In the Labyrinth

The Menacing Virgins: Chastity Before and After Marriage, I

    Menacing Virgins (ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie) is a beautiful collection of essays on 16th-century attitudes and traditions regarding female chastity and conjugal sex before and after marriage. These customs are inscribed by two other considerations: the honor of the household and virginity as a form of commodity that engenders an exchange of goods, debt, and payments. The bride should exhibit the virtues of her status: vagine, onesta, casta, virginity, honesty, and social class.  When marital sex becomes a requirement of marriage, purity should be expressed through public modesty and private sexual restraint. In this first half of the essay, Cristelle L. Baskins examines (mostly male) attitudes toward female sexuality in the Renaissance. (*note to self, compare these attitudes to the women writers of the period.)

    Research Notes from "Il Trionfo della Pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in Italian Renaissance Paintings" by Christelle L. Baskins: 

    Quotes from the 14th to the 16th century, written by men on the proper behavior for women, reveal a concern should the wife fail to behave illegally, she would, in effect, betray her husband's honor and that of her children. And probably, financial concerns as marriages saw exchanges of money and goods before weddings, brides contributing dowries (paid out over time only if the union remained a moral activity), husbands providing housing, and copious amounts of art and wedding furniture. (*note to self -- look up more information on the "Desco da Parto" birthing trays given as a wedding gift for the bride.)  

    Paolo da Certaldo: compares a woman's virtue to a beautiful flower and a husband's crown." (14th C). Francesco da Barbaro tells wives to "at least seem to be chaste in that sort of temperance from which chastity is derived...lust and unseemly desire are harmful to their dignity and to their husbands even when they say nothing about it." ("On Wifely Duties" 1416) (117).  Leon Battista Alberti: "Nothing is so important for yourself, so acceptable to God, so pleasing to me, and precious in the sight of your children as your virtue. The woman's character is the jewel of her family...per purity has always far outweighed her beauty. (Delle Famiglia, 1440) (117) Baldassare Castiglione's dialogue, "Il Cortegiano" (1528), ponders the construction of exemplary female virtue in the service of men. In the dialogues debating women's chastity, Giuliano de Medici challenges a misogynist Gasparo: "But if you acknowledge the truth, you surely know that of our authority, we men have arrogated to ourselves a license, whereby we insist that in us the same sins are most trivial and sometimes deserve praise which in women cannot be sufficiently punished unless by a shameful death or at least perpetual infamy." (117)

    By the middle of the 16th century, the ambivalent attitude toward female sexuality intensified as "every gesture towards purity of the text or the body risks further contamination and pollution. Virginity emerges in Renaissance discourse, then, as a site for the exercise of misogynistic assumptions about women's limited capacity for sexual restraint. "  Francesco da Barbaro echoes an ongoing need to contain his wife's sexuality by requiring that even in her thoughts "...see that you never want another man to share this bed but me." 118)

Containing Violence in the Language of Honor

I have been reading Thomas V. Cohen's Love and Death in Renaissance Italy, a fascinating study of crime reports, for the information they reveal about life and language in the 16th century (the setting of my WIP). Detailed handwritten depositions of criminal cases recorded the testimonies of everyone from the kitchen boy, the serving girls, maids-in-waiting, pages, the knights, and the aristocracy. These depositions offer a wealth of information on the crime and the formulaic language used by all witnesses when speaking about the crimes. There were competing considerations for everyone involved. The serving women tried to be loyal to their Lady but recognized the higher authority of the Lord to whom they were obliged. The criminal and the aggrieved party engaged in tense discussions to find reconciliation. The law scribe transcribed the different voices into a legal process that would move toward appropriate compensation and resolution, thus ending the potential for future retribution and violence.

To maintain a reasonable chance of peace after a heinous crime (especially among the aristocracy and on which the lower classes depended for their survival), a codified language was used to satisfy the law's requirements and distance all parties from the threat of additional violence. Arriving at proper justice required a lexicon of acceptable phrases to describe the drama in "words and ceremonies that could channel the pain and convert catastrophe into something that is, because encoded, bearable."

These are a few research notes of mine, as well as Italian vocabulary and phrases that are new to me. As I am still reading through Cohen's work (so well written), there will probably be more of these notes as I gather ideas and thoughts about the new novel. 

"Scannare": the ritual slaughter of cattle through the neck, though occasionally used against unfaithful wives. Since adultery is a crime, a husband would have been obliged to murder his wife if caught indelicate to preserve the honor of the family and its position. 

"Ah, traitorous, this is the honor you do the Savelli house; you have cut off the nose of the Savelli House!" A transcript of the Massara, the senior servant to the Lady of the House. Cohen explains it: "Nose cutting, in Renaissance Italy, was a gesture of extreme contempt, a permanent disfigurement penalized in codes of law and signaled in local speech and custom. As an act, as a notion, it is often attached to adultery and cuckoldry... Victoria's (the wife) treason had afflicted her husband, her brother (with whom she was having a sexual affair), and the whole Savelli House. "

Once the killing is done, there begins a dialogue on the propriety of events: honor lost and then restored by specific acts and words, which, if done according to the ritual, invites a legal restoration of honor and the rights of those dishonored. From the deposition in the case files: 

"Signor Luovico (Albano family) turned to Signore Giovanni Battista, asking who killed the signora. Signor Giovanni Battista answered, "I killed her with my own hands." Then Signor Ludovico answered, "If you had not killed her yourself, I would have killed all three of you (the wife, the brother, and Stefano, the Albano cousin charged with looking after the sister.) At this point, Stefano, who was present, said to Ludovico, "Signore, nobody laid a hand on the signora except Signor Giovanni Battista, but as Triano (the brother), I'm the one who killed him because I loved Your Lordship and because Signor Giovanni Battista commanded me to."

Cohen then takes apart how this script both exonerates the brutal murders and returns both families into an accord: honor restored to both houses rather than vendetta or revenge: "In all this discussion, probably only the husband spoke the single truth, Ludovico and the two servitors said what the situation demanded...Stefano's improbable declaration of love reached out to make Ludovico complicit, a putative advocate of killings done on his behalf. Here, Stefano's amore was of the instrumental variety, not expressive passion but a social obligation, tagged in the language of effect...As for Ludovico's blood-curdling declaration, it at once sanctioned and hedged the double murder. The weight of his mock threat gave the killings gravitas and underlined its propriety."

Old Bones, New Tales

This is an odd moment. Three book ideas I have been working on lately have suddenly come into clarity as a single cloth -- not as a trilogy mind you, for each is different enough from the other -- but organically they seem to spring from the same desire to write about early, middle, and late life. I feel as though on any given day, I could write in all three manuscripts without missing a beat. Two at least are set in Italy (thank god the research here helps both novels). The third is contemporary fantasy, so familiar ground.

As I am now in my sixties, I think this sudden meta-thinking about the novels has a lot to do with my age. When studying African oral narratives, I learned that women storytellers in South Africa (and probably in every traditional society) told the same stories (with some changes in emphasis depending on the audience) to all different ages. When the audience was a mixture young to old, the tales were meant to be entertaining and to introduce the very young to the artistry of story-telling. Other times it was intended for a specific audience such as young women going through rites of initiation, and there the same stories acquired an instructional emphasis, the tales focusing on transformation to adulthood.

However, older women also performed those same stories privately to each other. All of them so well versed in a lifetime of living and of telling those tales. They knew these stories intimately, and in the variants of the tales they told each other, there was depth and nuance in the performances. It was an opportunity for them to reflect and to comment through mature and evocative performances of the tales on their past rites of passage; their lives as young women, as wives or co-wives, as mothers, and now as elders. One of the great Xhosa storytellers Nongenile Masithathu Zenani towards the end of her life performed three, one-hundred-hour epics. Each epic was performed over about 21 days --with Masithathu speaking for 5 to 6 hours each day. And like Scheherazade, each morning she picked up the tale where she left off the night before. She composed the epics from the threads of the oral narrative stories she had learned and told throughout her life, intertwined with a wealth of cultural details and a social history of the Xhosa.  (I am still waiting to read one day the final translation of these three epics which were recorded and transcribed by Professor Emeritus Harold Scheub.)

As authors, we continue to reach back into the deep well of inherited stories -- the universality of rites of passage means every generation will want to hear them, read them, and connect to them. But unlike traditional society where the oral narratives and epics could be learned at the knee and then repeated (though different variants even within a culture suggest personal embellishment and emphasis in the telling), modern authors are always required to reinvent old tales and make them "fresh" -- sometimes with wonderful results and sometimes with stunningly bad ones. (I can never get over the dreadful Beowulf movies...Beowulf in Space, Beowulf with a Golden Stiletto-Heeled Monster mother).

So I guess this is the big challenge now for me. Trying to be faithful the tales, to take the time to reflect on how they have shaped and articulated different moments in my life, and yet, satisfy the craving to create something new, something "fresh" out of very old but venerable bones.

For more reading:

* Life Histories of African Women, edited by Patricia W. Romero which contains the autobiography of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani recorded, transcribed, and translated by Harold Schueb.

**The Word and the World: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradtion. "A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani’s detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub’s striking photographs of her in performance.  The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document."

 

Art: Edward Hopper: In the Barber Shop, 11:00AM, Summer in the City

Orality and The Singer of Tales.

I am continuing with my notes on reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, with some sidesteps to look at authors, whose work Ong references: Milman Parry and Albert Lord whose Singer of Tales is a fascinating study not only of the structure of Homer's Illiad and The Odyssey but also the important use of mnemonic devices in works that are orally performed and transmitted. So here are the key interesting ideas for me: 

Milman Parry analyzing Homer's Illiad and The Odyssey discover that every distinctive feature of Homer's poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition. These were never performed the same, as poets in an oral culture do not "memorize" the text, but "stitched together prefabricated parts."  They recognized a collection of epithets (so many versions of "the wine-red sea") that had different meter lengths and could be used anywhere in the text as the poetry required. This certainly makes sense to me where both epics and tales were highly patterned -- usually the only consistent feature of different collected variants of the same epic or story. According to Harold Scheub's observations, even a child of five can be a reasonable good storyteller because she will have learned the patterning of the narrative, having it heard it repeated with every telling.  

Ong argues: "Homeric Greeks valued cliches because poets and the entire oral noetic world or thought-world relied upon the formulaic constitution of thought. In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or would be lost." However, I would add that the repetition itself needed to be evocative and interesting, eliciting a variety of emotions out of the listener to engage them, and that is when repetition becomes art, rather than a list of items to be recalled. Ong expresses David Bynum's ideas (The Daemon in the Wood,1978) that "the clusters constitute the organizing principles of the formulas so that the essential idea is not subject to clear, straightforward formulation but is rather a kind of fictional complex held together largely in the unconscious." And so strong is the idea of the formulaic portions of storytelling that "they ride deep in the conscious and unconscious" and don't vanish the moment literacy is introduced, but often are reproduced even in early written form by those from the oral culture who have learned to write --mimicking at times the oral performance. (Amos Tutuola's brilliant The Palm Wine Drinkard is an excellent example of this -- although in Nigeria, he received criticism, mainly from educated Nigerians, because of what was perceived as low-class, uneducated English.)

I find this particularly interesting because when a fairy tale transforms from its oral version (ironically, we can only read in transcribed texts) into a literary tale, it risks losing its profound evocative nature. Repetition and patterning into forms organize the story's details, creating tension when the human and the fantastic interact -- emphasizing not just the surface movement of the tale but all the complicated feelings such arrangement of images brings forth to the listener. In some ways, it is closer to music (or indeed, singing the tale) -- we are aware of the patterning, the phrases, the way they move from introduction to increasingly complicated arrangements, and then a coda which feels like the beginning but isn't because of the experience of the journey to get to the end. For the analyst, the social message is: What is the story trying to tell us? I think it's more a case of how the story makes the audience experience, through its techniques, our lives as lived in that moment of the telling, and because our lives are always changing, it allows us to hear the same tale over and over, and find in it something new.

Photo: "Griot" © Emile Snyder, 1963, Tittia Frasciotti, Galekea Women, 1988.

Inspiration in "La Stigmatisée" by Georges Moreau de Tours

Portuguese artist João Lemos sent me this gorgeous and entirely unexpected painting "La Stigmatisée" by French painter, Georges Moreau de Tours (1848-1901). And what a narrative it visually suggests -- rich and full of possibilities: a sensual image of a young woman, where both the dressings over the stigmata of her hands and her clothing are unraveling. She appears languorous, almost trance-like in her calm, while the onlookers are tense, a hand gripping the sleeve of another as though threatened by the spectacle of the reclining woman. There is so much going on here, all of it ambiguous: earthy and ethereal, masculine and feminine, still and agitated, acceptance and skepticism all at once.

Research Notes I: Culinary Arts In the 16th Century

In the process of updating the blog, I was delighted to re-discover an older post on one of my favorite subjects -- food! Especially the culinary arts of the Renaissance which rival those of early Rome. John Varriano's book is a treat for both cooks and artists. 

Researching food is always fun, partially to make to make sure that I won't make any grievous errors putting in a dish that wasn't around until a century later -- or and even more important -- miss the chance to put in a dish that by its very design and substance is more fantastic and magical than anything I could have imagined. Maybe that is part of the allure of research -- discovering that the facts are so much more satisfying to write about than the imagined ones.

So to this lovely little book: Tastes and Temptations, Food and Art in Renaissance Italy by John Varriano -- an excellent examination of the relationship between the artists of the Renaissance and the great chefs of the same period. Varriano demonstrates the ways in which cooks and artists relied more on imagination in the production of their work (and often drawing inspiration from each other), and shared an affinity for ritual and the symbolic value of forms to represent the sacred, nature, and the senses. They were exercises in artifice to make aesthetic statements -- a salmon mousse molded to resemble a goat (so as to confuse and heighten the experience of eating one thing while imagining another) or an exquisite Ovidian scene of diners painted at the bottom of one's soup bowl. And in other ways, the relationship was organically close -- the artists creating still lifes using paints whose binding agents were mainly egg and lard.

I started reading this study in part because I needed to know if the roasted peacock I placed in a scene was acceptable -- and then discovered after reading that I had in fact grossly under sold it in the scene. One of the great chefs of the mid 1500s, Bartolomeo Scappi, known for dramatic and delectable skill (a kind of culinary sprezzetura -- a word that needs a post of its own to explain) enjoyed cooking that "vainglorious creature," using an extravagant assortment of spices and a method of preparation that reassembled the bird with metal rods and reattached its feathers  in order to serve it up come se fosse vivo-- "as if it were still alive." So yes -- my peacock is in. With bells and feathers and beak.

But this would have been one of many, many dishes. Consider this "simple meal" prepared by Scappi and his army of cooks -- a modest three course feast on a day of abstinence (meatless Friday) with forty guests, and "the first two courses consisted of fifty dishes served on four hundred pieces of gold, silver, and maiolica tableware," which were then followed by twenty-seven desserts served in two hundred and sixteen bowls and dishes. And..there were "six edible statues" of nymphs, exotic creatures and mythological inventions, "the first made of sugar; the second of butter; and the third, pasta." The meal then ended with scented toothpicks and posies of silk flowers with gold stems for each guest.

The hardest part now of writing that scene is going to be to reign in the desire to over indulge -- as artists and cooks are able to do -- so the reader won't somewhere midway through the scene, throw the book down and go in search of something good to eat. Like a pan of brownies or an entire brie with slices of pear,  or a half a pound of prosciutto and green olives. Sigh...now I am hungry.  

 

Art: Paolo Veronese, Wedding at Cana; Bartolomeo Passarotti, The Baker Prearing Pies; Bartolomea di Giovanni, The Wedding of Thetis and Peleus; Vincenzo Campi, Fruit Seller.

How To Do It In the Renaissance

Lately, I have been re-reading Rudolph M. Bell's How To Do It, Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians -- a terrific social history of how Italians viewed their lives from the 15th to the 17th century. Italians were fairly literate then (the publishing industry was booming). There was a proliferation of self-help and advice manuals for both men and women to guide one through the early years of marriage (and how to manage one for the long haul), along with advice on conception (including the promising moments and positions for guaranteeing the sex of the child), to healthy living, and how to live with your teenager.

What is impressive is that our anxieties, desires, and hopes for ourselves and our families haven't changed much over the last six hundred years. Much of the advice is outrageous (based on a peculiar understanding of the human body, sexuality, and procreation.) But some of it holds remarkably firm: temperate living, a healthy diet, tenderness and respect in marital relations, and attentiveness to your teen's extra-curricular activities still sound like solid advice.

Bell's academic style is very accessible -- the chapters are well organized, clearly written, full of fascinating references, and a good dose of Bell's dry wit. Even though I am returning to the book for a second time, I am enjoying it as much as the first time...and probably taking as many notes!