Scandalous Liaisons
Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Italian Novella
By (author) Karina Feliciano Attar
Hardback (Published)
(October 2018)
ISBN: 9782503532851
Price: $108.00
Out of stock
Scandalous Liaisons offers an extensive, historicized study of the treatment of cross-cultural, interfaith, interethnic, and inter-class sex and romance in the Italian novella tradition. Penned by both major and minor novellisti, the tales examined graphically dramatize the breaching and policing of sexual contacts with strangers. In doing so, they reveal the social anxieties and cultural fantasies about the dangers to self-definition, group belonging, morality, and social order that such contacts were seen to represent. While they elaborate stereotypically misogynist and xenophobic notions that circulated in medieval and early modern Europe, each novella also presents ambiguous images of non-Christian identity, which calls into question neat equivalences between Christians and virtue, and non-Christians and vice. The author argues that such equivocal perspectives are, in part, products of the narrative crisscrossing of racial, religious, and cultural classifications with gender and social categories, and of the complex and changing dynamics of contemporary Mediterranean encounters between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Through interdisciplinary close readings, Scandalous Liaisons reveals that these novellas disclose profound reservations about who could and could not be assimilated into Christian Italian society, and implicitly ask their readers to consider the significance of race, religion, gender, and social class in determining questions of individual and collective identity.
- By (author) Karina Feliciano Attar
Other Titles in this Series
Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers
Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380-1444)
Volume 4
Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution
Deference, Difference, and Dissent
Volume 25
Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons
The Spanish Inquisition's Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478-1700
Volume 17
Disciplined Dissent in Western Europe, 1200-1600
Political Action between Submission and Defiance
Volume 29
The Ghost of Boccaccio
The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and its Jewish and Christian Background
Volume 7
Rituals, Images, and Words
Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Volume 3
Sedition
The Spread of Controversial Literature and Ideas in France and Scotland, c. 1550-1610
Volume 28
Similar Books
A Late Antique Harrowing of Hell and Its Medieval Reception
Eusebius of Alexandria's Sermons 15 and 17 (CPG 5524; 5526) and their Latin Rewritings
Volume 99
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
Behind the Scenes of Medieval Roofs
An Overview of the Roofing Systems of Italian Churches
Volume 90
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Medieval Debates on Foreknowledge: Future Contingents, Prophecy, and Divination
Acts of the XXVII Annual Colloquium of the SIEPM, Trento 12-15 September 2023
Volume 31
Medieval Yeghegis, Armenia
History, Archaeology, Society. Local Multiplicities and Global Connections of a Rural Centre on the Silk Road(s)
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300-1600)
Volume 10
Students, Scholars and Their Books at the University of Louvain (1425-1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 1
Volume 17
