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        Incognito men unmasked. An exploration of masculinity in seventeenth century Venetian literature and culture of the Accademia degli Incogniti

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        Publication date
        2022
        Author
        Lammertink, Colin
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        Summary
        This thesis considers the authors of the seventeenth century Accademia degli Incogniti, and their writings inspired by libertinism, from a masculinities studies perspectives. The Venetian Academy offered a refuge to men who were affected on the level of their experience of gender by tensions on socio-political, economic, cultural and intellectual levels. These tensions are taken as the elements of a crisis of masculinity, to which freedom in writing offered a means of escape. A close reading of Antonio Rocco’s l’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola confirms not only the Incogniti’s fascination with non-(hetero)normative masculinity, it also reveals both how corrupt masculinity can become within a patriarchal system, as well as the disturbing extremes a literary articulation of libertinism’s predilection of a naturalist sexual ethics could reach. A focus on paratextual material in the Incogniti environment shows the importance of co-constructive bonds between men, and the practice of gifting texts to each other, usually through the printing of dedicatory epistles in collectively published works, establishes the Academy as a “literary fraternity”. Libertinism’s critical attitude against power constituted a shared discursive code, and remained so even after Ferrante Pallavicino’s execution for lèse majesté forced the Incogniti into a position of heightened circumspection. However, the crisis of masculinity became ever more anxious as the Incogniti’s preferred way of navigating it – writing and publishing – proved limited. Despite the cultural dominance of the Academy in Venice, the Incogniti still had to heed to patriarchal exigencies exerted by the early modern system of hegemonial masculinity.
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        https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/42072
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