Binding Passions Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance

by Ruggiero, Guido

• ISBN13: 9780195083200
• ISBN10: 0195083202
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-06-10
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Mining the rich Venetian archives, especially the unusually detailed records of Venice's own branch of the Roman Inquisition, Guido Ruggiero provides a strikingly new and provocative interpretation of the end of the Renaissance in Italy. In this boldly structured work, he develops fivenarrative accounts of individual encounters with the Inquisition that illustrate the double-edged metaphor of how passions were both bound by late Renaissance society and were seen in turn as binding people. In this way new perspectives are opened on magic, witchcraft, love, marriage, gender, anddiscipline at the level of the community and beyond. Witches, courtesans, prostitutes, women healers, nobles, Cardinals, and renegade priests and monks speak from these pages describing their lives, beliefs, hopes, fears, and lies. With an imaginative flair for storytelling and impeccablescholarship, Ruggiero exposes the rich complexity of the culture and poetics of the everyday at the end of the Renaissance and illuminates a previously unexplored chapter in Italian history.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction Carne Vale and Carnival	p. 3
Love Bound: Andriana Savorgnan, Common Whore, Courtesan, and Noble Wife	p. 24
"More Dear to Me Than Life Itself": Marriage, Honor, and a Woman's Reputation in the Renaissance	p. 57
That Old Black Magic Called Love	p. 88
The Women Priests of Latisana: Apollonia Madizza and the Ties That Bind	p. 130
"The Fortune-Telling Friar": Fra Aurelio Di Siena and the Wages of Sin	p. 175
Afterword: The Poetry of the Everyday and Binding Passions	p. 223
Notes	p. 229
Bibliography	p. 265
Index	p. 275
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