I work on the Italian Renaissance, specifically on theater, women writers (of novels/novellas, pastorals, tragedies and chivalric romances), medical history, and costume books
None of the images serve as illustrations alone, since they are intrinsic to Kravis’s analysis of... more None of the images serve as illustrations alone, since they are intrinsic to Kravis’s analysis of Freud’s argument about the nature of the analytic process. Freud rejected looking at his patients since he had experienced in his time in Paris Jean Martin Charcot’s analysis of his patients’ visual signs and symptoms, photographed as evidence of the patients’ psychopathologies. Freud later came to dismiss Charcot as a mere voyeur. The Ruhebett, as Freud employed it, demanded the patient be placed so as not to be able to look at the analyst. He demanded then that the analyst listen rather than look at the analysand. We sneak around the corner into Freud’s examining room with Kravis and peak at the world of recumbence, able to observe the prejudices and presuppositions inherent in our act of seeing and reading Freud along with Kravis. As in my own argument about the multifaceted moral claims of posture (from Plato to Jordan Peterson), the word “lying” for Kravis has a double meaning: does recumbent posture imply moral values or indeed immorality? Kravis, even more than Bernd Brunner in his examination of The Art of Lying Down, is attuned to the radical shifts in Western understanding of our horizontal life.2 Brunner’s epigraph is from Marx (Groucho not Karl) to the effect that a thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing; Kravis’s is from Aristophanes’s comic Socrates urging his student to just lie down and work out his problem. Given Aristophanes’s view of Socrates’s morals, the implication is not far from that of Groucho, but Kravis’s line from the sexuality of Athenian comedy to the Viennese sitting room is drawn with subtlety and finesse. In Kravis’s images we see the Greek theater with its anonymous but ever staring audience examining their anxieties through their own catharsis rooted in the actor’s actions prefiguring Freud’s own anxiety about scopophobia, about being stared at for eight hours a day. This is a brilliant, readable, and, more than that, beautiful book: it fills a need that most of us did not realize we had. That is the mark of a major scholarly achievement.
Introduced within the joke-work, not as a teller and only once as a member of a group of receiver... more Introduced within the joke-work, not as a teller and only once as a member of a group of receivers, the court lady in the Cortegiano finds herself occupying, all too often, the place of the laughed at. The look that causes laughter, however, is different from that which ...
The paper examines the case of Margherita Farnese, whose marriage to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in 158... more The paper examines the case of Margherita Farnese, whose marriage to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in 1581 had to be annulled because of a problematic sexual anatomy. As the the body of a rich, young and appropriately chaste princess suddenly started to be perceived as deviant so doctors from various courts converged to Mantua and Parma to give their opinion on what makes a female body typical. In working through the problematics of normal/subversive, I will discuss the medical discovery (actually, recovery) in the Renaissance of specific information about constitutive parts of the female sexual apparatus, the Church\u27s take on what makes a marriage validthe politicians\u27 need to guarantee an ordered successionč and the cultural hysteria coming from an inconvenient \u27hyster\u2
None of the images serve as illustrations alone, since they are intrinsic to Kravis’s analysis of... more None of the images serve as illustrations alone, since they are intrinsic to Kravis’s analysis of Freud’s argument about the nature of the analytic process. Freud rejected looking at his patients since he had experienced in his time in Paris Jean Martin Charcot’s analysis of his patients’ visual signs and symptoms, photographed as evidence of the patients’ psychopathologies. Freud later came to dismiss Charcot as a mere voyeur. The Ruhebett, as Freud employed it, demanded the patient be placed so as not to be able to look at the analyst. He demanded then that the analyst listen rather than look at the analysand. We sneak around the corner into Freud’s examining room with Kravis and peak at the world of recumbence, able to observe the prejudices and presuppositions inherent in our act of seeing and reading Freud along with Kravis. As in my own argument about the multifaceted moral claims of posture (from Plato to Jordan Peterson), the word “lying” for Kravis has a double meaning: does recumbent posture imply moral values or indeed immorality? Kravis, even more than Bernd Brunner in his examination of The Art of Lying Down, is attuned to the radical shifts in Western understanding of our horizontal life.2 Brunner’s epigraph is from Marx (Groucho not Karl) to the effect that a thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing; Kravis’s is from Aristophanes’s comic Socrates urging his student to just lie down and work out his problem. Given Aristophanes’s view of Socrates’s morals, the implication is not far from that of Groucho, but Kravis’s line from the sexuality of Athenian comedy to the Viennese sitting room is drawn with subtlety and finesse. In Kravis’s images we see the Greek theater with its anonymous but ever staring audience examining their anxieties through their own catharsis rooted in the actor’s actions prefiguring Freud’s own anxiety about scopophobia, about being stared at for eight hours a day. This is a brilliant, readable, and, more than that, beautiful book: it fills a need that most of us did not realize we had. That is the mark of a major scholarly achievement.
Introduced within the joke-work, not as a teller and only once as a member of a group of receiver... more Introduced within the joke-work, not as a teller and only once as a member of a group of receivers, the court lady in the Cortegiano finds herself occupying, all too often, the place of the laughed at. The look that causes laughter, however, is different from that which ...
The paper examines the case of Margherita Farnese, whose marriage to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in 158... more The paper examines the case of Margherita Farnese, whose marriage to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in 1581 had to be annulled because of a problematic sexual anatomy. As the the body of a rich, young and appropriately chaste princess suddenly started to be perceived as deviant so doctors from various courts converged to Mantua and Parma to give their opinion on what makes a female body typical. In working through the problematics of normal/subversive, I will discuss the medical discovery (actually, recovery) in the Renaissance of specific information about constitutive parts of the female sexual apparatus, the Church\u27s take on what makes a marriage validthe politicians\u27 need to guarantee an ordered successionč and the cultural hysteria coming from an inconvenient \u27hyster\u2
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Papers by Valeria Finucci
The event is also posted at the Amsterdam University Press site at https://www.aup.nl/en/events/book-launch-food-culture-and-literary-imagination-in-early-modern-italy