Courtney Quaintance

Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice - Toronto Italian Studies Courtney Quaintance

Commendation Quotes:"Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is a powerful and exciting book. A thought-provoking study of the homosocial circuits and writing in which ferocious misogyny and murderous contempt bonded men against women, Courtney Quaintance's work is lucid and approachable. Her expertise in Venetian dialect makes this study stand out in work on sixteenth-century Italian poetry, as does her painstaking archival work on manuscript writings and biographical data identifying the writers she analyses." - Ann Rosalind Jones, Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, Smith CollegeTable of Contents: Introduction: Writing the Whore in Renaissance Venice1. Gang Rape and Literary Fame2. Fictional Ladies and Literary Fraternity3. The Erotics of Venetian Dialect4. Dialect and Homosociality from Manuscript to Print5. Women Writers Between MenMarc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Commendation Quotes:"Courtney Quaintance's book will change the way scholars think of early modern pornographic literature. Her broad and meticulous research shows that these texts were not merely dalliances that circulated in dark corners. They were integral to the formation of important networks of men, and informed the public literary endeavours of these individuals." - Gerry Milligan, Department of World Languages and Literatures, College of Staten Island, City University of New YorkCommendation Quotes: Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is a powerful and exciting book. A thought-provoking study of the homosocial circuits and writing in which ferocious misogyny and murderous contempt bonded men against women, Courtney Quaintance s work is lucid and approachable. Her expertise in Venetian dialect makes this study stand out in work on sixteenth-century Italian poetry, as does her painstaking archival work on manuscript writings and biographical data identifying the writers she analyses. - Ann Rosalind Jones, Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, Smith College"Commendation Quotes: Courtney Quaintance s book will change the way scholars think of early modern pornographic literature. Her broad and meticulous research shows that these texts were not merely dalliances that circulated in dark corners. They were integral to the formation of important networks of men, and informed the public literary endeavours of these individuals. - Gerry Milligan, Department of World Languages and Literatures, College of Staten Island, City University of New York"Publisher Marketing: Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is a provocative analysis of the pornographic poetry written in patrician poet Domenico Venier s social circle. While Venier and his salon were renowned for elegant love sonnets featuring unattainable female beloveds, among themselves they wrote and circulated poems in Venetian dialect in which women were prostitutes whose defiled bodies were available to all. Courtney Quaintance analyses poetry, letters, plays, and verse dialogues to show how male writers established, sustained, and publicized their relationships to one another through the exchange of fictional women. She also shows how Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco, two women writers with ties to the salon, appropriated and transformed tropes of female sexuality and male literary collaboration to position themselves within this homosocial literary economy. Based on archival work and Quaintance s exceptional knowledge of Venetian dialect poetry, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is an unprecedented window into the understudied world of Venetian literature."

Contributor Bio:  Quaintance, Courtney K Courtney Quaintance is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College.