‘Il Sodo,’ announces that ‘è tempo che si dica del novellare’84 [it is high time that we speak of storytelling]. Although not specifically deemed a game, telling tales figured as an important form of entertainment during the Sienese veglie, as storytelling did in Murano during Carnival in Le piacevoli notti and at Prince Tadeo’s court in Lo cunto de li cunti.85 Rather than providing advice regarding the performative aspects of storytelling, Il Sodo commands his fellow Intronati to recount only novellas when called upon to tell a tale, an order that necessitates an excursus on prose genre theory. By sanctioning a decorum of storytelling that deemed the novella the only genre appropriate for academy members to narrate at the veglie, he is compelled to inform those present of how to distinguish among various kinds of narrative prose. Il Sodo commences his definition of the genre by declaring that a novella must contain ‘un’azzione e uno avvenimento solo e non molti’86 [only one single action or event and not many]. This Aristotelian unity of action distinguishes the novella from the istoria, a narrative which recounted many different events. He also differentiates true novellas from certain tales told on the First Day and all of the tales told on the Sixth Day of the Decameron. These, ‘che solamente in un detto e in una arguta risposta consistono e non in fatto e in azzione alcuna, propriamente novelle dire non si possono, ma motti e leggiadrie di parole più tosto’87 [which consist only of a witty saying or a smart retort and not of any fact or action, cannot properly be called novellas, but rather witticisms and pleasantries]. He urges the Intronati to eschew these motti when called upon to narrate a novella, surmising that Boccaccio included this type of tale in his masterpiece only because he had run out of novellas. The true novella must also possess ‘un certo verisimil raro, cioè che verisimilmente possa accadere, ma che però di rado addivenga’88 [a certain rare verisimilitude, that is something that could possibly happen, but rarely comes to pass]. This assertion places Il Sodo in the position of

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having to justify Boccaccio’s inclusion of fantastic tales in the Decameron, specifically two tales told on the Tenth Day which involve magic and the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti told on the Fifth Day. In tale X.9 Messer Torello travels from Babylon to Pavia in a few hours by ‘arte magica,’ while in tale X.5, Madonna Dionora’s lover hires a necromancer to conjure a blooming garden in January. While initially stating that these three tales do not adhere to the requirement of ‘verisimil raro,’ by the end of his discussion Il Sodo has reclassified as novellas the tales of Torello’s magic travel and the necromancer’s conjuring of a May garden in January for Lady Dianora. He argues that because in Boccaccio’s day people believed in the power of necromancy to accomplish such marvellous feats, these two tales would have been judged to be realistic in their representation of marvellous – but still credible – phenomena by Boccaccio’s earliest public, and so would have been considered novellas. As for tale V.8, in which Nastagio degli Onesti repeatedly witnesses the shade of a knight slay the ghost of the woman who refused his love when they were alive, Il Sodo comments: L’altra [novella] poi della cacciata donna ha bene più del impossibile, ma come sola fra tante, si può ben passare nel modo, che in un grande sborso fra molti belli, e pesanti scudi se ne passerebbe uno di bellissima lega, che non fosse al tutto di peso. Ma ancor che cotal novella trapassi alla favola, non può fare per la sua stravaganza di non dilettare. Egli è ben vero che risedrebbe meglio mescolata fra’ romanzi, dove le Fate, gli incanti, e le cose sopranaturali sono molto gratiose, e dilettevoli, e alhora maggiormente, quando sono felicemente spiegate, come dall’Ariosto fu fatto. Et ciò mi credo io che nasca, così per esser proprie di quel poema, come ancora per contenere sotto di senso allegorico, da giovare in un tempo stesso, e dilettare, laquale allegoria non ricercando la novella, ma desiderando l’ammaestramento, e utilità scoperta, avviene, che men belle, e meno perfette si tengono quelle, che maghi incanti e cose fatate contengono, e però lasciate cotali favole alle semplici fanciulette, qualcuna di caso verosimile ne narrarete, quando da comandamento di vegghia a ciò sarete astretti.89 [The other novella about the hunted woman has much more of the impossible, but as only one of many novellas it is accepted, as when in a payment, among many beautiful and heavy florins, one coin, well-minted but a little too light, would be accepted. Even though that novella crosses over to the favola, it can’t but delight on account of its unconventionality. It is quite true that it would sit better mixed among romances, where fairies, enchant-

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Fairy-Tale Science ments, and supernatural things are very pleasing and delightful, and all the more so when they are felicitously explained, as Ariosto did. And I believe that this comes about both because such supernatural things are typical of that poem and because they contain an allegorical meaning aimed at being of use and delighting. Since the novella does not aim to be allegorical, but wishes to convey a lesson and a readily apparent utility, it happens that those novellas that contain wizards, enchantments, and magic objects are held to be less beautiful and less perfect. And so, leave such favole to the simple young girls and narrate a verisimilar tale when it will be your turn to do so during the evening entertainment.]

For Il Sodo, the problem with favole lies not in the presence of fantastic elements per se, but the fact that such supernatural beings, objects, and occurrences are most appropriate in romanzi, or chivalric poems like Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, where they acquire a moral weight through allegorization. In his study on the Orlando furioso’s entry into the Italian literary canon, Daniel Javitch notes that ‘[a]llegorization, which had been the traditional way of preserving the normative character of the pagan epics in a Christian culture, and which was itself a sign that a poetic text deserved to be institutionalized, was another process that the Furioso underwent in the sixteenth century’ when commentators and editors sought to introduce the poem to the canon.90 In their attempts to legitimize Ariosto’s poem, some sixteenth-century editors added an octave to the beginning of each canto which provided the reader an allegorical interpretation of what followed, and thus brought the poem in line with post-Tridentine demands for the Christian marvellous. Because early modern favole, be they Boccaccio’s tale of Nastagio degli Onesti or Straparola’s fairy tales, tended not to be read allegorically, they lacked the legitimizing moral gravity ascribed to chivalric romances. Furthermore, they were viewed as lacking the readily apparent utility characteristic of the most perfect novellas. In effect then, the marvels in the favola succeed in fulfilling only one of the two humanist requirements placed upon texts: they are dilettevoli, but not particularly utili; delightful, but not useful for the edification of the reader or listener. For Il Sodo, favole are literary lightweights, beautiful but counterfeit coins, and as such best left to the ‘semplici fanciullette.’ Il Sodo’s advice to leave the favola to simple young girls feminizes the genre and discourages male narrators from embracing it. At the same time, the inability of the marvels in favole to acquire allegorical weight must have discouraged male authors from writing fairy tales.

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The texts of Boccaccio, Calmo, and Bargagli might perhaps seem disparate pronouncements spread too far over time and space to serve as an accurate reflection of the literary norms of Straparola’s and Basile’s day. If we examine the fortune of Straparola’s fairy tales in sixteenth-century anthologies of novellas, as well as seventeenth-century discussions of the merits of Lo cunto de li cunti, it becomes clear that these negative views of the genre were shared by many. Although Le piacevoli notti was reprinted with great frequency during the second half of the sixteenth century, Straparola’s fairy tales were routinely omitted from contemporaneous anthologies of novellas printed in Italy and abroad. In his analysis of three successive editions of Francesco Sansovino’s Cento novelle scelte dai più nobili scrittori [One Hundred Novellas Chosen from the Most Noble Authors] (1561, 1562, and 1566), Donato Pirovano notes that Straparola’s fairy tales are never included in this authoritative anthology, which served to construct the canon of Italian novellas.91 Nor would the fairy tales appear in anthologies of tales published abroad such as the Englishman William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1575). Painter gathers together tales he describes as ‘both profitable and pleasant’ written by ancient Greek and Latin authors, as well as authors writing in various European languages.92 A number of Straparola’s tales are featured alongside those of Boccaccio, Bandello, Marguerite de Navarre, Francois Belleforest, and Pierre Boaistuau, but no fairy tales figure in Painter’s selection from Le piacevoli notti. Even early champions of Lo cunto perceived the fairy tale to be a literary liability the use of which had to be justified. When lauding Lo cunto, Basile’s colleagues at the Academy of the Incogniti in Venice defined his cunti not as fairy tales, but as belonging to more respectable categories of prose.93 In 1647, the academy published Le glorie degli Incogniti, a catalogue containing biographies, bibliographies, and portraits of both living and deceased academy members. Each entry included an engraved portrait, a biography, and a list of the member’s most important publications.94 Basile’s biography mentions by name three of his works: his epic poem Teagene written in Italian and based on Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Histories, his masterpiece Lo cunto, and the eclogues Le muse napoletane. Concerning Lo cunto, the biographer remarks: E perché l’amenità dell’ingegno di Gio. Battista il credeva capace d’ogni maniera di componimento si compiacque egli per suo diporto, e per [t]rattenimento delle conversationi di comporre nel linguaggio materno un’opera ripiena di facetie, di motti, e di piacevolezze che intitolò lo Conto

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Fairy-Tale Science de’ Conti Trattenimento di Picciarilli, publicando col finto nome di Gio. Alessio Abattutis anagrammatismo tratto dal proprio nome.95 [And because of his great wit, Gio. Battista believed himself capable of every type of writing. For his own amusement and as entertainment during conversations he enjoyed writing a work full of witty anecdotes, witticisms, and jokes in his mother tongue entitled The Tale of Tales: Entertainment for the Little Ones, publishing it under the fictitious name Gio. Alessio Abattutis, an anagram of his own name.]

As the biography indicates, Basile wrote Lo cunto de li cunti for the amusement of himself and others during conversazioni, post-prandial gatherings of noble men and women at the Neapolitan courts dedicated to storytelling, theatrical recitations, and playing games.96 The academy’s praise for this text falls short of being an attempt to rehabilitate the maligned genre of the fairy tale, for here Basile’s text has been reclassified as a work full of ‘facetie, di motti, e di piacevolezze’ (humorous anecdotes, witticisms, and pleasantries or jokes). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, skilled courtiers were expected to recount motti and facetie to amuse their companions.97 In praising Lo cunto as a collection of motti and facetie, the Incogniti paint a portrait of Basile as a perfect courtier whose tales in dialect would undoubtedly find a welcome in the Neapolitan courts, without ever mentioning that it is a collection of fairy tales. In the dedicatory letter to his 1679 edition of Lo cunto, the Roman printer Bartolomeo Lupardi directly addressed negative assessments of the fairy tale when he argued that Basile’s cunti hid important truths underneath their literal surface. Lupardi explained in his dedicatory letter that while Basile’s tales might resemble those told by serving girls and wet nurses to entertain or lull to sleep small children, ‘ad ogni modo, anco sotto queste corteccie è stato da Saggi nascosto il midollo, el frutto di qualche precetto, et arcano da non essere disprezzato da’ Grandi’ [in any case, also below this bark the Wise have hidden the marrow, the fruit of some concept, arcane enough not to be disparaged by the adults].98 An astute reader of the critiques of the fairy tale, Lupardi recognized that most often the genre was rejected on account of the limited intellectual capacity of those who embraced it. It was guilt by association, rather than any intrinsic defect, that had damned the genre. In the hands of a wise man like Basile, Lupardi suggests, the marvellous tales traditionally recounted to children had been transformed into the sort of fiction that

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presented a useful moral lesson, as well as an interpretative challenge worthy of intellectually mature readers. In this way, he implies that the marvels of the fairy tales adhere to the requirements of the Christian marvellous because they furnish moral truths. Ultimately, neither the praise of the Academy of the Incogniti nor Lupardi’s suggestion that in the hands of a capable (male) author the genre had potential to delight and instruct was enough to encourage other Italian authors to begin writing fairy tales. The many marvels in Straparola’s and Basile’s literary wunderkabinette undoubtedly attracted and amused many readers, but the perception of the genre’s inability to withstand allegorical interpretation meant that these were precisely the sorts of marvels disdained by elite culture: they engendered marvel, but not meaning. Decades after the publication of Lo cunto, French authors of fairy tales were still compelled to justify their use of a feminized genre that was deemed defective because it lacked moral truths. When the genre blossomed in France in the 1690s, its defenders would put forth more articulated versions of the arguments found in Lupardi’s preface. Arguing for the merits of the genre within the broader context of the battle between the Ancients and the Moderns, Charles Perrault purported in his preface to the Contes en vers that the marvellous elements in fairy tales were more worthy than those found in classical texts because their simple tellers – old crones and serving girls – always strove to include an honest moral. For Perrault, fairy tales were both delightful and instructive while ancient myths aimed only to delight the reader.99 In her ‘Lettre à Madame D.G.’ another author of fairy tales from this period, Madame Lhéretier, displaced the traditional founding figure of the genre, the yarn-spinning crone, with a fanciful genealogy that located the origins of all folk tales in the medieval troubadours. As Lewis Seifert has shown, Lhéretier claimed that ‘the fairy tales told/written for polite society attempt to recapture the inherent moral purity of the troubadours’ storytelling and, thereby, regenerate both the novel and folklore.’100 Neither Straparola nor Basile left an explicit defence of the genre in the form of a preface or letters. Instead, they inscribed their own views on the genre into their texts. In the two chapters that follow, I demonstrate that Straparola and Basile simultaneously recognize and struggle to overcome the stigma of the fairy tale by incorporating scientific theories of monstrous birth into meta-literary frame tales meant to masculinize the genre and prove its allegorical worth.

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3 ‘Con l’uno e l’altro sesso’: Gender, Genre, and Monstrosity in Straparola’s Frame Tale

Although scholars of Italian novella collections have long viewed frame tales as a hermeneutic lens through which to examine individual tales that they circumscribe, those studying Le piacevoli notti have rarely utilized Straparola’s framing narrative in this manner. Undoubtedly, this critical negligence stems from the belief that Straparola merely presented his readers with a lieta brigata and a locus amoenus in the hope that his Boccaccian frame tale would serve as his entry-ticket to the genre, or that his bow to the Trecento master would temper his revolutionary decision to place marvellous fairy tales alongside verisimilar novellas.1 Certainly, the aesthetic limitations of the frame tale of Le piacevoli notti are many and the list of its literary sins quite long. At times, it is slavishly and mechanically derivative, a sort of low-resolution reproduction of a great master destined to adorn the walls of a bourgeois household rather than a noble palace.2 The historical personages rarely bring their political or cultural experiences to bear on the discussions at hand, and in their perfunctory presentation of the tales and the enigmas, the ten damigelle are virtually indistinguishable from one another. For these reasons, Straparola’s narrators have been dismissed as ‘ombre vane, fourché nel nome, figure convenzionali, scialbe e generiche’3 [empty shadows, except in name, conventional, pale, generic figures]. Furthermore, since the storytellers are never required to adhere to a pre-established topic or theme, as are the narrators in the Decameron, the tales often accumulate without the frame tale imposing any thematic coherence among them. Numerous lapses in logic also mar the frame tale. Straparola’s description of the locus amoenus, Signora Lucrezia’s rented villa on Murano, has been cribbed from the description of a villa in the Decameron; however, Straparola makes no attempt to adapt this plagiarized passage to his own

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needs.4 Although the fact that the narrators are celebrating Carnival indicates that Lucrezia arrived at the palazzo during the winter, the lovely garden is depicted as being in full bloom.5 Narrators recount enigmas out of order; new narrators are introduced with no explanation; decisions are made one night regarding who will narrate the next evening, only to be ignored when the group reconvenes.6 So many are the lapses that Ruth Bottigheimer hypothesizes that Straparola was assisted in the preparation of the final sections of the frame tale for volume 2.7 On account of these narrative flaws, critical assessments of Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti have consistently devalued the importance of the frame tale for interpreting the individual novellas. Rather than simply dismiss Straparola’s frame tale as a shoddy imitation of the Boccaccian model, I argue here for its importance as one of the earliest theoretical discussions of the literary fairy tale. While it was often in the context of literary academies that scholars formulated the rules governing new genres, authors also furnished their own opinions on the character and limits of the generic forms they engaged in their texts.8 I demonstrate that in a similar way Straparola employs the frame tale of Le piacevoli notti as a meta-textual space in which to sketch the parameters of the genre to which he gives birth. He articulates the contours of the literary fairy tale by juxtaposing the damigelle’s fairy tales of monstrous metamorphosis with a case history of an astounding, yet then thought to be completely possible, biological transformation: a female-to-male spontaneous sex change. It is the narrator Antonio Molino’s insistence on the veracity of his tale about a young woman who sprouts a penis that encourages Straparola’s readers to consider the differences between this tale of intersexual transformation and the fairy tales of marvellous metamorphosis told by the young females in the group. Novelle, Parabole, Istorie, Favole: A Genre without a Name Defining the literary fairy tale represented a particularly daunting task, for not only was Straparola the first Western European author to publish them, finding himself without an authoritative model, but more generally there existed only a limited, imprecise theoretical lexicon with which to describe and differentiate among the various forms of short prose fiction then in use in Italy. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the model par excellence for the novella genre, as well as the reigning linguistic model for Italian prose, offered little guidance in this regard. In his ‘Proem,’ Boccaccio informs his readers that ‘intendo di raccontare cento novelle,

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o favole, o parabole, o istorie che dire vogliamo’9 [I intend to recount a hundred novellas, or fables, or parables, or stories, however we want to call them]; yet, he never goes on to define these categories, nor does his use of the terms in the frame tale illuminate distinctions among them. While some critics assume that Boccaccio understood the four terms to be synonymous, Selene Sarteschi argues that the Boccaccian novella represented a mediation – and thus an undermining – of the medieval categories of historia (storia), argomentum (parabola), and fabula (favola). Boccaccio employs all four terms in order to emphasize that his hundred tales share the common traits of all three categories while representing a new sort of fusion of historia and fabula, of history and fiction.10 As in the Decameron, the narrators in Le piacevoli notti do not designate their stories so as to distinguish among genres: they refer to virtually all of their tales as favole, whether what they recount is a magical fairy tale, like Straparola’s Puss-in-Boots, or more closely resembles the beffe and merchant’s adventures of the Boccaccian novella tradition. In doing so, they embraced the common usage of this radically polysemous word.11 At the time, ‘favola’ denoted both the fables of Aesop and fairy tales, and more broadly any nonsensical tale. It encompassed texts as diverse as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Boccaccio’s stories of the adventures of medieval merchants. So it is quite striking when, on the thirteenth night of storytelling in Le piacevoli notti, Antonio Molino vehemently insists that the tale he tells is not a favola, but a caso. Molino’s Tale of the Hermaphrodite: ‘un caso il quale non è favola’ When on the final night of Carnival Lucrezia commands that everyone, men and women, participate in the storytelling, Antonio Molino offers his listeners a tale of marvellous metamorphosis. Molino explains to the brigata that Filomena of Salerno’s beauty was so great, and her many suitors so ardent, that her father, ‘temendo che non le avenisse qualche scorno per esser così stimulata’ (2:766) [fearing lest some disgrace or other befall her on account of being spurred on in this way], placed her in the convent of San Iorio. While under the care of the good sisters, Filomena falls ill with a violent fever. Her guardians and parents marshal healers from every stratum of the Renaissance medical professions. Herbalists offer an initial ineffectual cure; excellent and experienced physicians visit the girl without allaying her symptoms; even a few old women promise to cure her with their folk remedies, but to no avail. Indeed, Filomena’s condition only worsens: she now suffers from a painful edema of

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her pubic region, ‘a guisa d’una grossa palla’ (2:766) [which came to resemble a large ball]. Her screams of pain move her parents and guardians to send a group of wise surgeons to her aid. At first the surgeons cannot agree on a course of action; some want to apply a poultice of mallow and pork fat, while others suggest alternative cures. Finally, they concur that the swelling must be lanced, and with the nuns and Filomena’s female relatives worriedly looking on, the best among the surgeons takes knife in hand. The surprise at what this intervention revealed could not have been greater: ‘quando si credeva che di tal bucco uscir ne dovesse o sangue o marza, ne uscì un certo grosso membro il quale le donne desiderano e di vederlo si schifano’ (2:767) [when they expected that either blood or pus would come out of that hole, there popped out a certain large member which women desire but feel disgust when they see it]. The nuns immediately burst into tears, not because of any compassion for the patient, but because they wish, Molino explains, that what had occurred in the open had happened in private, for now Filomena, or Filomeno, has to be expelled from the convent. Just as curious as Filomena’s astounding sex change is Molino’s insistence on the veracity of his tale. Although Filomena’s story stands among the most brief in Le piacevoli notti, Molino will implicitly and explicitly call attention to the truth of his tale at three separate moments. First, he begins his tale by declaring, ‘Grandi sono, graziose donne, e’ secretti della natura e innumerabili, né è uomo al mondo che quelli imaginar potesse’ (2:765) [The secrets of nature, my gracious ladies, are great and innumerable, nor is there any man in the world who could imagine them all]. While this opening line conforms structurally to those of the female narrators, who often introduce their own tales of monstrous metamorphosis by way of a popular proverb or truism, Molino here eschews common wisdom and invokes a classical authority. His claim that the secrets of nature are far too great and numerous to be imagined echoes Pliny’s observation in Book VII (chapter 1) of the Natural History where the Roman naturalist writes: For whoever believed in Ethiopians before actually seeing them? or what is not deemed miraculous when it first comes to knowledge? how many things are judged impossible before they actually occur? Indeed the power and majesty of the nature of the universe at every turn lacks credence if one’s mind embraces parts of it only, and not the whole.12

With the first words he utters, Molino associates what follows with the

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learned discourse of natural history. He continues by explaining, ‘Laonde mi ho pensato di raccontarvi un caso il quale non è favola, ma intervenuto poco tempo fa nella città di Salerno’ (2:765) [So I thought to tell you of a case which is not a fairy tale, but happened a short time ago in the city of Salerno]. Playing upon the multiple meaning of the polysemous word favola, which, as mentioned above, signifies both ‘false information’ and ‘fairy tale,’ Molino presents the story of Filomena as a case history. Finally, although Filomena’s expulsion from the convent might seem to be the logical conclusion of this tale, Molino finishes in a surprising fashion: he offers ocular proof to verify his story. He swears to his listeners, ‘E referisco per bugia quello che è la verità: dipoi la vidi con gli occhi miei vestita da uomo con l’uno e l’altro sesso’ (2:767) [And I tell as a lie that which is the truth because later I saw her with my own eyes dressed as a man, with one and the other sex]. By claiming to have met the protagonist Filomena, Molino definitively moves the tale out of the realm of fiction and recasts it as firsthand experience. As none of the female narrators make such claims for their tales of metamorphosis, the story of Filomena occupies a unique position in Le piacevoli notti. It is a single, marvellous case history of monstrous physical transformation among many fairy tales of astounding metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is one of the hallmarks of the literary fairy tale: beasts become princes, pumpkins turn into elegant coaches, and bedraggled paupers transform into wealthy, handsome noblemen. In Fabulous Identities, Patricia Hannon argues that this emphasis on transformation attracted French women writers to the genre. Through the creation of scenes of physical transformation, early modern French women envisioned a new portrait of the female self by experimenting with identities that were not constrained by the dominant male discourse.13 We can consider the French literary fairy tale as a gendered reworking of themes present in their model, Le piacevoli notti. Through his own tales of metamorphosis, Straparola offered his non-aristocratic readers the fantasy of assuming social roles from which they were excluded by Venetian law and custom. In Straparola’s rise tales, corporeal metamorphosis often precedes and facilitates the social-economic betterment of the protagonist.14 The transgression of natural physical limits mirrors the protagonists’ ability to slip the bounds of social hierarchies. While in his tale Molino attributes Filomena’s sex change to natural and artificial (surgical) causes, in the tales of his female companions enchantment always catalyses significant somatic alterations and the parallel social change. In Straparola’s tale of Costantino Fortunato (XI.1), an enchanted cat uti-

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lizes her saliva, rhetorical skills, and quick wit to transform a mange-ridden pauper into a wealthy royal. When the fisherman Pietro Pazzo (Crazy Peter) releases a talking tuna from his nets in tale III.1, the enchanted fish repays him by granting his wishes. At the behest of Peter’s wife, the tuna transforms the crazy fool into a handsome and intelligent young man at the end of the tale. In the only tale in which the protagonists are able to alter their physical form without the aid of magic helpers, they themselves are skilled necromancers. In tale VIII.4, the lazy apprentice Dionigi proves incapable of acquiring any sartorial skills from the tailor Lattanzio, but quite adept at learning the magic spells that his master casts at night behind closed doors. Eventually, teacher and student engage in a metamorphic duel in which each transforms himself into different forms in order to attack or escape the other. When Dionigi assumes the form of a pomegranate that bursts and spills its seeds, Lattanzio transforms into a chicken that gobbles them up. The one seed the chicken overlooks becomes a fox that devours the bird, and so Dionigi triumphs over his master and marries a princess. The metamorphosis of noble characters in restoration tales similarly requires the intervention of magic. Of course, for those born into the upper echelons of the social hierarchy, change often implies a threat to their status and station. While physical changes may degrade them, they are also the reason for the return to power. For example, a malevolent fairy in tale II.1 curses Queen Ersilia by declaring that her long-awaited offspring will be born in the shape of a pig and assume his human form only after having married three times. When non-magical forces act upon a noble protagonist to alter his or her physical form, a magic intervention is required to undo such changes and facilitate the happy ending. In tale III.3, the fairy Samaritana transforms Biancabella, the daughter of the Marquis of Monferatto, into a stunning beauty whose hair produces jewels when combed and whose hands spontaneously generate perfumed flower blossoms. These marvellous traits lead to a promising marriage to the King of Naples. When Biancabella later has her hands amputated and her eyes gouged out by the servants of her jealous mother-in-law, it is once again the fairy who restores her to her former beauty. In tale V.1, a wild man captured by King Filippomaria of Sicily is said to have acquired his monstrous form through unrequited love. Freed by the king’s son, the wild man wanders through various countries until he chances upon an ailing fairy, who, like the wild man, suffers from a ‘heart condition,’ although hers is physical rather than emotional. She laughs so hard at his monstrous countenance that her mirth

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dissolves an abscess near her heart. In gratitude, she transforms him into the most handsome, graceful, and wise young man in the world.15 At the end of the tale, he marries a princess. In recounting Filomena’s marvellous transformation in the convent, Molino makes no mention of such enchanted interventions. No fairies flit through the the room; no enchanted beasts visit the girl. Despite the religious setting of the tale, there is no mention of divine intervention or of a miracle which could account for the protagonist’s transformation. Instead, Molino attributes Filomena’s marvellous metamorphosis to natural (the fever) and man-made (the surgery) causes. In this way, Straparola begins to define the literary fairy tale by first distinguishing the genre from the astounding accounts of monstrous metamorphosis found in the teratological canon and, more broadly, in treatises on natural history. The comparison of what today are two seemingly disparate genres – the literary fairy tale and scientific writing – was encouraged by the fact that metamorphosis, changes in the state of objects and beings, also fascinated natural philosophers. The Science of Sexual Difference While to modern readers the tale of Filomena’s spontaneous sex change might appear to be a favola, a fiction, I contend that for Molino’s audience, and for Straparola’s first readers, the insistence on the truth of the tale of the hermaphrodite would have seemed exaggerated, even superfluous. In Straparola’s day, Filomena’s transformation would have been considered by many to be a biological possibility. Furthermore, key physical and biographical details regarding Filomena’s metamorphosis align Molino’s tale with scientific and historical texts of the period. Although admittedly rare and marvellous occurrences, cases of women who had transformed into men regularly appeared in early modern teratological treatises and medical texts. In 1548, just two years before the publication of the first volume of Le piacevoli notti, the humanist Benedetto Varchi would discuss such transformations in his lesson ‘Della generazione de’ mostri,’ which he presented to the Florentine academy. As he begins to address the query, ‘Se di femmina si può diventare maschio’ [If a female can become a male], Varchi enumerates diverse instances of this phenomenon extending from Pliny’s Natural History to Giovanni Pontano’s De rebus coelestibus (c. 1494).16 Along with the authority of these authors, Varchi’s belief in an anatomy based on the Galenic tradition that described the penis and vagina as essentially the same organ permits him

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to answer the question in the affirmative. For Varchi, the human sex organs exhibit themselves in one or another form according to the innate heat of the individual, which was in turn determined by the proportion of the four humours – blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm – coursing through the individual’s body. In males, blood and black bile were thought to dominate and their corresponding qualities were thought to produce a hot and dry complexion.17 It is this vital heat, not any single anatomical structure, that distinguishes male from female. As he explains, secondo i filosofi, e così secondo i medici, il maschio non è differente, né si conosce dalla femmina per alcun membro, ma dall’essere o più caldo, o più freddo, conciosia che la natura dell’uomo sia senza alcun dubbio più calda, che quella della donna, e da questa forza del calore viene, che la natura può negli uomini mandare fuori quelle membra, che nelle donne, per la freddezza si rimangono dentro, onde è possibile, che poi col tempo, o per cibi, o per aria, o per altre cagioni questa freddezza si riscaldi tanto, che possa fare allora quello che non potette al nascimento.18 [according to the philosophers, and also according to physicians, the male is not different, nor does one distinguish it as different from the female because of any member, but instead for being hotter or colder. And therefore it is clear that the male nature is without a doubt hotter than that of the female, and from this force of heat it follows that nature can send forth in men those members that in women, due to their cold natures, remain inside, from which it is possible that, then with time, or because of diet, or because of the air, or for other reasons this coldness heats up so much that it can then do that which it could not do at birth.]

Whether explanations of sexual difference like Varchi’s represented the dominant worldview has been the subject of heated debate in recent years among prominent historians of science.19 In Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur argues that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a belief in just one sex, but (at least) two genders. Laqueur claims that sex was configured as a continuum, as a vertical axis on which women figured as imperfect men who lacked the vital heat necessary to achieve metaphysical perfection. This one-sex model would be replaced by a model of incommensurable sexual difference only in the eighteenth century. Laqueur finds support for his thesis in the engravings of anatomical texts which depicted the male and female genitalia as isomor-

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phic structures. He argues that the scientific explanations of female-tomale spontaneous sex change similar to that of Varchi gained wide acceptance during the sixteenth century as anatomists such as Jacopo Berengario da Carpi in Italy and Andreas Vesalius in Belgium offered visual ‘proof’ of the homology of the male and female reproductive organs. In Isagoge brevis (1522), Berengario asserted that ‘the neck of the uterus is like the penis, and its receptacle with testicles and vessels is like the scrotum,’20 a claim, Laqueur holds, that is supported by an illustration of female genitalia ‘labeled so as to make clear once again ... the correspondences between male and female organs.’21 For Laqueur, Vesalius’s depiction of the female genitalia in De humani corporis fabrica (1543) provided further visual corroboration for the theory that every vagina was a potential penis, that every woman could potentially become a man (figure 3.1). Laqueur’s account has been vigorously contested by Katharine Park and Robert Nye, among others. In their review of Making Sex, they contend that his assesment overemphasizes the influence of the Galenic model by failing to note the ways in which the equally influential Aristotelian theories recognized two distinct, opposing sexes. Laqueur, they argue, elides or misreads those portions of his sources which contradict his thesis. My own research has uncovered medical texts that openly refute the one-sex model proposed by Varchi. To cite just one example, the physician Scipione Mercurio rejects tales of spontaneous sex-change and reclassifies accounts of such phenomena as fictions, claiming that ‘il volgo abbia ampliato la verità dell’Historia con la vanità della favola’ [the common people have amplified the truth of History with the vanity of favola].22 Mercurio’s statement and the contemporary critical opposition to Laqueur’s assertion of the dominance of the one-sex model raises the questions: Is Straparola’s narrator Molino sincere when he labels his tale of Filomena’s sexual metamorphosis a caso? Is he trying to pass off as fact a phenomenon his companions assumed was a fiction? Not likely. Admittedly, Molino’s tale does not represent an unambiguous articulation of the one-sex model. He concludes the tale by insisting not upon a sexual conversion, that the uterus has become a penis through a sort ‘genital origami,’23 but by underscoring Filomena’s sexual dimorphism. He finishes by saying that the girl ‘divenne uomo e donna’ [became man and woman] and swearing that he saw her dressed as a man with ‘l’uno e l’altro sesso’ [with one and the other sex]. She assumes the sartorial markings of maleness, but Molino recognizes her as possessing both sexes, suggesting perhaps that the juridical imposition of a single

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Image Not Available

Figure 3.1 Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

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gender never fully erased the monstrous doubling in the hermaphroditic body. Of course, the tale of Filomena is a literary, rather than a medical, depiction of biological sex, and Molino’s goal, as I will show below, is simply to associate his caso with learned discourse, not to articulate precisely any medical theory. It is clear from the physiological details which he provides – the violent fever which added a masculinizing heat, the skin of the pudenda which had to be cut before the penis could descend – that Molino wishes to recall the Galenic model explained by Varchi. Furthermore, through other details he seeks to align his tale with another nonfiction genre, the contemporary chronicle. For his companions, Molino’s tale would have more closely resembled a storia, a chronicle, than a favola because the details of Filomena’s story recall a specific, then widely discussed case of hermaphroditism. Molino locates his tale temporally in the recent past (‘intervenuto poco tempo fa’’) and spatially in the vicinity of Naples (Salerno). He also provides a bit of information usually lacking in descriptions of the protagonists in Le piacevoli notti: Filomena’s approximate age (‘né passava il decimosesto anno’). Although the names differ, Molino’s caso appears to be a retelling of the widely chronicled sex change of a certain Francesca from Salerno, recorded at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Battista Fregoso’s Factorum dictorumque memorabilium (1508). Reprinted numerous times across Europe, Fregoso’s text is the likely source for the humanist Girolamo Morlini’s story of a young girl’s transformation in a Neapolitan convent included in his collection of Latin tales, Novellae (1520), which in turn became Straparola’s unacknowledged source for Molino’s story of Filomena. This particular episode of spontaneous female-to-male sex change became an exemplary case and was routinely cited in both scientific and literary texts which discussed this marvel of physiology. Furthermore, Pliny’s Natural History circulated widely during this period, both in Italian and Latin, and most editions included glosses, such as that of Lodovico Domenichi, that furnished early modern examples of male pseudo-hermaphroditism.24 In fact, Domenichi glosses Pliny’s discussion of intersexual metamorphoses with the story of Francesca of Salerno.25 In addition, examples of women who had transformed into men also appeared in wonder or prodigy books, as well as in academic lessons like the one Varchi presented to the Florentine academy. By the mid-sixteenth century, stories of hermaphroditic transformations and the texts that contained them were known well enough to figure as a key element in a beffa, or trick, recounted in Agnolo Firenzuola’s collection of novellas entitled I ragionamenti, published in 1548. The nar-

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rator of the second novella in this collection of tales relates the story of Fulvio Macaro, who falls in love with Lucia, the young and very beautiful wife of an older man, Cecantonio Fornari. In order to seduce her, Fulvio dresses as a woman and, thanks to his friend’s recommendation for employment, is hired by Cecantonio to serve as Lucia’s maid. After discovering Fulvio’s true identity, Lucia needs little convincing to protect his secret and accept him as her lover. When her elderly husband spies the serving ‘girl’ urinating standing up, ‘she’ quickly claims to have recently sprouted a penis. Confronted with what seems to be a miracle, Cecantonio sets off for Rome to consult a doctor regarding his maid’s marvellous condition. After hearing the old man’s story, a learned Roman doctor, who is coincidentally a friend of Fulvio, gli diede assai bene ad intendere che non solamente e’ gli era possible, ma che e’ gli era accaduto dell’altre volte; e a cagione che e gliel credesse più facilmente e’ lo menò in bottega d’un cartolaio chiamato Iacomo di Giunta, e fattosi dare un Plinio volgare, gli mostrò quello che nel settimo libro al quarto capitolo e’ dica di questo fatto, e simigliantemente gli fece vedere ciò che Battista Fulgosio [Battista Fregoso] ne scriva nel capitolo dei miracoli; in modo che e’ quietò l’animo dello affannato vecchio.26 [made him understand well that not only was it possible, but it had occurred other times; and in order that he believe it more readily, he brought him into the shop of a bookseller named Giacomo di Giunta. Having asked for a vernacular Pliny, he showed him what was said about this in the Fourth Chapter of the Seventh Book, and similarly, he had him look at what Battista Fulgosio wrote about this in his chapter on miracles in order to calm the mind of that worried old man].

The inclusion of both Pliny and Fregoso in this passage further attests to their widespread diffusion during this period as standard references on this topic. In a sense, readers need to already know of this phenomenon and its documentation in order to get the joke. The humour arises here from the young lover’s ability to manipulate ‘fact’ (the belief in the existence of the phenomenon of spontaneous sex change) to justify his fictional transformation and to dupe the old man. Admittedly, we have no way of knowing how Molino’s companions reacted to this tale and whether they were aware of the case of Francesca from Salerno, because Lucrezia, ‘vedendo la favola del Molino esser giunta ad un ridicoloso termine e conoscendo che ’l tempo velocemente correva, disse ch’il

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dovesse con l’enigma l’ordine seguire’ (2:768) [seeing that Molino’s favola had arrived at a ridiculous end and aware that time was flying quickly, said that he must continue with his enigma as ordered]. I imagine, though, as with Firenzuola’s novella, Molino’s tale was old news for his listeners and they would naturally categorize it as fact instead of fiction. We may wonder, then, if such sex changes were believed by many to be biological possibilities, and if the very incident on which the tale is based was so well known, why does Molino find it necessary to underscore the veracity of his tale? His insistence on the truth of his story of astounding metamorphosis encourages the reader to consider both in what ways this caso differs from the other tales of metamorphosis in Le piacevoli notti and why he would be so anxious for his companions to make this distinction. Because Filomena’s spontaneous sex change could easily be explained according to widely accepted theories of sexual difference, it appears that Molino wishes to make a literary, rather than a scientific point. When considering Molino’s tale in the context of the entire work, it becomes clear that his caso figures in what has been an ongoing discussion of gender and genre in Le piacevoli notti that extends into the paratexts, appearing first in the dedicatory letter of the first volume. On the few occasions in which male members of Lucrezia’s court share the burden of storytelling, the question of literary decorum arises. As they present their tales, her guests consider both whether storytelling is an appropriate activity for the men present and which types of tales are most suitable for male narrators. It is by locating Molino’s tale of the hermaphrodite in this broader discussion of genre that we are able to perceive how Straparola utilizes the scientific representation of the generation of Filomena’s monstrous body to define the contours of the literary fairy tale. The Fairy Tale as Women’s Work From the dedicatory letter in volume 1 of Le piacevoli notti through the final night of festivities, Straparola consistently depicts storytelling as women’s work. This occurs despite the frequent participation of male narrators during the thirteen nights of storytelling on Murano. Two men tell four of the twenty-five tales in the first volume of Le piacevoli notti: two tales on the second night and two tales on the fifth night. In volume 2, five tales are told on each of the first six nights (VI–XII), with only one told by a man: Pietro Bembo narrates the story of an obscene competi-

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tion held to determine which of three nuns will become the abbess of the convent in tale VI.4.27 On the thirteenth and final night of Carnival, eight men will enter the circle as narrators at the command of Lucrezia. While the full title of the first edition of Straparola’s collection of tales indicates the presence of male narrators (Le piacevoli notti di M. Giovanfrancesco Straparola da Caravaggio nelle quali si contengono le favole con i loro enimmi da dieci donne et duo giovani raccontate [The Pleasant Nights by Giovanfrancesco Straparola of Cavaraggio which contain tales with their enigmas told by ten women and two young men]), the author of the dedicatory letter to volume 1 Orfeo dalla carta, makes no reference to these men. Just as Boccaccio dedicated the Decameron to women in love, Orfeo, who is thought to have commissioned the printer Comin da Trino to publish the first edition of Le piacevoli notti, addresses himself to female readers, whom he calls the ‘amorevoli donne’ [loving ladies].28 After praising the work that follows, he asks these gentle women to overlook the lowly style of the tales: ‘Appresso di ciò non risguardarete il basso e rimesso stile dell’auttore, perciò che egli le scrisse non come egli volse, ma come udì da quelle donne che le raccontarono, nulla aggiongendole o sottraendole’ (1:3) [Disregard the author’s humble and lowly style, since he did not write them as he wished to, but as he heard them from those women who recounted them, neither adding nor subtracting a thing]. In Orfeo’s critical assessment of Le piacevoli notti, the tales are stigmatized as suffering from a lowly style and depicted as women’s work inasmuch as they seem to be produced by and for women. Through this fiction of transcription Straparola might seem to our eyes to resemble more closely a nineteenth-century folklorist, patiently recording tales from his female sources, than a sixteenth-century writer penning original tales.29 The ‘scribe defence,’ however, had been employed since Boccaccio’s Decameron to protect novellieri by constructing a protective screen that shielded them from anticipated criticisms regarding either the style or content of their tales.30 On account of Boccaccio’s claim in his epilogue of having written the tales down as they were told, the image of the author of novellas crouched outside of the circle of storytellers, scribbling furiously as the narrators spin their tales, had become a part of the visual iconography of the novella genre.31 Admittedly, Straparola does not emphasize this scribal role and mentions it explicitly only at one other point in the frame tale of Le piacevoli notti;32 however, in his dedicatory letter to volume 2, he depicts himself not as a creative force or as a critical audience, but as the scribe and editor of the women’s favole. Straparola writes, addressing his readers,

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Fairy-Tale Science Sono molti, amorevoli donne, i quali o per invidia o per odio mossi cercano co minacciosi denti mordermi e le misere carni squarciare, imponendomi che le piacevoli favole da me scritte, e in questo e nell’altro volumetto raccolte non siano mie, ma da questo e quello ladronescamente rubbate. Io, a dir il vero, il confesso che non sono mie, e se altrimenti dicesse, me ne mentirei, ma ben holle fedelmente scritte secondo il modo che furono da dieci damigelle nel concistorio raccontate. (2:425) [There are many men, affectionate ladies, who moved either by envy or hatred are trying to bite me with menacing teeth and to rend my miserable flesh, charging that the pleasant favole that I have written and collected in this and that other little volume are not mine, but were stolen dishonestly from this and that author. To tell the truth, I confess that they are not mine, and if I were to say otherwise, I would be lying; I have written them down quite faithfully according to the way that they were recounted by the ten young maidens at that gathering.]

By never mentioning the male storytellers in their dedicatory letters, both Orfeo dalla carta and Straparola operate a revealing erasure that serves to feminize the storytelling in Le piacevoli notti. The effacement of the male narrators is also reinforced by the title of volume 2, which makes no mention of the contribution of these men (Le piacevoli notti di M. Giovan Francesco Straparola da Caravaggio. Nelle Quali si contengono le favole con e lor enigmi da dieci donne raccontate, cosa dilettevole, ne più data in luce. Libro secondo [The Pleasant Nights of Mr Giovan Francesco Straparola from Caravaggio. In which there are the favole with their enigmas recounted by ten women. Volume Two]). Interestingly, the engraving that opens the 1570 edition confirms this depiction of Le piacevoli notti as the product of women’s work. Rather than an image of the merry band in Murano or the protagonists of one of the tales, we see three women engaged in different needle arts sitting together on a balcony presumably spinning both wool and tales (figure 3.2). The feminization of the narrative process begun in Orfeo dalla carta’s dedicatory letter continues in the frame tale when Lucrezia, an absolute female ruler presiding over a purely domestic rather than political court, declares that all of the literary entertainments, both the enigmas and the tales, will be women’s work. More specifically, the burden of literary production falls to the youngest women of the group, the ten damigelle, five of whom are chosen by lot each evening to sing songs, spin yarns, and pose riddles to the brigata. Despite the presence of a number of affirmed

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Image Not Available

Figure 3.2 Giovan Francesco Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice, 1570). Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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authors and poets who might seem the more logical choice for narrators, these talented men most often participate in the entertainments by singing songs and accompanying themselves on lutes, a task they willingly accept.33 When commanded to do so on nights II and V, Antonio Molino and Benedetto Trivigiano assume what had been up until that point the feminine role of storyteller. When it is then Fiordiana’s turn to tell a tale on the second night, she lures Molino into the narrative circle with a combination of flattery and self-effacement. She tells him he is a clever and accomplished narrator while observing, ‘a noi, semplici donne, starebbe meglio l’aco in mano, che ’l raccontare le favole’ (1:106) [it would be better for us simple women to have needle in hand than to be telling tales.] With these words, she reifies a gender-based literary hierarchy that recognizes the superiority of the male narrator and jokingly questions women’s participation in the literary sphere. Although the women have proven themselves competent narrators, they are, even if in jest and only momentarily, reduced to ‘semplici donne,’ a phrase that recalls the ‘semplici fanciullette’ of Bargagli’s dialogue. As if to make the distinction between themselves and the ‘semplici donne’ absolutely clear, Molino and Trivigiano distinguish their narrative acts from those of the women by telling overtly misogynistic tales which greatly displease their female companions while delighting the other men present. On the fifth night of storytelling, Lucrezia interrupts the predetermined order of narration when she commands Lauretta to remain silent and invites Molino to tell a tale in Bergamasque dialect. A renowned dialect poet, Molino delights his listeners with a tale about the misadventures of three hunchbacks. When Lucrezia warmly praises him, Molino suggest that his friend Trivigiano tell the next tale. Trivigiano narrates, in the ‘contadinesca lingua,’ a dialect of the Veneto known today as pavano, the escapades of an adulterous wife whose cunning allows her lover to escape right under her trusting husband’s nose. These tales in dialect meet a more universal acclaim than the misogynistic tales. It would be a mistake to equate the men’s use of popular language (Bergamasque and pavano) with the ‘basso e rimesso stile’ to which Orfeo dalla carta refers in the dedicatory letter of volume 1. Bergamasque and pavano were not merely the ‘mother-tongues’ of two geographic regions, but had become alternative languages for literary production through their use in the works of poets and playwrights like Il Ruzante, Calmo, and Molino himself. Indeed, the figure of the witless peasant from Bergamo had become a stock character in Italian comedy, as in

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Molino’s own Dialogo piacevole di un greco et di un fachino, in which the ‘fachino’ speaks Bergamasque. Straparola’s readers and the characters in the frame tale would have therefore perceived Molino’s and Trivigiano’s use of dialect as an alternative literary choice for two skilled poets. The damigelle relate a variety of stories ranging from the more verisimilar novella to the fantastic fable, but they do not include in their repertoire overtly misogynistic stories, nor do they ever utilize dialects to tell their tales. Thus, in the first volume of Le piacevoli notti, the reader comes to associate the male narrators with two specific types of tales: misogynistic stories that elicit a positive reaction only in the male members of the brigata, and tales told in dialect. Unlike the tales narrated by Molino and Trivigiano in the first volume, the nine tales recounted by men in volume 2 cannot be easily distinguished by theme or language from those told by the young female narrators. Yet Molino is not the only male narrator who during the thirteenth night of storytelling attempts to define his story as something other than a favola. When Lucrezia imposes an equitable division of labour commanding that ‘sì gli uomini come le donne dicessero una favola, perciò non è onesto le donne aver solamente questo carico’ (2:729) [both the men and the women tell a favola, since it is not fair that only the women bear this burden], the first narrator she chooses, the ambassador Casale, openly expresses his displeasure with her suggestion that he engage in women’s work. He accepts the task, but prefaces his tale with the following remarks: ‘Grave è il carico che mi ha dato la Signora in raccontar favole, percioché è piú tosto ufficio di donna che di uomo, ma poscia che cosí è il desiderio suo e di questa orrevole e degna compagnia, sforcierommi, se non in tutto, almeno in qualche particella sodisfare all’intento vostro’ (2:731) [Heavy is the burden of telling favole that the Signora has given me, since this is a woman’s duty rather than a man’s, but since this is her wish and that of the honourable and worthy company, I will force myself to satisfy your desire, if not completely, then in some small part]. Casale negotiates a compromise by agreeing to follow Lucrezia’s orders while at the same time taking great care to narrate a tale that is not a favola. He recounts the adventures of the ne’er-do-well Gasparino, who is sent to medical school in Padua and fails miserably. When his father gives him his inheritance and commands him to leave town, Gasparino settles in a wood and constructs an elaborate series of baths which he claims, along with his questionable remedies, can cure the insane. One day, one of these ‘pazzi’ asks a hunter who is passing through the

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wood the value of his horse, falcon, and dogs. When he learns that they cost many times more than the quail that the hunter has bagged, the insane man declares the hunter crazy and urges him to escape quickly so as not to fall into the clutches of Dr Gasparino. At the end of the comic tale, the narrator of the frame tale observes, ‘Molto fu commendata la favola del signor ambasciatore, la qual non fu favola, ma la istessa verità, percioché il cacciatore sopravanza di pazzia tutti e’ pazzi’ (2:734) [The Lord Ambassador’s tale, which was not favola but the very truth, since the hunter in his insanity surpassed all of the insane, was praised very much]. Casale, who unwillingly agreed to ‘raccontar favole’ [tell favole], has cleverly avoided the undesired task by replacing the favola with verità. Like Molino with his story of the hermaphrodite, the frame tale narrator and Casale strive to underscore the veracity of their tales. In Le piacevoli notti, all of the men eschew the fairy tale, and two of the men (Casale and Molino) explicitly differentiate their tales as something other than favole by calling them verità and a caso. Molino seems less concerned than Casale with revealing a hidden verità when trying to convince his audience that his story of Filomena’s hermaphroditic transformation is literally true. Instead, Molino’s presentation of his caso defines the literary fairy-tale genre by distinguishing the fairy-tale marvels from those found in scientific treatises, medical texts, and prodigy books. It serves as a meta-literary tale in which Filomena’s monstrous body is the nexus where the favola and the scientific caso touch in a mutually defining contiguity. It is a point in Le piacevoli notti where Straparola, like the authors of the teratological canon, begins to chart the boundaries separating the literary fairy tale from authoritative documentation of monstrosities. The caso of the hermaphrodite clearly belongs to the realm of science: it is narrated by a man, founded on widely accepted biological theories, and akin to similar episodes documented in authoritative texts. The fairy tales of monstrous metamorphosis can be defined in relation to this scientific discourse. Only the youngest women in the brigata narrate these marvellous tales; men never tell such tales and even Lucrezia and the noblewomen present shun this genre when they enter the narrative circle on the thirteenth night. When the young women recount fairy tales, they make no claim for their veracity. The marvellous transformations are attributed to the intervention of fairies or magic. It might seem then that Straparola replicates the very stigma attached to tales of ogres, witches, and fairies that Molino sought to avoid, for in the fiction of the frame tale the fairy tale becomes a female-appropriate genre.

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Monstrous Gender/Monstrous Genre: Straparola’s Literary Fairy Tales as an Intersexed Genre We might, however, read another layer of meaning in this monstrous metamorphosis, for we can view Filomena’s hermaphroditic transformation as emblematic of Straparola’s literary project. Typically in early modern Italy, hermaphrodites were interpreted in one of two ways: either as monsters that stood between the categories of male and female threatening to deconstruct gender taxonomies, or as beings that transcended categorization. Filomena’s story is told in such a way, however, as to emphasize the moment of her transformation, not her deconstructive or transcendent ontological status. Her tale, in fact, is unique in the tradition of hermaphrodite stories for two reasons. First, her metamorphosis is dependent upon surgical intervention. Second, Molino underscores Filomena’s intersex status by claiming to have seen her dressed as a man ‘con l’uno e l’altro sesso,’ rather than seeking to neutralize the disruptive presence of the hermaphroditic body by affirming the subject’s unquestionable conversion to a male gender identity, as was common in accounts in the teratological canon. For example, Lodovico Domenichi’s tale of an Italian hermaphrodite’s metamorphosis provides the reader with this reassurance of the stability of the categories of gender. Domenichi writes in his Historia varia: In Eboli anchora sotto il medesimo Re [Ferdinando I of Naples], a una fanciulla, laquale era già stata promessa et giurata quattro anni, la prima notte, ch’ella n’andò a marito, o per lo fregare, o per altra cagione, che non sia conosciuta, si ruppero et apersero le pelli, lequali la facevano tenere per donna, et ne uscì fuori membro virile, talche ella ritornando a casa, andò in giudicio, et rihebbe la dotte, et fu poi nel numero degli huomini.34 [In Eboli during the reign of the same king, [there was] a girl who had been already engaged for four years, [and] on the first night that she went to her husband, either because of the rubbing or some other reason which is unknown, the skin that made people consider her a woman broke and opened, and a virile member came out, so that upon returning home she went to court and got back her dowry, and was then counted among men.]

Domenichi provides both a possible explanation for the transformation (‘the rubbing’) and affirms the girl’s full acceptance of her new male gender (her dowry is returned and she is counted among men). This

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account echoes the juridical proscription against intersexuality that required intersex individuals to choose one sex and comport themselves accordingly.35 Molino’s story of Filomena’s transformation differs significantly from such ‘casi.’ While it is true that she suffers from a fever and thus a masculinizing ‘vital heat,’ the actual catalyst for Filomena’s sex change is the skilled (male) surgeon’s hand that ‘delivers’ forth the male member by performing a sort of circumcision, a cutting of flesh that reveals her true sexual, rather than religious, identity. Filomena’s metamorphosis symbolizes Straparola’s transformation of the previously femininized fairytale genre. Like the surgeon who took up the knife, Straparola took pen in hand and, by writing women’s words into the Boccaccian tradition and publishing them, transformed the literary fairy tale into a genre ‘con l’uno e l’altro sesso’ [with one and the other sex]. As such, his creation was both monstrous and marvellous. In early modern Italy, the intersexed body, like Straparola’s fairy tales, possessed the power to fascinate the onlooker and inspire the interrogation of systems of categorization. In his treatise De re anatomica (1559), the anatomist Realdo Colombo described hermaphrodites in enthusiastic terms, writing ‘among the many astonishing and rare things which I have observed at different times in the structure of the human body, I consider that nothing is more astonishing, nothing rarer, than what I have diligently investigated about a nature neither male nor female.’36 Both men of letters and men of science exploited the allure of the hermaphrodite to encourage their readers to contemplate gender issues not directly related to questions of biological sex. In Des Hermaphrodits, accouchemens des femmes, et traitement qui est requis pour les relever en santé, et bien élever leur enfans (1612), the French surgeon Jacques Duval began a treatise on sexual reproduction and childbirth with a seemingly unrelated topic, namely his examination of the hermaphrodite Marin le Marcis of Rouen. In the text, Duval ‘admits his use of hermaphrodites to draw the reader into what he deems to be a more serious discussion of reproductive issues.’37 Writing at a moment when surgeons and physicians began to displace midwives at the birthing bed, Duval argued for the importance of a male doctor, rather than unschooled women, to oversee childbirth. Some sixty years earlier, Straparola employed his tale of a hermaphrodite to entice his readers to consider an analogous displacement of the traditional female narrator of the fairy tale by a male author. As both Straparola and Duval encroach on activities which were previously the exclusive domain of women – midwifery and telling fairy

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tales – they, like the hermaphrodites they describe, blur gender boundaries. In early modern Europe, hermaphroditism ‘could exist in the noncorrespondence between the sexed body and gendered behaviour: the interstice between sex and gender.’38 In England, women writers such as Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn were called hermaphrodites by their critics for having dared to pick up the pen(is). In a similar way, Straparola’s hermaphrodite not only stands for his literary project, but also represents his ambiguous position as a male writer engaging a feminized genre. In Sexing the Body, Anne Fausto-Sterling claims that reconceptualizations of biological sex challenge social organization.39 In Le piacevoli notti and Duval’s treatise we see that something like the reverse is true: challenges to the gendered order of society gave rise to representations of intersex beings who disrupt the concept of the sexual binary. Straparola’s hermaphroditic literary project, like all monsters, was polyvalent: it evoked pleasure, horror, and repugnance in those who viewed it. Unable to completely normalize tales which had been denigrated over the centuries so as to facilitate the genre’s entry into the literary canon, Straparola nonetheless asserted the wondrous appeal of his monstrous creation.

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4 ‘Per far vere le favole’: Manipulating Maternal Desire in Basile’s Frame Tale

In this chapter I return to examine the story of Princess Zoza in order to demonstrate that Basile inscribes in his fairy-tale frame tale a scientific theory regarding the power of the maternal imagination to mark the fetus in utero. While in the frame tale of Le piacevoli notti Straparola forged a clear boundary between fairy tales of monstrous generation and Molino’s scientific case history, Basile confounds the division between what were thought to be facts and what were known to be fictions. From this fusion of science and fairy tale, he creates a framing narrative that ultimately functions to remove from the literary fairy tale the stigma formed during the sixteenth century that marked the genre as decorous only for young women or old crones. His meta-literary frame tale recasts the generation of the literary fairy tale as the avoidance of a potentially monstrous birth. The frame tale begins with the king of Valle Pelosa (Hairy Valley), whose daughter Zoza never laughs. Despite his many attempts to amuse her with jugglers, dancing dogs, and magicians, Zoza, like another Zoroaster or another Heraclitus, never cracks a smile. One day the king orders his servants to construct an oil-spouting fountain in front of the palace in the hope that the slipping and sliding of the passers-by will amuse his melancholy daughter. A short time later, as Zoza watchs from the palace windows, a decrepit old woman arrives at the fountain and begins to fill her jar with oil. When she has almost finished the job, an insolent court page lets sail a stone, which hits its mark and shattered the jar. The enraged old woman unleashes a river of curses on the lad, ending with ‘che se ne perda la semmenta, guzzo, guitto, figlio de ’ngbellata, mariuolo!’ (12) [May your seed be lost, blackguard, scum, son of a tax-paying whore, knave! (1:4)].1 The cheeky boy responds in kind: ‘Non vuoi appilare ssa chiaveca, vava de parasacco, vommeca-vracciolle, affoca-peccerille, caca-

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pezzolle, cierne-vernacchie?’ (12) [Can’t you plug up that drain of yours, Parasacco’s grandmother, blood-sucking witch, baby-smotherer, lump of filth, fart-face? (1:4)]. Infuriated beyond words, the hag resorts to an obscene gesture: she lifts her skirt and ‘auzato la tela de l’apparato fece vedere la scena voscareccia’ ([lifted up the curtain of the stage and displayed a woodland scene (1:5)]. This ribald exchange provokes Zoza’s laughter. Offended by the princess’s merriment at her misfortune, the old woman turned her fury upon Zoza and curses her to marry Prince Tadeo of Camporotondo, who lies in a death-like sleep under the spell of a wicked fairy. To break the spell Zoza has to cry enough tears fill a jar hanging on a tree near the sleeping prince. Without wasting a moment, Zoza sets off for Tadeo’s kingdom. During her seven-year journey she meets three fairies, each of whom gives her a magic nut. When she finally arrives beside the prince, she begins to cry to fill the jar but falls asleep exhausted before completing the task. A black slave named Lucia, who has been hiding in the bushes waiting for just such an opportunity, seizes the jar, finishes the job, and wakes the prince, who takes her as his wife. A short time later, the slave is pregnant with Tadeo’s child. Zoza is not easily discouraged, however, and like all of the most capable fairy-tale heroes she will defeat her foe not by brute force but by cunningly identifying and then exploiting Lucia’s weakness: her susceptibility to voglie materne, ‘maternal desires’ or cravings brought on by pregnancy. Zoza rents a house that stands in front of the royal palace, and thus situates herself strategically in full view of the prince. Tadeo is quickly besotted by Zoza’s charms, and spends many hours gazing out his window at her. When the slave spies Tadeo fixed at the window and realizes that he had fallen for Zoza, she threatens, in a pidgin Neapolitan known as napolitano-moresco, a hybrid language frequently found in popular improvised comedies,2 ‘Se fenestra no levare, [mi] punia a ventre dare e Giorgetiello mazzoccare’ (18) [If no go from window, me strike belly and Giorgetiello crush (1:7)]. Tadeo does not need to be told twice, and fearing for the well-being of his child, he quickly abandons his post at the window. Zoza then resorts to opening the magic nuts she received from the fairies. Each nut contains a marvellous automaton: a singing dwarf, a golden hen with twelve chicks, and a doll that spins gold thread. One by one, Zoza places the mechanized marvels upon her windowsill, and as soon as the slave sees each wonderful object she experiences an irresistible desire to possess it. With these words, she threatens to beat, and thus risk aborting, the child she is carrying:

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Fairy-Tale Science Si no avere chella piccinossa che cantare, mi punia a ventre dare e Giorgetiello mazzoccare. (18) [If me no have little singing man, me strike belly and Giorgetiello crush! (1:7)] Si chella voccola no pigliare, mi punia a ventre dare e Giorgetiello mazzoccare. (18) [If that hen no get, me strike belly and Giorgetiello crush! (1:8)] Si pipata no accattare, mi punia a ventre dare e Giorgetiello mazzoccare. (20) [If doll no buy, me strike belly and Giorgetiello crush! (1:8)]

Each of these sing-song rhymes sends Tadeo scurrying to Zoza for the desired object which she graciously gives him as a gift. Before handing the prince the third automaton, the doll that spins gold thread, Zoza commands it to breathe the desire to hear stories into the slave’s ear. Upon receiving the doll, ‘le venne cossì caudo desederio de sentire cunte che, non potenno resistere e dobitanno de toccarese la vocca e de fare no figlio che ’nfettasse na nave de pezziente, chiammaie lo marito e le disse: “Si no venire gente e cunte contare, mi punia a ventre dare e Giorgetiello mazzoccare”’ (20, 22) [so great grew her longing to hear fairy tales, that she was unable to resist it. She feared to touch her mouth lest she should produce children fit to weary a whole shipload of beggars with their whining, so she called her husband as usual and repeated once again: ‘If folk no come tell stories, me strike belly and Giorgetiello crush!’ (1:8–9)]. Tadeo issues a royal decree calling all of the women of the kingdom to the palace, and from the crowd assembled chooses ten chatty crones who seem the inversion of Boccaccio’s elegant young Florentines. There is limping Zeza, twisted Cecca, goitred Meneca, big-nosed Tolla, hunchbacked Popa, drooling Antonella, wry-faced Ciulla, blear-eyed Paola, scabby Ciommetella, and diarrhetic Jacova. He instructs these old women regarding the task at hand, saying, ‘se ve piace de dare’m brocca a lo sfiolo de la prencepessa mia e de cogliere ’miezo e a le voglie meie, sarrite contente, pe sti quattro o cinque iuorne che starà a scarrecare la panza, de contare ogni iornata no cunto ped uno, de chille appunto che soleno dire le vecchie pe trattenemiento de peccerille’ (22) [So if you will satisfy this whim of my princess and meet my wishes midway, you will be

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good enough, during the four or five remaining days for her belly to deflate, each one of you, to tell one of those tales that old women tell to amuse children (1:9)]. Although to contemporary readers the slave’s cravings might appear to be just a fairy-tale invention, the phenomenon of voglie materne was widely discussed in early modern medical and teratological treatises. In such texts, the maternal imagination from which these desires sprang was frequently listed as a cause of monstrous births. In order to understand how the frame tale serves to redefine the genre of the literary fairy tale, we need to recuperate the cultural context for this scientific theory. Although today in Italy birthmarks are still called voglie, by the twentieth century the idea that the mother’s imagination could mark or harm the child in her womb had been labelled a popular or folk belief to which only a small percentage of the population actually lent credence.3 In Basile’s day it was a scientific theory discussed in a multitude of both learned and popular texts. Voglie materne and the Science of Desire During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a multitude of theories circulated throughout Europe that ascribed certain physical imperfections on the newborn’s body, ranging from small marks to severe deformations, to the intervention of the maternal imagination on the fetus. Because, according to Aristotelian theories of reproduction, the male seed actively shaped the passive matter supplied by the female, the intervention of the maternal imagination upon the child represented a usurpation of the father’s creative power.4 The many variations of this belief can be divided into two distinct groups: one emphasized the importance of visual stimuli, while the other posited psychological stimuli – specifically desire – as the catalyst for this phenomenon. The former group of theories claimed that it was by staring fixedly at an image, usually a painting or statue, that the mother’s imagination came to imprint upon her child that which she beheld. In their discussions of this process, early modern physicians and surgeons often recalled the story of Hippocrates, who was said to have invoked this theory while defending a white woman married to a white man who had been accused of adultery after having given birth to a black child. When Hippocrates explained to the court that the woman had gazed upon the image of a Moor during conception and impressed that image onto the skin of her child, the woman was

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acquitted.5 According to this same set of theories, the mother’s imagination did not always harm the infant. If properly controlled, her mind could positively alter the child’s visage or body. In fact, some physicians and natural philosophers encouraged women to surround themselves with beautiful images and statues in order to imprint the beauty of these objects on their children. For example, Giambattista Della Porta boasted that on his advice a woman wishing to have a son commissioned a marble statue of a handsome boy and placed it in her room. She later gave birth to a boy with skin as white as marble.6 A second group of theories explained that the mother’s unsatisfied cravings could either impress a mark on the child’s skin in the form of the object desired, or, in more extreme cases, kill the child. Many early modern authors indicated the De la superfoetation, a text attributed to Hippocrates, as the classical authority on this type of voglie materne; however, the only reference in this work to maternal impressions warns pregnant women who are afflicted with an intense desire to eat coal against doing so, lest their children be born bearing dark marks on their heads.7 Here it is not the desire, but the fulfilment of that desire, the ingestion of the coal, which marks the child. It would not be until the late fifteenth century that the mother’s desire consistently figured as the direct cause of irregular marks found on the child’s skin. Matteo Palmieri’s treatise Della vita civile (before 1439), in which he claimed that ‘le voglie delle madri alle volte maculano i corpi de’ loro figliuoli’ [the mothers’ desires sometimes stain the bodies of their children], represents one of the earliest documents to link the mother’s desires or cravings during pregnancy to cutaneous imperfections in the child.8 Over the next century this simple declaration of the power of the mother’s desires to mark (‘le voglie ... maculano’) the child’s skin appeared, like other discourses on the monstrous, with increasing frequency in a variety of texts, not just medical treatises.9 By the mid-sixteenth century, this belief had gained wide acceptance and was routinely cited as proof of the power of the mind to act upon the body.10 Images of the desired object were thought to be transferred from the mother’s brain to the fetus by way of ‘spiriti’ or ‘specie,’ vapours which, after being formed from nutrients and air, travelled through the body. The Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius argued in his De miraculis occultis naturae (1559) that only those cravings or desires which went unsatisfied and remained fixed in the mother’s mind could deform or kill the offspring.11 The risk to the child could be eliminated by satisfying the desire of the mother in order to remove the obsessive thought from her mind.

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Some authors argued that the mother had the power to locate the mark on her child by touching the analogous part of her own body while experiencing an intense desire.12 Women who knew that their desires could not be satisfied were advised to touch themselves on a part of the body normally hidden from view, like the inner thigh, so as to minimize the damage to their child.13 Discussions of the power of the maternal imagination, be they learned or popular, often included contemporary and local instances of this phenomenon. The accumulation of so many examples, in turn, seemed to attest to the validity of these theories. Indeed, in the years in which Basile was writing Lo cunto, very few dissenting voices were raised.14 Even those such as the jurist Paolo Zacchia, who questioned why most birthmarks seemed to be red if women were also known to desire green vegetables and legumes during pregnancy, had difficulty completely dismissing the concept.15 The physician Scipione Mercurio’s unwavering belief in these theories represented the more widely held position. Addressing Italian midwives in his obstetrical manual La comare (1596), Mercurio depicts the theory of maternal desires to act upon the fetus as universally accepted: Ma per verità più aperta, e manifesta piglio quello, che da tutto il mondo è conosciuto vero, anzi certissimo, ed è, che la forte immaginatione, e il fisso pensiero della donna, ha forza di segnare nel corpo della creatura la somiglianza, e l’imagine della cosa desiderata; e ogni giorno per ciò si vedono nascere creature segnate, o di carne di porco, o di pomi, o di vino, o d’una o d’altre simili macchie.16 [But I take to be a more clear and manifest truth that which the whole world knows to be true, or most certain, that a woman’s powerful imagination and fixed thought has the power to mark on the body of the child the resemblance or image of the desired object; and for this reason, one sees children born every day marked with pigskin, or apples, or wine stains, or other types of blotches.]

According to Mercurio, everyone (‘tutto il mondo’) accepts this theory because the great number of children born every day possessing birthmarks proves its validity. Monstrous Generation in the Fairy-Tale Body If we return now to analyse the frame tale of Lo cunto, we find that

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Basile’s representation of Lucia’s voglie materne is a curious blend of scientific theory and fairy-tale magic. Up until the moment in which the automaton breathes the desire to hear stories into the slave’s ear, the descriptions of her pregnancy and maternal desires do not differ significantly from case histories found in medical texts of the period. Lucia’s pregnancy seems to have come about through a normal conception, for the narrator of the frame tale merely indicates that soon after being married to the prince, she was ‘già prena di Tadeo’ (18) [already pregnant by Tadeo].17 The prince understands his wife’s extremely strong cravings to be a direct consequence of her pregnancy, and he describes them as ‘li sfiole de na prena’ (20) [a pregnant woman’s longing (1:8)]. The Neapolitan word sfiolo specifically referred to intense desires or cravings experienced by women during pregnancy. At other moments in the frame tale, these cravings are called a golio, which, like the word voglia in Italian, possessed multiple meanings. Golio was defined as: 1) desire in a generic sense, or 2) a desire experienced by pregnant women, or 3) the marks these desires imprinted upon the child (i.e. birthmarks).18 The slave experiences five distinct sfiole, and the objects of her desire are quite varied. She wants Tadeo to get away from the window and stop mooning over Zoza; she wants the three automatons; she wants to hear stories. While today we tend to think of voglie materne strictly in terms of alimentary cravings, in Basile’s day pregnant women were thought to desire a wide variety objects and entertainments, as well as foodstuffs. In Degli errori popolari d’Italia (1605), Scipione Mercurio noted the diversity of the objects of these desires, stating ‘si vedono le gravide desiderar molte cose stravaganti appartenenti così al vitto, e vestito, come a i piaceri’ [you see pregnant women desiring many extravagant things; foods and clothing, as often as delightful things].19 Mercurio listed feste and comedie among the delightful things (piaceri) that women crave, activities which do not seem too far removed from the daily gatherings held at Tadeo’s court during which the participants feast, tell tales, play games, and enjoy eclogues recited by the servants. The slave’s first four sfiole, that Tadeo cease staring at Zoza and that she, Lucia, possess the three automatons, were realistically depicted and could be explained by the prevailing theories of the maternal imagination. Although all the automatons originated from enchanted nuts, they are not depicted in the text as directly causing the slave’s voglie for them. We never hear of them putting a spell on her, or directly transmitting a desire for them to her. Instead, the slave’s desire for the automatons is described as a typical pregnant woman’s craving, as ‘li sfiole de na prena.’

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In many respects, the fifth voglia to hear stories might appear no different from those that precede it. The slave’s threat ‘Si no venire gente e cunte contare, mi punia a ventre dare e Giorgetiello mazzoccare’ likens this final voglia to the other four, while her worry that by touching her mouth while she experiences the intense desire to hear stories she may give birth to a chatterbox echoes arguments in the scientific treatises discussed above concerning the mother’s power to locate the maternal impression on the body of her child.20 In the moment that the doll that spins gold breathes the desire to hear stories into the slave’s ear, however, the fifth voglia materna ceases to be a biological phenomenon. Her desire to hear stories is no longer a natural side-effect of her pregnancy, but becomes a supernatural event caused by a magic object. The enchanted doll, once the passive object of the slave’s desire, now becomes the magical force which directly provokes her fifth voglia materna. Basile’s depiction of all of Lucia’s voglie materne acquires a fairy-tale tone through his curious rendering of the harm that will befall the child should the slave’s desires not be satisfied. The slave’s threat ‘mi punia a ventre dare e Giorgetiello mazzoccare’ knows no correspondent in the medical literature of the period. No longer is the damage to the fetus an indirect consequence of the mother’s desire, but the child is threatened quite literally by his mother’s hand, by her conscious decision to beat her belly with her fist should she not be satisfied. What was in the medical literature an internal physiological process has been externalized, and the mother’s desires are now expressed in a comic sing-song rhyme. In this way, Basile stages the emerging, more misogynistic interpretation of voglie that considered the mother culpable for those birth defects attributed to the maternal imagination.21 Sixteenth-century authors such as Pedro Mexía and the physician Lemnius asserted that the maternal imagination could potentially kill the fetus,22 and blows to the mother’s belly had long been viewed as provoking deformities and miscarriages;23 but neither Mexía nor Lemnius directly blamed the mother in those instances in which her desires were thought to have provoked an abortion. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, Scipione Mercurio preached that any woman who behaved in an immoderate or unruly manner which she knew could provoke an abortion was a murderer who would be called before Christ on judgment day to account for her atrocious actions.24 For Mercurio, the mother harmed the child through her own moral failing when she refused to regulate or was incapable of regulating her urges. By externalizing the threat to the fetus, and thus depicting the mother as both weak and immoral, as unable to

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contain her desires and consciously willing to abort in order to fulfil them, the frame tale narrator ensures that the slave will not gain the public’s sympathy and prepares the way for what will be perceived as her welldeserved demise. Basile’s attribution of the slave’s voglie to both biological and magical causes is unique in the representation of the body in Lo cunto. In most European fairy tales, the body is not constrained by the natural laws which govern physiological functions in the real world, but is a carnivalesque body in a carnivalesque world.25 The fairy-tale body is marked by a radical mutability that transgresses the laws of nature. When the handsome prince in ‘Lo serpe’ [The Serpent] (II.5) refuses to satisfy the unbridled desires of an ogress, he is transformed into a snake. In ‘La vecchia scortecata’ [The Flayed Old Woman] (I.10), when a group of fairies happen upon an old woman hanging in a tree, they laugh heartily at her plight. To compensate her for the mirth they enjoy at her expense, ‘le dezero ogne una la fatazione soia, decennole una ped una che potesse deventare giovane, bella, ricca, nobele, vertolosa, voluta bene e bona asciortata’ (210) [they each gave her their own particular charm, and one after the other wished her young, beautiful, rich, noble, accomplished, beloved, and fortunate (1:99)]. Renzolla, the ungrateful protagonist of ‘La facce de crapa’ [Goat-Face] (I.8), leaves the home of a hospitable and nurturing fairy who provided a dowry so that she could marry a king without so much as a thank you. To punish her, the fairy turns her face into that of a goat. When fairies cast their spells, the rule of natural law is overthrown. Men become snakes, the aging process is reversed, and animal-human hybrids are formed. The necessity of such enchanted interventions to affect marvellous transformations of the human body is openly recognized by the characters in ‘La cerva fatata’ [The Enchanted Hind] (I.9). The King of Lungapergola desperately longs for an heir. After many ineffectual pilgrimages, he eventually despairs that his prayers will ever be answered. One day a wise man arrives in the kingdom and suggests the following remedy to the king: ‘fà pigliare lo core de no drago marino e fallo cocinare da na zitella zita, la quale, a l’adore schitto de chella pignata, deventarrà essa perzì co la panza ’ntorzata; e cuotto che sarrà sto core, dallo a manciare a la regina, che vedarrai subeto che scirrà prena, comme si fosse de move mise’ (184) [get the heart of a sea-dragon, have it cooked by a virgin, and just from the odours that come from the cauldron, even her belly too will become swollen. When the heart is cooked, give it to the queen to eat and you will see that she will at once become as if already nine

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months gone (1:86)]. When the king doubts the efficacy of this cure, the wise man offers a literary, rather than medical, explanation of why the cure will work. He reasons, ‘si lieie la favola, truove che a Gionone passano pe li campe Olane sopra no shiore l’abbottaie la panza e figliaie’ (184) [for if you read the old myths, you will find that Juno, when passing over a flower in the Olenian fields, felt her womb grow heavy and forthwith gave birth to a child (1:86)]. The cure works wonderfully well; the virgin cook, the queen and all the furniture in the room become pregnant and deliver forth offspring. Basile’s meta-literary message is clear: bodies in favole, whether Basile’s La cerva fatata or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, require a magical or divine intervention in order to undergo transformations that would be impossible through natural means. Max Lüthi has observed that ‘folk tales strike us as enigmatic because they mix the miraculous with the natural, the near with the far, and the ordinary with the incomprehensible in a completely effortless way.’26 Similarly, in fairy tales a single body can be simultaneously represented as behaving prodigiously in some moments, and naturally in others. The everyday physiological functions of the body, however, tend to be articulated in the fairy tale only when tied directly to the development of the plot. We never hear of Zoza tiring during her seven-year hike to Camporotondo, although we can imagine that she did; her physical experience concerns the narrator only in the moment in which it directly intersects with the forward trajectory of the story, when her exhaustion allows the slave to cheat her out of her marriage to Tadeo. When these quotidian physical experiences are depicted in the fairy tale, they are almost never stimulated by magic objects or helpers. Indeed, this is the case for the representation of voglie materne in two other tales, ‘Petrosinella’ and ‘Sapia Liccarda.’ The tale ‘Petrosinella’ (II.1) begins: Era na vota na femmena prena chiammata Pascadozia, la quale, affacctiatose a na fenestra che sboccava a no giardino de n’orca, vedde no bello quatro de petrosino, de lo quale le venne tanto golio che se senteva ashievolire: tanto che non potenno resistere, abistato quanno scette l’orca, ne cogliette na vrancata. (284) [There was once a pregnant woman called Pascadozia who, standing before a window which overlooked the garden of an ogress, saw a fine bed of parsley and was seized with so great a desire to have some that she nearly fainted. Unable to resist the desire, as soon as she saw the ogress go out, she went down to the garden and took a handful (1:135)].

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When the ogress discovers that it is her neighbour who has been raiding her garden, the pregnant Pascadozia begs forgiveness and explains why she was driven to steal the parsley: ‘non pe cannarizia o lopa c’avesse ’n cuorpo l’aveva cecato lo diascance a fare st’arrore, ma ped essere prena e dubetava che la facce de la criatura non nascesse semmenata de petrosine’ (286) [it was not through gluttony or greed that she had been prompted by the devil to this wrongful act, but because she was pregnant and feared there might be a crop of parsley on the face of her child when it was born (1:136)]. Here Pascadozia describes her own voglie as a biological impulse resulting from her pregnancy. In the tale ‘Sapia Liccarda’ (III.4), Sapia’s pregnant older sisters claim to suffer from voglie materne in order to lure her into a romantic trap. The tale begins when a rich merchant named Marcone locks his three daughters, Bella, Cenzolla, and Sapia Liccarda, in his home and nails the windows shut before embarking on his travels. In order to further discourage the young women from taking lovers in his absence, he gives each a ring, ‘che deventavano tutte macchie si chi le portava ’n dito faceva triste vregogne’ (522) [which clouded with spots if the wearers engaged in any evil practices (1:251)]. Marcone’s plan fails when the king’s three sons, who live across the street, manage to enter his house. While Sapia barricades herself in her room to avoid the youngest son Tore’s amorous advances, her two sisters enjoy the company of his brothers and soon become pregnant.27 In a ploy to permit Tore access to their reluctant sister, Bella and Cenzolla exploit Sapia’s benevolent nature and tell her: ‘Non desiderammo autro signale de l’affrezzione toia si no che ’nce abbusche no poco de pane de chello che magna lo re, perché ’nce n’è venuto no tale sfiolo, che si non ce cacciammo sto desiderio è pericolo de nascere quarche panella ’m ponta lo naso de li nennille’ (526) [We desire no other proof of your affection than that you should get us some bread of the kind that the king eats, for we have such a longing for it that if we cannot satisfy this desire, it may well be that our children will be born with a loaf on the tip of their noses (1:253)]. The sisters assume correctly that Sapia will accept their claim of experiencing voglie materne without question. While she disapproves of her sisters’ unchaste actions, Sapia is moved to pity the children that they are carrying and agrees to embark upon the mission. As all of these tales demonstrate, magical forces tend to act upon a body in a fairy tale in Lo cunto only to affect changes in that body which would be impossible through normal physiological functions. When a protagonist’s body experiences what were then considered normal bio-

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logical urges – hunger after a period without food or exhaustion after a performing physically demanding tasks – we do not find any enchanted catalyst provoking them. The slave Lucia’s voglie materne represent an exception to this rule: they are alternately a natural psycho-physiological effect of pregnancy and the result of the intervention of the enchanted automaton. Why does this unique representation of a physiological process involve the representation of the reproductive powers of the female body and not some other corporeal function? ‘Per far vere le favole’ In both Basile’s tales and contemporaneous scientific treatises, the female body often functions as a locus for the production of the marvellous. In Lo cunto, we find stories of a woman who gives birth to a dragon, of another who delivers forth a myrtle tree, and of a third accused of having given birth to a dog.28 In early modern Europe, non-fiction texts provided an equally astounding array of monstrous births. In Historia varia (1564), Lodovico Domenichi tells of the ‘incredibile parto’ [incredible parturition] of a certain Countess Margherita of Holland, who gave birth to 360 children, a number of whom were baptized.29 The French surgeon Ambroise Paré documented numerous cases of women giving birth to conjoined twins and hermaphrodites in his treatise On Monsters and Marvels (1573).30 In Italy, Tommaso Garzoni compiled an exhaustive list of monstrous births in his wonder book Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo (1613). Among the many amazing parturitions discussed by Garzoni, we find the story of a Swiss woman who gave birth to a lion and an Albanian woman who delivered a canine-human hybrid.31 While astounding, such births pale in comparison to a creature that became known as the monster of Krakow, described by Tommaso Garzoni as having the face of an ox, a back covered in dog-like fur, monkey faces on its chest, two cat eyes by its navel, growling dog heads on its elbows, and swan-like feet.32 Decades earlier, an illustration of this horrifying monster had appeared in Pierre Boiastuau’s Histoires prodigieuses (figure 4.1). There seemed no end to the perversions that the female body could produce! Perhaps at no other moment in the European collective consciousness did the scientific representation of the female body and its reproductive capacities dwell in such proximity to those found in the fairy tale. The authors of the treatises cited above sought to maintain the distinction between the biological body, which acted according to natural laws, and the fictional fairy-tale body, which overcame such limitations through

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Image Not Available

Figure 4.1 The monster of Krakow. Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses (Paris, 1564). Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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enchantment, by carefully explaining each anomalous birth according to the prevailing scientific theories. Inevitably, disagreement arose over which births in the ever-growing list of examples were to be considered as biological possibilities and which were to be dismissed as impossibilities or frauds. The line that divided the possible from the impossible was unstable and ever-changing, redrawn by each author who approached the subject of monstrous births according to those scientific theories which he held to be true. When scientific explanations failed to explain adequately how a woman’s body could generate a given strange creature, and the anamolous offspring was not deemed a divine portent, the case was reassigned to the genre of the fairy tale, the favola, to a space where the body could and did overcome the limits of natural law. For example, in the midwife’s manual La comare, Scipione Mercurio reviews myriad monstrous births recorded by other authors and distinguishes between those he deems to be real monsters (mostri veri) and those he considers to be fake monsters (mostri finti). In this review, Mercurio ridicules the Spanish writer Antonio Torquemada for his credulity and for his inability to distinguish between true stories of monstrous births and fandonie (nonsense) in his dialogue entitled Jardin de flores curiosas (1570). Divided into six ‘trattati,’ Torquemada’s dialogue examines a diverse array of curiosities including human oddities, ghosts and witches, Fortune’s role in men’s lives, and the strangeness of the lands in the far north of Europe. The conversation of the three interlocutors, Luigi, Bernardo, and Antonio, constitutes a sort of encyclopedia of marvels. In the first trattato, the three men discuss what they judge to be the incredible but true stories of three women who copulated with animals – a bear, a dog, and a monkey – but delivered perfectly normal human offspring.33 Adhering to the Aristotelian laws of generation by which matings of dissimilar species are necessarily sterile, Mercurio declares Torquemada’s stories to be ridiculous and concludes: queste in somma sono fandonie più atte a esser raccontate alle veglie l’inverno, che d’esser scritte ne i libri, e particolarmente da persone giudiciose, come dal Signor Torquemada, il quale per quanto mostra nel suo giardino, è scrittore accorto, e molto pratico in Auttori gravi.34 [these, in short, are nonsensical stories better suited for telling at evening gatherings during the winter, than to be written down in books, and particularly by sensible persons like Mr Torquemada, who, as he demonstrates in

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Mercurio does not merely declare Torquemada’s stories to be untrue or impossible according to biological principles, but recasts these tales as fandonie or favole, as fictional tales more fitting for evening entertainments than for learned books.35 Through this distinction, Mercurio participates in the articulation of the parameters of the nascent genre of the fairy tale. As in other texts in the teratological canon, the fairy tale and scientific accounts of monstrous generation meet in a mutually defining contiguity in his treatise. His words recall the literary hierarchy that Bargagli constructed in the Dialogo de’ giuochi in which favole of ogres, fairies, and witches occupied the lowest position and were deemed appropriate only for ‘semplici fanciulette.’36 If Bargagli’s disdain for the favola arose from the genre’s lack of allegorical truth, Mercurio finds a different defect. The fandonie of monstrous births recounted by Torquemada do not adhere to scientific truths and cannot be explained by natural laws. Despite such attempts to erect boundaries, it is surprising how quickly a fairy tale could become a scientific case history, and how little intervention was necessary to rewrite a fandonia as a true story. Mercurio operates just such a revision on Torquemada’s claim that women who copulated with animals, specifically baboons and bears, could give birth to normal human children. After a brief summary of the case histories which Torquemada furnishes as evidence for his theory, Mercurio judges these stories to be fictions, favola and figmento. He doubts the veracity of Torquemada’s account of interspecies copulation producing perfectly normal human offspring because such tales contradict Aristotle’s observations regarding the sterility of such unions. Mercurio concedes, however, ‘[d]ella Portughese crederò io qualche cosa, se però per Baboino il Cronista Portughese intese qualche huomo salvatico’ [I’ll believe in part the story of the Portuguese woman, if, however, for ‘baboino’ the Portuguese Chronicler meant ‘wild man’].37 By reclassifying the baboino with a huomo salvatico, or wild man, Mercurio alters the story so as to make it conform to Aristotelian laws of reproduction. Although sometimes confused with monkeys and apes, the species of homo sylvaticus was a medieval European invention, a creature that dwelt in a liminal space between the animal and the human.38 Humans were thought to share a greater number of somatic features and cognitive abilities with wild men than they did with other primates.39 Just as donkeys and horses, although belonging to different species, could unite in fer-

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tile unions to produce mules, intercourse between a woman and a wild man might in the same way generate offspring. Despite all attempts of these authors to maintain distinctions between the natural body and the fabulous body, between learned literature and the fairy tale, unruly females continued to produce marvellous creatures that confounded these categories and resisted facile categorization. Sperone Speroni alludes to the disruptive power of the pregnant female body in his ‘Dialogo del tempo del partorire delle donne’ (1542), when he observes: Quante sono hora, quante furono per lo passato, che, tre, e quattro e cinque, e sette figliuoli vivi, e sani partorirono in una volta? Similmente tale ve n’hebbe, ch’in una volta dieci, dodici, trenta, e settanta ne disperdette. Tal serpenti, tale elefanti, e per far vere le favole, tal minotauri, e hippocentauri si partorì. Taccio i mostri d’infinite maniere, di quattro gambe, di due teste, di due ventri, e di due sessi.40 [How many are there now, and how many were there in the past who gave birth to three, four, five, and seven live and healthy children at one time? Similarly, there have been some who at one time delivered forth ten, twelve, thirty, and seventy of them. Some elephants, others serpents, and to make fictions come true, some gave birth to minotaurs and others hippocentaurs. I’ll say nothing of the infinite varieties of monsters with four legs, two heads, and two bellies and two sexes.]

Speroni creates a crescendo of reproductive perversity, which moves quickly from an unusual but possible number of multiple births (three) to figures which seem completely fantastic (seventy), from the snake to the Minotaur, from the four-legged monster to the hermaphrodite. He depicts the female body as hovering at the edge of the biologically possible, as capable of dragging creatures once thought only possible in fairy tales and myth into reality. In this period, the female body became the ultimate generator of fairy tales because women were capable of producing both literary and material favole. Women made fairy tales true (far vere le favole) through their monstrous parturitions that turned fiction into fact. Basile’s innovative depiction of the slave’s body as simultaneously influenced by magic and natural forces, as possessing the qualities of both a biological body and a fairy-tale body, can be viewed as a literary mirror of the scientific texts in which the female body stood poised

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between the biologically possible and the fantastic. Basile’s frame tale playfully inverts Speroni’s claim that women’s bodies can ‘far vere le favole’ [make favole true]. In the story of the struggle between Zoza and the slave, he succeeds in ‘far favole del vero’ [making fairy tales out of the truth] by rewriting what were widely accepted theories of voglie materne into a fairy-tale context in which they are provoked by magical rather than biological forces. This blurring of the distinctions between truth and favole represents a kind of inversion of Straparola’s use of scientific discourse to define the fairy-tale genre. Although this interpenetration of science and fairy tale distinguishes Lo cunto from Le piacevoli notti, like Straparola, Basile utilizes scientific theories to articulate his own view of the fairy-tale genre, one which, as we shall see, is unambiguously positive. In the concluding pages of this chapter, I show that the theory of voglie materne functions in the frame tale to remove the stigma assigned in the preceding centuries to tales of ogres, fairies, and witches. Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti: Il più bel parto del suo ingegno By inscribing this scientific theory of voglie materne in his frame tale so that all of the tales are recounted to satisfy the slave’s craving during the final days of her confinement and ensure the healthy delivery of the royal heir Giorgetiello, Basile has metaphorically positioned his readers beside Lucia’s birthing bed. The ten old crones gathered at Tadeo’s palace can be viewed as early modern midwives inasmuch as their presence is aimed at facilitating the safe birth of Lucia’s child. When they tell their tales to satisfy Lucia’s craving and soothe her ‘omore malanconeco’ (22) [melancholy state of mind (1:9)], they follow the prescribed practice for midwives who anticipate a difficult birth for their clients. Scipione Mercurio offered the following advice to midwives who found themselves assisting a fearful or melancholic patient: Le passioni dell’animo si mitighino, com l’ira con la benignità, il timore con la speranza di riuscire a bene del parto, la maliconia con l’allegrezza, laquale dee essere procurata ad ogni suo potere dalla saggia Comare con gratiosi motti, con argutie ingegnose, con favole piacevoli, e sopra il tutto col prometterle quasi certo, che patirà nel parto pocchissimo, e che al sicuro partorirà un maschio, perché se l’ha sognato quest notta nell’alba nel quale tempo per lo più i sogni sogliono veri riuscire; e simili ciancie, che alle donne si convengono a maraviglia, poiché ad esse è proprio, e naturale il cianciare.41

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‘Per far vere le favole’: Basile’s Frame Tale 87 [The mind’s passions are mitigated, as ire by goodness, fear by the hope of succeeding in delivering well, melancholy by cheerfulness which must be sought after with all of the powers of the wise Midwife by way of gracious witty remarks, ingenious witticims, and pleasant tales, and above all promising her that she will almost certainly suffer very little during the birth, and that she will surely give birth to a boy because she [the midwife] dreamed it this evening at dawn, the time when dreams are most true, and similar idle chatter which works wonders with women, since they are naturally given over to chattering idly.]

It is with favole piacevoli that the midwife can put the expectant mother’s mind at ease. At the end of Lo cunto, however, no child is born, for Tadeo discovers Lucia’s deception and takes Zoza as his wife. It is only at this point that the readers realize that the birth that we had so eagerly awaited was not that of Tadeo’s offspring, but the metaphoric birth of Lo cunto de li cunti.42 Undoubtedly, Basile’s peers would have recognized this conclusion in these terms because literary production had long been represented through tropes of parturition. In the Middle Ages, fatherhood and authorship were linked in the Christian worldview. God figured as both the creator of the universe and the author of the Book of Nature.43 By the sixteenth century, European authors depended more heavily on classical references when constructing their own tropes of literary parturition or when examining the relationship between the father-author and his literary offspring. Specifically, Aristotle’s theory of sexual reproduction, in which the male provided the form that shaped the passive material supplied by the female, encouraged the association of the artist-creator with the father. Many early modern writers also adopted Plato’s depiction of literary works as ‘children of the spirit.’44 For example, in his essay ‘On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children’ Michel de Montaigne called the texts born from an author’s heart, mind, and spirit ‘immortal children’ capable of deifying their father.45 In Italy, these classical concepts of the father-creator producing ‘spiritual children’ would be reworked in a variety of ways. In prefaces, dedicatory letters, and other paratexts, early modern Italian authors and editors referred to both the creative act that generated a literary text and the text itself as a parto. The word signifies both childbirth and offspring and came to refer figuratively to any product of the intellect. In these tropes of parturition, both male and female authors suffered the throes of labour, became parents to their texts, and watched

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anxiously as the intellectual progeny sought to make its way in the world.46 Born defenceless, new texts counted upon their fathers or mothers for protection from the critics who sought to harm them. Intellectual offspring stood alongside biological progeny and experienced the same challenges and dangers as they ventured forth from their parents’ sheltering embrace.47 The death of the author before a work went to press orphaned the text, leaving it dependent upon relatives and friends for its survival.48 Just as human offspring exhibiting physical imperfections were deemed monstrous, texts that did not conform to existing categories of literary genres were depicted as monstrous births. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the ‘birth’ of the hermaphrodite facilitated by the surgeon’s knife in Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti functions as a symbol for the inscribing of the feminized genre of the favola into the (male) Boccaccian novella tradition, an act that creates an intersex text.49 Basile and those closest to him adopted similar tropes of parturition when referring to his own literary production. In the dedicatory letter to his observations on the verse of the sixteenth-century poets Bembo and Della Casa, Basile writes that one day he hopes to provide the dedicatee Marco Scitico a ‘parto piú proportionato alla sua grandezza’ [an offspring more equal to your greatness].50 Basile’s sister Adriana, who oversaw the posthumous publication of her brother’s epic poem Teagene, declared the text to be ‘l’ultimo parto del suo ingegno’ [the last offspring of his wit].51 In their seminal study The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar examine tropes of literary parturition to argue that in ‘patriarchal Western culture, therefore, the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. Moreover, his pen’s power, like his penis’s power, is not just the ability to generate life but the power to create a posterity to which he lays claim.’52 At the same time, Gilbert and Gubar perceive in tropes of literary paternity the paradox that ‘in the same way an author both generates and imprisons his fictive creatures, he silences them by depriving them of autonomy (that is, of the power of independent speech) even as he gives them life.’53 As I show below, Basile assumes the position of the author-father of his text; but, before he silences Lo cunto de li cunti, he first silences the voices of his ten female narrators by replacing them with the authorial pen. It might initially seem counter-intuitive to assert one’s masculine authorial control through depictions of maternity and the maternal

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imagination; however, Basile was not the only one to do so. Recent studies of the construction of early modern masculinity have shown that the privileging of female figures or the appropriation of female capacities by male poets oftentimes served to efface the feminine and present ‘a new concept of masculine wholeness and self-sufficiency.’54 Poets in the Petrarchan tradition and Neoplatonic philosophers depicted the idealized female beloved as the means through which men could arrive at spiritual enlightenment. What is exalted is not the woman’s intrinsic value, but the man’s capacity to contemplate her beauty and virtue. French poets such as Ronsard depicted male literary masters as nursing their students at their breasts. These writers ‘masculinized maternity in order to empower their writing – co-opting women and women’s roles to further the cause of the French literary tradition, and perhaps more importantly, their own quest for immortality.’55 Basile employs an analogous discursive move in order to remove the stigma from the feminized genre of the literary fairy tale. While Straparola and his male narrators strove to distance themselves form the stigmatized genre of the fairy tale, the author and the chracters in Lo cunto initially seem to embrace it. The Neapolitan tales are repeatedly presented in terms that liken them to favole, the type of tales recounted by old women and young girls for the entertainment of children that had been denigrated in previous centuries by authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Girolamo Bargagli, and Andrea Calmo.56 In the frame tale, Prince Tadeo defines the cunti in terms that recall Boccaccio’s definition of the lowest form of fiction in the Genealogia deorum as the invention of ‘pazzarelle vecchiacciule’ [crazy old women] recounted around the hearth to serving girls and children. He commands the ten crones gathered at his palace to tell tales to his wife, the slave Lucia, ‘appunto che soleno dire le vecchie pe trattenemiento de peccerille’ (22) [that old women tell to amuse children (1:9)]. Over the course of the five days of storytelling, the ten narrtors also occasionally refer to their tales as belonging in the nursery or having been first heard at the knee of a grandmother.57 Although the complexities of his Baroque prose, the use of dialect, and the fact that the lessons furnished by the tales were often of questionable moral value would seem to render the tales inappropriate for children,58 the Neapolitan subtitle for Lo cunto, Lo trattenemiento de peccerille, designates a puerile audience for the tales and an early edition of an Italian translation of Lo cunto included an engraving of this young public on the frontispiece (figure 4.2). While in his frame tale he depicts telling fairy tales as a female practice, in the

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Figure 4.2 Giambattista Basile, Il conto de’ conti (Naples, 1804). Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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final pages of Lo cunto the pen of the male author displaces the female voice. At the same time, Basile must also destroy the slave Lucia’s unruly maternal imagination, for it represents the sort of defective imagination to which the generation of tales of ogres and fairies have been attributed, those of old crones and simple young girls. In Monstrous Imagination, Marie-Hélène Huet observes that ‘[w]hereas European languages have long hesitated between the Latin imaginatio – the ability to form images – and the Greek phantasia, which Plato defined as the power to make images while interpreting them, it may be said that the maternal vis imaginativa falls within the scope of imaginatio, also described as the capacity to produce images similar to “wax imprints,” reproductions without interpretations.’59 Just as the maternal imagination reproduces without interpreting, the traditional narrators of the fairy tales were thought to produce tales that lacked allegorical meaning and thus resisted interpretation beyond the literal sense.60 Although the threat of a monstrous generation pervades Basile’s entire frame tale, Lo cunto concludes with the avoidance of a monstrous birth when Tadeo condemns the pregnant slave to death. Just as Tadeo’s union with Zoza, an aristocrat like himself, holds the promise of bringing forth healthy offspring, the text born from the slave Lucia’s voglie materne comes into being free of any of the defects previously attributed to the fairy-tale genre. In the frame tale, Basile creates a female economy of narration that initially appears to affirm the prevailing critical prejudice which saw fairy tales as an imperfect genre appropriate only for women. Lucia’s demand to hear stories is satisfied by a steady supply of tales produced by the ten old crones. While Tadeo recognizes that listening to stories appeals to both men and women, he commands the women assembled before him to narrate the type of tales old women recount to entertain children. In the final pages of Lo cunto, however, Basile replaces this female economy of narration and overturns the two charges levelled against the fairy-tale genre: first, that fairy tales are full of lies; and second, that fairy tales are women’s work. When Tadeo invites Zoza to recount what will be the fiftieth and final tale of Lo cunto, the princess modestly explains that she is not ‘usata a fegnere ’menziune ed a tessere favole’ (1018) [used to weaving fictions and inventing stories (2:163)]. In her desire to tell the truth when asked to recount a fictional tale, Zoza resembles the male narrators in Straparola’s frame tale who resisted Lucrezia’s command to contribute a favola and offered instead a tale that was truthful on either the literal or

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allegorical level. Zoza recounts her own story, which is both a true story within the fiction of the frame tale (it is her biography) and the fairy tale that the extradiagetic narrator began on the first page of the text. In this way, Basile transforms favola into verità. When she tells her tale, Zoza disrupts the female economy of narration, for her tale is told to satisfy not so much Lucia’s voglia as Tadeo’s curiosity. Indeed, Zoza’s storytelling causes the slave to cry out, ‘Stare zitta, appilare, si no punia a ventre dare, e Giorgietiello (sic) mazzoccare!’ (1018) [Stop mouth, be quiet, or me belly beat, and Giorgetiello crush (2: 164)]. Her ploy fails, for Tadeo has already begun to decipher Zoza’s roman à clef. Unwilling to recognize Lucia as his legitimate wife, he is no longer concerned with the fate of her child. Rather than attempt to satisfy Lucia’s desire, he tells her to stop complaining about Giorgetiello and be quiet. Although Tadeo commands Lucia to allow Zoza to finish her tale, it is actually the extradiagetic narrator of the frame tale who recounts the fiftieth and final tale, which is presented as indirect discourse: ‘E commannato a Zoza che secotiasse a despietto de la mogliere, essa, che non ne voze autro che lo zinno secotaie la trovata de la lancella rotta, lo ’nganno de la schiava per levarele da le mano sta bona fortuna’ (1018) [And he told Zoza to go on in spite of his wife. She was only waiting for his sign, and continued telling how she had found the vase broken and of the trick used by the slave when she took it from her (2:164)]. As in the opening pages of Lo cunto de li cunti, the extradiegetic narrator relates the tale of tales, the fairy tale of a princess who is cursed to marry a sleeping prince who can only be awoken by filling a jar with tears. Since there are no paratexts here that portray the author of Lo cunto as a scribe and the extradiegetic narrator never intervenes to describe himself as other than the author whose name appears on the title page, the reader is left to assume that the frame tale, the tale of tales, has come from the hand of Gian Alessio Abbattutis, Basile’s literary alter-ego. For the first time, then, fairy tales are depicted as born from the pen of a male author rather than from an old or young woman’s feeble imagination. Lo cunto is born not from a woman, but in the space of the struggle between the slave Lucia and the princess Zoza. This tumultuous encounter between high and low classes ultimately functions as an apt metaphor for Basile’s literary project, which blends popular and learned literature to produce a new sort of favola, one that is not monstrous parturition, but clearly il piú bel parto del suo ingegno, the most beautiful parturition of his wit.

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5 Bestiality and Interclass Marriage in Straparola’s ‘Il re porco’

This chapter represents the first of three in which I furnish new socialhistorical readings of a number of Straparola’s and Basile’s classic fairy tales that feature representations of monstrous generation. I consider here Straparola’s animal bridegroom tale of ‘Il re porco,’ or the King Pig, in which a capricious fairy curses a queen to give birth to a pig who must marry three times in order to regain his human form. In quick succession, he brutally murders his first two wives, the daughters of an impoverished widow. When he overhears each of them plotting to kill him on their wedding night rather than submit to his bestial desires, he gores them with his tusks. It is the accepting love of his third wife, Meldina, the youngest child of the same poor family, that permits him to transform into a handsome young man. Folklorists like Stith Thompson and D.P. Rotunda catalogue the tale of the pig king under the animal bridegroom tale type,1 a group of stories which trace their origins to Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche and count Beauty and the Beast tales among their variations.2 Contemporary critics, regardless of their theoretical framework, tend to read animal bridegroom tales as revealing a given society’s anxieties surrounding sex and marriage. Specifically, the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim views animal bridegroom tales as narratives which work through the psychological aspects of the process of sexual maturation. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim notes that in these tales ‘the male’s anxieties that his coarseness will turn off the female are juxtaposed with her anxieties about the bestial nature of sex.’3 More recently, Ruth Bottigheimer has defined ‘Il re porco’ as a rise tale, a sub-genre of the fairy tale in which an impoverished protagonist first secures a marriage through magic and then acquires wealth.4 Bottigheimer argues convincingly that the fantasy of upward mobility con-

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tained in the rags-magic-marriage-riches plot invented by Straparola greatly appealed to the growing class of literate Venetian artisans who in reality were barred by Venice’s marital laws from forging such advantageous bonds with the ruling class. In the very same moment in which the tale offers a fantasy of upward mobility, it also reasserts traditional gender roles. Lewis Seifert finds in Straparola’s tale a hero who ‘is always already a man waiting for a woman to assume her rightful submissive place beneath him so that he can assert his dominance.’5 The two sisters who refuse to accept their arranged marriage to the beast are killed, while the sister who acquiesces is richly rewarded. Now undoubtedly, the psychological mechanisms described by Bettelheim are at work in this tale, and when read from the point of view of poor Meldina, the pig king’s third wife, Straparola’s ‘Il re porco’ is a rise tale. If we insert the tale into the context of the sixteenth-century debate on the monstrous, however, it becomes clear that Straparola has written this story in such a way as to highlight a very different set of anxieties in this fantasy of social-economic betterment. In our own day, stories of bestial births are most often relegated to those genres a majority of readers recognize as popular fictions: children’s stories, horror films, and supermarket tabloids. In sixteenth-century Europe, accounts of women giving birth to animal offspring appeared both in Straparola’s fairy tales and in virtually every scientific or medical text dealing with monstrosity or sexual reproduction. For example, Straparola’s young female narrators spin yarns about the birth of the pig king and about a young queen falsely accused of having delivered forth three mongrel pups. A few years after the publication of Le piacevoli notti, the Swiss humanist Conrad Lykosthenes documented in words and images a number of instances in which women gave birth to pigs, lions, and elephants in his prodigy book Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (1557) (figure 5.1). In another one of Straparola’s fairy tales, a noble woman gives birth to mismatched twins: a normal child and a serpent. Serpent siblings, however, were not merely the fantastic inventions of storytellers used to entertain their audiences or readers. In his treatise On Monsters and Marvels (1573), the French surgeon Ambroise Paré wrote that in 1494 a woman in Krakow delivered a stillborn child with a ‘snake attached to its back’.6 Like Lykosthenes, Paré furnished his readers with an engraving of this marvel (figure 5.2). Straparola also includes in his collection the story of an enchanted tuna that magically impregnates a haughty young princess at the behest of a foolish lad. A similar case of ichthyo-human hybridization can be found in Juan Huarte’s Essame degl’ingegni degli huomini (1586), in which the Spanish physician related what he held to be the true episode of a

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Figure 5.1 Women nursing their animal offspring. Konrad Lykosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (Basel, 1557). Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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Figure 5.2 Ambroise Paré. Les oeuvres d’Ambroise Paré (Paris, 1579). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

woman who, while walking along the sea shore, was impregnated by a fish that had leapt out of the water.7 In the pages that follow, I argue that Straparola’s story of the pig king is not so much a story of Beauty and the Beast as a tale of Beast and the Beauty in which the narrator focuses on the male protagonist. Through a close reading of the tale, I show that the pig king’s own identity as a hybrid creature becomes the narrator Isabella’s primary concern, while the fate of the ‘beauties,’ his three brides, the scenes of their sexual initiation, and his third wife Meldina’s eventual social and economic rise all assume a secondary importance. By juxtaposing Straparola’s depiction of monstrous birth with contemporaneous scientific accounts of similarly marvellous parturitions, we can bring the issues that bind together favola and science into sharper focus. Early modern anxieties surrounding bestiality and the limits of the human permeate both Straparola’s animal bridegroom tale and the scientific texts. By shifting our gaze from the subject of sexual initiation to issues of interspecies generation and lineage, I show that Straparola utilizes the animal bridegroom tale to explore culturally specific concerns related to Venetian marriage law. His story of the pig king serves to assuage the Venetians’ fear that unmarried male patricians could destabilize civic order as they attempted to satisfy their sexual desires in a restricted marriage market. Animal Anxieties in Le piacevoli notti The frame narrator Isabella begins the first favola of the second night of

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Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti by informing her listeners that King Galeotto of Anglia (England) and his virtuous bride Ersilia lacked only an heir to complete their otherwise happy union. Although his name recalls the famous panderer of the romance tradition cited by both Dante and Boccaccio,8 this Galeotto is no go-between, but a faithful husband and wise ruler. One day, after having gathered flowers in the garden, Queen Ersilia reclines in the shade of a tree and falls fast asleep. Three fairies happen upon the dozing queen and, moved by her beauty, decide to render her ‘inviolabile e affatata’ (1:96) [inviolable and enchanted]. The first fairy grants that Ersilia will become pregnant the next time she sleeps with her husband. The second fairy declares that the son born to her will be the most handsome in the world. The third fairy inexplicably swears that Ersilia herself will be the richest, wisest woman in the world, but that her son will be born with the appearance and manners of a pig and that he will be liberated from this curse only after having married three times. With no knowledge of what has occurred as she slept, Ersilia awakes and returns to the castle. Upon discovering a short time later that the queen is pregnant, the whole kingdom rejoices. This joy gives way to terror the moment that the child arrives, for it more closely resembles a pig than a human. After initially resolving to murder the monstrous newborn, Galeotto orders that it be raised as a rational being. Although the pig boy behaves like a swine, rooting through garbage and rolling in manure, he possesses the power of speech, an ability which humanists believed distinguished humans from beasts.9 One day he demands that his parents find him a bride. Because his monstrous appearance and behaviour render him an undesirable match for a noble woman, he chooses to marry the eldest of a poor woman’s three daughters. When he overhears his bride’s plot to kill him on their wedding night rather than endure his bestial ways, the pig prince brutally murders her. He then marries the poor woman’s second daughter, who, like her sister before her, meets a violent end after conspiring to kill her husband. It is the third daughter’s unconditional love, a love that blinds her to the excrement-encrusted skin of her spouse, that permits the pig prince to become human. At the end of the fairy tale, he peels off his pig skin, metamorphoses into a handsome youth, and assumes the throne. After having concluded her tale with a happy ending, Isabella poses an enigma to her listeners which recalls a central motif of the animal bridegroom tale: the patriarchal figure who provides a husband for the young female protagonist. She challenges those gathered before her with this puzzle:

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When her companions cannot solve this enigma, Isabella reveals that a husband is that which a man can give to a woman but can never have himself. In this way, Straparola shifts the traditional marriage discourse of the young woman receiving a husband from her father to a space outside the limits of the favola, fixing it in the frame tale of Le piacevoli notti. This displacement permits Straparola to concentrate on what was for him and the Venetian brigata a more compelling component of the animal bridegroom tale: the animal-human hybrid. Although three marriages will occur in the tale, what preoccupies Isabella is the pig king’s uncertain morphology, which challenges the boundaries of human identity and threatens the stability of the state by disrupting the royal lineage. Marriage remains a central theme in Straparola’s tale; however, through the monstrous body of the pig king, Straparola explores the Venetian aristocracy’s deep concern with interclass marriages, rather than the individual anxiety created by the sexual initiation of a wedding night. Isabella’s description of the royal couple’s negative reaction to the birth of their bestial son reveals these preoccupations: ... aggiunta al desiderato parto, parturí un figliuolo le cui membra non erano umane ma porcine. Il che andato alle orecchi del re e della reina, inestimabile dolore ne sentirono. E accioché che tal parto non ridondasse in vituperio della reina, che buona e santa era, il re piú fiate ebbe animo a

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Bestiality and Interclass Marriage 99 farlo uccidere e gettarlo nel mare. Ma pur rivolgendo nell’animo e discretamente pensando che ’l figliuolo, che si fusse, era generato da lui ed era il sangue suo, deposto giú ogni fiero proponimento, che prima nell’animo aveva, e abbracciata la pietà mista col dolore, volse al tutto, non come bestia, ma come animal razionale allevato e nodrito fusse. (1:97) [having arrived at the moment of the much-awaited birth, she gave birth to a son whose limbs were not human but porcine. Having heard this, the king and queen felt an inestimable grief. And so that this birth would not redound to the shame of the queen, who was good and pious, the king more than once thought of having it killed and thrown into the sea. But, turning this over in his mind and prudently thinking that his son, such as he was, was generated by him and from his blood, he put aside all cruel resolutions that he had had before in his mind, and embracing mercy mixed with sorrow, wanted him to be raised and nurtured, not as a beast, but completely as a rational animal.]

Although Galeotto never doubts his wife’s virtue, since he knows her to be good and pious [‘buona e santa’], he fears that this monstrous birth might tarnish the queen’s reputation. Isabella never precisely articulates why this birth would discredit the mother because the reasons would have been readily apparent to her listeners (as well as to Straparola’s readers). In this period, abnormal births were often perceived as signs of the sins of the parents regardless of the nature of a child’s deformity. For example, in his Histoires prodigieueses (1560), the Alsatian scholar Pierre Boaistuau preached that ‘il est tout certain que le plus souvent ces creatures monstrueses procedent du iugement, giustice, chastisement, e malediction de Dieu, lequel permet que les peres e meres produisent telles abominations, en l’horreur de leur pechê’ [It is quite certain that most often the monstrous creatures arise from the judgment, justice, and chastisement, and curse of God, who allows the fathers and mothers to produce such abominations, horrified by their sin].10 Furthermore, from the Middles Ages through to Straparola’s day, there was always the risk that the bodies of children that appeared to unite the human and the bestial would be (mis)interpreted as a sign of the creatures’ sinful origins, as the physical evidence of their mothers’ wicked couplings with brute beasts, a point which will be discussed in detail below. In chapter 2, I argued that hybrids were sources of wonder in early modern Europe; however, in Le piacevoli notti the birth of animal-human hybrids engenders more horror than pleasure in those who observe it

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because it raises the spectre of bestiality. In fact, such monstrous births can be distinguished from other sorts of marvels found in Straparola’s fairy tales because their presence creates confusion in those who view them. While the marvellous animal-human hybrids never quite spur the characters to philosophize, to actively formulate biological or supernatural explanations for such occurrences, they do demand a kind of moral interpretation. More precisely, the woman who brings forth a monstrous birth must be judged by her consort and her community: Did she or didn’t she? In the tale of the pig king, Galeotto, moved by the desire to protect the queen, repeatedly resolves to have the child murdered and its body thrown into the sea. Confused and not completely convinced of this decision, the king refrains from acting immediately in order to reflect more deeply on the situation. Based on his faith in his wife’s chastity and virtue, Galeotto finally arrives at a conclusion regarding the child’s abnormal body: the pig-child must somehow have been generated by their union (‘era generato da lui ed era il suo sangue’). Unable to explain the child’s anomalous form, yet convinced that it is his own flesh and blood, the king spares his son’s life. The marvellous birth gives pause and demands a moral decision, but is never completely stripped of wonder. The royal family never learns of the cause of their son’s anomalous form. The fairies do not return to reveal their role in the prince’s birth or to explain their actions. Galeotto’s grief and his need to contemplate and interpret the abnormal body of his son can be considered the typical reaction to monstrous births in Le piacevoli notti. Indeed, in the only other two tales in Le piacevoli notti in which the characters must confront the birth of animal-human hybrids, those who gaze upon the monsters experience a similar horror. The tale of the fairy-snake Samaritana and her ‘sister’ Biancabella begins much like the story of the pig king, with an infertile royal couple. The Marquis of Monferrato greatly desires children but has been denied God’s blessing. One day after disporting in her garden, his wife lies down in the shade of a tree and falls asleep. As the marchioness dozes peacefully, a small serpent crawls up her skirts and ‘nella natura entrò, e sottilissimamente ascendendo, nel ventre della donna si puose, ivi chetamente dimorando’ (1:200) [entered her privates, and ascending unnoticed, came to rest in the woman’s womb, dwelling there quietly]. Shortly thereafter, the marchioness finds herself pregnant and the city rejoices. When she gives birth to a daughter named Biancabella on account of her fair skin, however, the snake is coiled around the baby’s neck. The midwives are horrified and frightened at this sight (‘si paventarono molto’

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[1:200]). In this case, however, the horror produced by this bestial birth dissipates quickly when the snake slithers off into the garden, thus removing the burden of interpretation from those present. In tale IV.3, King Ancilotto’s mother, greatly distressed by his choice of a bride ‘di minuta gente’ (1:276) [from base folk], discredits her daughter-in-law by replacing her newborn triplets with three mongrel pups. The tale begins with the humble daughter of a baker, Chiaretta, winning Ancilotto’s heart by promising to bear him triplets, two boys and a girl, with hair braided with gold, gold necklaces encircling their necks, and stars upon their foreheads. When Chiaretta becomes pregnant soon after the wedding, the king is delighted at the prospect of quickly acquiring three heirs. As her confinement draws to a close, King Ancilotto is summoned to a nearby kingdom. With her husband abroad, Chiaretta delivers three marvellous babies who fulfil her promise to the letter. At this very moment, Chiaretta’s sisters – jealous of her newfound position and power – bring three mongrel pups born in the palace to Ancilotto’s mother, who devises the plan to replace her daughter-in-law’s newborns with the beasts. With the complicity and assistance of Chiaretta’s sisters and the midwife, the curs are placed in the queen’s bed while the royal heirs are set adrift on the river. When King Ancilotto returns to his kingdom and discovers three mongrels in the bed beside his wife, he almost swoons. Since his wife denies the charge but is unable to explain the three pups at her side, Ancilotto, confused and unsure of what to believe, ‘molto si turbò, e quasi da dolore in terra caddé, ma poscia che egli rivenne alquanto, stette gran pezza tra il sú e ’l no suspeso, e al fine diede piena fede alle parole materne’ (1:280) [became very upset and almost fainted from the grief; but he came to, and for a long time was suspended between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and in the end he put his complete faith in his mother’s words]. Like Galeotto, Ancilotto experiences wonder and horror before what he understands to be animal-human hybrids. Isabella’s description of the animal-human hybrid in the tale of the pig king marks the brigata’s first of many encounters with the marvellous in Le piacevoli notti; the tales that follow teem with wondrous phenomena. A speaking tuna grants Pietro Pazzo’s wishes in tale III.1; Doralice saves her husband Fortunio from a siren who has swallowed him whole in tale III.4; Costanza captures and subdues a satyr in tale IV.1; Chiaretta and King Ancilotto’s children, Acquirino, Fulvio, and Serena, possess jewelgenerating locks in tale IV.3; Guerrino frees a wild man in tale V.1; and Cesarino slays a dragon in tale X.3. Yet none of these marvels evoke the intense horror and moral anxiety that the pig boy generates in his father.

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In fact, the characters in Straparola’s fairy tales often simply accept monstrosities as quotidian. Without expressing fear or pausing to reflect, the characters in the vast majority of fairy tales react without hesitation to the monstrosities that appear before them, viewing these creatures either negatively as obstacles to overcome, or positively as helpers in their quests. For example, when the tuna that Pietro Pazzo has caught in his net begins to speak, the lad does not recoil in horror, but merely wants to throw it over his shoulder, carry it home, and enjoy it with his poor mother who could use a good meal. Moved by the tuna’s pleas, Pietro frees the creature and is rewarded with a boatload of fish; however, he never questions or investigates the miraculous loquacity of his scaly interlocutor. We cannot dismiss Pietro’s passive acceptance of the marvellous as a result of his insanity, for protagonists of sounder mind react in a similar manner. In tale III.4 the quick-witted Doralice calmly negotiates the release of her husband with a siren who has swallowed him whole. Doralice never pauses to contemplate the siren’s hybrid body, nor does the encounter terrify her: she simply barters for her husband’s freedom by offering the siren a golden ball. On occasion, characters are amazed by the marvels in their midst. As I discussed in chapter 2, Adamantina and her sister experience meraviglia when confronted with a doll that defecates money; however, they are not compelled to search for explanations of the doll’s origins or astounding abilities. Why do animal-human hybrids terrify those who witness their birth while dragons, talking animals, and satyrs do not? Why do these hybrid births both demand and ultimately resist interpretation while other marvels and monstrosities are merely accepted as givens? To answer these questions, we must look beyond the tale of the pig king and search for interpretive clues first in the contiguous space of the frame tale and then in scientific texts of the period that depict similar monstrous births. ‘Uomo e non animale brutto’: On the Superiority of Man Isabella introduces her story not with some observation on matrimony or with some banalities about the transforming power of love, but with a call to her listeners to thank God that they were created humans instead of beasts. Her tale, she tells her companions, will make them realize, Quanto l’uomo, graziose donne, sia tenuto al suo creatore che egli uomo e non animale brutto l’abbia al mondo creato, non è lingua sí tersa né sí faconda, che in mille anni a sofficienza il potesse isprimire. (1:95)

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Bestiality and Interclass Marriage 103 [So beholden, graceful ladies, is man to his creator who has made him a man and not a brute animal in the world, that there is not a tongue so clear and prolific which in a thousand years would be able to sufficiently express this debt.]

With these words, Isabella simultaneously recalls for her listeners and praises the Christian hierarchy in which man stood above the beasts. In their writings and teachings, the early Church fathers endeavoured to shape a Christian culture that defined itself against the pagan culture from which it had emerged.11 Part of this effort involved the reconfiguration of the relationship between the human and the animal. While the boundary between these categories was tenuous and permeable in pagan culture, the Christian fathers forged a deep divide between them. Saints Ambrose and Augustine, and later scholastics like Thomas Aquinas, held that reason, intellect, or rational capacity, as well as having been created in the image of God, placed men above the beasts.12 Certainly, Isabella will temporarily upset this hierarchy by relating an episode of monstrous birth that calls into question the division between the human and the animal, for although the pig king is capable of speech and reason, he possesses the body of a beast. By the time we arrive at the happy ending of her tale, however, the monster will be undone and the threat to the existing order removed. Evidently, Straparola anticipated that the type of ambiguity of category introduced by Isabella’s fairy tale would be so disturbing to her listeners that it would necessitate a verbal reassurance of the fixity of the boundaries circumscribing the human. This same mechanism is at work in tale IV.3 of King Ancilotto and the falsified monstrous birth. There too, the narrator Lodovica begins by reminding her listeners of the privileged and distinct position of man in relation to the animals: Io ho sempre inteso, piacevoli e graziose donne, l’uomo esser il piú nobile e il piú valente animale che mai la natura creasse, perciò che Iddio lo creò alla imagine e alla similitudine sua e volse che egli signoreggiasse e non fusse signoreggiato. E per questo si dice l’uomo esser animal perfetto e di maggior perfezzione che ogni altro animale, perché tutti, non eccettovando anche la femina, sono sottoposti all’uomo. (1:274) [I have always understood man, pleasant and gracious ladies, to be the most noble and most clever animal that nature ever created, because God created him in his image and likeness, and wanted him to lord over, and not be

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lorded over. And for this reason they say that man is a perfect animal and of greater perfection than every other, because all animals, even women, are beneath men.]

On account of this supremacy, Lodovica concludes that whoever conspires to murder another human, as will the four women in her tale, commits a grave sin. These words recall the verses in Genesis often cited by the fathers of the Church as justification for the human domination of other species: ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness to rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all wild animals on earth, and all reptiles that crawl upon the earth ... Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth.’13 As in the fairy tale of the pig king, the birth of the three mongrel pups – albeit a fraudulent birth – requires the verbalization of the superiority and separateness of the human. The concern with maintaining distinct divisions between the human and other species links these tales to what was a broader cultural debate in early modern Europe on the nature of the monster and the limits of humanity. Animal-Human Hybrids in the Teratological Canon: The Dog Boy of Avignon Virtually every teratological text of the period, regardless of the author’s theoretical stance, included a few cases of human mothers who delivered what were perceived to be animals or animal-human hybrids. Accounts of such hybrids could be found in texts as varied as Sperone Speroni’s dialogue on human gestation, the prodigy books of Lykosthenes and Boaistuau, the encyclopedic natural histories of Ulisse Aldrovandi, and the medical treatises of physicians Levinus Lemnius and Fortunio Liceti.14 Among this plethora of cases, Benedetto Varchi’s account of a woman who gives birth to a canine-human hybrid offers an illuminating point of comparison for analysing Straparola’s tale of the pig king because of the similarity of content: in both cases a king must decide the fate of what appears to be an interspecies creature. Of course, each author offers different causes to explain the generation of such monsters: Straparola attributes the birth of the pig king to the magical intervention of fairies, while Varchi looks to scientific theories to explicate similar phenomena. Varchi’s discussion of the canine-human hybrid appears in his ‘Della generazione de’ mostri,’ first presented as a lecture to the Florentine acad-

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emy three years before the publication of the first edition of Straparola’s text. Because of the geographical and chronological proximity of the publication of the two texts, as well as the inclusion of the case in other Italian treatises,15 it is likely that some of Straparola’s sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century readers were familiar with Varchi’s account. As he stood before his fellow academics in July of 1548, Varchi recounted the story of a woman from Avignon who brought forth a ‘monster’ three days after having given birth to a daughter. The girl perished only an hour after entering the world, but her monstrous twin lived. Varchi describes the surviving child to his audience in detail, lingering over the description of his hybrid form: quel mostro che nacque l’anno 1543 in Avignone, il quale nacque dopo tre dì che era nata della medesima donna una bambina, la quale non visse un’ora, ed era così fatto. Egli aveva la testa d’uomo dagli orecchi in fuori, i quali insieme col collo, colle braccia e mani erano di cane, e così il membro virile: le gambe ed i piedi con un picciol segno di coda di dietro ...16 [that monster that was born in the year 1543 in Avignon, that was born three days after the same woman had given birth to a girl who didn’t live but an hour, was made like this. He had a human head except for the ears, which, along with the neck, arms, and hands, were those of a dog, and similarly the virile member, the legs and feet with the hint of a tail behind ...]

Like the pig king, the dog boy confounded the boundary between the human and the animal; he exhibited a horrifying blend of canine and human features, emitting cries that more closely resembled the whine of a dog than human speech. The public reaction was one of great anxiety. Those who viewed the dog child interpreted its body not as a portent of some future event, or as a marvel of nature, but as a sign of the mother’s past sin of bestiality, a charge to which she confessed. Mother and child were transported from Avignon to Marseilles, where the most Christian King Francis I (‘cristianissimo Re Francesco’) ordered that both be burned. On the last day of July, 1543, mother and dog, as Varchi refers to this woman’s offspring, perished at the stake. Bestiality, Or the Sins of the Mother Varchi’s lesson provides insight into both those anxieties which initially spur Galeotto to contemplate infanticide and those which then cause

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him to reconsider his murderous plan. The teratological text also illuminates those aspects of hybrid births that render them fundamentally different from other forms of monstrosity in Le piacevoli notti which do not elicit an anxiety of interpretation or extreme terror in those who view them. While the woman of Avignon confessed to unnatural sexual relations with a dog, the reference to this sin simmers just under the surface of Straparola’s tale, threatening to burst forth. Galeotto worries that the pious queen will be ‘vituperata,’ shamed, on account of her abnormal offspring. This depiction is in keeping with Straparola’s tendency in Le piacevoli notti to deny the free expression of female sexuality in his fairy tales while emphasizing issues of honour and shame when depicting sexual encounters.17 In this case, however, it is not simply the perception that the queen has been unchaste that threatens her honour. Although he does not dare utter a precise term, what Galeotto fears is not merely that rumours will fly, but that people will interpret the birth of the pig king as a sign of some act of bestiality on the part of the queen, a charge so serious that it moved the French King Francis to condemn both mother and child to death. The fear of damaging accusations in the fairy tale and King Francis’s order of execution reflect the early modern perception of the sin of bestiality, which I define as sexual intercourse with animals, as far worse than other sexual transgressions. The prohibition against human-animal intercourse was an ancient one set down in Leviticus: ‘A man who has sexual intercourse with any beast shall be put to death, and you shall kill the beast. If a woman approaches any animal to have intercourse with it, you shall kill both woman and beast.’18 The earliest Christian penitentials, texts considered by scholars to be ‘comprehensive codes of sexual behavior,’19 upheld this proscription. Over the centuries, the perceived gravity of this sin, and the corresponding duration and severity of the penance necessary to expiate it, increased dramatically. While sex with animals was viewed in the earliest penitentials as a relatively minor offence common to young boys engaged in herding,20 in the eleventh century bestiality was judged to be a more serious crime, a form of sodomy or unnatural sex that went against nature and offended God.21 By the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas wrote that among all the types of unnatural vice, which included homosexuality, masturbation, and unacceptable sexual positions, ‘the most grievous sin is that of bestiality, because the use of the due species is not observed.’22 According to one of Aquinas’s contemporaries, the Franciscan theologian Alexander of Hales, both the human and animal partner involved in unnatural cou-

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plings must be killed in order to ‘erase the memory of the act with the participants.’23 As Varchi’s academic lesson attests, those found guilty of bestiality in Straparola’s day also risked execution. Clearly, a desire to eliminate the abnormal body in order to stave off rumours of bestiality motivates Galeotto to contemplate the murder of his offspring; but, his murderous impulse also betrays his need to maintain order. The pig boy’s apparent hybridity taints the purity of humankind and dismantles the sanctioned hierarchy of species lauded by Isabella at the beginning of the fairy tale. Although to some degree all monsters stand between categories, animal-human hybrids are especially disturbing because they challenge the limits of our own identity. Even in cases where the mother was not accused of bestial acts, these abnormal births threatened the taxonomic order. Such creatures were destabilizing radicals within the carefully constructed system of classification erected in order to make sense of the surrounding world and humankind’s position within it. If allowed to live, such births raised vexing questions: Should they be baptized? What is their legal status?24 In Straparola’s day, the desire to restore order was often fulfilled by violence. Midwives in early modern Europe, in fact, were described in teratological treatises as smothering those births which they judged to lie outside the category of the human, and thus unfit for baptism. The Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius chronicled the birth of an incredible monster that upon leaving the womb, ran about the room wildly, ‘ma le donne ch’erano quivi presenti pigliano i guanciali, e gettandogliene adosso, l’affogarono’ [but the women who were present there grabbed the pillows and throwing them on top smothered it].25 The practice became so widespread that the German physician Martin Weinrich, who believed that physical deformity did not necessarily preclude the existence of a soul, felt compelled to remind the readers of his De ortu monstrorum that ‘num lecito occidere monstra’ [it is forbidden to kill monsters].26 Weinrich’s interdiction did not apply to all monstrous births, however, and he argued that one could kill those children thought to be born from unions with brute beasts or devils, or those who due to the intervention of the maternal imagination were born more animal than human.27 As no specific guidelines or standards existed, it was no simple task to distinguish between those births to be declared human, and thus fit for baptism, and those which were to be killed. Galeotto’s hesitation, his reflection and ultimate rejection of infanticide, also reflect the difficulty in this period of determining which monstrous births were to be deemed human and spared and which were to be eliminated.

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Galeotto’s deliberation is rendered even more complex because there was no consensus in scientific writings as to whether the coupling of two disparate species could produce offspring. Although he appears to believe that his wife would never commit such a sin, Galeotto lacks the security of the scientific knowledge that such unions are always sterile, knowledge which would dismiss any doubts that the malformed newborn might be the product of a bestial act. Accounts of such hybrid births had been recorded since classical times. In Book VII of his Natural History, Pliny, a favourite source for early modern naturalists and scientists,28 claimed to have seen the remains of a hippocentaur (half-man, halfhorse) and noted the astounding case of Alcippe, who gave birth to an elephant.29 Many other classical authors, however, dismissed the idea that such unions could be fertile, although they recognized that similar species, such as horses and donkeys, did reproduce in nature. Varchi, like many Renaissance humanists, adhered to this theory. He observes that those in Avignon and Marseilles who thought that the creature before them was the product of interspecies generation had been mistaken. Citing the laws set forth in Book II, chapter 5 of Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals, Varchi states that unions between species with differing gestation periods and disparate somatic types are necessarily infertile. Therefore, he concludes that the French woman’s offspring could not have been generated through her copulation with a dog. But for every author like Varchi who refuted the generative possibility of such unions, there was another like Ambroise Paré who argued that such abominable unions could indeed produce monstrous hybrids. In On Monsters and Marvels, Paré furnished both verbal and visual proof of his assertion in the form of case histories and illustrations. He furnished his readers with engravings of a canine-human hybrid, not unlike Varchi’s dog boy, born in 1493, and of a child born in Antwerp possessing the body of a dog and the head of a fowl, as well as instances of animals thought to have been inseminated by men (figures 5.3 and 5.4). For Paré, the aberrant form of these offspring, fusions of man and beast in a single body, replicated the ‘sinful union’ that lead to their generation. By restoring the contiguity of science and favola, by juxtaposing the fairy tale of the pig king with Varchi’s and Paré’s teratological treatises, we can bring the submerged causes of Galeotto’s distress at the birth of his bestial boy and the motivations for his behaviour to the surface. Unlike the dragons, sirens, and talking animals in Le piacevoli notti, the pig king raises the spectre of bestiality. So great was the fear of the disintegration of the boundaries between animals and humans in this period

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Image Not Available

Image Not Available

Figure 5.3 and 5.4 A canine-human hybrid. Ambroise Paré, Les oeuvres d’Ambroise Paré (Paris, 1579). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

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that the birth or alleged birth of animal-human hybrids rent the fantastic fabric of the fairy tale, allowing the extreme terror that this particular monstrosity evoked in early modern Italy to penetrate the realm of make-believe. In the end, the animal-human hybrids in both the fairy tales and the teratological treatise, like those found guilty of acts of bestiality in this period, must be erased. The Double Erasure of the Monster The anthropologist Mary Douglas posits in her seminal work Purity and Danger that all cultures possess mechanisms intended to remove any radical elements which might dismantle their classificatory systems. She explains that ‘any given system of classification must give rise to anomalies, and any given culture must confront events which seem to defy its assumptions. It cannot ignore the anomalies which its scheme produces, except at risk of forfeiting confidence. This is why, I suggest, we find in any culture worthy of the name various provisions for dealing with ambiguous or anomalous events.’30 Douglas describes five distinct orderenforcing reactions to those events which defy collocation in existing schema, but the first two of these are the most relevant to our argument here. The first provision involves reducing ambiguity through interpretation, while the second requires physically controlling (destroying) the anomaly.31 So powerful is the destabilizing force of the hybrid creature that both Straparola and Varchi must employ not one but both of these provisions in their texts in order to neutralize it. Before the reader arrives at the happy ending which reinstitutes the clear division between animals and humans that Isabella enthusiastically endorses at the beginning of the fairy tale, the monster must undergo a double erasure. The first of these is a sort of intellectual cancellation that occurs when Galeotto concludes that despite all appearances, and even though no rational or supernatural explanation can be found for the child’s irregular form and behaviour, his malformed progeny is not a beast but a rational creature. The second erasure of the monster regards its physical nature and begins shortly after the pig boy’s marriage to his third wife, Meldina. Her accepting love quite literally transforms the pig from a dirty swine into an affectionate spouse. One evening soon after the wedding, the pig king peels off his pigskin, drops it beside the bed, and reveals himself to be a handsome young man, a metamorphosis he reverses each morning. When Meldina becomes pregnant, Galeotto’s

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fear of interspecies transgression resurfaces, for he knows nothing of his son’s temporary nocturnal metamorphoses. The delivery of a normal (human) son dispels these anxieties: ‘al re e alla reina fu di grandissimo contento, e massimamente che non di bestia, ma di creatura umana teneva la forma’ (1:103–4) [the king and queen were very happy and chiefly because he did not have the form of a beast, but of a human]. The agnatic line, seemingly interrupted by the birth of the pig boy, continues with the birth of his human son. One day Meldina confesses to the queen that she has not married a beast, but a handsome and virtuous youth. That night, when the queen and king steal into the young couple’s bedroom, they are overcome with joy when they spy their son, no longer a swine but a man, dozing beside his wife. The queen quickly seizes the pigskin, and the king orders that this hide be destroyed, ‘tutta minutamente stracciata’ (1:104) [completely shredded into small pieces]. Galeotto’s order to shred his son’s animal hide eliminates the pig boy’s monstrosity by physically destroying its outward sign. Not surprisingly, it is ultimately the action of the king – the male – that removes the final traces of the disorder created by the female body. The fairy tale concludes with the pig king’s ascension of the throne after which he and his family live happily ever after (‘lungo tempo felicissimamente visse’ [1:105]). The monster is undone, the threat to the division between the animal and the human is removed, and the natural order is restored. In Varchi’s lecture, the first erasure of the monster is physical, occurring when the canine-human hybrid perishes at the stake. The French king’s call for execution, like Galeotto’s command to shred his son’s skin, restores taxonomic and civil order by physically destroying the offending bodies. The second erasure occurs in Varchi’s commentary on the events and is essentially an intellectual negation of the hybrid’s double nature. Varchi tells his audience: è tanto lontano da’ filosofi, che una spezia perfetta possa generare un’altra spezie diversa da sè, che essi non vogliano ancora che si possa generare mostro acluno di due spezie diverse, come molti affermano di aver veduto come, esempi grazia, un fanciullo col capo di bertuccia, o di cane, o di cavallo, o di altro animale, o un vitello, o cane, o bue col capo d’uomo.32 [that a perfect species can generate another species different from itself is so far from the teachings of the philosophers that they do not yet admit that

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any monster can be generated by two species, as many attest to having seen, as, for example, a lad with the head of a monkey, or of a dog, or of a horse, or of another animal, a calf, a dog, or an ox with the head of a man.]

With this appeal to ancient philosophers, the humanist Varchi neutralizes the threat that the dog boy posed to the Christian hierarchy of being. Furthermore, he moves beyond this specific case to summarily dismiss the possibility that any animal-human hybrid could be formed in nature. Like Galeotto, Varchi declares that the anomalous birth is human. Thus, two texts which might at first appear to be drastically different, the one an academic lecture based on classical philosophy, the other a fiction attributing monstrous births to fairy spells, perform the same double erasure, intellectual and physical, of the animal-human hybrids depicted in their pages. Patricians and Pigs in the Venetian Marriage Market Having understood the cultural anxieties that inform the scenes of monstrous births in Le piacevoli notti, we can see that a coherent interpretation of the entire tale of the pig king demands that we move our critical focus away from issues of sexual initiation, seen by critics like Bettelheim as central to the interpretation of animal bridegroom tales, in order to redirect our gaze toward the related issues of generation and lineage. Isabella sets her fairy tale in the recent past in England, but a close analysis of the events which follow Galeotto’s rejection of infanticide reveals that this tale is an apt reflection of the interactions of gender, family, and politics unique to the brigata’s own cultural milieu: sixteenth-century Venice. In fact, the preoccupation with lineage, the intertwined fates of the family and the state, and the difficulties of arranging a suitable marriage for the pig boy in this fairy tale replicate the social realities of the young, unmarried patrician male. The Venetian Republic was an aristocratic oligarchy in which ‘the Venetian noblemen ... are the state itself.’33 The Great Council which governed the Republic comprised patrician males who acquired the privilege and responsibility of governance through agnatic descent. Male identity lay at the heart of the establishment of entitlement, and young male patricians were required to present detailed documentation of their ancestry in order to be inducted into the Great Council.34 In the early sixteenth century, the mother’s status came to play a greater role in determining a son’s nobility. A law passed in 1506 required patrician families to document the

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birth of noble sons in registers called Libri d’Oro (Golden Books), which listed both the father and mother of the child.35 In her comprehensive study of the representation of pregnancy in brief prose narratives, Ruth Bottigheimer has documented the ways in which the historical reality of women’s loss of fertility control in the years 1500–1700 is inscribed in the figure of the fairy-tale heroine who suffers at the hands of men. The heroines of medieval fabliaux were joyfully sexually active, planning and scheming to get men into their beds, but these illicit affairs rarely left them pregnant.36 In Straparola’s fairy tales, Bottigheimer discerns the representation of a more passive female sexuality that results in pregnancy and is marked by concerns with honour and shame. She links this new image of the powerless woman to specific social-historical realities of Renaissance Europe that altered women’s status in society, including exclusion from the growing market economy, the spread of venereal disease, and Catholic reformation practices. I see the social-historical forces of Straparola’s immediate context, the Venetian Republic, as playing a more important role in the shaping of both the sexually submissive heroine and the dangerously libidinous hero in this tale. While the tale undoubtedly registers women’s loss of power and status, which was felt across Europe, it also has as much to tell us about the Venetian perception of male sexuality. The historian Guido Ruggiero has shown that in early modern Venice young, unmarried male patricians were often perceived as destabilizing elements capable of upsetting societal order, a description which we could also apply to the pig boy in Straparola’s fairy tale. While women tended to be married off at puberty or shortly thereafter, men married much later, granting them a period of ‘adolescence.’ ‘This period was viewed with ambivalence; these young males – attractive as future scions of their families – were also feared in practice, as well as often uneasily laughed about in literature for their tendencies to deflower daughters, commit adultery with wives, and disturb the calm disciplined flow of business in urban society.’37 The rulers of the Venetian Republic feared that these young men, lacking a licit outlet for their sexual energy, would turn to illicit and unnatural activities, including fornication or sodomy, in order to satisfy their urges. Since in the eyes of fifteenth-century Venetian lawmakers ‘adultery, fornication, rape, homosexuality, and other sexual acts labeled criminal threatened the stability and order of family and community,’ the Republic began to enact stricter laws and enforce them with greater vigour in an effort to regulate sexual practice, and thus maintain civic order, measures which were still in effect in the six-

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teenth century.38 Of course, marriage also offered a means by which to satisfy the disruptive sexual desire of the young patrician male. In Straparola’s day, however, ‘the strong pressure on nobles to marry within their rank,’ coupled with fewer marriageable women because of sky-rocketing dowries, led to a tightening of the marriage market and a subsequent decline in patrician marriages.39 Certainly, some patrician males found mates by lowering their standards, by marrying the non-noble daughters of wealthy merchants,40 or in one case a courtesan.41 In 1526, the Republic sought to discourage such unions by passing a law governing patrician marriage which required that the lineage of both the bride and groom be recorded. From this point forward, ‘any young man seeking to establish his noble credentials had to be born of a marriage recorded in that register; lacking that documentation he would not be recognized as noble.’42 Certainly, the upper echelons of the Venetian aristocracy, those whose ancestors had served as doges, managed to preserve their status despite the occasional alliances with non-noble brides. Families of the lesser nobility could not hope to maintain or to improve their socialpolitical status if they contracted an interclass marriage. On account of this legislation, Venice witnessed an increase in the population of potentially disruptive single males, and presumably a corresponding elevation in the anxiety surrounding this segment of society. Interestingly, in Le piacevoli notti animal-human hybrids are born only to noble couples whose marriages have not yet produced an heir. In tale III.3 the rulers of Monferatto are said to be denied the blessing of children by God until the marchioness gives birth to a girl with a snake wrapped around her neck. In the tale of Ancilotto and Chiaretta, the triplets who are replaced by dogs are the couple’s first – and only – offspring. At the outset of each of these stories, both the fate of the aristocratic line and the fate of the state remain uncertain as the noble spouses await the birth of a child. The intertwined destinies of family and government in these fairy tales mirror the interrelationship of these same institutions in the Venetian Republic, for in both the maritime republic and the fictional English kingdom of the fairy tale of ‘Il re porco,’ any interruptions in the aristocratic lineage erode the very foundations of the state. It would be naïve to think that in such world only a desire to preserve his wife’s reputation and a need to maintain order motivate Galeotto to contemplate infanticide. Such rumours would raise doubts regarding the purity of the royal line and, in turn, question the pig boy’s right to the throne. What sways Galeotto from his initial resolve is the conviction

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that the pig boy ‘era generato da lui ed era il sangue suo’ (1:97) [was generated by him and was his blood]. The patriarch’s word temporarily neutralizes the pig boy’s monstrosity by testifying to his royal heritage, and thus secures him the right to govern. The articulation of the royal genealogy, however, does not completely annul the destructive power of the pig boy, for it is not simply rumour that undermines the king’s authority. Although the pig boy ‘parla umanamente’ [speaks like a human], his porcine morphology and comportment contest the validity of the paternal word, for he appears better adapted to the dung heap than to the court. Instead of dedicating himself to the study of statecraft, this prince spends his days wandering about the city, and ‘dove erano l’immondicie e le lordure, sí come fanno i porci, dentro se li cacciava’ (1:97) [he got into wherever there was garbage and filth, just as pigs do]. When the pig boy demands that his parents find him a bride, his mother responds by pointing out the impossibility of her son’s request: ‘O pazzo che tu sei, chi vuoi tu che per marito ti prenda? tu sei puzzolente e sporco, e tu vuoi che uno barone o cavaliere sua figliuola ti dia?’ (1:98) [Oh you are crazy, who do you want that would take you as a husband? You are smelly and dirty, and you want a baron or courtier to give you his daughter?]. Because the pig boy’s stench and his uncivilized behaviour drastically restrict the pool of available brides, it appears that even if the pig ascends the throne he will do so alone, and Galeotto and Ersilia’s line will end with their malformed son. However, the pig boy adopts the strategy of ‘marrying down’ as a means of continuing his family line despite the dearth of noble brides. He finds a bride in this tight marriage market by marrying below his station, perhaps comforted by the fact that his own offspring, although born to a common mother, will be able to prove their nobility through their father’s line. The pig boy’s diminished prospects for a bride also indirectly harm the realm by removing the possibility of creating politically fruitful alliances through marriage. While the marriage of his parents united two nations – Ersilia is the daughter of King Mattias of Hungary – the pig boy’s betrothal creates no advantageous political ties. Eventually, the pig boy’s sexual desire, like that of the young male patricians described by Ruggiero, becomes a direct threat to the security of the kingdom. When, after having gored his first wife to death, the pig boy demands a second wife, his mother initially refuses his request. He responds violently, ‘minacciando di porre ogni cosa in roina’ (1:100) [threatening to destroy everything]. This overt challenge to authority incites Galeotto to once again contemplate killing his son,

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but Ersilia’s maternal love diffuses her husband’s murderous rage and they eventually cede to their son’s demand. Only after the pig boy has been civilized through his third marriage and his bestial hide has been destroyed do the threats to the security of the kingdom cease.43 The pig boy is both a biological and a social monster who simultaneously menaces taxonomy and civic order. The pig king, like many social monsters, is ‘transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker; and so the monster and all that it embodies must be destroyed.’44 In Straparola’s fairy tale, the unmarried patrician pig boy’s desire, a desire frustrated in a marriage market restricted by his own deformity, becomes a disruptive force that challenges the throne and leads to acts of uxoricide. While Galeotto intellectually and physically erases the biological monster through Scholastic theory and the destruction of the pig’s hide, the social monster is erased through marriage to a woman who, although not of noble blood, succeeds in fulfilling her husband’s desires and perpetuating the agnatic line. Isabella’s story delights the brigata, and they can laugh at ‘messer lo porco tutto inlordato che accareciava la sua diletta moglie e cosí impiastracciato da fango con lei giaceva’ (1:105) [Monsieur Pig completely filthy who caressed his dear wife and so smeared with mud lay down with her], precisely because the need for the destruction of the monster is fulfilled by the end of the fairy tale. With this tale, Straparola offers his readers from the artisan classes a fantasy of social and economic betterment; however, he simultaneously renders this tale palatable for aristocratic readers by offering them a fantasy of an interclass marriage that serves to preserve both the nobility and the state. Ultimately, Isabella’s animal bridegroom tale functions not only to assuage early modern anxieties concerning the instability of the boundary between the animal and the human, but also to allay the brigata’s fear of the unmarried patrician male whose unbridled sexual desire threatens Venetian society. Thus, Isabella, like Varchi and Galeotto, performs a sort of double erasure at the end of her tale by eliminating both the biological and the social monstrosity that the pig boy represents.

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6 Foils and Fakes: Manufactured Monsters and the Dragon-Slayer

Vicious devourers or fierce guardians, dragons are a fixture in the myths, legends, and folklore of the Western tradition. Hercules slew the Hydra of Lerna as one of his seven labours; Saints George and Martha succeeded in converting infidels by smiting dragons; and countless legions of protagonists in both oral and literary fairy tales have proved their mettle by butchering these malevolent creatures. Even in contemporary feminist fairy tales such as The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, dragons threaten to devour princesses, although in these versions the female character often trades in the role of victim for that of victor by vanquishing the scaly beast herself. So prevalent is the dragon in European oral and literary traditions that twentieth-century folklorists identified the dragon-slayer tale as one of the fundamental tale types.1 Vladimir Propp indicates the encounter with the dragon as one of the elemental motifs of the Russian folktale, and Max Lüthi argues that ‘all fairy-tale heroes and heroines are in fact somehow or other dragon-slayers, rescuers, disenchanters, or victims of “dragons,” those rescued and freed.’2 In these stories, the monster functions as the necessary counterpart to the hero or heroine: its defeat testifies to the hero’s or heroine’s strength and cunning and earns him or her some kind of reward, be it marriage, wealth, or the spiritual gain of converting heathens.3 So closely intertwined are their fates that some critics have suggested that the monster is simply an extension of the hero, an alter ego or a sort of brother-father figure that must be slain so that the hero can achieve his goals.4 Historians and anthropologists have documented the diverse guises of dragons – and of their many-headed kin, hydras – in early modern European societies where these monsters figured as fantastic antagonists in legends, as the handiwork of charlatans displayed in the town square, as

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divine portents appearing on earth and in the sky, and as a living species.5 Although literary critics now recognize that early modern Europeans understood dragons and hydras to be both materially real creatures and imaginary monsters, they have not yet studied how this multifaceted identity affects the representation of this beast in early modern fairy tales.6 Despite the fruitful trend in fairy-tale studies of socio-historical analysis, dragons continue to be interpreted as universal symbols or narrative motifs, perhaps in part because of their persistent cross-cultural presence. In this chapter, I reject such universalizing interpretations as I undertake a reading of the hydra in Giambattista Basile’s fairy tale ‘Lo mercante,’ or ‘The Merchant’s Two Sons.’ Utilizing Straparola’s depictions of dragons as a point of comparison, I show that Basile creates a new type of monster in this tale that supersedes the traditional role of foil to the hero that his predecessor had granted to dragons in Le piacevoli notti. Through a close reading of the description of the many-headed dragon slain in this tale, I demonstrate that Basile purposefully recalls a monster known as the Venetian hydra, which was discussed widely in prodigy books and natural histories. By reconstructing a textual genealogy for the scientific accounts of this hydra, I reveal that by the time Basile wrote his tale, natural historians considered it to be a hoax crafted from fish skins rather than a marvel of nature. Basile’s engagement of scientific depictions of the Venetian hydra leads to a comic deflation of the epic struggle between hero and dragon, for the protagonist of ‘Lo mercante’ does battle with a manufactured monster instead of a ferocious beast. Basile’s ‘Lo mercante’ On the first day of storytelling in Lo cunto de li cunti, the seventh narrator, Ciulla, tells the slave Lucia and all those gathered at Tadeo’s palace that there was once a wealthy Neapolitan merchant named Antoniello who had two sons, Cienzo and Meo. One day the luckless Cienzo returns home from a game of throwing stones and informs his father that he has just inadvertently killed the king’s son. While Cienzo naively thinks that the king will forgive him this act, since it is a first offence, Antoniello angrily responds, ‘no te preggiarria tre caalle, c’hai male concinato, che si trasisse dove sì sciuto manco t’assecuro da le manzolle de lo re, ca tu saie c’hanno le stenche longhe ed arrivano pe tutto’ (142) [You’ve cooked your goose so well that I wouldn’t wager three calli on you. Even if you could creep back into what you came out of, I couldn’t save you from the long arm of the King, for you know that it reaches everywhere

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(1:65)]. He sends Cienzo off with money and two enchanted animals: a horse and a dog. Cienzo redeems himself by performing three valiant acts in the course of his travels, but he repeatedly refuses or defers the awards offered to him for these brave deeds. After having survived a night in a haunted cellar and having liberated a fairy from a band of marauders, he arrives at a kingdom terrorized by a fierce, seven-headed hydra. On the very day Princess Menechella is about to be sacrificed to the beast, Cienzo engages it in battle and lops off one head, which the dragon quickly reattaches by rubbing the bloody stump of its neck on a magic herb. Undaunted, Cienzo grits his teeth and severs all seven heads with one mighty blow. Immediately after this triumph, he gathers the magic herb the dragon used to reattach one of its heads and then cuts out the beast’s seven tongues. Instead of announcing his victory to Menechella’s father, King Perdisenno, Cienzo, exhausted, retires to the Osteria de l’Aurinale (The Urinal Inn), where he has rented a room. Overjoyed at his daughter’s safe return, the king issues a decree proclaiming that Menechella’s saviour should take her as his wife. When a rustic imposter attempts to usurp the dragon-slayer’s rightful place as royal spouse by presenting the severed heads, Cienzo commands his magic dog to carry a letter to the princess in which he declares himself the true victor and her rightful husband. After arriving at court, Cienzo displays the hydra’s tongues and wins the princess’s hand in marriage. His adventures do not end with his marriage, for after his wedding night he spies his beautiful neighbour at her window and resolves to meet her. Despite Menechella’s protests, Cienzo slips out of the palace intent on meeting the beautiful neighbour, who he discovers – to his dismay – is an evil fairy. She binds Cienzo in her enchanted tresses, thus preventing his escape. In this same moment, Meo, who has been searching for his brother Cienzo, enters the kingdom. Since the two brothers are physically indistinguishable, Menechella assumes Meo is her husband. When they retire to bed, Meo rebukes Menechella’s amorous advances with claims that his physician has prescribed abstinence. The next day, Meo discovers Cienzo’s predicament and frees him from the spell by killing the evil fairy. Rather than thanking his liberator, Cienzo decapitates him, mistakenly believing that Meo offended his honour by sleeping with Menechella. Upon learning of his brother’s chaste comportment from Menechella, Cienzo repents his fratricidal act. He then remembers the magic herb and revives his brother. At the diegetic level, Cienzo’s slaying of the hydra might appear to warrant little critical attention, because it adheres quite closely to the motif

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structure laid out by Vladimir Propp and Antti Aarne: Cienzo puts down the dragon, demonstrates his merit, and marries the princess. Indeed, the monster appeared to Basile’s twentieth-century English and Italian translators to be simply a foil to the hero, undeserving of any explication.7 And yet if we compare the monster in ‘Il mercante’ to the dragons and basilisks in Le piacevoli notti, it will become clear that Basile’s hydra is quite extraordinary. Minimalist Portraits: Straparola’s Dragons If we turn for a moment to Le piacevoli notti, we can deduce from an analysis of the three fairy tales in which dragons and basilisks appear that Straparola was not a ‘draconophile’. His interest in these monsters does not extend beyond their function in his tales as obstacles punctuating the hero’s trajectory toward a happy ending. He places these beasts in his heroes’ paths but wastes no words defining the particulars of their anatomy or detailing their behaviour. For example, in tale III.2, the Sultan of Cairo orders the protagonist Livoretto to retrieve the water of life, a precious liquid guarded by ‘duo fieri leoni e altretanti dragoni’ (1:194) [two fierce lions and as many dragons]. Should Livoretto refuse or fail to accomplish the task, the sultan will execute him. Named but never described, the two guardian dragons remain a vague presence in the tale. Livoretto never directly confronts the monsters, but instead dispatches a helpful falcon to retrieve the water that the sultan desires. He awaits the bird’s return at safe distance from the ferocious beasts. After being introduced as the guardians of the precious water, the dragons are not named again, so we can only assume that the falcon evaded them with relative ease. This minimalist portrayal of the dragons in the tale of Livoretto is typical of the entire collection. Straparola’s dragons are so lacking in specificity that, as long as they share the same narrative function (e.g. guardian or devourer), they are virtually interchangeable from one tale to the next. One could, for example, easily substitute the two ‘dragoni’ guarding the water of life in the fairy tale of Livoretto for the ‘serpente che per la bocca getta fuoco e veleno’ (2:516) [serpent that shoots fire and poison out of its mouth] and the ‘basilisco’ [basilisk] which guard a princess locked in a tower in tale VII.5. In this story, the three brothers learn of the fire-breathing serpent and the basilisk from a bird that informs them of the girl’s plight. When the narrator of the tale, Isabella, recounts how the eldest brother storms the tower to rescue the princess,

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no mention is made of these ferocious beasts. In both tales, the narrator pays such scant attention to the monsters that they are merely mentioned, and the protagonists, the potential dragon-slayers, never actually encounter the beasts. Even when a devouring dragon functions as the single greatest impediment on the hero’s path to happiness, as is the case in the tale of Cesarino da Berni (X.3), Straparola only cursorily draws the monster, favouring a few qualitative adjectives over precise physical or behavioural descriptions. Cesarino secretly raises a wolf, a lion, and a bear to be his loyal hunting companions. Once grown, the animals ensure that their master always returns home with plenty of game. One day, against his wishes, Cesarino’s mother reveals to their neighbours the key to his successful hunts. Fearing that the neighbours’ envy might spur them to steal his animals, Cesarino leaves home with the three beasts. After having travelled for some time, he meets a hermit who tells him of a dragon that preys upon the inhabitants of a nearby kingdom: ‘Non molto lunge di qua alberga un dracone, il cui anelito ammorba e avelena ogni cosa; né è persona che le possa resistere, ed è di tanta roina che sarà bisogno che i paesani tosto abbandonino il paese. Appresso questo fa mistieri ogni giorno di mandargli un corpo umano per suo cibo, altrimenti distruggerebbe il tutto; e per empia e mala fortuna dimani tocca la sorte alla figliuola del re, la quale e di bellezza e di virtù e di costumi avanza ogni altra donzella, né è cosa in lei che non sia degna, e veramente è grandissimo peccato che una tanta donzella senza lei colpa sí crudelmente perisca.’ (1:640) [‘Not far from here dwells a dragon whose breath infects and poisons everything, nor is there a person who can stand it, and it is so ruinous that it will make it so the villagers must abandon the village. They make it their business to send it a human body every day for its food, otherwise it would destroy everything. By pitiless bad fortune, tomorrow it is the king’s daughter’s turn, she who surpasses all other maidens in virtue and manners, nor is there anything about her that doesn’t deserve praise. Truly it is a great pity that such a maiden without fault should perish so cruelly.’]

Cesarino needs no more convincing to do battle with the dragon. The next day at dawn he and his three animal companions go to the lair of the ‘minaccioso dracone’ [threatening dragon], where they find the poor princess weeping. As Cesarino reassures the terrified girl, ‘con gran

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empito uscir fuori l’insaziabil dracone e con la bocca aperta cercava di lacerare e divorare la vaga e delicata giovane, la quale per paura tutta tremava’ (1:641) [with a great roar the insatiable dragon came out and with an open mouth tried to slash and devour the beautiful and delicate young woman, who was trembling out of fear]. Cesarino does not attack the dragon himself, but instead sends forth the lion, bear, and wolf, who succeed in felling the ‘ingorda belva’ [greedy brute] after prolonged combat. He then carefully cuts out the tongue of this ‘drago’ [dragon], places it in his bag, and leaves without uttering another word to the princess. She returns to her father’s castle frightened but unharmed. A peasant comes upon the carcass of the ‘orribil fiera’ [horrible beast], cuts off its head, and presents himself to the king claiming to have slain the ‘pauroso e fiero mostro’ [frightening and cruel monster]. In gratitude, the king grants the peasant permission to marry the princess. The hermit appears and reveals that Cesarino is the true dragon-slayer, causing the king to halt the ceremony. Soon after, Cesarino arrives at the castle and proves himself to be the real hero by producing the dragon’s tongue, which ‘era di estrema grandezza, né mai per l’adietro fu la maggior veduta’ (2:644) [was extremely large, nor had a larger one ever been seen]. The king recognizes Cesarino as the true dragon-slayer and bestows upon him his daughter’s hand in marriage. The imposter, like the dragon before him, is swiftly decapitated. Certainly, in this fairy tale in which the dragon serves as the central obstacle to the hero’s happy ending rather than as one of many trials facing the hero, Straparola provides a more detailed description of the monster. The narrator describes Cesarino’s foe as an insatiable dragon (‘insaziabile dracone’), a greedy brute (‘ingorda belva’), a horrible wild beast (‘orribil fiera’), and a frightening and fierce monster (‘pauroso e fiero mostro’). Straparola matches adjectives and nouns creating word pairs that succeed in conveying the terribleness of the creature yet do little to evoke a precise image. If we take the enormous tongue as an indicator, this dragon seems quite large. Beyond this fact, however, we do not know the beast’s dimensions, nor are any other anatomical details provided, such as whether it possesses a long tail or wings, or whether it is a biped or quadruped. Action takes precedence over description here and the narrator, Alteria, is not interested in what the dragon is but in what it does, and more specifically, how it interacts with the hero. The dragon must be described as an imposing foe so that the reader will come to value the strength of Cesarino’s animals, and by association, the valour of their master.

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Basile’s Hydra: Evil Brute, Bird Cage, and Cocoon While in regard to plot, Basile’s fairy tale ‘Lo mercante’ closely resembles Straparola’s tale of Cesarino, the two monsters could not be more different. A number of the traits attributed to the hydra slain by Basile’s Cienzo distance the creature from its legendary counterparts. For example, Basile’s hydra lacks the astounding regenerative powers usually attributed to this monster, and it must rely instead on a sort of monstrous homeopathy in order to heal itself and re-enter the battle. In classical mythology, the Hydra of Lerna, slain by Hercules during his second labour, possesses the power to spontaneously replace any single head that the hero manages to lop off with two new ones.8 Early modern natural histories also attributed this remarkable capacity to the hydra. Instead of instantly regenerating a new one, the wounded creature in Basile’s tale must rub its bloody neck on a magic herb in order to reattach the severed head. If the monster is the measure of the hero, then Cienzo is no Hercules, for his opponent is less formidable. Cienzo’s foil also lacks the speed and spontaneity in responding to the blows of its attacker that render the Hydra of Lerna such a terrifying foe. Certainly, like Hercules, who dons the lion of Nemea’s hide and renders his arrows poisonous by dipping them into the hydra’s blood, Cienzo is savvy enough to profit from the magic herb with which the hydra reattached its severed head. He does so, however, not to increase his own strength or overcome further obstacles, but to correct his own mistake and undo his fratricidal act. The various rhetorical figures that portray this encounter similarly undermine the reader’s expectations of a worthy opponent that tests and proves both the hero’s mental agility and his physical prowess, for the monster we find before us is consistently described in terms of diminutive natural or domestic objects. For example, before he engages in battle, Cienzo overhears the lament of the court ladies who accompany Menechella to the place where she is to be sacrificed. These noblewomen cry out: Chi ’nce l’avesse ditto a sta scura figliola de fare cessione de li beni de la vita ’n cuorpo a sta mala vestia? chi ’nce l’avesse ditto a sto bello cardillo de avere pe gaiola lo ventre de no dragone? chi ’nce l’avesse ditto a sto bello agnelillo de lassare la semmenta de sto stame vitale drinto a sto nigro fuollaro? (148) [Who could have thought that this maiden would give up the joys of life

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inside the body of this evil brute! Who would have thought that this lovely goldfinch should be caged in the belly of a dragon? Who would have thought that this beautiful silkworm would have left the seed of its vital stamen in a black cocoon? (1:69–70)]

In this moment of great anticipation, when the ferocity of the dragon should be underscored in order to valorize the hero, we find a decrescendo of rhetorical figures in which the dragon shrinks before our eyes, transforming from an evil beast into a harmless cocoon. The wailing women assign the traditional function of the devourer – and thus a container for its victims – to the beast that Cienzo will slay, but they reformulate the relationship between the container and the contained in ever less threatening terms. In this lament, the wild dragon first becomes a cage for the princess-goldfinch, a container associated with domestication. Next, the monster is reduced to a shell of its former self; it is depicted as a mere cocoon, the inert, protective casing manufactured by the princess-silkworm. No longer an active devourer, the dragon through these images becomes simply a passive vessel that seems to suggest that the princess will emerge from it, like a butterfly, in a more mature and beautiful state. In the battle scene, the narrator continues to utilize similes that compare the dragon to unthreatening, harmless objects, deflating what should be a moment of epic triumph for the hero. Cienzo succeeds in chopping off one head with his first blow, but ‘lo dragone, ’mbroscinato lo cuollo a certa erva poco lontano, lo ’nzeccaie subeto a la capo, comme lacerta quanno se iogne a la coda’ (148, 150) [the dragon rubbed his neck on a plant which was growing close by and immediately the head reattached itself: just as a lizard joins itself on at the tail (1:70)]. Transformed in Basile’s narrative from an intrinsic force to the result of an external intervention, the ability to overcome amputation that lies at the heart of the hydra’s monstrous power is further diminished through the comparison to what was then held as the amazing, but completely natural, capability of lizards to reattach their severed tails. Rather than underscoring the ferocity of Cienzo’s foe, this simile reduces the monster to a mini-dragon, to an everyday reptile, a mere lizard. The subversion of the hydra’s ferocity through similes continues in the final moments of the battle. Cienzo, ‘stregnuto li diente, auzaie no cuorpo cossì spotestato che le tagliaie ’n truonco tutte sette le capo, che se ne sautaro da lo cuollo comm’a cecere da la cocchiara’ (150) [clenching his teeth, gave such a tremendous blow that he cut off all the seven heads at once, and they

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leapt from the dragon’s neck like chickpeas rolling off a ladle (1:70)].9 Once again, a simile serves to reduce the magnificence of Cienzo’s final blow to his opponent: the gaping maws of the devouring beast become harmless legumes that tumble from a spoon; the ferocious monster transforms into a humble comestible that is harvested, not hunted. In this tale Basile creates a perceptible tension between the narrative function of the hydra as a worthy foil to the hero and the rhetorical language that depicts this encounter. Just as at other moments in Lo cunto when Basile describes vulgar scenes with citations from lofty literary texts, here the comedy arises from an unexpected juxtaposition, from the depiction of the epic struggle with a ferocious beast through comparisons to lowly, small objects. While on the diegetic level the story exhibits all the motifs of the typical dragon-slayer tale and we arrive at a happy ending in which the hero weds the princess, the accumulation of similes and metaphors that consistently depict the monster in terms of small or harmless objects seems to tell a different story, one in which the hero remains the victor, but of a mediocre foe. In order to understand this rhetorical subversion of the foil and, because of their dialectical relationship, of the hero, we must insert the tale into its cultural context. Only then can we recuperate the full range of associations that the figure of this seven-headed hydra would have evoked in the minds of Basile and his earliest readers. A Typology of Dragons: Divine, Natural, Artificial, and Fabulous The German physician Martin Weinrich wrote in De ortu mostrorum (1595) that the category of the monstrous could be further divided into four distinct subcategories: the divine, the natural, the artificial, and the fabulous.10 While for most modern readers dragons and hydras are restricted to the category of the fabulous, in Basile’s day they were also believed to be a naturally occurring species, signs of divine favour or wrath, and manufactured monsters shaped from dried animal skins by skilled taxidermists. Thus they were wholly monstrous monsters that partook in all four of Weinrich’s subcategories. If we are to understand why Basile undermines his protagonist’s victory through the rhetorical language in the tale, we must recuperate the lost identities of this monster, for Basile’s game here, as we shall see, is once again one of category confusion. This discursive move is akin – although not identical – to his use of Petrarchan verse to depict scatological scenes in the tale ‘Lo scarafone, lo sorece, e lo grillo’ [The Cockroach, the Mouse, and the

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Cricket] discussed in chapter 2. Rather than bringing low revered literary texts, through references to the teratological canon in ‘Lo mercante’ Basile places a manufactured monster where one would expect to find a fabulous hydra. Regardless of whether a dragon was divine, natural, artificial, or fabulous, its monstrosity derived from its hybrid body, a body that exhibits a transgressive morphology and refutes taxonomic boundaries. In medieval taxonomies the vast animal kingdom was neatly organized under three of the four fundamental elements: air, water, and earth. Bestiaries, thus, were often subdivided into three sections: birds figured as creatures of the air, fish and reptiles as of the water, and mammals as of the earth.11 While dragons appeared frequently alongside fish and reptiles in these bestiaries, their bodies implicitly confounded the very categories that sought to regulate them. Their squamous biped or quadruped form clearly linked them to both fish and reptiles, yet they also often possessed wings like birds. Equally ambiguous was the habitat of these beasts, for though they often dwelt underground or in the water, they nonetheless had the power of flight.12 The horror of these creatures did not end here. Dragons tended to be inordinately large, fire-breathing, and venomous. On the pages of medieval bestiaries, and later of early modern natural histories, the dragon dwelt in close proximity to two other serpentine monsters: the hydra and the basilisk. The seven- or nine-headed hydra can be considered a cousin of the dragon; its monstrosity lies in its multiplicity and in its astounding power to spontaneously regenerate its heads whenever they are severed.13 The diminutive basilisk – Pliny claimed these creatures measured only twelve inches in length – was a serpent that walked upright and whose mere odour or look could kill.14 Although particularly interesting species inhabited the exotic lands of India and Ethiopia, natural dragons were thought to be dwelling just outside European city walls. For example, the renowned collector and naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, ‘an unashamed draconophile,’ reported to his peers the episode of a dragon caught in the Bolognese countryside on 13 May 1572.15 Aldrovandi personally examined the monstrous corpse, interpreted it as a good omen for the newly invested pope, and then instructed illustrators in his employ to produce an accurate rendering of the beast, which he quickly circulated throughout Italy. The discovery of this dragon so inspired Aldrovandi that he set to work on a volume tentatively titled Dracologia, which would be published posthumously as Serpentum et draconum historiae (1640).16 This particular dragon sighting was by no means a singular event on the Italian peninsula.

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Almost one hundred years after Aldrovandi’s encounter, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, then teaching at the Collegio Romano, related the account of a hunter who came upon a flying dragon somewhat larger than a vulture while tramping through the salt marshes near Rome in November 1660.17 The hunter managed to strike the beast down but was himself mortally wounded in the struggle. As his final hour drew near, his body turned green from the monster’s venom, and shortly thereafter the valiant man died. Although the monster’s body decomposed quickly in the swamp, its head was carried back to Rome, where Kircher himself authenticated it before placing it on display in his museum. For Kircher and Aldrovandi, dragons were not merely the fictional antagonists of fairy tales and legends but were perceived to be a real – albeit rare – menace to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian society, a menace whose body was at once a prophetic sign and a natural wonder. Thus, many of Basile’s contemporaries perceived dragons to be both fictional antagonists and biological realities. In both Aldrovandi’s tome on dragons and Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus, the dragon is no longer the foil par excellence for the fairy-tale hero but rather an object of scientific scrutiny. In short, the roles of the hero and the destructive beast are radically rewritten: the dragon-slayer is displaced by the naturalist, the sword by science. The mighty hunter assumes a secondary importance, reduced to the mere deliverer of the monstrous body, a facilitator for the true hero, the man of science, who interprets the corpse either as a prophetic sign or as an anatomical marvel before exhibiting it in his collection of natural wonders. It is prestige among peers, not a princess or kingdom, that is the naturalist’s final reward. The dragon’s monstrosity is undone not by the lance but by the scientific gaze that analyses, interprets, and catalogues the monster, normalizing its wondrous body within an orderly taxonomy. Like dragons, hydras and basilisks appeared in the teratological canon as divine signs, manufactured monsters, legendary foes, and living species, although by the early seventeenth century, some natural philosophers like Aldrovandi had begun to doubt, or even outright refute, their existence as biological entities. Natural and Fabulous Dragons in Le piacevoli notti In Le piacevoli notti, Straparola depicts basilisks both as marvellous antagonists for his fairy-tale heroes and as a naturally occurring species. The biological basilisk, identifiable and differentiated from its marvellous counterparts by copious details regarding its physiology, never enters

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into a fairy tale. Instead, it is fixed at a safe distance from the fabulous basilisks of the fairy tales in an enigma in the frame tale. On the fifth night of storytelling after recounting the fairy tale of Guerrino and the wildman, Eritrea proposes the following riddle to her companions: Nasce un fiero animal d’un picciol seme c’ha in odio per natura ogni persona; di mirarlo ciascun paventa e teme, ch’uccide altrui, n’a se stesso perdona; a tutto ov’egli d’ognintorno preme il valor toglie, e a morte in preda dona; arbori secca e da per tutto infetta: mai fiera fu piú cruda e maladetta. (1:342) [A fierce animal is born from a small seed That by nature hates all people Everyone is frightened and afraid to look at it Because it kills others, and does not spare itself, From everything that feels his power It steals valour and delivers them into the hands of death, It withers trees and infects all around, There has never been such a cruel and cursed beast.]

The company offer various solutions but no one succeeds in finding the correct answer to the puzzle. Finally, Eritrea enlightens her friends by explaining, ‘Io questo fiero animale non penso esser altro se no il basilisco, il quale odia altrui e con l’acuta vista l’uccide; e vedendosi se stesso, muore’ (1:342) [This fierce animal, I think, is none other than the basilisk that hates others and kills with its piercing gaze, and upon seeing itself dies]. Although Eritrea’s companions fail to peer beneath the ‘corteccia’ of her riddle, her description of the basilisk’s origins and behaviour reads like a learned natural history in verse. It is surprising that her companions fail to provide the answer to her enigma, for the basilisk appears in some of the earliest works of Western zoology: Pliny’s Natural History and medieval bestiaries. Pliny supplies the following description of this monster in Book VIII, chapter 33: The basilisk serpent ... is native of the province of Cyrenaica, not more than twelve inches long, and adorned with a bright white marking on the head

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like a sort of diadem. It routs all snakes with its hiss, and does not move its body forward in manifold coils like other snakes but advancing with its middle raised high. It kills bushes not only by its touch but also by its breath, scorches up grass and bursts rocks. Its effect on other animals is disastrous: it is believed that once one was killed with a spear by a man on horseback and the infection rising through the spear killed not only the rider, but also the horse.18

The authors of medieval bestiaries painted an almost identical portrait of the deadly basilisk.19 By the mid-sixteenth century, discussions of the basilisk circulated widely in both translations and editions of classical texts and contemporary treatises on natural history. In the years immediately preceding the publication of Le piacevoli notti, the renowned botanist Andrea Mattioli declared that it was impossible to discern the creature’s true history among these many diverse descriptions.20 The difficulty of determining the true history of this creature did not deter natural philosophers from including it alongside more common species in their treatises. Eritrea’s enigma clearly draws upon this learned tradition. The fearsome basilisk in her rhyme, like the ones described by Pliny and Mattioli, can kill merely by gazing upon its victim, scorch vegetation, and infect any living being that approaches. She asserts that the monster is born from a ‘picciol seme’ [a small seed], a trait that likens her riddle to Mattioli’s claim that some people believe the basilisk to be born from an old rooster’s egg, a calcified deposit resembling an egg that often forms in older fowl.21 In composing the enigmas, Straparola most likely reworked oral material into a literary form, borrowed others from existing popular collections in print, and took a few from more learned sources.22 Giuseppe Rua has suggested that when an enigma’s solution is a legendary animal, such as the basilisk (V.1), the unicorn (XIII.1), or the catoblepas (XIII.7),23 Straparola employed the third technique, gathering information from learned texts, such as natural histories and epic poems, to formulate the octave.24 Ultimately, Straparola’s exact source for this enigma is less crucial to our discussion than his decision to insert this scientifically informed portrait of a basilisk in the frame tale outside of the narrative space of his fairy tales. In his dragon-slayer fairy tales, Straparola limits his description of the monster so that the reader remains impressed by its actions and function as a guardian or devourer without being distracted by descriptive details to contemplate the ontological status of this creature

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rather than follow the unfolding plot. Only cursorily described, the dragons and basilisks of the fairy tales serve only as foils to the heroes who encounter them; their defeat demonstrates the protagonists’ cunning or physical prowess. In this way, Straparola enforces the strict division that he seeks to maintain in Le piacevoli notti between fairy tales and ‘facts’ or casi, between monstrosities found on the pages of learned treatises and those inhabiting the female narrators’ fairy tales. The Hoax of the Venetian Hydra As with Straparola’s basilisk enigma, Basile’s detailed description of the hydra’s somatic particulars recalls a monster frequently discussed in the prophetic and scientific texts in the teratological canon. Tellingly, while Basile quickly dispenses with the description of the dragons that appear in four other tales of Lo cunto, much as Straparola had done in Le piacevoli notti, he lingers over the physical description of this hydra, signalling the ontological – as opposed to narrative – importance of this creature.25 When Cienzo arrives at a kingdom where the palaces are draped in black and asks why the people are in mourning, he learns that the monster terrorizing these people ‘aveva le centre de gallo, la capo de gatto, l’uocchie de fuoco, le bocche de cane corzo, l’ascelle de sporteglione, le granfe d’urzo, la coda de serpe’ (148) [had the crest of a cock, the head of a cat, eyes of fire, jaws of a race-hound, the wings of a bat, the claws of a bear and the tail of a serpent] (1:69). Surely, by equating each body part to a different species, Basile seeks to convey the creature’s terrifying hybridity;26 however, when he describes the dragon that Cienzo slays as a hydra with seven crested heads and a serpentlike tail, he also likens the fairy-tale monster to the hydra pictured in figure 6.1. This engraving first appeared in Europe in Konrad Lykosthenes’ Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon, a richly illustrated compendium of portents published by the Swiss humanist in 1557. By chronologically cataloguing portents from the beginning of Creation through his own day, Lykosthenes sought to teach Christians to recognize the divine messages that God transmitted to men through these marvellous occurrences.27 Admittedly, this image does not correspond exactly to Basile’s description of the beast that attempts to devour Princess Menechella, since the fairy-tale hydra is said to possess batlike wings; yet the similarities between the two far outweigh this single difference. Both the hydra in figure 6.1 and that described by Basile share the curious crests; heads and jaws more mammalian than serpentine; broad, flat ursine paws; and a snakelike tail. It is

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Figure 6.1 Konrad Lykosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (Basel, 1557). Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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easy to imagine that this hydra would have been a ready point of reference for Basile and his earliest reading public, as familiar as those manyheaded beasts in chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation and classical mythology, because its story and image were reprinted numerous times in a variety of Latin and vernacular texts in the seventy years preceding the publication of Lo cunto de li cunti.28 Lykosthenes does not describe this hydra as the bearer of a specific holy message but instead depicts the monster as the object of international trade. In a single sentence, the Swiss humanist recounts that the hydra, which he describes as a ‘serpens monstrosus’ with seven crowned heads and two feet, was carried in January, 1530 from Turkey to Venice and then sent to the king of France, Francis I. Lykosthenes’ description includes one other detail: the estimated worth of this monstrous beast was six thousand ducats. As the story of this hydra reached an ever-widening audience, the details of the monster’s westward journey as commodity changed little in the many retellings, but the interpretation of the significance of its body altered considerably. What was for Lykosthenes a divine portent was later understood by others to be either a natural marvel or a hoax. Like Lykosthenes’ Prodigiorum, Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses (1560) aimed to reform its readers through the contemplation of the prodigies on its pages, which in turn was intended to spur the reader to expunge his or her own vices, although the copious illustrations and marvellous tales surely contributed to this work’s great success during the sixteenth century.29 In the Histoires prodigieuses, Boaistuau cites Lykosthenes’ story of the hydra and muses: ‘Si la chose est veritable, comme il est vraysemblable (eu esgard a l’authorité de celuy qui la décrit) je croy que nature n’ayt rien produict de plus esmerveillable entre tous les Monstres de la terre’ [If it is a true thing (as it is likely to have been, judging by the authority of the one who describes it) I believe that nature has never produced a more marvellous creature among all the monsters of the earth].30 Since he was never able to verify that the defunct king ever actually owned this creature, Boaistuau tentatively questions its authenticity. Although lacking this physical proof of the beast’s existence, Boaistuau concludes this chapter by suggesting that the monster is both a portent and a natural marvel, the most marvellous among all the monsters of the earth. Undoubtedly, his conclusion is motivated in part by the realization that an assertion of authenticity would be more likely to encourage his readers to reform than would the unmasking of a hoax. The Swiss natural philosopher and humanist Konrad Gesner, however,

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did not readily accept the biological origins of the Venetian hydra, nor did he believe that the image that often accompanied this tale depicted a member of any real species. Gesner discusses this hydra and reprints the same image found in Lykosthenes and Boaistuau in two volumes of his six-volume Historia animalium: first in the fourth book, on fish (published in 1558), and then again in the fifth book, dedicated to serpents (published in 1587).31 The tale he relates concerning this fantastic monster in a chapter entitled ‘De hydra fabulosa’ differs from Lykosthenes’ and Boaistuau’s reports, although the creature’s origins in the East and its presence in Venice remain constants. Following a discussion of the legendary Hydra of Lerna that opens the chapter, as well as a list of relevant proverbs derived from this legend, Gesner writes that some mountebanks in Venice had been exhibiting to a credulous public a broadsheet with the engraving of a hydra and an inscription that recounted the tale of a seven-headed hydra taken from Turkey to Venice in 550, insisting that it was a portrait of a once-living monster (figure 6.2). From Gesner’s account, we know that by 1558 this story had crossed the Alps and entered Italy through routes of popular transmission; in a few short years, Italian authors would be citing Lykosthenes, Boaistuau, and Gesner in their own treatises on monsters.32 According to Gesner, the inscription on the broadsheet noted the resemblance of the beast’s crests to Turkish hats and interpreted the monster as a bad omen for the Turkish nation, under whose government it had been born. In commenting on this multicephalic beast, Gesner displays the sort of analytical scepticism one would expect from a natural philosopher creating a taxonomy and thus distinguishing among the somatic types of different species. Since the ‘auriculem, lingua, nasus, facies, toto genere a serpentium natura discrepant’ [ears, tongues, noses, and faces are inconsistent with the nature of serpents], he doubted that the Venetian hydra was once a living creature.33 As for another seven-headed dragon rumoured to be held in the ducal treasury of Venice, Gesner also dismissed this as a hoax, observing that should it exist, it would be one of the great marvels of nature. Gesner’s scepticism prevailed in the discussions of this monster published after Boaistuau’s Histoires. For example, Edward Topsell in The Historie of Serpents (1608), which is a free translation of Gesner’s De serpentium natura, observed ‘that there should be a serpent with seven heads, I think it unpossible.’34 In Serpentum et draconum historiae, 35 Aldrovandi repeats almost verbatim Gesner’s description of the Venetian hydra and affirms that his Swiss colleague was never able to convince himself that this was a real dragon. Aldrovandi similarly declares another hydra (figure 6.3),

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Figure 6.2 Konrad Gesner, Historia animalium, Vol. 3 (Tiguri, 1551). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

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Figure 6.3 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Serpentum et draconum historiae (Bologna, 1640). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

said to be the property of a Ferrarese courtier at the Gonzaga court, to be a fraud, a manufactured monster. Manufacturing Monsters: ‘Voilà la fabrique du Basilisc’ While today this sort of creative taxidermy is found most often at roadside attractions or in carnival sideshows, in Basile’s day artificial monsters were found in both popular and learned spaces in Italy, in both the public square and the court or civic natural history collection. The secrets of this craft were revealed in natural histories, museum catalogues, and the letters of travellers who viewed the fakes during their sojourns in Italy. In a letter written in Verona on 16 December 1687, the French traveller Maximilien Misson described how a ray fish could be transformed into a basilisk convincingly enough to fool thousands of people. In the epistle, printed in Nouveau voyage d’Italie, Misson explained: Je ne sçai si vous n’avez jamais vu de ces prétendus animaux qu’on appelle des Basilics. Celà a un certain petit air dragon qui est assez plaisant: l’inventione en est jolie, e mille gens y font trompez. Cependant ce n’est rien autre chose ch’une petite raye: on tourne ce poisson d’une certain maniere; on

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lui è leve les nageoires en formes d’aîles; on lui accommode une petite langue en forme de dard; on ajoûte des griffes, des yeux d’émail, ave quelques autres petites pieces adroitment raportées; et voilà la fabrique du Basilic.36 [I do not know if you have ever seen any of these fake animals they call the Basilisk. It bears a certain resemblance to a dragon that is quite pleasing: it is a nice invention and thousands of people have been fooled. However, it is nothing but a small ray fish. They bend the fish in a certain manner, lift the fins to form wings, and create a small, arrow-shaped tongue for it. They add claws and enamel eyes as well as other cleverly assembled small pieces. And voilà! That’s how they construct a Basilisk.]

Misson’s testimony represents one of the more detailed descriptions of this craft, but he was certainly not the first author to reveal the true origins of these monsters.37 Indeed, some hundred years earlier Gesner described a similar process by which charlatans skilled in the art of taxidermy dried the flat, pliable skins of the ray fish and then shaped them into strange serpents or winged dragons.38 In his discussion of the ray fish, Gesner even provided an illustration of one result that could be achieved by such techniques (figure 6.4). Not surprisingly, Venice, with its geographic proximity to and economic dependence upon both the sea and exotic Eastern markets, was the centre for the manufacture of these monsters. Practitioners of this art had ready access to prime materials and could credibly claim their creations’ origins in faraway lands. Perhaps out of a sense of civic pride, the more discerning citizens of the Serenissima held that the best of these tricksters were not really Venetian but rather immigrants from Dalmatia who worked in the city peddling their craft to collectors or displaying creatures like the one pictured in figure 6.5 on a stage in the piazza as the true basilisk.39 In the popular space of the piazza, artificial monsters became illustrative props for a type of dragon-slayer tale told by quacks hoping to boost the sales of their antivenom elixirs. In the town square, dried basilisks and dragons were incorporated into performances and exploited as marketing tools. In La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1587), a description of the world’s professions and trades, Tommaso Garzoni describes this practice in the chapter dedicated to charlatans, quacks, and street performers. In this passage he links the display of a manufactured monster, specifically the exhibition of a dead basilisk, with the narration of a tale (he uses the terms favola and novella). Garzoni tells of a

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Figure 6.4 Konrad Gesner, Historia animalium, Vol. 2 (Tiguri, 1551). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

certain Mastro Paolo of Arezzo who launches into his spiel by declaring himself a direct descendant of St Paul. With this genealogy Mastro Paolo intimates that he, like his holy forefather, who miraculously survived viper bites in Malta, is immune to the venom of serpents. As he puts forth his credentials, he holds a variety of live serpents above the heads of the horrified crowd. Having sufficiently frightened his public, he begins to spin a yarn (tesse una favola) about how he captured all of the serpents while the farmers were in the fields harvesting the wheat, thus freeing the town from the great danger from those cursed snakes.40 This story has the desired effect on those gathered: they are convinced both of the efficacy of the elixir and of their need for it. The charlatan does not stop here, however, because he returns once again to dig around in the boxes, and he pulls out an asp, a dead basilisk, a crocodile brought from Egypt, a tarantula from the country, a lizard from India, and by displaying these serpents he strikes fear in the crowd, who, trembling, grab their wallets.41 With this final spectacle the charlatan seals the deal, as the fearful crowd lines up to purchase the elixir. So common were these manufactured monsters that any respectable early modern museum exhibited one among its treasures. Misson, in fact, was inspired to reveal the secrets of the charlatans’ trade after having viewed an artificial basilisk in the ‘cabinet’ of the Veronese collector Count Lodovico Moscardo, who had obtained it from the estate of another esteemed Veronese collector, the apothecary Francesco Calzolari (figure 6.5). Aldrovandi’s collection included the dried remains of

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Figure 6.5 Benedetto Ceruti and Andrea Chiocco, Musaeum Franc. Calceolari (Verona, 1622). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

a rather petite dragon, only slightly larger than a human hand, which can still be seen today in the museum dedicated to the naturalist in Bologna. While the number of visitors to these collections was necessarily limited, early modern Italians across the peninsula could view these manufactured monsters in well-illustrated museum catalogues.42 More often than not, the authors of museum catalogues and natural histories denounced these dried dragons as fakes. In De piscibus,43 Aldrovandi recognized the two alleged dragons in figures 6.6 and 6.7 to be frauds used to fool the ignorant masses. The titles for these engravings – ‘Raia exiccata et concinnata ad formam Draconis’ and ‘Draco effictus ex raia,’ respectively – clearly indicate that these ‘monsters’ were formed from ray fish. On occasion, however, less discerning viewers could be duped. Boaistuau, for example, provides his readers with the image of a dragon (or ‘hideous serpent,’ as he calls it) that he examined personally in a cabinet of curiosities in Paris. While he admits that some monstrous specimens displayed in museums and Wunderkammern are

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Figure 6.6 Ulisse Aldrovandi, De piscibus (Bologna, 1613). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

counterfeits, as scientists like Gesner have warned, Boaistuau maintains that the creature he viewed in Paris did not belong to this category of hoaxes. In fact, all others who had seen it agreed that it had once been a living creature.44 While inevitably some viewers, like Boaistuau, were tricked into thinking that certain monocephalic manufactured dragons were actually the remains of once-living monsters, artificial hydras were consistently dismissed as frauds. Aldrovandi, as we have noted above, declared to be fakes both the hydra allegedly brought from Turkey and the Ferrarese courtier’s hydra (figure 6.3). Even the mere rumour of a hydra squirrelled away in the treasury of the Serenissima prompted naturalists like Gesner, Aldrovandi, and Topsell to denounce this monster – if it existed at all – as a hoax.45 The English traveller John Evelyn clearly understood that the specimen he observed on 4 May 1645, at the Villa Ludovisi in Rome, was a fake when he described it in his Diary as being ‘not a foot long; the three necks and fifteen heads seem to be but patched up with several pieces of serpents’ skins.’46 Conceivably, the considerable amount of sewing and patching required to construct one of these multi-limbed monsters made it easier to detect traces of the craftsman’s hand. While it is impossible to ascertain for certain if Basile ever looked on

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Figure 6.7 Ulisse Aldrovandi, De piscibus (Bologna, 1613). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

when a charlatan displayed a manufactured monster for economic gain, we can be sure that he viewed an artificial hydra during his tenure at the Gonzaga court between 1612 and 1613, when he joined his sister Adriana at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. In documents written before his death in 1605, Aldrovandi included the Gonzagas in his list of owners of artificial hydras, so we can assume that the hydra’s presence in the Gonzaga collection predates Basile’s arrival in Mantua. Furthermore, we know from an account written by the German architect Josef Furtembach that the hydra was still in the court’s possession in 1627. Furtembach describes the collection as including a unicorn horn, a stuffed walrus, five crocodiles, an armadillo, petrified wood, the mummified head of a man, and ‘un’idra, o drago, con sette teste ed altrettanti colli, lunga tre piedi, elegantamente imbottita, curiosa a vedersi’ [a hydra or dragon, with seven heads and as many necks, three feet long, elegantly stuffed, a curious thing to see].47 Thus it is most probable that at some moment during his stay at the Gonzaga court, Basile wandered through the duke’s renowned natural history collection and inspected this seven-headed dragon firsthand. Of course, Basile and his educated court audience could very well have examined artificial dragons in the pages of museum catalogues, natural histories, and prodigy books discussed above.

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Metaphor and Metamorphosis By the time Basile was writing Lo cunto, the interest in portents had waned and naturalists had discounted the hydra as a living species. The tension between the diegetic and extradiegetic levels in Basile’s tale results in a slippage between the remaining two subcategories of the monstrous, between the ferocious, legendary hydra and its petite, artificial counterpart exhibited in museums and city squares. For if in its monstrous multiplicity and narrative function Cienzo’s foe recalls the legendary monster slain by Hercules, in its diminished dimensions it more closely resembles the ‘not a foot long’ hydra measured in Rome by the British traveller John Evelyn, and the ‘three-foot-long’ hydra at the Gonzaga court. But why, we may ask, would Basile want to forge a link between manufactured monsters and the creature slain by his hero? We might be tempted to conclude that the subversion of the foil serves to define the defects of this hero, who is often thwarted by his own impulsive behaviour. Since he does manage to slay the hydra by dint of his own strength and cunning, Cienzo is not the typical incompetent fairy-tale protagonist who achieves a happy ending through sheer luck; yet neither is he a Hercules. Instead, Cienzo is, as the proverb that closes the tale suggests, a crooked boat that sails straight into port. He kills the king’s son in a youthful game, attempts to betray his wife, and decapitates his brother, but he manages to land on his feet through a combination of his own efforts and the aid of his family. At each of these junctures Cienzo is berated for his actions in tirades by his father, by his wife, and finally by his own self-accusation, but he never seems to acquire the self-knowledge or personal insight that would enable him to avoid such mistakes in the future. To some extent, then, the diminished foil reflects the limits of this hero. The hydra, however, functions in this tale as much more than a simple foil to the hero; it becomes a stage for the display of Basile’s linguistic virtuosity, his mastery of the metamorphic power of language. It is important to recall that European baroque culture exhibited a fascination with both metamorphosis and metaphor.48 Social and economic strife, the continued fracturing of previously unified religious belief, and the unravelling of Aristotelian cosmology before Galileo’s theories of the universe all contributed to the destabilization of long-held assumptions in baroque Italy, which in turn fostered a cultural obsession with all sorts of transformations.49 Thus it is no surprise that Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so popular across Europe during the sixteenth century, continued to cap-

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tivate Italian writers in the early seventeenth century.50 In an age that privileged novelty over tradition, Basile created a new book of metamorphoses through the adoption of the fairy tale, a genre for which transformations – be they physical, social, or economic – serve as a defining characteristic. The tales of Lo cunto brim with remarkable instances of transformation: trees become fairies, animals become princes, excrement becomes gold, merchant-class protagonists like Cienzo marry into royal families, and those born in penury acquire mountains of wealth. Such metamorphoses are inextricably bound to Basile’s preferred rhetorical figure, the metaphor. In From Court to Forest, Nancy Canepa carefully maps the relationship between metaphor and metamorphosis in Lo cunto, noting that ‘underlying Basile’s Baroque use of metaphor is a recognition of the unlimited metamorphosis of the world’s phenomena which can only lead to an awareness of the fundamental instability of all identities.’51 She goes on to explain that ‘the fairy-tale theme of metamorphosis is an ideal springboard for Basile’s particular rhetorical and cultural sensibility, in which incessant, extravagant metaphor is symptomatic of a recognition of the potentially limitless metamorphosis of the world’s objects.’52 Whether we understand metamorphosis macrocosmically as the ‘vehicle whereby individuals are transported among the layers’53 that structure the universe or microcosmically as ‘a reversible transition between contrasted aspects of the same being,’54 the tension between the diegetic and extradiegetic levels in the representation of the hydra in ‘Lo mercante’ can be understood as the by-product of a metamorphosis enacted through metaphor. The physical description of this monster, which likens it to the fake carried from Turkey to Venice, coupled with the accumulation of tropes that describe the beast through a comparison to diminutive objects that further supports this association, serves to subvert the heroic tenor of Cienzo’s victory. Basile playfully shifts this monster from one of Weinrich’s subcategories to another, evoking the artificial hydra in the place where we would expect to find the hydra fabulosa. Before our eyes, the hydra transforms from the legendary opponent into a charlatan’s prop. Dialectically bound to his foil, Cienzo too undergoes a comic metamorphosis, momentarily transforming from the heroic victor into a quixotic fool, tilting madly at a harmless, manufactured monster. Finally, we can discern one more level of meaning in this risible transformation. In the early modern museum, artificial monsters became scientific jokes of sorts, which ‘invited the viewer either to participate in the joke,

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by understanding the subtle transition from natural to artificial, or to be deceived by it and, in a sense, to become the joke himself.’55 The chapter that follows will confirm that Basile appreciated such jesting, for he makes a similar a joke at the expense of the ogre in the tale ‘Viola.’ In that tale, an ogre convinces himself that his flatulence possesses reproductive powers to sire a daughter by misapplying an ancient theory on fertile winds which had been dismissed as a fiction by seventeenth-century natural philosophers. Like visitors to early modern natural history collections who became the object of fun when they took artificial monsters for once-living specimens, Basile’s ogre accepts Pliny’s tale of the wind impregnating Spanish mares as fact rather than as favola. The same joke is played upon readers of Lo cunto who do not recognize Cienzo’s foe to be a manufactured monster. In failing to comprehend the subtle shift from the category of the fabulous to the category of the artificial, they themselves become the joke. Ultimately, the manufactured monster is also an apt metaphor for Basile’s hybrid tales. Patched together from disparate cultural elements, their humour and delight derive from discerning the seams of the author’s handiwork and the inability of others, be they characters or other readers, to do so.

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7 Fertile Flatulence: Monstrous Paternity in Basile’s ‘Viola’

Just as images and descriptions of monstrous births multiplied on the pages of the teratological treatises, prodigy books, and popular broadsheets printed in early modern Europe, so did the theories explaining such anomalies. In his treatise On Monsters and Marvels (1573), the French surgeon Ambroise Paré enumerates thirteen different causes of monstrous generation including the glory of God, defects of the seed, blows to the mother’s womb, hereditary illness, and demonic forces.1 Paré readily admits the incompleteness of what might appear to our eyes an exhaustive list and reminds his readers that not every monster can be sufficiently explained by ‘human reasons.’2 Most likely, however, his European peers would have found his discussion to be comprehensive because he considers divine, biological, environmental, human, and demonic forces as causes of monstrosity. While Paré’s treatise aims to be as inclusive as possible, many authors in the teratological canon emphasized one category of theories, for example the divine or biological, when describing monstrous generations. The historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park note that ‘[b]y the last quarter of the sixteenth century, there existed a specialized body of medical writing on the causes of monsters’ that proposed three main causes of monstrous births: an excess or defect of the reproductive matter, the maternal imagination, and an equal contribution of male and female seed during conception which was thought to produce hermaphrodites.3 And yet, as Daston and Park themselves indicate, the emergence of a body of medical theories did not eliminate competing supernatural explanations, nor did it represent a linear progression during the sixteenth century toward the naturalization of the monster. In some medical texts circulating in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, biological and religious explanations

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were tightly entwined. As Stephen Pender notes, ‘[c]atastrophic births were subject to a dialectical understanding: the dynamic attempt to naturalize the monster through the discourses of science ran parallel to, and in some instances ratified, the continued proliferation of accounts of terata as miraculous, strange, and portentous.’4 Since myriad theories regarding the generation of monstrous births circulated in this period, it is not surprising that conflicting explanations arose concerning the origins of individual monstrous specimens. As we have seen, where some saw the remains of a once-living dragon, others saw a charlatan’s hoax;5 where some thought they witnessed a penis formed from a spontaneous female-to-male sex change, others asserted that they viewed a prolapsed uterus.6 While in the preceding chapters I examined depictions of monsters (the pig king, dragons) and processes of monstrous generation (spontaneous sex change, voglie materne), this chapter examines an ogre’s struggle with competing theories of monstrous generation as he attempts to explain the seemingly marvellous appearance of a young girl in his garden in Basile’s fairy tale ‘Viola.’ Through this inscription of teratological theories, Basile transforms the fairy tale into a commentary on the shifting paradigms of scientific inquiry. The ogre’s failed quest to explain what seems to be a wondrous event by recourse to academic discourse based on textual authority becomes a cautionary tale concerning the inadequacy of such methodologies for explaining natural phenomena and an affirmation of the methods of the nascent New Science. Envy’s Harsh Wind After receiving a sign from Prince Tadeo, the old crone Meneca begins the third tale of the second day by informing her listeners that ‘È la ’midia no viento che shioshia co tanta forza che fa cadere le pontelle de la grolia de l’uommene da bene e ietta pe terra lo semmenato de le bone fortune’ (310) [Envy is a wind which blows with such force that it overthrows the props on which the reputation of a good man rests and devastates the crops sown by good fortune (1:147)]. She illustrates this assertion with the story of Colaniello’s three daughters, Rosa (Rose), Garofano (Carnation), and Viola (Violet). Although their names might seem to indicate otherwise, it is the third daughter, the humble violet of Colaniello’s garden, who ‘era tanto bella che faceva sceruppe solutive de desiderio pe purgare li core d’ogne tormiento, pe la quale cosa ne ieva cuotto e arzo Ciullone, figlio de lo re’ (310) [was so beautiful that she was

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like a syrup of love which purged the heart of every trouble. The king’s son, Ciullone, was tormented and burning with love for her (1:147)].7 Each day as the girls toil in a street-level room, the prince passes by, raises his hat, and says, ‘Bonnì, bonnì, Viola!’ [Good day, good day, Viola (1:147)] in the hope of winning her affections, to which Viola replies, ‘Bonnì, figlio de lo re. Io saccio chiù di te’ (310) [Good day, king’s son. I’m cleverer than you! (1:147)]. Fearing that this insolent response will anger the prince, Rosa and Garofano warn their sister to refrain from such cheeky retorts. When she ignores their advice, they inform their father of her actions. Hoping to eliminate any further encounters between the prince and his youngest daughter, he sends Viola to live with her Aunt Cucevannella to learn the needle arts. The young royal succeeds in discovering her whereabouts and uses threats and bribes to coerce Cucevannella to allow him access to her niece. Ultimately, neither his social status nor his rank helps him to steal a kiss from Viola. Her aunt will send her three times to retrieve objects from a downstairs room where the prince is hiding, and each time the girl will manage to slip from his grasp. After her third escape, an infuriated Viola returns to the aunt who was willing peddle her virtue and cuts off her nose and ears. In three hops, she is back at home where the prince passes once again and delivers his usual greeting, ‘Bonnì, bonnì, Viola.’ Still unmoved, Viola responds with her insolent rhyme ‘Bonnì, figlio de lo re. Io saccio chiù de te,’ which has taken on a new meaning now that she has outsmarted the prince. Unable to tolerate Viola’s impudent behaviour any longer, and perhaps jealous of her beauty and charm, her sisters Rosa and Garofano devise a plan to permanently remove her from their midst. First, they wail that a precious spool which they were using to embroider a curtain for the queen has fallen from their window into the walled garden of their neighbour the ogre. Next, Rosa and Garofano convince Viola, since she is the smallest of the three, to lash a cord about her waist so that they can lower her into the ogre’s garden to retrieve the thread. Once her feet touch the ground, however, the evil sisters simply let the rope fall, leaving Viola trapped in the ogre’s walled compound. At that moment, trasette l’uerco pe pigliarese na vista de lo giardino e, avenno pigliato granne omedetà de lo terreno, se lassaie scappare no vernacchio cossì spotestato e co tanto remmore e strepeto che Viola, pe la paura, strillava: ‘Oh, mamma mia, aiutame!’ E votatose l’uerco e vistose dereto sta bella figliola, allecordatose d’avere ’ntiso na vota da certe stodiante che le cavalle de Spagna se ’mprenano co

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Fertile Flatulence 147 lo viento, se penzaie che lo corzo de lo pideto avesse ’ngravidato quarche arvolo e ne fosse sciuta sta pintata criatura. (314, 316) [the ogre came out to have a look at the garden, and feeling the dampness of the ground he brake wind with such a fearful explosion and noise that Viola was terrified and called out: ‘Oh, Mother mine, help! help!’ The ogre turned round, and seeing the beautiful young girl, and remembering once having heard some students say that in Spain mares had been known to become pregnant by the wind, he thought that the rush of air from his fart must have caused some tree to bring forth this lovely creature. (1:149)]

The ogre’s seemingly surreal explanation for Viola’s unexpected presence in his garden – that he fathered her when his flatulence impregnated a tree – is actually a curious (and comic) fusion of folklore and scientific theories of the reproductive power of wind culled from classical sources. The Folklore of Flatulence Although fart-babies are not unheard of in our own culture, the connection between farting and giving birth most likely seems tenuous at best for twenty-first-century readers.8 As Luisa Rubini notes, the ogre’s assumption that his flatulence possesses reproductive powers rests on an archaic agrarian belief common to both high and low medieval Italian culture.9 Perhaps it is best to initiate the recuperation of this set of beliefs, as the cultural historian Piero Camporesi does in Il paese della fame, with an examination of one of the most famous representations of flatulence in the Italian literary canon: Canto XXI of Dante’s Inferno.10 At the command of their leader Malacoda, a group of demons led by the devil Barbariccia assemble to escort Dante and Virgil through the fifth pocket of Malebolge: Per l’argine sinistro volta dienno; ma prima avea ciascuna la lingua stretta coi denti, verso lor duca, per cenno; ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta. (XXI, 136–9) [They made left face on the bank; but first each had bit his tongue toward their leader, as a salute, and he of his ass had made a trumpet.]11

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Certainly, this trumpeting begets only a noisy fanfare; however, if we consider the visual iconography of devils and hell contemporary with Dante’s poem, it becomes clear that in medieval Italy the demonic anus functioned as a locus for the generation of sinners’ souls. In the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, Giotto depicted the devil as eating sinners while defecating others into hell. Similar images could be found on the walls of churches and abbeys in Bologna, Modena, Pisa, and San Gimignano.12 Camporesi locates the origins of such depictions of Lucifer and devils in a figure associated with ancient agrarian festivals, stating, ‘nel corpo gigantesco e villoso di Lucifero rimane sottesa l’arcaica immagine dell’orso padre dai cui peti nascevano le nuove anime, il gigantesco mostro delle feste agrarie, l’orso carnevalesco, una bestia pelosa e peteggiante’ [in the gigantic and furry body of Lucifer there remains underneath the archaic image of the father bear from whose farts were born new souls, the gigantic monster of agrarian festivals, the carnivalesque bear, a hairy and farting beast].13 These flatulent bears, wild men, devils, and Basile’s ogre derive from the same lineage and exhibit a number of shared behavioural and physical traits, including hirsuteness and a propensity for dining on human flesh.14 Indeed, in Italian, just one letter separates the bear (‘orso’) from the ogre (‘orco’). As Nancy Canepa rightly remarks, the origins of Basile’s ogres extend back to the pagan god of the underworld, Orcus, who in the Christian tradition became a devourer of human flesh.15 The ogre’s family line begins with an infernal consumer of men, a description also befitting Dante’s Lucifer, who stands embedded in ice at the very centre of the Inferno, his three mouths gnawing on the bodies of the three traitors. It is on account of his kinship with these other monstrous creatures displaying reproductive flatulence that the ogre who finds Viola in his garden assumes his own ‘wind’ could generate another being. The acts of breaking wind and birthing souls – so seemingly incongruous to us – were linked etymologically in the minds of early modern Italians. The Italian word for soul, anima, derives from the Latin, anima, which can mean air, wind, breath, and life and is related to animus which means soul. Carnival rituals replicated this verbal relationship among souls and wind, ‘[a]nima era infatti sinonimo di “fiato” e di “vento” che i “pazzi” di carnevale, appartenenti alle corporazioni o congreghe degli “stulti” e dei “fatui,” cercavano di moltiplicare magicamente servendosi di mantici e soffietti (folles) che emettevano suoni del tutto simili a quelli prodotti da Barbariccia’ [‘Anima’ was in fact a synonym for ‘breath’ and ‘wind’ that the ‘madmen’ of Carnival belonging to corporations or con-

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gregations of ‘dullards’ and ‘the fatuous’ tried to multiply magically using bellows and whistles that emitted sounds quite similar to those produced by [Dante’s devil] Barbariccia].16 Medieval and early modern texts similarly exploited this association between the ‘soul’ and ‘wind.’ The thirteenth-century poet Matazone da Caligano wrote of a flatulent donkey that gave birth to stinking peasants.17 In a similar vein, tales of a devil who mistakenly carried off a dying peasant’s fart thinking that it was his soul circulated in collections of Aesop’s fables, while popular poems told of peasants who cautiously covered their bums when they descended into hell so that their souls would not escape out their rear ends.18 Basile’s ogre appears to be quite familiar with this tradition as his first words to Viola underscore the interrelationship of souls, wind, flatulence, and procreation. After concluding that he himself has sired the lovely girl he sees before him in his garden, he embraces her, saying, ‘Figlia, figlia mia, parte de sto cuorpo, sciato de lo spireto mio, e chi me l’avesse ditto mai che co na ventositate avesse dato forma a ssa bella facce? chi me l’avesse ditto ca n’effetto de freddezza avesse ’gnenetato sto fuoco d’Ammore?’ (316) [My daughter, my daughter, child of my body, breath of my soul; who would have thought that with a fart I could give life to such a beauteous form, that the effect of a cold could produce such a fire of love! (1:149)]. Certainly, Basile exploits the scene for comic effect, for the ogre finishes his declaration in a sort of carnivalesque Petrarchan ecstasy expressed through the oxymoronic juxtaposition of the coldness that causes him to break wind and the ardent love spawned by this act. Although the ogre associates his ‘wind’ with the generation of a soul, he fails to interpret this marvellous birth as a physiological process particular to his kind. In her article ‘Ogres and Fools,’ Nancy Canepa observes that many of Basile’s ogres defy the typical portrayal of evil, flesh-eating monsters and are instead good-hearted and civilized like the one we find in the tale ‘Viola.’ She likens these ogres to the figure of the wild man, a figure that ‘embodied cultural anxieties about what civilized men could degenerate into and, conversely, was the vehicle for equally strong anxieties about a more “genuine” essence that civilized man would like to retrieve from the depths of his hyper-acculturated being.’19 A nurturing father for Viola who wisely entrusts her care to three benevolent fairies, the ogre figures as a much more decent and civilized creature than the haughty prince who wields his economic and political power to manipulate any of his father’s vassals who serve as Viola’s guardians. Undoubtedly, the ogre’s highly civilized comportment obscures for him his own genealog-

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ical connection to the violent ancestors of his folk origins. For this reason, he turns to academic discourse rather than to folklore as he seeks an explanation for what has occurred in his garden. Learned Theories of Fertile Winds The ogre arrives at his rather outlandish assessment that he himself ‘gave birth’ to Viola after he recalls having heard some students discuss how mares in Spain could be impregnated by the wind. What the ogre most likely overheard was a conversation concerning this marvellous theory of conception, which originated in the works of Latin authors such as Varro, Virgil, and Pliny.20 The latter wrote in his Natural History (Book VIII, chapter XLII), ‘dicesi, che in Portugallo appresso Lisbona, e sul fiume Tago le cavalle volte al vento Favonio, se impregnano di quel fiato, e fanno cavalli velocissimi, ma non vivono più che tre anni’ [they say that in Portugal near Lisbon and on the river Tagus, mares facing the Phavonius wind are impregnated by that breath, and give birth to the fastest horses, that live, however, no more than three years].21 As in the ogre’s speech to Viola, in this passage from the Roman writer wind (vento), breath (fiato), conception (se impregnano), and generation are all linked; but the ogre has comically misapplied this explanation of marvellous generation to his own rather different situation. Nancy Canepa interprets the ‘ogre’s appeal to classical authority’ as ‘typical of Basile’s comic degradation of the materials of elite traditions.’22 While undoubtedly we find here one of the many cases in Lo cunto in which the learned tradition is brought low, Basile’s game is much more complex than a mere comic inversion of registers. In fact, if we recover the discourse to which the reference ‘le cavalle de Spagna’ alludes, it becomes clear that Basile’s fairy tale functions as a meditation on the rapidly changing practices and methods of scientific inquiry. Although many classical authorities embraced the theory of what we might call fertilization through ventilation, by the late sixteenth century many authors had ceased to accept it as a literal explanation of conception, while others had dismissed it as complete nonsense. One such author was Girolamo Frachetta, who wrote a series of lessons entitled Breve spositione di tutta l’opera di Lucretio (1589) which were intended to demonstrate the ways in which the classical poem conformed to or deviated from accepted scientific truths founded on the works of Aristotle.23 Frachetta argues that Lucretius’s statement regarding the power of the Zephyr wind to enter the mouths of Spanish mares and impregnate them

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should not be considered fact, but was instead ‘da riputar favola’ [to be held a fiction].24 He underscores his point that this marvellous fertilization is a fiction by following the standard enumeration of classical sources – a list which includes not only the natural philosopher Pliny but also the poet Virgil – with an octave from a contemporary literary masterpiece, Torquato Tasso’s Geruselemme liberata. In the octave Frachetta cites from Canto VII, Tasso reveals the marvellous origins of the knight Raimondo’s trusty steed Aquilino. The charger was foaled on the banks of the Tagus by a mare that had been impregnated by the wind.25 For Frachetta, tales of fecund winds find their proper place in the wondrous fictions of the epic poets, not in the works of natural philosophers. His contemporaries, he feels, would do better to insert this theory in their fantastic poems rather than consider it as a biological possibility. He writes: Hora quanto s’aspetta a quello, che scrivono Virgilio, Plinio, e altri, delle cavalle, che possino essere impregnate dal vento ricevuto per la bocca, è cio da riputar favola, imperoché, oltreché il vento non puo haver forza di adoprar quello, che il seme adopra, per le ragioni, che di sopra habbiam tocche, dimostra Aristotile, nel terzo libro della Generatione de gli animali al capo quinto, e al sesto, che ne anco il seme ricevuto per la bocca, può impregnare, e si beffa d’Herodoto, che crede, che i pesci, concepiscano divorando il seme, e il medesimo Aristotile, nella decima parte de probl. alla Quist. 66. afferma che ne i cavalli, ne gli huomini, non nascono, se non per congiungimento.26 [Now, in regard to what Virgil, Pliny, and others write about the mares that can be impregnated by the wind received through their mouth, this is to be held to be fiction, since, apart from the fact that the wind cannot have the power to use that which the seed uses, for the reasons which we touched on above, Aristotle demonstrates in the third book of On the Generation of Animals in the fifth and sixth chapters, that neither can seed received via the mouth impregnate, and he mocks Herodotus who believes that fish conceive by devouring seed, and likewise Aristotle, in the tenth part of Question 66 affirms that neither horses nor men are born, if not through sexual unions.]

With these words Frachetta sets out to discount the theory of fertile winds by showing that it contradicts two basic tenets of sexual reproduction set forth in Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals: the first, that intercourse is necessary for generation in all animals; the second, that

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seed deposited in the mouth does not lead to conception. He then subjects the theory to a rehabilitative reading by recasting the classical histories that purport the fertility of wind into fictions meant to be understood figuratively, not literally. Frachetta interprets Lucretius’s description of the generative power of wind as a sort of allegorical tableau.27 In the lines from De rerum natura to which Frachetta refers, Lucretius depicts a group of personified figures: ‘On comes Spring and Venus, and Venus’ winged harbinger marching before, with Zephyr and mother Flora a pace behind him strewing the whole path in front and filling it with brilliant colors and scents.’28 Frachetta explains that animals conceive when this particular wind blows because its arrival coincides with the beginning of spring. It is not that the Zephyr literally impregnates the mares, but that this particular wind blows during the equine mating season. In this way, Frachetta reduces this misconception regarding the fertility of wind to an act of misreading; those who accepted the tales in Pliny and Tasso as facts had misread allegorical passages as literal ones. Many shared Frachetta’s opinion. Citing Frachetta in his own Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo (1613), Tommaso Garzoni dismisses the idea of the fertile wind by asking, ‘Ma in effetto chi può dir d’haver sentito mai la più ridicolosa, né la più solenne facetia?’ [But in effect, who can say he has ever heard a more utterly ridiculous anecdote?].29 For Garzoni, the misconception derives from the reader’s inability to distinguish among different genres and to discern the differences dividing facetie and favole from those accounts in natural histories that should be deemed true. The Quest for Knowledge: A Love Story When the ogre attributes reproductive power to his flatulence, he does not simply misapply a teratological theory but misapplies a theory that had already been discredited by authors like Frachetta and Garzoni, and reclassified as fiction, as favola and facetia. Regardless of whether the students he overheard were discussing fertile winds in classical natural histories or Tasso’s poem, the ogre mistook fictions for facts. If we analyse the ogre’s actions in the context of the entire tale, his misuse of teratological theory can be understood as something more than a comic misreading of his situation. The tale becomes a commentary on both the shifting boundaries dividing natural history from favola and the changing nature of scientific inquiry and practices during Basile’s lifetime. In order to understand how Basile utilizes this fairy tale to stage a sort of brief history of the recent developments in the realm of scientific

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inquiry, we must comprehend the peculiar nature of the love story in which the ogre’s own experience is embedded. The ogre, like Viola’s father and aunt before him, functions as a sort of gatekeeper or guardian figure who furnishes the female protagonist with a home and regulates the prince’s access to her. At the heart of the tale lies the love story between Viola and the prince in which Basile replaces the sexual economy of desire with an economy of knowledge. While initially Viola’s physical beauty attracts the prince, she maintains his interest and fuels his desire by claiming to know more than he does. At first, the prince attempts to engage in a sexual exchange with his plan to steal a kiss from Viola at her Aunt Cucevannella’s house. All the acts of courtship and seduction that follow involve possessing, controlling, and gaining knowledge. After Viola is lowered into the ogre’s garden, her romance with the prince unfolds in the form of a series of tricks, rather than sexual acts, through which the young lovers court each other. When Viola disappears from her father’s home, the prince begins to display the classic symptoms of lovesickness: ‘l’uocchie se le fecero a guallarella, la facce deventaie morticcia, le lavre de cennerale e non pigliava muorzo che le facesse carne o suono che le desse quiete’ (316) [pouches formed beneath his eyes, his face became deathly pale and his lips ashy. Not a mouthful that he ate did him any good, no sleep could give him rest (1: 150)]. As he had in the past, he exerts his economic and political power in order to discover Viola’s whereabouts and gain access to her: he locates her by offering a reward for information. When he learns where she now lives, he summons the ogre and explains that he only needs to stay a day and a night in the ogre’s garden to regain his health. It is a request that the ogre, as the prince’s social inferior and the king’s vassal, cannot refuse: ‘[l’]uerco, comme vassallo de lo patre, non potennole negare sto piacere de poco cosa, l’offerze, si non vastava una, tutte le cammare soie e la vita stessa’ (316) [The ogre, who was a subject of the Prince’s father, could not refuse this small favour, and offered not only one room but every room in the house and his life as well (1:150)]. The prince has the good fortune to stay in a room near the one in which the ogre and Viola sleep. No longer interested in stealing kisses from his beloved, the prince now seeks a kind of intellectual rather than sexual gratification: he wishes to alter the imbalance of power in the relationship by knowing more than Viola. When the ogre and Viola are fast asleep, he sneaks into their room and pinches the girl two times. Thinking that she has been bitten, she exclaims, ‘O tata, quanta pulece!’ (316) [Oh, Daddy, what a lot of fleas! (1:150)]. The ogre moves the girl to a

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new bed, but the prince returns to pinch her again and she screams out once more. The torture continues until dawn, with a new mattress and sheets providing no relief from this apparent infestation. The next morning when the prince sees Viola he greets her in his usual fashion. But this time when Viola says to the prince, ‘Bonnì, figlio de lo re, io saccio chiù di te!’ he reveals his own intellectual superiority by mockingly crying out, ‘O tata, quanta pulece!’ Realizing that she has been duped, Viola recounts the events of the previous evening to the three fairies who care for her. The fairies devise a plan to avenge their young charge and tell Viola to ask the ogre for a pair of slippers decorated with bells. That night, all four steal into the royal castle under cover of darkness where they secretly enter the prince’s bedchamber. Each time he closes his eyes, the fairies make a racket and Viola stamps her feet so that the terrified prince cries out ‘O mamma, mamma, aiutame!’ (318) [Oh, Mother, Mother, help! (1:151)]. The next morning, when Viola and the prince exchange their usual greetings, she responds to his mocking ‘O tata, quante pulece!’ with ‘O mamma, mamma, aiutame!’ When the prince hears his own words in Viola’s mouth, he admits defeat: ‘Me l’hai fatta, me l’hai calata! io te cedo e hai vinto e, canoscenno veramanete ca sai chiù de me, io te voglio senz’autro pe mogliere!’ (318) [You did it then, you played me that trick! You have won and I give in; and since I see you’re really cleverer than I, I ask you, without further ado, to be my wife (1:151)]. In this battle of wits, each of the lovers succeeds in deceiving the other because they both work under the cover of darkness. As I discussed in chapter 2, the sun never rises or sets in the same way in Lo cunto, and Basile inserts two similes to convey the blackness under which the protagonists hide themselves.30 The prince does not enter Viola’s room until ‘comme scette la Notte a ioquare a Stienne mia cortina co le stelle’ (316) [the Night came to play at “stretch my curtain” with the stars (1:150)], while she and the fairies do not enter his room until ‘aspettato che lo cielo comm’a femmena genovesa se mettesse lo taffettà nigro ’ntuorno la facce’ (318) [waiting till the sun, like a Genoese lady, had veiled her face with black silk (1:150)]. When deciphering what they experience during the night, Viola and the prince must depend on senses other than sight. Viola feels something pinching her and assumes that she is being bitten by fleas. While we never learn exactly why the prince so greatly fears the cacophony created by Viola and the three fairies, the darkness of night veils the cause of the noise and the prince’s ears give him an incomplete account of what is occurring.

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Although presumably the ogre finds Viola in his garden during the day, at a moment when he has decided to take a look at his property, he too lacks a clear vision of what has taken place. In fact at the end of the tale, his misinterpretation of Viola’s presence is described in terms of a visual deception. The tale concludes with both the marriage and the ogre’s realization of his mistake: Cossì, chiamato l’uerco e cercatocella, ca non voze mettere mano a le gregne d’autro, avenno saputo la matina stessa ca era figlia de Colaniello e che s’era ’ngannato l’uocchio de dereto a pensare che sta vista adorosa fosse parto de no zefero fetente e però, dato na voce a lo patre e fattole sapere la bona fortuna ch’era apparecchiata a la figlia, co granne allegrezza se fece la festa, facenno rescire vera chella settenza che: bella zita ’n chiazza se marita. (318–20) [So he went to the ogre to ask Viola in marriage of him; but the ogre would not interfere with other people’s property. That very morning he had learnt that Viola was the daughter of Colaniello and that he had deceived himself in thinking such a beautiful daughter could be born from foul wind. Therefore he called the true father and told him of the good fortune which had befallen his daughter, and a festival was held amidst great rejoicings, and the truth of this saying was shown: A fair maid is early wed (1:151)].

As it was for Viola and the prince when each deceived the other, it is a vision problem that impedes the ogre from correctly interpreting the girl’s appearance in his garden. Basile describes the ogre’s misperception in terms of a carnivalesque failure of sight, ‘s’era ingannato l’uocchio de dereto.’ It is the ‘eye behind’ or the ‘eye in the back,’ his anus, rather than the eyes in his head that was tricked into believing that his flatulence could produce a daughter. Framed by this love story in which knowledge is power and in which obscured or distorted vision leads to misinterpretation of physical phenomena, we find the ogre’s story, which similarly revolves around incorrectly viewing and interpreting Viola’s unexpected appearance. He is a monstrous figure who embodies the folkloric tradition of fertile flatulence, and yet he explains his own act of monstrous generation by applying academic discourse derived from classical authorities. In the end, however, he learns that what the students said was false and that his inability to see correctly, the fact that his ‘eye behind’ was tricked, led to his false assessment of Viola’s presence. Through the story of ogre’s

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enlightenment, Basile stages the displacement of natural history based on authoritative texts by a New Science that insists upon the primacy of vision in scientific inquiry. Seeing Is Believing: The Lynx-Eyed Academy and the Primacy of Vision in Scientific Inquiry As a native Neapolitan and a member of his city’s Academy of the Oziosi, Basile witnessed firsthand how the discoveries of the New Science had begun to destabilize – albeit slowly – the Aristotelian worldview. Although dedicated primarily to literary endeavours, the Oziosi occasionally debated issues related to the natural world. Generally speaking, the scientific efforts of the Oziosi can be characterized as more conservative than revolutionary.31 For example, when three comets appeared in the skies in 1618, the academy framed its discussion of this marvellous event in terms that recalled the Ptolomeic-Aristotelian vision of the cosmos as composed of fixed, concentric spheres. In a meeting held in December, they tried to determine ‘se questa “si mova non solo di moto ratto dal primo mobile, ma ancora se si move di moto proprio, dal primo distinto”’ [if this [comet] ‘moves not only through the swift movement of the primum mobile, but also if it moves by its own movement distinct from that of the first’].32 An examination of Francesco De Pietri’s Problemi accademici, which contained summaries of a number of the debates held during the academy meetings, reveals the conservative nature of the Oziosi’s scientific interests. As Aristotelians had for centuries, the Oziosi considered the questions of the infertility of mules (‘Perché il mulo, e la mula sieno infecondi’) and the causes of a child’s resemblance to his or her father (‘Se i figliuoli sieno simili a’ padri’). The explanations that follow consist of a series of citations from classical sources that had been the touchstones of sixteenth-century natural philosophy, such as Aristotle and Lucretius, as well as the works of classical poets, jurists, and historians. Occasionally, references to biblical passages confirm the assertions of the classical authorities. While in their repudiation of alchemy (‘Se si dia l’Alchimia’) the Oziosi recognize that truth may be arrived at ‘per la Dimostratione, per l’Autorità, e per la Ragione’ [by Demonstration, by Authority, or by Reason], the Problemi accademici shows that they relied most heavily on ‘autorità,’ rather than experiments or demonstrations, in their discussions of scientific topics.33 Basile’s participation in this academy brought him in close contact with more progressive minds as well, for the membership of the Oziosi

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overlapped with that of the Neapolitan branch of the Academy of the Lincei, or lynx-eyed. Founded by the young Roman nobleman Federico Cesi and three friends in 1603, the Lincei were urged ‘studiare la natura per disvelare “i suoi più intimi segreti,” ad applicarsi alle discipline matematiche, a fare “pubblici esperimenti di Medicina e di Meccanica per pubblica utilità,” ed a imparare le lingue’ [to study nature in order to reveal ‘her most intimate secrets,’ and to apply themselves to the mathematical disciplines, to carry out ‘public experiments in medicine and mechanics for the public utility,’ and to learn languages].34 Cesi envisioned founding branches of the academy in cities across the globe, each with its own library, botanical garden, and scientific instruments. By 1610 he had begun to invite new members either to join the Roman group or to found academies in their own cities.35 In that same year, Cesi asked Giambattista Della Porta to found a Neapolitan branch of the academy, while one year later Galileo joined the ranks of the Lincei in Rome. Della Porta, of course, was Basile’s colleague in the Oziosi, as were a number of the men that Della Porta gathered about him to form this new scientific institution in Naples.36 While the members of the Oziosi continued to cite Aristotle in their erudite tomes, Cesi and his fellow Lincei employed the new technologies of the telescope and microscope in their investigations. The very name of the academy indicated the members’ belief in the necessity of a piercing gaze to decipher the secrets of Nature. As David Freedberg observes: Not for nothing did Cesi and his friends call themselves lynx-eyed, for they knew, and were daily discovering, that there was indeed more to be seen on earth and in heaven than was immediately accessible to the ordinary human eye. As Galileo had already made clear in his satirical treatise on the nova, what could not be seen could indeed exist. After all, as he put it in a magnificent letter on the telescope and the powers and limitations of sight a few weeks later to Piero Dini, was it not commonly acknowledged that the eyes of eagles and lynxes could see better than those of humans? And did not everyone know that lynxes and eagles could see things inaccessable to normal unaided sight – just as the figure from classical mythology, also named Lynceus, who could see things clearly at a distance of one hundred and thirty miles and penetrate the trunks of trees with the eyes alone?37

Not only did the Lincei utilize instruments to empower their sense of sight, they also opened their eyes to flora and fauna never described by the ancient authorities arriving from the New World in the form of both

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specimens and scientific illustrations. This was especially true in Naples, where since the late sixteenth century the physician Nardo Antonio Recchi conserved and displayed to interested parties (although somewhat reluctantly) his illustrated manuscript of West Indian botanicals that he himself had copied from the first-hand observations and illustrations of the Spaniard Francisco Hernandez. Such visual images of the objects of inquiry quickly became essential tools in scientific study. An editorial team of Lincei that included the Neapolitan botanist Fabio Colonna would eventually obtain and publish Recchi’s manuscripts.38 Be it Galileo peering through his telescope or Colonna gazing at scientific illustrations of New World flora, the Lincei were able to view worlds never even mentioned by the ancient authorities. Observation displaced classical texts and theories as the means by which one could know the world; it was by observing nature that one could discern Nature’s laws. In his treatise La sambuca lincea, published in Naples in 1618, Colonna described this new relationship between observation and theory in the following terms: Et però habbiamo tenuto che si debba credere più alla osservatione delle cose naturali, che alle cose imaginate, et supposte da un sol principio osservato, senza il mezzo et il fina della cosa stessa, dalla quale si deve poi cavar regola, essendo che la cosa osservata perfettamente dà il methodo, et non il methodo farà che la cosa sia conforme il suo presupposto al methodo: non potendo la Natura delle cose mutarsi nel capriccio dell’huomo a farsi conoscere come egli pensa, ma ben dovendo l’huomo formar il suo capriccio dalla cosa naturale esattamente osservata, et cavarne se può il Methodo.39 [We have held, however, that one must lend more credence to the observation of natural things than to things imagined and deduced merely by an accepted principle without considering the function and purpose of the very thing [under consideration], from which one must then derive the rule, because the Nature of things is unable to transform itself in order to satisfy the whims of man and to reveal itself as he thinks it is. Instead, man must shape his whims according to the natural thing exactly observed and derive from this, if he can, the method.]

Two years earlier Cesi delivered a speech to the academy in Rome entitled Del naturale desiderio di sapere, in which he decried those early modern institutions in which the perception of the natural world was

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conditioned, and indeed distorted, by preconceived notions and theories drawn mainly from ancient texts. Specifically, he criticized universities and other academies as incapable of furnishing students and members with the new knowledge created by the methods employed by the Lincei.40 Today historians of the Lincei academy concur that the Neapolitan branch of the academy lagged behind its Roman counterpart in implementing these new methodologies.41 In part, this retrograde orientation among many of the Neapolitan Lincei can be attributed to Cesi’s choice of the elderly Giambattista Della Porta as their leader. As his magnum opus Natural Magic indicates, Della Porta was more interested in the Renaissance endeavour of learning the secrets of Nature in order to bend natural processes to his will than in seeking to establish universal laws that govern them.42 Perhaps Della Porta’s brand of science was more familiar to Basile and the other Oziosi than the revolutionary work of Roman Lincei like Galileo.43 And yet, Della Porta himself had invented a working telescope which then, to his dismay, Galileo perfected and for which he received the accolades that Della Porta felt were more rightly his own. Whatever animosity Della Porta felt for his more famous colleague, it was not enough to dissuade him from accepting the validity of Galileo’s discoveries.44 So, although not quite as avant-garde as its Roman counterpart, the Neapolitan branch of the Lincei served as a conduit through which the New Science, with its emphasis on visual acuity and disdain for those still bound to the ancient authorities, flowed into Basile’s cultural milieu. Turning once again to Basile’s fairy tale ‘Viola,’ it becomes clear that the ogre closely resembles the old-school scientists. The ogre never thinks to interrogate directly the object of his wonder but stupidly trusts those representatives of the backward university culture, the students. He is so convinced of this theory and the credibility of those who pronounce it that he never even asks Viola about her origins. Although as an ogre he presumably exhibits those features of his species which distinguish him from humans, he never considers why his offspring does not share these physical characteristics. Instead, the ogre interprets the events unfolding before him in such a way as to make them conform to the theory: he reasons that his own ‘wind’ impregnated a nearby tree that in turn gave birth to Viola. In having the ogre obtain this discredited theory from students, Basile echoes Federico Cesi’s charge that Italy’s universities were inadequate educators, unable, and in some cases unwilling on account of the professors’ unflagging support of classical authorities, to furnish students with knowledge based on the latest dis-

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coveries in the fields of natural history. The fact that this theory of the wind impregnating Spanish mares had been dismissed decades before even by authors of an Aristotelian leaning like Frachetta only serves to underscore how removed these students were from the vanguard of scientific inquiry. Although he initially practises the type of erudite, humanist natural history typical of the sixteenth century, once the ogre learns that Colaniello is Viola’s father, he describes his mistake in more modern terms as a failure to observe correctly the phenomenon before him. A clearer sense of sight informed by facts learned in the world rather than theories written in ancient texts ultimately leads the ogre to the truth regarding Viola’s origins. Like so many early modern natural historians, the ogre mistook a favola for a true explanation of a monstrous birth. The ogre’s quest to comprehend Viola’s arrival in his garden serves as a cautionary tale for those who would depend on textual authorities, rather than their own careful observations, to decipher the wonders of nature. At the same time, Basile’s tale of the farting ogre is a meta-marvellous tale that contests the lowly position of the fairy tale in the hierarchy of wonder that the practitioners of the New Science constructed in their scientific texts. On the pages of seventeenth-century astronomical and biological treatises we find one marvel after another: the astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini called the appearance of a comet in 1668 a ‘meraviglioso spettacolo’ [wondrous spectacle]; the biologist Francesco Stelluti deemed fossilized wood as ‘degno di meraviglia’45 [deserving of wonder]; the biologist Francesco Redi described the green body of a fly as ‘meravigliosamente brillante’ [marvellously brilliant]. These marvels of nature produced wonder in those who observed them. When experienced by learned men, this cognitive emotion functioned as a catalyst for further observation and inquiry, which in turn produced scientific knowledge. In this regard, the New Science was founded on some very old ideas concerning the relationship of wonder to knowledge. For Aristotle had written in the Metaphysics, ‘It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about greater matters too, for example about the changes of the moon and the sun, about the stars and about the origins of the universe.’46 Not all wonders, however, were created equal. Although Aristotle asserted that marvellous fictions could lead one to philosophize (he writes ‘the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders’),47 in the treatises of men like Francis Bacon and Gali-

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leo, marvellous tales and the old crones and nurses who told them came to symbolize the backward thinking of those who opposed new theories and methodologies. In his treatise Novum Organum (1620), Francis Bacon likened the falsehoods perpetuated in natural histories to the fables with which nursemaids corrupted the minds of their young charges. He described his own efforts to correct such errors by insisting upon visual proof: For I admit nothing but on the faith of the eyes, or at least of careful and severe examination, so that nothing is exaggerated for wonder’s sake, but what I state is sound and without mixture of fables or vanity. All received or current falsehoods also (which by strange negligence have been allowed for many ages to prevail and become established) I proscribe and brand by name, that the sciences may be no more troubled with them. For it has been well observed that the fables and superstitions and follies which nurses instill into children do serious injury to their minds; and the same consideration makes me anxious, having the management of the childhood, as it were, of philosophy in its course of natural history, not to let it accustom itself in the beginning to any vanity.48

Bacon’s depiction of ‘fables’ and ‘nursery tales’ as antagonistic to scientific progress and the new philosophy which he espoused was a commonplace among early modern natural philosophers. When a fellow Englishman, William Gilbert, attacked the natural magic of Giambattista Della Porta in his treatise On the Loadstone (1600), he decried the Neapolitan’s observations on the powers of magnets as old wives’ tales, as ‘the maunderings of a babbling hag.’49 Similarly, in Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Christina, in which he defends the synthesis of a Copernican worldview and Christian doctrine, ‘old wives’ tales’ figured ‘as a byword for all that impedes the progress of science in general, and of Copernicanism in particular.’50 In many ways the fairy tale serves as the perfect metaphor for the old science. The typical representation of the telling of fairy tales – crazy old women or illiterate nurses narrating nonsense to an unquestioning puerile public – functioned nicely as a searing critique of the transmission of classical natural history in universities. Furthermore, Bacon and Galileo seemed to know instinctively what literary scholars and folklorists would articulate only centuries later: generally speaking fairy-tale protagonists – like practitioners of the old science – often experience wonder only superficially; the wonders in their midst might momentarily surprise

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them, but they never move them to question or to think. In fairy tales, when a talking fish grants you three wishes, you might be surprised, but you start wishing without wasting a second to investigate the ichthylogical marvel. Bacon, Galileo, and other men of science employed these negative characterizations of the fairy tale primarily to disarm those who stood in the way of their scientific revolution. Their attack, however, wrought collateral damage, for these images functioned to denigrate the nascent genre of the literary fairy tale. As I have shown in chapter 4, although Basile’s frame tale initially appears to reify the image of the old crone spinning yarns, he replaces these female narrators with the authorial pen at the end of Lo cunto in an attempt to remove the stigma from the genre. Basile’s tale of the flatulent ogre similarly challenges this negative image. The ogre contemplates and then seeks to explain Viola’s miraculous appearance rather than passively accepting her arrival. The tale also requires readers to ponder the interrelationship of classical natural history, folklore, and science, as I have shown in this chapter. Like Aristotle, Basile believed in the power of the marvellous fictions – be they myths or fairy tales – to move the reader to philosophize. He subscribed to a poetics of wonder that granted to rhetorical figures a power similar to that ascribed to natural wonders by men like Galileo. This power is perhaps best described by the literary theorist Emanuele Tesauro in his treatise Il cannocchiale aristotelico of 1654. Tesauro describes the process by which metaphors produce wonder as follows: ‘Et di qui nasce la Maraviglia: mentreche l’animo dell’uditore, dalla novità soprafatto; considera l’acutezza dell’ingegno rappresentante: et la inaspettata imagine dell’obietto rappresentato’51 [the marvelous is born while the spirit of the listener, overwhelmed by the novelty, considers the acuity of the representing wit, and the unexpected image of the object represented].52 Tesauro’s definition seems an apt description of the effect of Basile’s tale on readers: we are overwhelmed by the novelty of the farting ogre who spouts classical theories of generation, and impressed by the acuity of Basile’s wit, which seamlessly fuses seemingly disparate elements. But ultimately, it is the unexpected image of the object represented that instils wonder in us. For behind this fairy tale we find a veiled defence of the emerging scientific methodology. The true marvel here is that in Basile’s hand the fairy tale becomes an ally, rather than an impediment, to the New Science.

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Epilogue

In Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti, Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti, and the many texts that composed the teratological canon, the fairy tale and scientific theory slid over and under each other, collided and withdrew, only to collide once more at the fault line of the marvellous. In both collections of tales, these dynamic encounters displaced the prevailing prejudice against stories of ogres, witches, and fairies with a definition of the literary fairy tale as a genre worthy of male authors. Straparola and Basile – albeit each in his own way – showed that the monsters and marvels of the literary fairy tale could serve as a locus for engaging scientific theory and practice. In the hands of capable, male authors, the tales of old crones and simple young girls could become science fictions. The French authors of fairy tales who would adopt Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti as their models clearly recognized in the marvellous elements of the nascent genre the potential for exploring scientific issues and themes.1 The engagement of scientific theories would extend beyond the first wave or vogue (1690–1715) of the literary fairy tale in France, during which women authors such as Mme D’Aulnoy and Mlle de la Force inscribed medical theories of generation into fairy tales that challenged the misogynistic discourse of their day by asserting a positive, intergenerational connection among women. During the second vogue (1722–78) in the hands of male writers, the fairy tale shed its role as ‘contestatory space for women’ to become ‘an ideal vehicle to explore, and to discredit, what were increasingly being viewed as the fanciful ideas – the “fairy tales” – of preformationists’ who claimed that perfectly formed humans were contained in the egg or sperm.2 Meanwhile on the Italian peninsula, scientific discourse and the literary fairy tale had already begun to drift apart. In eighteenth-century

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Italy, the once dynamic fault line of the marvellous had transformed into an ever-widening rift that prevented science and the literary fairy tale from interacting in significant ways. Imagining the one as contiguous to the other had become as difficult as imagining Africa once having been fused to South America before the theory of plate tectonics had been articulated. Because in Italy the genre never experienced the widespread popularity that it did in France, men of science did not appropriate the genre as a means for ridiculing what they considered foolish or outdated theories. Furthermore, despite Straparola’s and Basile’s attempts to erase the stigma long assigned to women’s tales of ogres, witches, and fairies by recasting these tales as a masculine genre, old prejudices would return and new charges would be levelled. When in 1742 Basile’s tales were translated into Bolognese dialect by two sets of sisters, Maddalena and Teresa Manfredi and Teresa and Angela Zanotti, the literary fairy tale once again assumed a feminized, domestic character. Although the Manfredi and Zanotti sisters were highly educated women who often assisted their brothers (university professors) in scientific endeavours, they published their translation anonymously and thus erased any connection to their intellectual milieu.3 Furthermore, the paratexts accompanying the translation functioned to move Basile’s literary fairy tales from the space of the court to the space of the hearth, and from the hands of men to those of women, while asserting the didactic utility of the text. This operation began with the new title they bestowed on the collection of tales, La chiaqlira dla banzola, or ‘The Old Gossip on the Bench.’ In the dedicatory letter addressed to the women of Bologna, Basile’s tales are presented as ‘giocose favolette a noi private donne, per altro di tanto bene, e sollievo, conciossiaché atta a farci passare meno noiose, e più utili le lunghe sere invernali spese ne’ domestici lavori liberandoci dalle molestie del sonno’ [playful fables, which are apt to help us spend in a less boring and more useful way the long winter evenings that we dedicate to domestic chores by freeing us from sleep.]4 Then the anonymous author of the letter to the readers anticipates the negative reaction sure to be evoked by a book created by women: Mi n’ vrè, ch’ al titol, ch’ha in front st Libr v’ spaventass. Vù sintend st nom d’ Chiaqlira capirj subit, ch’ l’ è sta fatt da una donna, es si mustazz d’ turnarl a srrar subit ch’al avi avert senza lezzrl, pinsand dn i truvar sn del gnaccarat. Mò pruvà, stà paziint, lizin qualch carta; cascarà il mond? Sì ben ch’ la par un’ubbligazion, ch’ tutt quell, ch’ fa l’ donn ava sempr da puzzar sotta

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Epilogue 165 al nas, a vrè mò ch’ sta volta am fìssi servizi d’ astupparval, tant ch’ av dìssi temp d’ guardar a qualch una d’ sti Fol. Anch in dl mattiri ai pò essr qualch sentenza, ch’ serva alla correzion di custum.5 [I would not want the title that this work bears on the frontispiece to frighten you. Hearing this word ‘Chiaqlira’ you will immediately understand that this book was made by a woman, and with long faces, you’ll shut it, having opened it without reading it, thinking that you won’t find anything but gossip. But try, be patient, and read a few pages, is the world going to go to pieces? Even if it is a given that everything women do must always stink, I’d like you this time to do me the favour of holding your nose so that you’ll have the time to take a look at some of these fairy tales.]

Even though the anonymous author of the letter openly admits that what follows is a translation of Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti, she insists that La chiaqlira dla banzola is the work of women, and as such inferior to canonical literature. In the eighteenth-century debates over the proper use of Neapolitan dialect, Lo cunto de li cunti was positioned by defenders and detractors alike as a repository for folk, rather than learned, culture. While Luigi Serio defended Basile’s masterpiece as a witty parody of the Decameron, Ferdinando Galiani evoked the longstanding criticisms of the genre that Basile himself had sought to efface in his frame tale. Galiani’s harsh critique of Lo cunto in his treatise Del dialetto napoletano (1779) also depended upon the relatively new theory articulated in the wake of the first European publication of the Thousand and One Nights (1704–17), which purported that the fairy tale had originated in the Orient. For Galiani, the defects of Basile’s tales reflect their author’s limited talents: ‘Privo di tutto e di genio elevato e di filosofia e di felicità d’invenzione e di ricchezza di cognizioni a potere immaginare o adornare novelle graziose o interessanti o tragiche o lepide o morali, altro non seppe pensare che d’accozzare racconti di fate e dell’orco così insipidi, mostruosi e sconci, che gli stessi Arabi, fondatori di questo depravatissimo gusto, si sarebbero arrossiti d’abergli immaginati’ [Lacking in all things, refined taste, philosophy, inventiveness, and the profound knowledge necessary to be able to imagine and adorn graceful, interesting, tragic, or sprightly novellas, he could not think of anything but piecing together stories of fairies and the ogre that were so dull, monstrous, and indecent that the very Arabs, the founders of this most depraved taste, would have blushed at having invented them].6 The monstrous aspects of the text are many,

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and Galiani goes on to condemn Basile’s Baroque poetics, stating, ‘[a]lla stupidità dell’invenzione corrisponde la mostruosità dello stile’ [[t]he monstrousness of his style corresponds to the stupidity of his work].7 Indeed, the only value he detected in the text was that it preserved the language of the Neapolitan folk. Galiani concluded that ‘Il solo preggio adunque del Basile si ristringe all’aver egli avuta la più incredibile e minuta contezza di tutte le voci, de’ proverbi, de’ modi di dire e delle espressioni strane e bizzarre usate dal volgo. Se avesse consumata tutta la vita ne’ chiassi e nelle taverne non ne poteva apprendere dippiù’ [Basile’s only value, then, lies in having had the most incredible and detailed cognizance of all of the words, proverbs, idiomatic phrases, and strange and bizarre expressions used by the common people. Were he to have spent his entire life in brawls and in taverns he could not have learned more].8 Now a text of folklore inserted into the feminized domestic sphere through the Bolognese translation, Lo cunto was moving far from the learned, scientific discourse that informed the composition of its tales. The importance of the monstrosities in the text, and their relationship to learned discourse, were now overshadowed by the monstrousness of Basile’s Baroque rhetoric. In the following two centuries, it would be the fortunes of the genre outside of Italy that would continue to widen the rift between the literary fairy tale and scientific discourse. The critical and editorial fate of the genre during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in an attenuation of the perception of the bond between science and fictions as well as a reduction in the perceived importance of monsters in Straparola’s and Basile’s tales. Entrenched assumptions regarding the origins of the literary fairy tale inherited from nineteenth-century folklorists following the lead of the brothers Grimm encouraged the association of the fairy tale with popular, rather than learned, culture. For the Grimms, the study and publication of fairy tales was a political as well as philological enterprise: their fairy tales were published in the service of a German nationalist agenda aimed at providing a shared cultural past for regions long divided politically, linguistically, and economically.9 The Kinder- und Hausmärchen represented just one facet of a vast project undertaken by Wilhelm Grimm in collaboration with his brother Jacob to recover the traditions, legends, and mythology of the German people. When Grimm’s tales passed into the hands of German educators, they quickly became a highly effective pedagogical tool for instructing the youngest citizens of the new nation in the language and mores of their people.10 The great editorial success of Grimm’s fairy tales throughout Europe and North America ensured that

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the double identity of the fairy tale as folk artefact and children’s literature would spread beyond the borders of the new German nation. By the mid-nineteenth-century, literary fairy tales would also become essential reading in nurseries and schoolrooms across Europe and North America.11 Regardless of the place, time, or circumstances of their creation and use, literary fairy tales were viewed as at best transcriptions – and at worst corruptions – of the precious voice of the folk. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson writes that the interpretation of texts is often ‘an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code.’12 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, editors, translators, and literary critics transcoded the literary fairy tales of Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti utilizing the master narrative supplied by the brothers Grimm. For example, in the preface to his English translation of Lo cunto, John E. Taylor casts Basile as a tale-collector or proto-anthropologist who gathered his cunti from the mouths of the folk he encountered while stationed on Crete as a young soldier, an assertion which supported the view that all fairy tales originated in the Orient.13 Taylor’s translation represents an odd cross between children’s literature and a serious study of folklore. While his own interests seem to lie in conducting a philological and anthropological study of European fairy tales, his translation of Lo cunto de li cunti was clearly destined for the nursery, as is readily apparent from the paratexts. The renowned children’s book illustrator George Cruikshank provided the drawings that accompany Basile’s tales.14 When the American edition appeared in Boston in 1849, Taylor’s learned preface – which would have been of little interest to children – had become an appendix, sandwiched between advertisements for other children’s books printed by the same publisher.15 Critical assessments of Le piacevoli notti similarly associated its fairy tales with folk traditions and domestic spaces dedicated to the care of children. When writing of Straparola’s fairy tales in his vast study of the Italian novella entitled La novellistica (1924), Letterio Di Francia underscored their oral, folk origins by declaring them ‘vere fiabe’ [true fairy tales], like the ones told by grandmothers and nurses around the hearth to little children.16 While he grudgingly conceded that Straparola’s tales had a ‘veste letteraria’ [literary dress], he simultaneously asserted that they exhibit ‘un carattere prevalantemente popolare’ [a prevalently popular character].17 By insisting on both the popular origins and the domestic utility of Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunti de li cunti, Taylor and Di Francia

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Fairy-Tale Science

characterized these literary fairy tales in such a way as to make them conform to nineteenth-century perceptions of the genre. While nineteenth-century views of the literary fairy tale as folk artefact and children’s literature served to distance the genre from all forms of learned discourse, the formalist and psychoanalytic approaches that dominated the twentieth century interpreted monsters as a narrative element possessing a common function and significance across cultures. These approaches discouraged the sort of social-historical readings I have undertaken here. In his seminal formalist study The Morphology of the Folktale (1928), Vladimir Propp proposed what he termed a scientific system of classification for the fairy tale that he had derived from an analysis of one hundred tales in Aleksandr Afanasyev’s collection The Russian Folktale (1855–63).18 Propp structured his classificatory system based on a number of assumptions about the genre. He believed that all fairy tales possess the same basic structure and are composed of functions which he defined as ‘an act of character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action.’19 He identified thirty-one of these functions, which always occur in the same order, although not all functions necessarily appear in every tale. In the simplest terms, Propp’s morphology describes what the various characters do in a tale, not what they are. It was the monster’s teleology, rather than its ontology, that most interested him. In the list of functions, monsters figure most often as ‘villains,’ characters who seek to thwart the inevitable progress of the hero toward the marriage which marked the end of all tales. First translated into English in 1958, the Morphology gained a second life when folklorists and narratologists outside of Russia adopted Propp’s theories as a tool for comparing tales from different cultures.20 Psychoanalytic approaches interpreted fairy tales as the embodiment of childhood anxieties, regardless of whether they were seventeenth-century Neapolitan tales, Grimm’s märchen, or Romanian folktales. In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim asserted that fairy tales convey an important message to children concerning the need to face life’s obstacles with steadfastness and resolve while assuring them of a happy ending to such struggles.21 With their heroes and heroines, who overcome a series of trials to marry happily, fairy tales represent the process of healthy human development in an imaginative form. In the plots of tales like Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and the dragon-slayer, Bettelheim discerned the articulation and resolution of the Oedipal conflict. When told to children, such stories serve to keep the repressed desires, violent fantasies, and anxieties of the

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Epilogue 169

unconscious in check by allowing the child to work through these feelings in his or her imagination. For Bettelheim, monsters function as screens onto which children project the anxieties created by their desires. Because monsters embody the child’s anxieties, their psychological utility lies in the fact that they are vanquished or transformed in the tales.22 In this way, all fairy-tale monsters served as psychic tools for mastering the process of sexual maturation. The goal of Fairy-Tale Science has been to map the cultural landscape in which Straparola and Basile lived and wrote, a landscape that has been radically reshaped in the wake of the Enlightenment, in order to offer a new story about old tales. I have sought to recuperate the moment when science and the fairy tale encountered and defined each other in the broader cultural discourse of the marvellous. My hope is that the reconstruction of the lively dialogue between these two seemingly disparate genres now makes it impossible to ignore their contiguity. In the preceding chapters, I have focused on representations of monstrous generation, but before a more complete history of the genre can be written, much more work must be done to explore the social-historical significance of other sorts of marvels found on the pages of Le piacevoli notti and Lo cunto de li cunti, particularly in regard to the relation of the depictions of fairy-tale magic to learned discussions of demonology and witchcraft. But that is a tale for another day.

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Notes

Unless otherwise specified, all translations are my own. Introduction: Science Fictions 1 In tale IV.5 of the Decameron, Lisabetta’s dead lover returns to her in a dream. In tale V.8, Nastagio degli Onesti sees the ghost of a knight condemned to perpetually hunt down the ghost of the woman who refused his love during their lifetime. When in tale X.5 Madonna Dionora sets for her admirer Messer Ansaldo the impossible task of giving her a garden that would be just as beautiful in January as in May, he hires a magician to create this marvel. Magic also plays a role in tale X.9. In this novella, Saladin uses magic means to send the ailing Messer Torello from the Orient to his home in Pavia in just one night. 2 For the story of the dog child see Varchi, Opere, 2:666. The citation is the title of Chapter 7 in the French surgeon Ambroise Paré’s 1573 treatise On Monsters and Marvels, 31. Both Girolamo Frachetta (Breve spositione, 221) and Tommaso Garzoni (Il serraglio, 88) discuss the power of the Zephyr wind to impregnate horses. The story of this Hydra was recounted across Europe, retold in Switzerland by Konrad Lykosthenes (Prodigiorum, 538), in France by Pierre Boiastuau (Histoires prodigieuses, 354 ), and in Italy by Ulisse Aldrovandi (Serpentum et draconum, 387). All of these monstrosities and the texts that depict them are discussed at length in subsequent chapters. 3 See Tommaso Garzoni’s chapter ‘L’appartamento prestigioso’ in his Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo for descriptions of such diabolical transformations (224–40). 4 ‘The Age of the Marvelous’ was the title of an exhibit curated by Joy Kenseth at Dartmouth. Kenseth describes the period thus in her introductory essay to the exhibit catalogue, The Age of the Marvelous (25).

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172 5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21

Notes to pages 4–9

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 19. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 137. Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, 9. See by way of example Giulia Bigolina’s prose romance Urania (after 1553?), which features a wild man and woman and a magic garland capable of making any woman who receives it fall in love with the donor. Lorenzo Selva’s Le metamorfosi (1581) includes depictions of fairies but lacks the fairy-tale plot structure I have described here. For a history of Straparola’s tales in France see Ruth Bottigheimer’s article ‘France’s First Fairy Tales’ as well as her Fairy Godfather. Donato Pirovano’s edition of Le piacevoli notti includes a descriptive catalogue of early modern editions (2:805–16). For a catalogue of early modern editions and translations of Basile’s tales see Michele Rak’s edition of Lo cunto de li cunti (1025–7). Kathryn A. Hoffman, ‘Of Monkey Girls and a Hog-Faced Woman,’ 67–8. I take these three responses to the monstrous birth from Daston and Park’s discussion of three ‘separate complexes of interpretation and associated emotions’ found in sixteenth-century discussions of monstrosity (Wonders and the Order of Nature, 176). Holly Tucker, Pregnant Fictions, 7. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 3. Italo Calvino, Sulla fiaba, 114, emphasis in original. Robyn McCallum, ‘Approaches to the Literary Fairy Tale,’ 20. See Paul Larivaille’s Le realisme du merveilleux, 112–16. Also for a socialhistorical reading of magic in Le piacevoli notti, see Giuseppe Bonomi, ‘Motivi magico-stregonici in una novella dello Straparola.’ Nancy L. Canepa, From Court to Forest; Michele Rak, ‘Fonti e lettori nel Cunto de li cunti di G.B. Basile,’ 81–121; Rak, ‘Genesi del racconto fiabesco,’ Napoli gentile, 293–330. See also Rak’s well-annotated edition of Lo cunto, which meticulously documents Basile’s references to both high and low culture. Kingsley Amis, ‘Starting Points,’ 11. Sam Moskowitz, cited in John Aquino, Science Fiction as Literature, 10. In Monstrous Imagination, Marie-Hélène Huet notes, ‘This re-appropriation in literature of an idea associated primarily with medical beliefs was anticipated in treatises of the Renaissance which quoted with equal regard poets, physicians of Antiquity, hearsay, and personal testimonials. Tales of monstrous births caused by the maternal imagination could be found in legends, philosophy, and medical essays’ (9). Valeria Finucci examines Tasso’s use of the theory of maternal desire in her analysis of the figure of Clorinda from the epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (‘Maternal Imagination and Monstrous Birth’).

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Notes to pages 10–16

173

1. Facts and Favole 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

Benedetto Varchi, Opere, 2:662. Varchi, Opere, 2:662. Varchi, Opere, 2:664. The verse comes from Petrarch’s Sonnet 75. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses),’ 6. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature, 71. Georges Canguilhem, ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous,’ 27. See, by way of example, Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges (1996; first edition 1977); Huet, Monstrous Imagination (1993); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (1998). Regarding monsters and prophecy, see Ottavia Niccoli’s Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (1990). Besides Findlen’s work on monsters and collecting, see Giuseppe Olmi’s L’inventario del mondo (1992). On the interpretation of the monster in these and other classical sources in the teratalogical canon see Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine, 6–14. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 176. Mary B. Campbell, Wonder and Science, 15. For more on the organization of Gesner’s encyclopedia see Willy Ley’s introduction to Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts, which was the first English translation of the Historia animalium; and William S. Ashworth’s ‘Remarkable Humans and Singular Beasts.’ Giuseppe Olmi, ‘Science-Honor-Metaphor,’ 8. The bibliography on collecting practices in early modern Italy has grown considerably over the past two decades. See Findlen, Olmi, Lugli, Weschler, as well as Von Schlosser’s older but still useful study. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 3. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 65. Findlen, ‘Jokes of Nature,’ 310. The practice of manufacturing monsters will be discussed at length in chapter 5. Chapter 34 in La comare is entitled ‘Delle molte sorti di mostri, e quali possono essere veri, e quali si debba reputare favolosi’ [Of the many sorts of monsters, and which can be true and which must be deemed fabulous]. Mercurio, La comare, 194. Cited in Findlen, Possessing Nature, 92. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 180. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 1–4. I borrow the term ‘intellectual omnivore’ from David Freedberg’s The Eye of the Lynx, 72.

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Notes to pages 16–20

23 Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 180–1. 24 Luisa Muraro, Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato, 15–19. 25 Ruth Bottigheimer suggests that Straparola followed this career path in her Fairy Godfather, 70–3. 26 The most detailed and useful biographical study in English is found in Nancy Canepa’s From Court to Forest, 35–52. Older but still useful are Vittorio Imbriani’s ‘Il gran Basile’ and Benedetto Croce’s essay on Basile, ‘Giambattista Basile e Lo cunto de di cunti.’ For more contemporary biographical studies in Italian see Alberto Asor Rosa’s ‘Giambattista Basile’ (76–8) and Rak’s ‘Nota Biografica’ in his edition of Lo cunto (1048–53). 27 In 1608, he published Il pianto della vergine [The Virgin’s Tears], a collection of canzonette which were set to music by his brother Donato in 1610. Two years later he penned what was known as a ‘favola marittima’ entitled Le avventurose disavventure [The Adventurous Misadventures], in which he replaced the shepherds and nymphs typical of the pastoral drama with fishermen. 28 These include what Michele Rak terms ‘testi cortigiani,’ or works prepared specifically for festivities organized by the court, such as L’Apparato della festività del glorioso s. Gio. Battista ... (1626). 29 These paratexts included a prose preface, the argomenti or summaries for each canto, two letters, and a few poems parodying the sonnets written in praise of the author which were typical of academic publications of the period. See Nigro, ‘Dalla lingua al dialetto,’ 86. 2. Wonder Tales in the Age of the Marvellous 1 Marina Warner, Wonder Tales, 4. Michele Rak makes a similar observation (‘Il sistema dei racconti,’ 14). 2 Joy Kenseth, ‘The Age of the Marvelous: An Introduction,’ 31. 3 Carolyn Walker Bynum, ‘Wonder,’ 7. 4 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 194. 5 I take the preceding list of categories of the early modern marvellous from Joy Kenseth’s essay ‘The Age of the Marvelous: An Introduction.’ Daston and Park ascribe a similar array of stimuli for wonder when describing which aspects of Francesco Calzolari’s natural history collection evoked wonder: the variety, beauty, rarity, exoticism, unusual form and behaviours of the specimen, natural mysteries (fossils), and objects with occult powers (magnets) (Wonders and the Order of Nature, 154–5). 6 Bernard of Clairvaux described admiratio in these terms. See Bynum, ‘Wonder,’ 12. 7 Here I have in mind the drawings of Charles LeBrun and Charles Darwin’s

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Notes to pages 21–5

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24

25

26

175

The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals (1872), both mentioned by Bynum in her address to the American Historical Association on wonder (‘Wonder,’ 5). Aristotle, Metaphysics, 13. For examples of this in the writings of Galileo, Stelluti, and Redi see Giovanni Getto’s La prosa scientifica nell’età barocca, 15–17. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 111. For other Medieval scholars who held similar opinions see Bynum, ‘Wonder,’ 9. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 110. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 118. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 19–20. Paula Findlen, ‘Jokes of Nature,’ 319. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 19. Mary Campbell, Wonder and Science, 76–7. Campbell, Wonder and Science, 85. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder, 158. Stafford and Terpak, Devices of Wonder, 163–4. Stafford and Terpak, Devices of Wonder, 163. I maintain Straparola’s spellings for all of the characters’ names. In some instances, these spellings differ from modern usage. When citing Straparola’s text, I use Donato Pirovano’s recent edition of Le piacevoli notti (Salerno, 2000) and include the volume and page number in parenthetical references. Her suggestion recalls the opening pages of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano, where the Duchess of Urbino calls upon her lady-in-waiting Emilia Pia to govern the evenings’ entertainments. Emilia commands that each person present suggest a game to play. For the significance of these musical performances see Cathy Ann Elias’s article ‘Musical Performance in Sixteenth-Century Italian Literature.’ My description is based on the editio princeps, which readers can now consult in Donato Pirovano’s excellent edition of Le piacevoli notti. Subsequent editions contained a number of variations and even in some cases, different novellas. For a description of the textual variants see Pirovano ‘Nota al testo’ in his edition of Le piacevoli notti (2:805–14). Manlio Pastore Stocchi, ‘Introduzione,’ xv. In La cornice e il furto, Marziano Guglielminetti suggests that the presence of Bembo and Capello is an ‘atto d’emenda’ [request for pardon] for the canzoniere Straparola wrote in his youth (32). Angelo Beolco (1496–1542), also known as Il Ruzante, wrote plays and dialogues in pavano koine, and Andrea Calmo penned plurilinguistic comedies and letters in Venetian dialect in the same years that Straparola wrote his

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27 28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35

36

Notes to pages 25–8

tales. Beolco performed his works in his native Padua, as well as in Venice and Ferrara. He abandoned the plot lines of classical theatre, choosing instead to explore such themes as poverty, war, and the difficulties encountered by peasants who had immigrated to the cities in search of employment. Although his later works would include comedies in five acts, his use of dialect and his preference for farce distinguished him from other comic playwrights of the day, such as Machiavelli, Bibbiena, and Ariosto. Andrea Calmo (1510–71) also shunned the classic comic model provided by Terence and Plautus that was embraced by many of his contemporaries. Instead, he wrote plurilinguistic comedies in which he combined a number of different dialects and languages. In Calmo’s theatre, plot yields to language and the comedy arises from the misunderstandings generated from the Babel on stage. Pirovano, ‘Introduzione,’ Le piacevoli notti, xv. Guglielminetti notes that tales VII.1 and tale IX.2 in Le piacevoli notti are rewritings of tales III.9 and IV.8 from the Decameron (‘Dalle “Novellae” del Morlini’). Gianni Villani precisely defines Straparola’s debt to Morlini: ‘Ricordiamo che le novellae di Morlini riprese dallo Straparola sono le seguenti: V, VI, VII, XIII, XX, XXI, XXII, XXVI, XXVII, XXIX, XXX, XXXII, XXXVI, XLVII, LI, LIV, LIX, LXI, LXVIII, LXXI, LXXIV, LXXVII, LXXX. Essi confluiranno, rispettivamente, in Piacevoli notti, XII.5, XIII.3, XI.4, XIII.2, XIII.4, XIII.9, XII.1, XII.4, XIII.6, XII.2, VIII.6, XI.5, VIII.4, XIII.13, XIII.11, XIII.8, VI.5, XIII.10, XII.3, XIII.7, XIII.1, VII.5’ (‘Da Morlini a Straparola,’ 68). For more on Morlini and his Latin novellas, see Gianni Villani’s ‘Introduzione’ to the author’s Novellae (ix–lvi). This defence is discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. Interestingly, the 1599 edition of Le piacevoli notti published in Venice by Alessandro de’ Vecchi included a hundred enigmas and seven riddles in the form of sonnets by the Bolognese author Giulio Cesare Croce. Giuseppe Rua, ‘Intorno alle piacevoli notti,’ 147. Here I am thinking of the Decameron’s tale VIII.3, in which Calandrino is tricked into thinking an ordinary stone is a heliotrope, and tale VI.10, in which Frate Cipolla claims ordinary objects are holy relics. Ruth Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 13–14. This is discussed in detail in chapter 5. Some tales, however, more closely resemble novellas. Nancy Canepa includes in this group ‘Lo viso’ (III.3), ‘Lo compare’ (II.10), and ‘La Sapia’ (V.6). See From Court to Forest, 58. For discussions of the eclogues, see Paolo Cherchi’s essay ‘La coppella.’ For a comparison between the eclogues in Lo cunto and Basile’s Le muse napoletane that highlights the theme of the contrast between appearance and reality in

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Notes to pages 29–32

37 38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

177

the former, see Mario Petrini, Il gran Basile, 41–51. Pasquale Guaragnella reads La coppella as ‘la rappresentazione amara di una secentesca “malattia dell’apparenza”’ [the bitter depiction of a seventeenth-century ‘illness of appearance’] (Gli occhi della mente, 185). Andrea Battistini, ‘La cultura del Barocco,’ 468. Rak, Lo cunto, 1057. Rak, Lo cunto, 1065. More recently, Rak has provided the following provisional list of genres that come into play in Basile’s fairy tales ‘(i) la diceria, (ii) fogli volanti, (iii) romanzi, (iv) i poemi e molti sottogeneri in rima, (v) il teatro, compresa l’opera dei pupi, il teatro di strada, and la commedia dell’arte, (vi) cantimbanchi e l’opera di quadro, (vii) la novella umanistica, (viii) i proverbi, (ix) la favola di tipo esopiano, (x) la tradizione del racconto delle vecchie (‘Il sistema dei racconti,’ 29) [ (i) gossip, (ii) broadsheets, (iii) romances, (iv) poems and many subgenres in verse, (v) theatre, including marionette theatre, street theatre, and the commedia dell’arte, (vi) strolling players and their scenes, (vii) the humanist novella, (viii) proverbs, (ix) fables of the Aesopian type, (x) the tradition of old wives’ tales.]. Rak, ‘Fonti e lettori,’ 81. Canepa, From Court to Forest, 24–5. When citing Basile’s text, I use Michele Rak’s edition of Lo cunto de li cunti. Here I have provided my own English translation, but for the most part I cite Norman Penzer’s two-volume English translation, The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, which is based on Benedetto Croce’s Italian translation of Basile’s tales. When referring to the tales of Lo cunto I use both the day/tale numbers and the titles in both Neapolitan and Penzer’s English translation. Unfortunately, I was unable to use Nancy Canepa’s excellent translation, The Tale of Tales (Wayne State Unviersity Press, 2007), which was published only after this book was in press. On this topic, see Canepa, From Court to Forest, 56 and 273n12. For a list of the games, songs, and dances mentioned by Basile, see the ‘Indici dei Balli, Canzoni, e Dei Giochi,’ in Rak’s edition of Lo cunto de li cunti, 1140–1. Cited in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 171. Giovanni Getto, La prosa scientifica dell’età barocco, 15. ‘Marvelous Metaphor’ is the title of chapter 8 in Canepa’s From Court to Forest. Canepa, From Court to Forest, 32. Cited in Battistini, ‘La cultura del Barocco,’ 479. Cited in Battistini, ‘La cultura del Barocco,’ 479. Canepa, From Court to Forest, 218. See Canepa, From Court to Forest, 238, where she reviews the observations of Benedetto Croce, Italo Calvino, and Michele Rak.

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Notes to pages 32–41

53 Rak, Lo cunto, 1092. 54 Canepa, From Court to Forest, 238, 241. 55 This list is compiled from Canepa’s analysis of these tropes in From Court to Forest, 243–6. 56 Benedetto Croce, ‘Giambattista Basile e Lo cunto de li cunti,’ 56. 57 The verses come from sonnets 185 and 327, respectively, from Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Mark Musa translates these lines as ‘of Love extracts from it a subtle liquid,’ and ‘The aura, fragrance, coolness, and the shade’ (Musa, 227, 455). 58 Battistini, ‘La cultura del Barocco,’ 478. 59 Bernard Weinberg calls this rediscovery the ‘signal event’ in Renaissance literary criticism in his monumental study A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1:349). 60 Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, 9. 61 Weinberg, A History, 1:350. 62 Weinberg, A History, 1:350. 63 Kenseth, ‘The Age of the Marvelous,’ 28; James V. Mirollo, ‘The Aesthetics of the Marvelous,’ 68. 64 Aristotle, Poetics, 33. 65 Aristotle, Poetics, 59. 66 Aristotle, Poetics, 123. 67 Aristotle, Poetics, 125. 68 Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, vii. 69 For an analysis of a number of these trials see Anne Schutte’s Aspiring Saints. See also Cecilia Ferrazzi’s Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint, edited by Schutte. 70 Kenseth, ‘The Age of the Marvelous,’ 30. 71 Cited in and translated by Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, 118. 72 Cited in and translated by Mirollo, ‘The Aesthetics of the Marvelous,’ 70. 73 Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, 138–39. 74 Cited in and translated by Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, 127–8. 75 Betussi’s translation was reprinted at least eight times in the forty years following the printing of the editio princeps in 1547 (1553, 1554, 1564, 1569, 1574, 1581, 1585, and 1588). 76 This discussion occurs in Book I, section 3 of the Genealogia. My summary here is based on Charles G. Osgood’s comments in his introduction to Boccaccio on Poetry (xviii). 77 Boccaccio, Genealogia, 236r. 78 Boccaccio, Genealogia, 236v. 79 Boccaccio, Genealogia, 238r. 80 Andrea Calmo, Le lettere, 346–7. Calmo published four books of letters over

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Notes to pages 41–6

81

82

83

84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97

179

the course of almost ten years: the first in 1547, the second in 1548, the third in 1552, and the fourth in 1556. Interestingly, both Straparola and Calmo employed the same printer, Comin da Trino, a fact that perhaps indicates some overlapping of their respective intellectual circles. Girolamo Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi, 46. The seven reprintings of Bargagli’s dialogue before 1610 attest to the enduring public interest in the academy and the games the members played with Sienese noble women during the evenings (Bargagli, 35). See, by way of example, Vittorio Rossi’s edition of Calmo’s letters cited above, in which Rossi cites Bargagli’s dialogue to explain the various games described in Calmo’s letter to Signora Frondosa (347–50). Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi, 216. There is, however, another storytelling game called ‘il giuoco del novella,’ in which one player is chosen to narrate a novella from the Decameron while the other players are assigned the name of a character or object from the tale. Whenever a character or object is mentioned during the telling of the tale the player assigned that identity must jump up and exclaim, ‘Avete fatto bene, gran mercé a voi!’ Telling tales is considered to be a game when a specific theme is established to which all narrators must adhere. Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi, 217. Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi, 217. Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi, 219. Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi, 220. Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 6. Pirovano, ‘Una storia editoriale cinquecentesca,’ 557–8. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, 7. Basile had been invited to join the ranks of this prestigious institution as a corresponding member soon after its founding in 1630. Girolamo Brusoni, Le glorie degli Incogniti, 209–11. I have modernized the capitalization in the original. While Girolamo Brusoni is listed as the author on the frontispiece of Le glorie degli Incogniti, it is now thought that the work was a collective project involving a number of members of the academy and perhaps, in some cases, the participation of the subject of the biography. See Monica Miato, ‘Accademia e autoprofilo,’ 159. Brusoni, Le glorie degli Incogniti, 210. Rak, ‘Il Racconto Fiabesco,’ Lo cunto 1057. See by way of example, Federigo Fregoso’s suggestion in Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano that the perfect courtier must know how to ‘recreare gli animi degli auditori con motti piacevoli e facezie discretamente indurgli a festa e

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Notes to pages 46–9

riso’ [recreate the minds of his listeners and induce them discreetly to be festive and laugh through pleasant witticisms and humorous anecdotes] (149–50). 98 Basile, Il pentamerone, iii. Lupardi reprinted Pompeo Sarnelli’s 1674 edition entitled Il pentamerone in Rome in 1679. 99 Lewis C. Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender, 65. 100 Seifert, 66. 3. ‘Con l’uno e l’altro sesso’ 1 Giorgio Bàrberi-Squarotti, ‘Problemi di tecnica narrative cinquecentesta: Lo Straparola,’ 84. 2 Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Conflitti di culture nel Cinquecento, 96. 3 Letterio Di Francia, La novellistica, 715. 4 Donato Pirovano notes that Straparola’s description of the villa on Murano depends heavily on a passage from the introduction to the third day of the Decameron. See Pirovano’s edition of Le piacevoli notti, 1:7n1. 5 Marga Cottino-Jones interprets this as an indication that we must read Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti as a fantastic text aimed at subverting the realism of the Decameron. See Cottino-Jones, ‘Princesses, Kings, and the Fantastic,’ 174–5. 6 Pirovano notes a number of these inconsistencies in his introduction to Le piacevoli notti. While in the proem the group establishes that the damigella narrating her tale will wear a green garland on her head, this custom is never put into practice. The names of the narrators are sometimes confused, as at the end of tale IV.4, when Lucrezia is said to indicate that Lionora begin the enigma which according to the prescribed order should rightfully be told by Isabella, who has just finished narrating a tale. A new damigella named Diana is introduced on the ninth night with no explanation. At the end of the eleventh night Signora Lucrezia states that everyone – men and women – will participate in the storytelling. This change in the narrative order actually occurs on the thirteenth, rather than the twelfth, night. Pirovano, ‘Introduzione,’ xix. 7 Ruth Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 84. 8 In his article ‘Argomenti di discussione letteraria nell’accademia degli Alterati,’ Bernard Weinberg provides insight into how academies like the Alterati shaped literary opinions and taste through their discussions of works written by members and debates on canonical texts by Dante and Ariosto. For discussions of the use of the Prologue as a meta-textual space in Renaissance comedies see Nino Borsellino, ‘Prologo,’ 530; Franca Angelini, ‘Teatro moderno,’ 77.

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Notes to pages 50–5

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9 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, 26. 10 Selene Sarteschi, ‘Valenze lessicali,’ 85–6. In his edition of the Decameron, Cesare Segre notes that the four terms should be understood as synonymous (26n13). 11 The Crusca Academy defined favola in their dictionary of 1612 as follows: ‘Falsa narrazione alla verità simigliante; trovato non vero, ma talora verisimile, talora no; come gli apologi, e le trasformazioni d’Ovidio: e de’ versimili, come le novelle di Boccaccio’ [a fictional narrative that resembles the truth, found to be not true but sometimes verisimilar sometimes not, as with the apologues and the transformations of Ovid, and regarding the verisimilar, like the novellas of Boccaccio]. 12 Pliny, Natural History, 2:511. 13 Patricia Hannon, Fabulous Identities, 16. 14 As Ruth Bottigheimer demonstrates in Fairy Godfather (13–18), Straparola invented the rise tale, a fairy tale of social and economic metamorphosis. While restoration tales that told of royals being restored to power through magical means after a disgraceful fall from their station could be found in medieval romances, Straparola was the first to pen tales of impoverished protagonists who marry into a higher social class by means of magic and then acquire wealth. Such metamorphoses permit lowly characters to climb the socio-economic ladder. With the aid of enchanted beings, such unfortunates ascend from the lowly rung of impoverished commoners to that of wealthy royals. Some rise tales entail the physical transformations of the protagonist, others do not. For example, an enchanted doll which speaks and defecates money facilitates the socio-economic metamorphosis of the poor orphan Adamantina in tale V.2 without altering Adamatina’s physical being. 15 In medieval love lyric, the wild man came to represent the tortured lover as well as courage in the face of love’s adversity. He was thought to laugh when it was raining because he anticipated that the sun would return and cry when the sun shone because he knew the rain must come. For this trope see Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, 98; Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 32. 16 The humanist Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) wrote a number of treatises on astronomical and astrological subjects, although today he is most remembered for his Latin verse. Varchi refers to his treatise with an Italian title, Libro delle cose celeste. 17 Londa Schiebinger argues that the various combinations of the humours allow for a range of articulations of male and female such as ‘womanish man’ or ‘manly woman’ (The Mind Has No Sex? 161–3). Varchi, however, does not make such distinctions. 18 Varchi, Opere, 2:681.

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Notes to pages 55–61

19 The debate began with the publication of Londa Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex? (1989) and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex (1990). Both Schiebinger and Laqueur argue that the modern notion of incommensurable sexual difference arose only in the eighteenth century as a means to justify the oppression of women at the moment when Enlightenment thinkers were arguing for universal rights for men. Laqueur focused his argument on early modern anatomical texts, while Schiebinger focused on the emergence of ‘female’ skeletons during the eighteenth century. As I explain below, Laqueur’s argument was quickly challenged by Katharine Park and Robert Nye in a review of Making Sex published in the New Republic (1991). Michael Stolberg presented a second challenge to Laqueur’s and Schiebinger’s thesis in a 2003 edition of Isis by way of an examination of female skeletons which pre-date those studied by Schiebinger. They in turn refute his arguments in responses printed in the same issue by stating primarily that Stolberg has not mustered enough evidence to counter their claims that the one-sex model represented the dominant worldview. Revisiting all the nuances of this debate is beyond the scope of this study. For a concise summary of the major points and positions involved see Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites, 35–41. 20 Cited in Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, 79. 21 Laqueur, Making Sex, 80 fig. 17. 22 Mercurio, La comare, 197. 23 I borrow this phrase from Gilbert, Early Modern Hermphrodites, 37. 24 For details on the wide circulation of Pliny, see Charles G. Nauert, ‘Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny,’ 76. 25 See Domenichi’s translation of Pliny’s Storia naturale, 188–9. 26 Agnolo Firenzuola, Opere, 153. 27 When a vote for the new abbess of a convent results in a three-way tie, the vicar decides that each of the three contenders must do something ‘laudevole e degna di memoria’ (2:465) [praiseworthy and memorable]. Sister Veneranda urinates through the eye of a needle. Sister Modestia pulls out a die and places a seed in each of the five divots. With a frighteningly loud fart, she manages to blow the four seeds in the corner divots off the die while leaving the seed in the centre untouched. Sister Pacifica tosses a peach pit in the air, catches it between her buttocks, and grinds it into dust. Bembo concludes the story by noting that they still fight over which was the most astounding feat. 28 Pirovano asserts that ‘Orpheus of the Page’ [Orfeo dalla carta] is a bookseller-editor from the Danza family who commissioned Comin da Trino to print the first edition of Le piacevoli notti. Pirovano provides a number of convincing pieces of evidence to support his theory. First, the frontispiece of the

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Notes to pages 61–8

29

30 31

32

33

34

35

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editio princeps of the first volume of Le piacevoli notti indicates that the text was printed ‘Appresso Orpheo dalla carta tien per insegna. S. Alvise.’ Second, Pirovano notes that the Danzas were papermakers, so ‘dalla carta,’ meaning ‘of the page’ or ‘of the paper,’ could function as an attribute instead of a surname (and indeed it is not capitalized). Furthermore, it is known that the brothers Giovanni Antonio and Sebastiano Danza ran a bookshop in Venice in the San Bortolamio quarter, and the words ‘A San Bortholomeo alla libraria della colombina’ appear under the printer’s device in the editio princeps of the second volume of Le piacevoli notti. See Pirovano’s article ‘Una storia editoriale cinquecentesca: Le piacevoli notti di Giovan Francesco Straparola, ’ 544–5. In his La novellaia milanese [The Milanese Storyteller] the folklorist Vittorio Imbriani described his field technique for gathering tales as follows: ‘Le ho stenografate, mentre si narravano da contadine, operaie, domestiche e quindi trascritte senza farmi lecito di mutar sillaba dalla dicitura igenua primitiva’ (xxxiv) [I transcribed them, while they were told by peasant women, female workers, and housekeepers and then rewrote them without allowing myself to change a syllable of the naïve, primitive words]. Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi, Anatomy of the Novella, 18. See also Boccaccio’s epilogue, Decameron, 675. In From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner provides a number of different illustrations that depict the novelliere as scribe, including a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Decameron in which Boccaccio is depicted crouched outside of the circle of narrators transcibing what he hears (xiii). This reference can be found in the paragraph concluding the fourth tale of the thirteenth night. It begins: ‘Finita l’isposizione del vago enigma, la Signora impose al signor Bernardo Capello che partecipasse con esso noi una delle sue favole, usando però quella brevità che a questa notte si conviene’ (2:747) [The demonstration of this beautiful enigma complete, the Signora ordered Bernardo Capello to participate with us with one of his tales, using, however, the brevity that this night called for]. On the fourth night Molino and Trivigiano strum their lutes and sing a canzone. On the tenth night, Bembo sings a canzonetta to the delight of his companions. Molino and Trivigiano will sing on the final three nights of storytelling. Lodovico Domenichi, Historia varia, 217. For another example, see the French surgeon Paré’s account of Marie-Germain in On Monsters and Marvels, 31–2. On the legal aspects of intersexuality in early modern Italy and France see Andrea Gloria Michler, ‘Ambiguità e trasmutazione.’

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Notes to pages 68–74

36 Realdo Colombo, De re anatomica, cited in Robert J. Moes and C.D. O’Malley, ‘Realdo Colombo,’ 527. 37 Kathleen P. Long, ‘Jacques Duval on Hermaphrodites,’ 114. 38 Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites, 28. 39 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 31. 4. ‘Per far vere le favole’ 1 All citations from Lo cunto refer to Michele Rak’s 1986 edition. Citations in English are taken from Norman Penzer’s translation. 2 See Rak’s short note in Basile, Lo cunto, 29n17. 3 For contemporary examples of this belief see Claudia Pancino, Voglie materne, 9, and Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, 158, 162, and 168. 4 Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 13–14. 5 See by way of example the French surgeon Ambroise Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels where he writes, ‘Hippocrates saved a princess accused of adultery, because she had given birth to a child as black as a Moor, her husband and she both having white skin; which woman was absolved upon Hippocrates’ persuasion that it was [caused by] the portrait of a Moor, similar to the child, which was customarily attached to her bed’ (38–9). 6 Giambattista Della Porta, Dei miracoli, 84v–r. 7 Pancino, Voglie materne, 20; Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, 146. 8 Cited in Pancino, Voglie materne, 43. Pancino notes that Matteo Palmieri (1406–75) most likely wrote this treatise before 1439. 9 See for example Montaigne’s essays ‘On the Power of the Imagination.’ 10 The Spanish humanist Pedro Mexía discusses the power of the maternal imagination in La selva di varia lettione, 133r. A kind of compendium of curious phenomena and historical episodes gleaned from a multitude of classical sources, Mexía’s Selva was first published in Spain in 1540. The work quickly gained popularity across Europe and was translated into Italian three times during the sixteenth century: first by Mambrino Roseo (1544), and then by Lucio Mauro (1556) and Francesco Sansovino (1564). 11 Levinus Lemnius, De miraculis occultis, 23–6. The title of the chapter in which Lemnes discusses this concept nicely summarizes his theory: ‘De absurdo pragnatium appetitu, atque insatiabili rerum desiderio, quibus si contigat frustrari periclitantur’ [On the strange appetite of pregnant women, and of their desire for many things, who, when they are denied them, are at risk for aborting and miscarrying]. Lemnius’s text was reprinted many times throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Translations in Italian

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Notes to pages 75–7

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

185

(Degli occulti miracoli, 1560), German, and French made this book of secrets accessible to an even wider public. Massimo Angelini, ‘Il potere plastico,’ 61. Angelini, ‘Il potere plastico,’ 62. See also Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, 155. For a review of dissenting opinions see Pancino, Voglie materne, 103–8. Pancino, Voglie materne, 92. Paolo Zacchia wrote a treatise addressing questions of medical law entitled Quaestionum medico-legalium (1621). Scipione Mercurio, La comare, 54. Mercurio’s manual for midwives enjoyed some eighteen editions and remained the only guide for midwives written in Italian until 1721. See Pancino’s Il bambino e l’acqua sporca, 27. Here the translation is mine. See Raffaele D’Ambra, Vocabolario Napolitano-Toscano, s.v. ‘golio.’ In his Vocabolario Napoletano-Italiano, Andreoli defines the term ‘golio’ as follows: ‘desiderio propriamente di gola, donde ha preso il suo nome, Voglia, Appettito,. desiderio checchessia, Desiderio, Brama. desiderio capriccioso, Ghiribizzo, Fantasia. desiderio di una donna gravida, Voglia. impronta di cosa desiderata invano dalla donna incinta., voglia, es. Aveva sul braccio una voglia di fragole’ [a gluttonous desire, from whence it has taken its name; Wish, Appetite. any desire. Desire, Yearning, capricious desire, Whim, Fancy. desire of a pregnant woman, Voglia. the mark of the thing desired in vain by the pregnant woman, birthmark, ex. ‘He had a strawberry birthmark on his arm’]. Scipione Mercurio, Degli errori popolari, 367–8. Pancino, Volgie materne, 100. Pancino indicates that Nicolas de Malebranche suggests this strategy to the readers of his La ricerca della verità. Not everyone, of course, accepted this theory of the capacity of the mother to locate the voglia on the child’s body. Mercurio argued that the location of the mark was determined by Nature, not the mother. He reasons that if such a thing were possible, ‘facilmente farebbono le mogli de’ Ciarlatani desiderando il naso dell’Elefante a fine di far nascere un mostro tale per poter col mostrarlo guadagnare molti denari, si toccassero il naso continuamente’ (La comare, 77) [then the wives of Charlatans would likely touch their noses continually while desiring the elephant’s trunk in order to make such a monster be born that they would be able to display it to earn a lot of money]. As Pancino notes, ‘la credenza perde in qualche modo innocenza da una parte compaiono nei racconti effetti sempre più spiacevoli della fantasia materna, dall’altra si comincia a ipotizzare che quell’indiscusso potere delle madri sia dovuto non tanto a un non detto loro potere sull’atto della generazione, quanto piuttosto ad alcune particolarità del loro carattere che le rendono disordinate, volubile, capricciose, e per questo profondamente diverso

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22 23

24 25 26 27

28

Notes to pages 77–81

dall’uomo’ (Voglie materne, 81) [the belief somehow loses its innocence; on the one hand, there appear in the stories increasingly unpleasant effects of the maternal imagination, while on the other, authors begin to hypothesize that this unquestioned power of the mothers is due not so much to their power of the act of generation, as to some character traits that render them immoderate, fickle, capricious, and because of this profoundly different from men]. Mexía, La selva, 133r; Lemnius, Degli occulti miracoli, 25. In On Monsters and Marvels, Ambroise Paré writes, ‘when the mother receives some blow over the womb or when she falls down from a certain height, the infants can have their bones broken, thrown out of joint and twisted, or receive some other defect, such as being crippled, hunchback, and misshapen’ (46). Mercurio, Degli errori popolari, 343. For Basile’s tales as carvnivalesque texts, see Nancy Canepa’s ‘Basile e il carnevalesco,’ especially 41–4. Max Lüthi, The European Folktale, 2. Ruth Bottigheimer reads Basile’s representations of women becoming pregnant from amorous, often illicit, trysts as indicative of women’s historical loss of status and fertility control in the years 1500–1700 (See her ‘Fertility Control’). I will discuss this theory in detail in chapter 5. In ‘Lo dragone’ [The Dragon] (IV.5), the queen who persecutes the courtier Miuccio was born with a monstrous twin, a dragon. The destiny of each twin is inextricably bound to that of the other: when the dragon is slain, the queen dies. A childless woman in ‘La mortella’ [The Myrtle] (I.2) is so desperate for offspring that she exclaims, ‘O dio, partoresse quarcosa a lo munno, e non me curarria che fosse frasca de mortella!’ (54) [Oh God! if only I could bring something into the world, I shouldn’t mind if it were only a sprig of myrtle (1:25)]. The heavens hear her cry and she delivers forth a myrtle plant. In ‘La Penta mano-mozza’ [The Girl with the maimed Hands] (III.2), a letter sent to the king, who is abroad, from his cabinet that announces that Queen Penta has given birth to a beautiful son is intercepted by a jealous woman and replaced with another that accuses the queen of having given birth to a dog. Upon receiving the letter, the king writes back to his council advising them to tell the queen ‘non se pigliasse manco na dramma de desgusto, ca cheste cose erano permessione de lo cielo e l’ommo da bene non deve mettere assietto a le stelle’ (486) [not to feel even an ounce of sorrow, because these things were in the hand of God, and no man should fight against the stars (1:236)]. This letter too is intercepted by the jealous woman and replaced with another that instructs the king’s advisors to burn mother and child immediately, an order which they cannot bring themselves to carry out.

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29 Lodovico Domenichi, Historia varia, 217–18. 30 See Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, 8–23; 26–31. 31 Tommaso Garzoni, Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo, 170; 173–4. Animalhuman hybrids will be discussed at length in chapter 5. See figures 5.1, 5.3, and 5.4. 32 Garzoni, Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo, 169. 33 Antonio Torquemada, Giardino de’ fiori curiosi, 42–46. Torquemada’s dialogue was first published in Spain in 1570. Here I cite from the Italian translation by Celio Malaspina. Malaspina’s translation enjoyed a modest editorial success and was reprinted five times between 1590 and 1620. 34 Mercurio, La comare, 194. 35 It should be noted that Mercurio’s summary of Torquemada’s opinion fails to acknowledge how the dialogic exchange among the three interlocutors serves to temper the veracity of any single assertion. For example, Luigi remarks after the conversation on interspecies mating, ‘Se quello dell’huomo marino con la donna, et quello dell’orso con la donzella, et questo del Babuino è verità, etiando sarà possibile quello di questi Regni dicono; però lasciamola, accioché ogn’uno tenga l’opinione che più li piace, senza che gli sforziamo a nulla se non quello che al suo giuditio più gli quadra’ (Torquemada, Giardino, 57) [If that one about the merman and the woman, and that one about the bear and the maiden, and this one about the Baboon are true, then likewise it is possible that that one they tell in these parts [about the woman and the dog] is true; but let’s drop it so that each one can hold the opinion that he likes, without us forcing him to believe anything, if not that which squares best with his judgment.] 36 See chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of Bargagli’s definition of favole. 37 Mercurio, La comare, 195. 38 Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 86–9. 39 Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, 88. 40 Sperone Speroni, Dialoghi, 53r. 41 Mercurio, La comare, 173. 42 Canepa observes, ‘It is in satisfaction of Lucia’s pregnant longings that the tales are told, though when Lucia dies, still pregnant, at the end of the frame tale, it becomes clear that what is to be born is not Lucia’s child but the collection itself’ (‘Quanto,’ 49). Salvatore Nigro interpets the ending of the frame tale as the birth of truth. All forty-nine tales serve ‘di aiutare un parto che, infine, si rivelerà di natura metaforica risolvendosi nella nascita di “verità” triofante con la quale farà lega una giustizia rigida da sconfinare nella crudeltà’ (‘Dalla lingua al dialetto,’ 110) [to assist in a birth that, in the end, will reveal itself to be metaphoric in nature, concluding in the birth of trium-

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43 44 45 46

47

48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

Notes to pages 87–9

phal ‘truth’ which will be in league with a inflexible form of justice that crosses over into cruelty]. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 5. Kirk Read, ‘Mother’s Milk from the Father’s Breast,’ 85. Read, ‘Mother’s Milk from the Father’s Breast,’ 85. For example, in his letter to the readers of Ortensio Landi’s Commentario de le piú notabili, et mostruose cose d’Italia (1550), Nicolò Morra described the author’s struggle to generate the text, explaining that it is ‘non senza gran sudore ci ha dato questo parto’ (Landi, Commentario, 47r) [not without a great deal of sweat (that the author) has given us this parto]. Galileo describes critics as rapacious vultures with wings spread wide ready to set upon the newborn chicks as soon as they venture out from beneath their fathers’ feathers (Opere fisico-matematiche, 1:326). Such was the case for Angolo Firenzuola’s prose and verse, which ‘privi del padre andavano dispersi’ [deprived of their father were scattered]. Firenzuola’s friend Lodovico Domenichi gathered these texts together, nursed them back to health, and presented them to the deceased author’s brother Girolamo, who recognized the pages as ‘legittimi figliuoli di M. Agnolo’ (Firenzuola, Prose, 4) [the legitimate children of Messer Agnolo]. See my article ‘Giralomo Parabosco’s L’Hermafrodito’ for another example of monstrous textual parturition. Basile, Osservationi intorno alle rime. Basile, Teagene. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 6. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 14. Philippa Berry, cited in Read, ‘Mother’s Milk from Father’s Breast,’ 75. Read, ‘Mother’s Milk from Father’s Breast,’ 72. See chapter 2 for a discussion of the favola as characterized by Boccaccio, Calmo, and Bargagli. Nancy Canepa, ‘Entertainment for the Little Ones?’ 38. Canepa enumerates the following examples: ‘in the introduction to IV.5, Poppa, one of the tellers, ‘sailed off into the sea of nursery tales.’ Likewise, at the start of II.10, Iacova ‘tapped her cask of nursery tales to refresh the desire of her listeners.’ The tellers also allude, on occasion, to the repertoire of popular ‘old wives’ tales’ that they draw from: in the introduction to I.9, Ciommetella offers her tale as ‘an example [of the force of friendship] that grandmother Semmonella used to tell me, may her soul rest in peace.’ Or, at the start of II.1, Zeza tells her audience: ‘I sorted through the stories that that good sould madam Chiarella Vusciolo, my uncle’s grandmother, used to tell.’ Canepa, ‘Entertainment for the Little Ones?’ 39.

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Notes to pages 91–104

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59 Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 26. 60 As Holly Tucker demonstrates in Pregnant Fictions, when French women writers inscribe theories of the power of the maternal imagination to mark the fetus they do so in order to stress the positive transmisson of knowledge across generations of women (118). 5. Bestiality and Interclass Marriage in Straparola’s ‘Il re porco’ 1 Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature; D.P. Rotunda, The Italian Novella in Prose. 2 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 274. See also Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 282 3 Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 298. 4 Ruth Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 13–14. 5 Lewis C. Seifert, ‘Pig or Prince?’ 204. 6 Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, 58. 7 Juan Huarte, Essame degl’ingegni degli huomini, 347. 8 In the Old French romance Lancelot du Lac, Galeotto arranges the romantic meeting between Lancelot of the Lake and Queen Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife. In Canto V of the Inferno, Francesca da Rimini concludes the explanation of how while reading a book with Paolo she was lead astray: ‘Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse: / quel giorno piú non vi leggemmo avante’ (V:137–8) [Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it / that day we read no further]. Boccaccio subtitles the Decameron ‘prencipe Galeotto.’ 9 Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals, 64. 10 Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses, 18. 11 Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within, 4. 12 Salisbury, The Beast Within, 5. 13 Genesis 2:26, 28. In his critical edition of Le piacevoli notti, Donato Pirovano notes that Lodovica’s observation closely resembles a line from tale II.9 in the Decameron. In Boccaccio’s text, however, the words that recall the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis (‘Io ho sempre inteso l’uomo esser il più nobile animale tra’ mortali fosse creato da dio, e appresso la femina’) are a prelude to a reflection on gender difference and an assertion of male superiority and female inconstancy. In Boccaccio’s tale, the merchant Ambrogiuolo, who utters the words cited above, convinces Bernabò of Genoa that he has slept with his wife Zinevra. Although she has done no wrong, Zinevra is driven from her home and assumes a male identity and dress. Many years later, while dressed as a man, she confronts the deceitful merchant, exposes his deceit, and regains her honour and her husband.

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Notes to pages 104–17

14 Sperone Speroni, Dialoghi; Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia; Levinus Lemnius, Degli occulti miracoli; and Fortunio Liceti, De monstrorum caussis. 15 See for example Tommaso Garzoni, Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo, 91. 16 Benedetto Varchi, Opere, 2:666. 17 Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘Fertility Control,’ 48. 18 Leviticus 20:15–16. 19 Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials, 5. 20 Payer, Sex and the Penitentials, 44. 21 Salisbury, The Beast Within, 94. 22 Salisbury, The Beast Within, 99. 23 Salisbury, The Beast Within, 99. 24 On these problems see John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, 178. 25 Garzoni, Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo, 41. 26 Martin Weinrich, De ortu monstrorum, 56v. 27 Ottavia Niccoli, ‘“Menstruum quasi Monstrorum”: parti mostruosi e tabù mestruali nel ’500,’ 404. 28 Charles G. Nauert, Jr, ‘Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny: Changing Approaches to a Classical Author,’ 74. 29 Pliny, Natural History, 2:529. 30 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 40. 31 For the other methods of containment see Douglas, Purity and Danger, 40–1. 32 Varchi, Opere, 2:666. 33 Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice, 2. 34 Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 30–1. 35 Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 63. 36 Bottigheimer, ‘Fertility Control,’ 47. 37 Guido Ruggiero, ‘Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality,’ 17. 38 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, 9. 39 Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic, 19. 40 Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic, 20. 41 Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 64. 42 Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 65. 43 This civilizing process is highlighted in French versions of ‘The Pig King,’ as Lewis Seifert demonstrates in ‘Pig or Prince?’ 44 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses),’ 16. 6. Foils and Fakes 1 Antti Aarne, The Types of Folktale, 44–5.

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Notes to pages 117–29

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2 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 51–2; Max Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 144. 3 Massimo Izzi, I mostri, 104. 4 Francisco Vaz da Silva, Metamorphosis, 172. 5 These four manifestations of the dragon will be discussed in depth below. 6 Stefano Calabrese, Fiaba, 3; Eugenio Battisti, L’antirinascimento, 108–14. 7 Neither of Basile’s Italian translators (Benedetto Croce and Michele Rak) furnishes any cultural notes on this monster. Norman Penzer, who translates from Croce’s Italian, similarly refrains from commenting on this beast. 8 David Williams, Deformed Discourse, 127. 9 Here I have altered Penzer’s translation to render the line closer to Basile’s Neapolitan. Penzer’s translation reads: ‘clenching his teeth gave such a tremendous blow, that he cut off all of the seven heads at once, and they leapt from the dragon’s neck like peas out of a frying pan.’ 10 Martin Weinrich, De ortu monstrorum, 62v. 11 Williams, Deformed Discourse, 177–8. For an example of this type of division see The Book of Beasts edited by T.H. White. 12 Izzi, I mostri, 105. 13 See Véronique Dasen’s article ‘Des molionides à Janus’ for a discussion of the monstrosity of multiplicity. 14 Pliny, Natural History, 3:57. 15 Peter Dance, Animal Fakes and Frauds, 58. 16 I base my account here on Paula Findlen’s careful reconstruction of this episode in her Possessing Nature, 17–27. 17 Battisti, L’antirinascimento, 111, 409n24. 18 Pliny, Natural History, 3:57, 59. 19 See, by way of example, the description of this monster in the twelfth-century bestiary The Book of Beasts, edited by T.H. White, 169–70. 20 Andrea Mattioli, Il Dioscoride, 127. 21 In his commentary on the Book of Beasts, T.H. White remarks on this phenomenon: ‘Aristotle had correctly pointed out that elderly roosters do develop a sort of egg: “substances resembling the egg ... have been found in the cock when cut open, underneath the midriff where the hen hath her eggs, and these are entirely yellow in appearance and of the same size as ordinary eggs (H[istory of] A[nimals] VI, 559b)”’ (169n1). 22 Giuseppe Rua, ‘Intorno alle Piacevoli notti dello Straparola,’ 147. 23 Pliny writes of this beast, ‘In Western Ethiopia there is a spring, the Nigris, which most people have supposed to be the source of the Nile, as they try to prove by the arguments we have stated. In its neighborhood there is an animal called the catoblepas, in other respects of moderate size and inactive with

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24 25

26

27

28

29 30 31

Notes to pages 129–33

the rest of its limbs, only with a very heavy head which it carries with difficulty – it is always hanging down to the ground; otherwise it is deadly to the human race, as all who see its eyes expire immediately’ (Natural History, 3:57). Rua, ‘Intorno alle Piacevoli notti dello Straparola,’ 147. Dragons appear in five tales in Lo cunto: ‘La cerva fatata,’ [The Enchanted Hind] (I.9); ‘I tre re bestie’ [The Three Animal Kings] (IV.3); ‘Il dragone’ [The Dragon] (IV.5); ‘Il corvo’ [The Raven] (IV.9); and ‘Il mercante’ (I.7). The dragons in the first three of these tales do not function as mere guardians or devourers: in ‘La cerva fatata’ the marine dragon’s heart partakes of an enchanted pharmakon employed to impregnate a barren princess; in ‘I tre re bestie’ the slaughter of the dragon both frees a princess and disenchants the protagonist’s brothers so that they may assume their human form once again; and in ‘Il dragone’ the dragon is both a devourer and the twin brother of the evil queen who persecutes the hero. Despite that fact that these dragons function as more than simple devourers or guardians, Basile hastily depicts them with only an adjective or two. Interestingly, in equating each part of the hydra with a known species, Basile embraces Leonardo da Vinci’s advice to painters of imaginary animals to form the fabulous creatures from existing species in order to make them appear natural. On Leonardo’s advice, see Joseph Nigg, The Book of Fabulous Beasts, 222–3. For more on the publishing history of this and other prodigy books see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 173–214, and Jean Céard, La nature, 161–91. The diffusion began almost immediately with Lykosthenes’ German translation of his prodigy book, Wunderwerck, oder Gottes unergründtliches Vorbilden (Basel, 1557), and Stephen Batman’s English translation The Doome, Warning all Men to the Judgement (London, 1581). See Park and Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions,’ 30 n24. Céard, La nature, 252; Park and Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions,’ 37. Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses, 354. This duplication is most likely due to the fact that the fifth and sixth volumes of this encyclopedic work were published posthumously by Gesner’s students. Gesner (1515–65) envisioned the Historia animalium in six volumes. The first four were published between 1551 and 1558, the first on four-footed mammals (1551), the second on egg-laying quadrupeds (1554), the third on birds (1555), and the fourth on fish (1558). Gesner’s students gathered his notes and later published the fifth volume (on serpents and dragons) and the sixth volume (on insects) in 1587. For more on Gesner see Willy Ley’s introduction to The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts.

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32 See, e.g., Tommaso Garzoni’s Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo, which was written in the late sixteenth century but published posthumously in 1613, in which all three of these authors are cited. 33 Gesner, Historia animalium, 5: 63r. 34 Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 202. 35 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Serpentum et draconum historiae, 387. 36 Maximilien Misson, Nouveau voyage d’Italie, 161. The letter was written from Verona and is dated 16 December 1687. 37 The manufacture of dragons and hydras in Italy and elsewhere in Europe has been documented and analysed in a number of studies. See Achille Forti (‘Del drago,’ ‘Intorno’), E.W. Gudger, Felice Grondona, Peter Dance, and Colin Clair, Unnatural History, 234–5. 38 Gesner, Historia animalium, 4:945. 39 Grondona, ‘Basilischi artificiali,’ 256; Lodovico Moscardo, Note, 234. 40 Garzoni, La piazza universale, 2:1196. 41 Garzoni, La piazza universale, 2:1196. 42 Moscardo, Note, 232; Benedetto Ceruti and Andrea Chiocco, Musaeum Francisci, 91. 43 Aldrovandi, De piscibus, 443, 444. 44 Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses, 167. 45 See, e.g., Gesner, Historia animalium, 4:63; Aldrovandi, Serpentum, 387; and Topsell, The Historie, 201. 46 John Evelyn, Diary, 1:178–9. 47 Giuseppe Olmi et al., La scienza a corte, 136–8. 48 Andrea Battistini, ‘La cultura del Barocco,’ 483. 49 Battistini, ‘La cultura del Barocco,’ 467. 50 On the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Europe during the sixteenth century, see Michel Jenneret, Perpetual Motion, 105. For the continued interest in Ovid on the part of seventeenth-century Italian writers see Rak, Napoli, 301. 51 Nancy Canepa, From Court to Forest, 220. 52 Canepa, From Court to Forest, 221. 53 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, 2. 54 Vaz da Silva, Metamorphosis, 6. 55 Paula Findlen, ‘Jokes of Nature,’ 319. 7. Fertile Flatulence 1 Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, 3–4. 2 Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, 4. 3 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 192.

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194 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21

Notes to pages 145–50

Stephen Pender, ‘No Monsters at the Resurrection,’ 146. See chapter 6. See chapter 3. For an interesting study of the significance of the names in this tale see Luisa Rubini’s article ‘I trionfi di Viola.’ The cartoon series ‘Ren and Stimpy’ created during the 1990s for Nickelodeon includes an episode in which Stimpy believes that his fart is his son. Rubini, ‘I trionfi di Viola,’ 139. As the notes below indicate, the discussion that follows of the fertile flatulence of ogres and devils summarizes a number of points and texts cited by Piero Camporesi in the chapter ‘Carnivale all’inferno’ of his book Il paese della fame. Dante, Inferno, trans. Robert M. Durling, 325. Camporesi, Il paese della fame, 41. Camporesi, Il paese della fame, 6. Camporesi, Il paese della fame, 35. Nancy Canepa, ‘Ogres and Fools,’ 222. See also Marina Warner’s ‘Ogres and Storytellers.’ Camporesi, Il paese della fame, 27. Cited in Camporesi, Il paese della fame, 27. The entire poem ‘Nativitas rusticorum et qualiter debent tractari’ can be found in the anthology Poeti del Duecento edited by Gianfranco Contini (1:791–801). Camporesi relates the following example: ‘Uno villano essendo per morire, venne il diavolo per portarne l’anima all’inferno come fosse uscita del corpo: et stando attento ad aspettare che il villano morisse, trasse el villano una grande correggia: la quale el diavolo credendo che fussi la sua anima, se la pose in seno et andò allo inferno per mostrarla ai suoi compagni: li quali, sentendo i gran fetore e puzzo di quella correggia, feciono una legge, che mai anima di villano potesse entrare ne l’inferno’ [When a peasant was dying, a devil came to carry off his soul to hell as soon as it would leave his body. He stood by attentively waiting for the peasant to die when the peasant let loose a great fart, which the devil, believing that it was the peasant’s soul, gathered in his arms and went to hell to show it to his companions. Upon smelling the great stench and stink of that fart, they passed a law that souls of peasants could never enter hell] (Il paese della fame, 45n29). Canepa, ‘Ogres and Fools,’ 225. Warner makes a similar observation regarding the benevolence of many ogres in Lo cunto de li cunti, including the one found in Viola, in ‘Ogres and Storytellers’ (21–3). Rak in Basile, Lo cunto, 322n5; Canepa, From Court to Forest, 181. Pliny, Storia naturale, 252. Here I cite the Italian so that it is easier to note the

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22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

195

linguistic resemblance that this passage bears to the words of the ogre (trans. Domenichi). Canepa, From Court to Forest, 181. Enzo Baldini, ‘Girolamo Frachetta,’ 568. Frachetta (1558–1619) is perhaps best known for his political works published during the 1590s, including L’idea del libro de’ governi di stato, Commentari delle cose successe in Francia, and Il seminario de’ goveri di stato e di guerra. He held various positions in the Roman curia. In 1604, he fell into disfavour at the Roman court and fled to Naples, where he remained until his death in 1619. Girolamo Frachetta, Breve spositione, 223. Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 149. Frachetta, Breve spositione, 223. In his edition of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Martin Ferguson Smith suggests that Lucretius’ description of the arrival of spring informed Botticelli’s famous painting Allegory of Spring. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 434–7. I cite lines 5.737–40. Tommaso Garzoni, Il serraglio, 88. For a discussion of a fair number of Basile’s metaphors of sunrise and sunset, see Italo Calvino’s ‘La mappa delle metafore’ in Sulla fiaba (129–46). Girolamo de Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 148 and 167–9. Girolamo de Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 167. Francesco De Pietri, Problemi accademici, 16. Giuseppe Olmi, ‘Libertà di filosofare,’ 5. Olmi, ‘Libertà di filosofare,’ 6. For discussions of the Neapolitan members of the Lincei see De Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 145–50; and Giuseppe Olmi, ‘La colonia lincea a Napoli.’ David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 108. For an engaging and thoughtful account of the publication of the Tesoro Messicano, see Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 245–74. Olmi, ‘La colonia lincea di Napoli,’ 54. Giuseppe Olmi characterizes Cesi’s speech as follows: ‘in tal discorso egli, oltre a condannare apertamente non tanto Aristotele, quanto l’aristotelismo allora dominante e ogni forma di accettazione supina degli autori antichi, avanzava una serie di critiche molto circostanziate nei confronti delle università e delle altre accademie, da lui ritenute istituzioni incapaci di fornire un sapere al passo coi tempi’ (‘Libertà di filosofare,’ 9) [in that speech, besides openly condemning not so much Aristotle as the then dominant form of Aristotelianism and every form of servile acceptance of the ancient authors, he put forward a series of very detailed criticisms of the universities and other

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

Notes to pages 159–66

academies which he held to be institutions incapable of furnishing a knowledge in step with the times]. De Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 147–8; Olmi, ‘La colonia lincea di Napoli,’ 52–4. For these different approaches to scientific inquiry, see Olmi, ‘Libertà di filosofare,’ 7–8. De Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 147–48. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 102. Giovanni Getto, La prosa scientifica dell’età barocca, 15–17. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 13. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 13. Cited in Mary B. Campbell, Wonder and Science, 73. Cited in Eileen Reeves, ‘Old Wives’ Tales and the New World System,’ 311. Reeves, ‘Old Wives’ Tales and the New World System,’ 332. Reeves notes that the figure of the old wife herself, rather than her tales, came to possess simultaneously a positive valence. She demonstrates that ‘while the old wives’ tale is normally associated by [William] Gilbert, Galileo, and Kepler with all that impedes scientific progress – naïve superstition, reliance on older lore rather than contemporary experimentation, and genuine stupidity – in each case the teller of such tales also emerges, precisely because of her social marginalization, as a likely advocate for the most advanced and questionable aspect of Copernicanism, the theory of extraterrestrial life’ (303). Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, 266. Translation by James V. Mirollo, ‘The Aesthetics of the Marvelous,’ 71.

Epilogue 1 For a discussion the essential role that Le piacevoli notti played in the French tale tradition see Bottigheimer’s ‘France’s First Fairy Tales.’ For an explanation of how Basile’s Lo cunto arrived in the hands of French fairy-tale authors see my forthcoming article in Marvels and Tales ‘Postulated Routes from Naples to Venice.’ 2 Holly Tucker, Pregnant Fictions, 121. 3 For a more thorough discussion of this translation and the translators, see my article ‘Dal “cunto” alla “chiaqlira”: una traduzione al femminile’ and Bruna Badini Gualducci’s introduction to her trnalsation of La chiaqlira. 4 The letter is signed with the initials ‘A.M.S.’ 5 Giambattista Basile, La chiaqlira dla banzola, letter to the readers, n.p. 6 Ferdinando Galiani, Del dialetto napoletano, 130. 7 Galiani, Del dialetto napolitano, 130. 8 Galiani, Del dialetto napolitano, 132.

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9 Ruth Botttigheimer, ‘The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World,’ 68. 10 Donald Haase, ‘Motifs: Making Fairy Tales Our Own,’ 66. See also Rudolf Schenda, ‘Telling Tales – Spreading Tales,’ 83. 11 Zohar Shavit, ‘The Concept of Childhood and Children’s Folktales,’ 317. See also Hans-Jorg Uther, ‘Fairy Tales as a Forerunner of European Children’s Literature,’ 123. 12 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 10. 13 Giambattista Basile, The Pentamerone, Or The Story of Stories, Fun for the Little Ones, x. 14 For a brief biography of Cruikshank as well as a sampling of his illustrations of various fairy tales see Maria Tatar, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, 357; 405–27. 15 John E. Taylor, ‘Appendix,’ Story of Stories, Fun for the Little Ones by Giambattista Basile, 315–28. Immediately following the appendix there is an advertisement for The Boy’s Own Book, which is said to make ‘a most elegant and acceptable birthday gift or holiday present.’ 16 Letterio Di Francia, La novellistica, 2:716. 17 Di Francia, La novellistica, 2:716, 726. 18 Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, 23–4. 19 Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, 21. 20 Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, xiii. Alan Dundes writes in the ‘Introduction to the Second Edition,’ ‘[m]any, if not all, of the tales are Aarne-Thompson tale types and thus Propp’s analysis is clearly not limited to Russian materials.’ 21 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 22 Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 120–1.

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Images on the Screen. With an object list by Isotta Poggi. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001. Stolberg, Michael. ‘A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centures.’ Isis 94 (2003): 274–99. Straparola, Giovan Francesco. Le piacevoli notti. Ed. Giuseppe Rua. 2 vols. Bologna: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1899, 1907. – Le piacevoli notti. Ed. Donato Pirovano. 2 vols. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000. Tasso, Torquato. Jerusalem Delivered. Ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Tatar, Maria, ed. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. Tesauro, Emanuele. Il cannocchiale aristotelico. Ed. Giovanni Menardi. Cuneo: Editrice Artistica Piemontese, 2000. Testaferri, Ada. ‘Baroque Women in Medieval Roles: The Narrative Voices in Basile’s Pentamerone.’ Rivista di studi italiani 8.1–2 (1990), 39–45. Thompson, Stith. Motif-Index of Folk Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Topsell, Edward. The Historie of Serpents. London: W. Laggard, 1608. Torquemada, Antonio. Giardino de’ fiori curiosi. Trans. Celio Malaspina. Venice: Altobello Salicato, 1591. Tucker, Holly. Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Uther, Hans-Jorg. ‘Fairy Tales as a Forerunner of European Children’s Literature.’ Narodna umjetnost 38.1 (2001), 121–32. Varchi, Benedetto. Opere. Ed. A. Richeli. 2 vols. Trieste: Sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd austriaco, 1858. Vaz da Silva, Francisco. Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Villani, Gianni. ‘Da Morlini a Straparola: Problemi di Traduzione e Problemi del Testo.’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 159 (1982), 67–73. – ‘Introduzione.’ Novelle e favole by Girolamo Morlini. Rome: Salerno, 1983, ix–lvi. Vives, Juan Luis. The Education of a Christian Woman. Ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca. Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1612. Von Schlosser, Julius. Raccolte d’arte e di meraviglie del tardo Rinascimento. Trans. Paola di Paolo. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994.

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Bibliography 213 – ‘Ogres and Storytellers: Strategies of Resistance in the Italian Fairy Tale.’ The Italianist 17 (1997), 18–28. Warner, Marina, ed. Wonder Tales. Trans. Gilbert Adair, John Ashbery, Ranjit Bolt, A.S. Byatt, and Terence Cave. Illus. Sophie Herxheimer. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994. Weinberg, Bernard. ‘The Accademia degli Alterati and Literary Taste from 1570– 1600.’ Italica, 4 (1954), 207–14. – ‘Argomenti di discussione letteraria nell’academia degli alterati.’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 131 (1954), 175–91. – A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Weinrich, Martin. De ortu monstrorum. N.P.: Sumptibus Heinrici Osthusii, 1595. Weschler, Lawrence. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Westwater, Lynn. ‘Humanism Reworked: The Reuse of Guevara’s Relox de Príncipes in Doni’s Marmi.’ Sondaggi sulla riscrittura del cinquecento. Ed. Paolo Cherchi. Ravenna: Longo, 1998, 39–62. White, T.H., ed. and trans. The Book of Beasts. New York: Dover, 1984. Williams, David. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Zipes, Jack, ed. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Index

Aarne, Antti, 120 Abbattutis, Gian Alessio, 17–18, 92; see also Basile, Giambattista abortion, 77–8 Adelard of Bath, 21 academies, 6, 49; Alterati, 180n8; Crusca, 181n11; Florentine, 10, 16, 104–5; Incogniti, 18, 45, 47; Intronati, 41–4; Lincei, 16, 157–9; Oziosi, 16, 156–7, 159; Stravaganti, 17 Aesop, 39, 50, 149 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 14, 104, 126–7, 137–9 Alexander of Hales, 106–7 allegory, 38–9, 43–4, 47 Alterati, Academy of the. See academies Ambrose, Saint, 103 Amis, Kingsley, 9 animals, 13, 97, 102–4, 106, 108, 111; see also hybrids, animal-human Apuleius, 93 Aquinas, Thomas, 103, 106 Ariosto, Lodovico, 16, 36, 38, 43–4, 176n26, 180n8 Aristotle, 15–16, 21, 141, 156–7; Analytica posteriora, 10; Metaphysics, 35,

160; on monsters, 12; on theories of reproduction, 73, 84, 108, 150–2, 156; on wonder, 34–5, 162; Poetics, 5, 34–5 artificial monsters. See manufactured monsters Augustine, Saint, 103 automatons, 13, 28, 30, 76 Bacon, Francis, 7, 22, 160–2 Bacon, Roger, 21 Bandello, Matteo, 45 Bargagli, Girolamo, 41–5, 89, 179n82 Basile, Adriana, 17, 88, 140 Basile, Giambattista, 17–18, 45–6, 174nn26, 27; Il pianto della vergine, 174n27; Le avventurose disavventure, 174n27; Le muse napoletane, 18, 45; and Oziosi, 156–7; and fairy tales, 85–7, 88–92, 141–3, 162; Teagene, 45, 88; see also Gian Alessio Abbattutis, Lo cunto de li cunti basilisks, 28, 126, 135–8; in Le piacevoli notti, 120–1, 127–30 Behn, Aphra, 69 Belleforest, François, 45 Bembo, Pietro, 25, 88, 183n33

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Beolco, Angelo. See Ruzante Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo, 56 Bergamasque. See dialects bestiality, 96, 99, 105–8 bestiaries, 126, 129 Bettelheim, Bruno, 93, 94, 168–9 Betussi, Giuseppe, 38, 178n75 Bigolina, Giulia, 172n8 birthmarks, 73, 75; see also voglie materne Boaistuau, Pierre, 45, 81, 99, 104, 132, 138–9 Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron, 3, 43–4, 48, 49, 50, 61, 97, 171n1; Decameron as model for Le piacevoli notti, 23–6; Genealogia deorum gentilium, 38–41, 89; and Andrea Calmo, 41; and Girolamo Bargagli, 42–4 body, monstrous, 6, 60; in fairy tales, 78–81, 98; female as, 111, 113 Bolognese. See dialects Bottigheimer, Ruth, 26–7, 49, 93, 113, 172n9, 174n25, 181n14, 186n27 Brusoni, Girolamo, 179n94 Bulgarini, Bellisario, 36–7 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 174n6, 174– 5n7

cannabilism, 31 Capello, Bernardo, 25, 183n32 carnival, 24, 49, 50, 148 Casale, Giambattista, 65–6 caso, 50, 56, 58, 66 Cassini, Gian Domenico, 160 Castiglione, Baldassare, 175n22, 179n97 Catholic Reformation, 35–6 catoblepas, 26, 129, 191n23 Cesi, Federico, 157, 158–9 charlatans, 4, 14, 136–7, 140, 185n20 Cicero, 12 classification, 9, 110–11, 125; see also taxonomy Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 11, 116 Colombo, Realdo, 68 Colonna, Fabio, 158 Comin da Trino, 38, 61, 179n81 Cortese, Giulio Cesare, 18 Cottino-Jones, Marga, 180n5 Council of Trent, 35 Croce, Benedetto, 174n26, 177n42, 191n7 Croce, Giulio Cesare, 176n30 Cruikshank, George, 167 Crusca, Academy of the. See academies

cabinets of curiosities, 4, 13–15, 29, 138– 9; see also museums; wunderkabinette Calmo, Andrea, 40–1, 89, 175n26, 178n80, 179nn81, 83 Calvino, Italo, 8, 177n52 Calzolari, Francesco, 137–8, 174n5 Campanella, Tommaso, 37 Campbell, Mary, 22 Camporesi, Piero, 147–9, 194n18 Canepa, Nancy, 8, 29, 31, 142, 148–9, 150, 174n26, 187n26 Canguilhem, Georges, 12

Dante, 16, 36–7, 97, 147–8, 180n8, 189n8 Daston, Lorraine, 4–5, 12, 144–5, 172n12, 174n5 D’Ambra, Raffaele, 185n18 Darwin, Charles, 174n7 D’Aulnoy, Mme, 163 DaVinci, Leonardo, 192n26 Della Casa, Giovanni, 88 De la Force, Mlle, 163 Della Porta, Giambattista, 16, 30, 74, 157, 159, 161

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Index demons, 4, 147–8, 169 De Pietri, Francesco, 156 Descartes, René, 21 devil, 147–8, 194n18 dialects: Bergamasque, 25, 64; Bolognese, 165–6; napoletanomoresco, 71; Neapolitan, 5, 18, 29, 165–6; pavano, 25, 64 Di Francia, Letterio, 167 Dioscorides, 14 Domenichi, Lodovico, 58, 67, 81, 188n48 Douglas, Mary, 110 dragons, 3, 8, 28, 117–18, 120–2, 125– 7, 130, 135–40, 192n25; see also basilisks; hydras Dundes, Alan, 197n20 Duval, Jacques, 68 epic poetry, 36–8, 44, 151 Evelyn, John, 139, 141 facetie, 46, 179n97; see also motto fairies, 19, 38, 40 fairy tales: as a feminized genre, 6, 39, 47, 60–6, 91, 164–5; as an anomalous genre, 6; as children’s literature, 166–8, 188n57; as science fictions, 9; conveying morals, 46–7; in opposition to science, 6, 9, 160–2; failure in Italy, 5, 163–6; in France, 5, 47, 52, 196n1; origins, 47; problems defining, 49–50; relation to folk tales, 47, 167; see also favola fake monsters. See manufactured monsters farts and farting. See flatulence favola, 39–40, 44, 49–50, 52, 66, 84–7, 89, 108, 152, 160, 181n11 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 69

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fertility, 113, 186n27 Findlen, Paula, 11–3, 126, 142–3 Finucci, Valeria, 172n21 Firenzuola, Agnolo, 58–9, 188n48 flatulence, 147–50, 155 folklore, 47, 93 Frachetta, Girolamo, 152, 160, 195n23 Freedberg, David, 157–8, 173n22 Fregoso, Battista, 58–9 Furtembach, Josef, 140 Garzoni, Tommaso, 81, 136–7, 152, 193n32 Galen, 14, 29, 54, 58 Galiani, Ferdinando, 165 Galileo, 7, 16, 141, 158, 158–62, 175n9, 188n47 games, 42, 46, 179nn82, 83, 85 Genesis, 104 Gesner, Konrad, 13, 132–5, 136, 139, 192n31 Gilbert, Ruth, 182n19 Gilbert, Sandra, 88 Gilbert, William, 161 golio, 76, 185n18; see also voglie materne Grafton, Anthony, 15 Greenblatt, Stephen, 4, 30 Guaragnella, Pasquale, 177n36 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 166 Gubar, Susan, 88 Guglielminetti, Marziano, 175n25, 176n28 Hannon, Patricia, 52 Hathaway, Baxter, 35 Heraclitus, 29 Hercules, 117, 123, 141 hermaphrodites: as metaphor, 67–9;

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in chronicles, 58; in Firenzuola’s novella, 58–9; in Le piacevoli notti, 51–4; in scientific texts, 54–60, 85; laws regarding, 68 Hernandez, Francisco, 158 Hoffman, Kathryn A., 5 Homer, 39 Hippocrates, 29, 73–4, 184n5 Huarte, Juan, 94, 96 Huet, Marie-Hélène, 91, 172n21 humours, 55 hybridity, 28–9, 143 hybrids, animal-human, 83–5, 94–6, 98–100, 102, 104–5, 107, 108–10, 115 Hydra of Lerna, 117, 123 hydras, 3, 117, 118; in Lo cunto, 118– 20, 123–5, 14; Venetian Hydra, 118, 130–5 Imbriani, Vittorio, 174n26, 183n Incogniti, Academy of the. See academies infanticide, 107, 112, 115–16 Intronati, Academy of the. See academies Index of Prohibited Books, 36 infertility, 114 ingegno, 23, 34, 162 istoria, 42, 49–50 Jameson, Fredric, 167 Javitch, Daniel, 44 jokes, scientific, 142–3 Kenseth, Joy, 171n4, 174n5 Kircher, Athanasius, 14, 127 Landi, Ortensio, 188n46 Laqueur, Thomas, 55–6, 182n19

LeBrun, Charles, 174n7 Lemnius, Levinus, 74, 77, 104, 184n11 Le piacevoli notti: anthologized, 45; as folklore, 167; dedicatory letters, 61–2; enigmas, 26, 98, 128, 129, 176n30; frame tale, 23–8, 48–9; male narrators, 60–6; print history 5; title, 61–2; see also Straparola, Giovan Francesco; plagiarism – tales: II.1, 53, 96–102; III.1, 53, 101; III.2, 120; III.3, 53, 100, 114; III.4, 101, 102; IV.1, 101; IV.3, 41, 101, 103–4, 114; V.1, 53, 101; V.2, 27–8, 102; VI.4, 182n27; VII.5, 120–1; VIII.4, 53; X.2, 41, 101; X.3, 121–2; XI.1, 27, 52–3; XIII.4, 183n22; XIII.9, 50–60, 67–9 Leviticus, 106 Ley, Willy, 173n11 Lhéretier, Mme, 47 Liceti, Fortunio, 104 Lincei, Academy of the. See academies Lippi, Lorenzo, 5 Lo cunto de li cunti: eclogues in, 28, 176n36; frame tale, 28–34, 70–3; metaphors in, 31, 124, 141–2, 154; narrators, 72; print history, 5, 46–7, 164–7; title, 89; translations, 165, 167, 177n42, 191n9, 196n3 – tales: I.2, 186n28; I.5, 30–1; I.7, 118–20, 123–5, 130, 192n25; I.8, 78; I.9, 78, 192n25; I.10, 78; II.1, 79– 80; II.2, 32; II.3, 143, 145–7, 152–6; II.4, 32; II.5, 78; II.10, 176n35; III.2, 186n28; III.3, 176n35; III.4, 80; III.5, 33–4, 125–6; IV.3, 192n25; IV.5, 186n28, 192n25; IV. 6, 32; IV.9, 30, 192n25; V.6, 176n35 Lucretius, 150–2, 156 Lupardi, Bartolomeo, 46–7, 180n98

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Index Lüthi, Max, 79, 117 Lykosthenes, Konrad, 94, 104, 130–2 Manfredi, Maddalena, 164–5 Manfredi, Teresa, 164–5 manufactured monsters, 14–15, 22, 135–40, 143 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 26, 176n26 magic: in Decameron, 43–4; in epic poetry, 37; in fairy tales, 26–8, 181n14; in Le piacevoli notti, 53, 172n17; in Lo cunto, 76; see also natural magic; restoration tales; rise tales Marguerite de Navarre, 45 Marino, Giambattista, 31–2 marvellous, 4, 11–12, 19, 31–2, 35–8, 44, 101–2; see also marvel; meraviglia; wonder marvels, 22–3, 29, 58; see also cabinet of curiosities; meraviglia; wonder; wunderkabinette Matazone da Caligano, 149 maternal imagination, 73, 74, 88–9, 91, 107; see also voglie materne maternity, 88–9 Mattioli, Andrea, 129 Mazzoni, Jacopo, 37 Mercurio, Scipione, 14, 56, 75, 76, 83– 6, 173n17, 185n20 metamorphosis: and Baroque culture, 141–2; in French fairy tales, 52; in Le piacevoli notti, 27, 49, 52, 53, 54, 60, 66, 68, 111, 181n14; in Lo cunto, 31, 78–9; in scientific texts, 58; see also Ovid; sex change meraviglia, 19–22, 32, 102, 162; see also marvellous; wonder; wunderkabinette Mexía, Pedro, 77, 184n10 microscope, 4

219

midwives, 7, 86, 100 Minotaur, 85 Misson, Maximilien, 135–6 Molino, Antonio, 25, 48–5, 183n33 Montaigne, Michel de, 87 monsters, 6, 11–12, 69, 101–2, 110, 166; see also basilisks; body; catoblepas; dragons; hermaphrodites; hybrids; hydras; maternal imagination; monstrous generation; ogres; satyrs; sirens; voglie materne; wild men monstrous generation, 7, 60, 81–6, 88–91, 94, 96, 99, 100, 101, 107, 144–5, 150–2 Morlini, Girolamo, 26, 58–9 Moscardo, Lodovico, 137 motto, 42, 46, 179n97 Munsch, Robert, 117 Musa, Mark, 178n57 museums, 13–15, 22, 137–9, 142–3; see also cabinet of curiosities napoletano-moresco. See dialects natural magic, 30, 161 Neapolitan. See dialects New Science, 6, 12, 156–62 New World discoveries 4, 11–12, 16, 157–8 Nigro, Salvatore, 174n29, 187n42 novella, 42, 49–50 Nye, Robert, 56 Obsequens, Julius, 12 observation, 160–2 ogres, 3, 31, 38, 40, 143–7 old wives’ tales, 161, 188n57 Olmi, Giuseppe, 173n12, 195n40 Osgood, Charles, 178n76 Ovid, 50, 79, 141, 193n50

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Oziosi, Academy of the. See academies Painter, William, 45 Palmieri, Matteo, 74 Pancino, Claudia, 184n8, 185n20 parables. See parabola Paré, Ambroise, 81, 94, 108, 144, 184n5, 186n23 parabola, 49–50 Park, Katharine, 4–5, 12, 56, 144–5, 172n12, 174n5 paternity, literary, 87–91 pavano. See dialects Pender, Stephen, 145 penitentials, 106 Penzer, Norman, 177n42, 191nn7, 9 Perrault, Charles, 5, 47 Petrarch, 11, 24, 32–3, 149 Pirovano, Donato, 45, 48–9, 180n6, 182n28, 189n13 plagiarism, 25–6, 48, 61–2 Plato, 21, 87, 91 Pliny, 11–12, 14, 15–16, 35, 51–2, 54, 58–9, 108, 128–9, 150, 191n23 Pontano, Giovanni, 54, 181n16 Propp, Vladimir, 117, 120, 168 Protestant Reformation, 35 Rak, Michele, 8, 174n28, 177n39, 191n7 Recchi, Nardo Antonio, 158 Redi, Francesco, 160, 175n9 Reeves, Eileen, 196n50 Reformation. See Catholic Reformation, Protestant Reformation restoration tales, 26, 53 Revelation, 132 riddles. See Le piacevoli notti: enigmas riscrittura. See plagiarism rise tales, 26–7, 93–4

Ronsard, 89 Rossi, Vittorio, 179n83 Rotunda, D.P., 93 Rubini, Luisa, 147 Ruggiero, Guido, 113, 115 Ruzante, 175n26 Sansovino, Francesco, 45 Sarnelli, Pompeo, 5, 180n98 Sarteschi, Selene, 50 satyrs, 11, 13, 28, 101 Schiebinger, Londa, 181n17, 182n19 science fiction, 9 science, 7–8, 15–16, 22, 76; see also New Science Scientific Revolution, 16 Scitico, Marco, 88 Segre, Cesare, 181n10 Seifert, Lewis, 47, 94, 190n43 Selva, Lorenzo, 172n8 Serio, Luigi, 165 sex change, 51, 54 sexual difference, 54–8, 182n19 sfiolo and sfiole, 76 Shapin, Steven, 8 sirens, 14–15, 28, 101 Sperone, Speroni, 85–6, 104 Stelluti, Francesco, 160, 175n9 Stolberg, Michael, 182n19 Straparola, Giovan Francesco, 17, 179n81; see also Le piacevoli notti Stravaganti, Academy of the. See academies superstition, 22, 37 Tasso, Torquato, 37, 151 taxonomy, 9, 110–11, 116, 126 Taylor, John E., 167 telescope, 4, 16, 30 teratological canon, 10, 12–15

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Index teratology, 10 Tesauro, Emanuele, 31–2, 162 Thompson, Stith, 93 Thousand and One Nights, 165 Torquemada, Antonio, 83–5, 187n35 Trivigiano, Benedetto, 24, 64–5, 183n33 troubadours, 47 Tucker, Holly, 7, 163, 189n60 unicorn, 13, 26, 129 universities, 6, 159, 161 Varchi, Benedetto, 10–12, 16–17, 54– 6, 104–5, 111–12 Varro, 150 veglie, 42 Venice: government, 96, 112–13, 116; marriage laws, 94, 96, 98, 113–14; origin of manufactured monsters, 136 verisimilitude, 35, 37, 42–3 Verne, Jules, 9 Vesalius, Andreas, 56 Virgil, 11, 29, 39, 150 vision, 154–9 voglie materne, 73, 75, 76, 79–80, 86

221

Warner, Marina, 183n31 Weinberg, Bernard, 178n59, 180n8 Weinrich, Martin, 107, 125 Wells, H.G., 9 White, T.H., 191n21 wild men, 53–4, 84–5, 101, 149, 181n15 wit. See ingegno witchcraft, 4, 169 witches, 8, 38, 40 women, as narrators of fairy tales, 40, 44, 60–6, 89, 91, 113; see also maternal imagination; monstrous body; old wives’ tales wonder, 4, 19–22, 160; see also marvel; marvellous; meraviglia; wonder tales; wunderkabinette wonder tales, 19 Wroth, Mary, 69 wunderkabinette, 6, 22–3; see also cabinets of curiosities; museums Zacchia, Paolo, 75 Zanotti, Angela, 164–5 Zanotti, Teresa, 164–5 Zoroaster, 29