The sexual behavior of people in any given society or subculture is guided by certain codes of conduct: written or unwritten rules on how to behave. Cupid on a Leash researches the different codes... Show moreThe sexual behavior of people in any given society or subculture is guided by certain codes of conduct: written or unwritten rules on how to behave. Cupid on a Leash researches the different codes of conduct that guided sexuality in Italy between c. 1450 and 1550. It identifies which codes were present for people of different genders, ages, social classes and sexual orientations. Moreover, the book examines how broadly these codes were shared within the source material, and analyzes the roots and rationalizations of their existence. A wide variety of sources, written by male as well as female authors, is used to analyze these sexual codes of conduct. These sources range from romance epics, novellas, and treatises on love, to sermons, anatomical treatises, and personal correspondence. By revealing the many, often contradictory codes of conduct guiding sexuality, Cupid on a Leash provides insight into the complexities of societal expectations in Renaissance Italy. It studies the arguments that people used to defend sexual codes of conduct, and analyzes the logic behind these arguments, seeking to explain why they were considered so important. Show less
The Revolt in the Low Countries against the Spanish monarch received a lot of international attention in the seventeenth century. In Italy too, the events in the Low Countries were closely followed... Show moreThe Revolt in the Low Countries against the Spanish monarch received a lot of international attention in the seventeenth century. In Italy too, the events in the Low Countries were closely followed. This apparent from the large number of Italian historical works on the war. Using a variety of texts, this research focuses on different aspects of early modern Italian historiography on the conflict in the Low Countries. The first question of this thesis has sought to address is how we can explain the great historiographical interest in Italy for the military, religious and political complications during the Revolt. This research shows that some Italian texts about the Revolt have their origins in a local context, such as political debates in Italian cities. The second part of this study concerns the impact of the transnational historiography on political opinions, in particular the question of the implications of the Italian histories of the Revolt for the political debates in Italy and in the Republic of the United Provinces. How were those Italian publications received and what can we learn from them when it comes to the influence of transnational works on the writing of history and on political debates, both in the Republic and in Italy? This study aims to contribute to a greater knowledge of the international attention for the Revolt and to our contemporary view on the conflict in the Low Countries. Show less
This thesis studies the role of trust in the Catholic Reformation in seventeenth-century Genoa. It explores the way in which many reform-minded Catholics consciously tried to find an answer to the... Show moreThis thesis studies the role of trust in the Catholic Reformation in seventeenth-century Genoa. It explores the way in which many reform-minded Catholics consciously tried to find an answer to the crisis of trust that dominated post-Reformation Europe by means of reforms and new initiatives. In particular, this dissertation examines how the effectiveness of these reforms and initiatives was impacted by practices of trust and distrust, as well as the reformers’ own perception of their strategies. Several features of the Catholic Reformation are analysed: the attempt to reform the secular clergy; new female religious initiatives; the effort to reform female cloistered life; and the establishment of new religious congregations. The trust approach used in this thesis constitutes an antidote to the current Italian paradigm in which the focus on power and discipline tends to obscure the plurality of the Italian Church in the seventeenth century. The concept moreover provides a key to explain several contradictions with which the current historiography confronts us such as the juxtaposition of instances of freedom and compulsion in the realm of female religiosity and the paradoxical coexistence of very ineffective and very successful attempts to reform. Show less
This study goes beyond the analysis of the causes of the emergence of populist actors in the party system, focusing instead on those cases in which populism and its counterpart anti-populism,... Show moreThis study goes beyond the analysis of the causes of the emergence of populist actors in the party system, focusing instead on those cases in which populism and its counterpart anti-populism, translate into an ideological and discursive divide that contributes to structuring a certain party system. When populism/anti-populism emerges as a political cleavage, the factors behind parties’ political choices in general, and electoral coalition preferences in particular, can be affected. For this new cleavage to start to polarize, a change in the political opportunity structure is needed. In fact, when the political opportunity structure opens as a consequence of events external to the party system new actors may enter the system, producing a change in the dynamic of competition. Moreover, considering also the organizational density of the parties in the system, defined as the power of penetration of a given party, both in terms of intensity and reach, this dissertation can shed light on the likely duration not only of the parties but also of the cleavage. Show less
When thinking about criminality, it is generally not a female protagonist that first comes to mind – especially not in early modern Italy, where women’s scope of action is commonly portrayed as... Show moreWhen thinking about criminality, it is generally not a female protagonist that first comes to mind – especially not in early modern Italy, where women’s scope of action is commonly portrayed as heavily restricted. This dissertation examines the influence of gender on recorded crime in the city of Bologna, and reveals two distinct features: the prominence of violence among recorded crime, and a consistently low share of formally investigated female offenders. Rather than seeking to explain this crime pattern through the stereotypical notion of women’s restricted agency alone, this dissertation distinguishes three other important mechanisms for cities like Bologna: the tendency to institutionalise rather than criminalise ‘problematic women’, judicial paternalism, and, importantly, the pervasive culture of peace-making. While all of these mechanisms withdrew women from formal criminal prosecutions, a close-reading of hundreds of complaints alongside the formal investigations allows us to uncover women’s far more prominent roles in crime. Not only were women’s shares among offenders much higher than the formal investigations alone would suggest, the fact that female victims of crime actively and strategically employed the criminal court to their own ends speaks to the notion that women’s scope of action was far more significant than was commonly assumed. Show less
