"[This book's] ensemble of motifs is not simply cast in currently fashionable psychoanalytical language. It displays a wide array of critical perspectives yet a homogeneity of viewpoints and ideological bents occur through its disparate contributions. A truly unified piece of scholarship."-- Giuseppe F. Mazzotta, author of "The Worlds of Petrarch"

Valeria Finucci is Associate Professor of Italian at Duke University. She is the editor of Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, also published by Duke University Press and the author of The Lady Vanishes.

Kevin Brownlee is Professor of French and Italian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machau.

Introduction: Genealogical Pleasures, Genealogical Disruptions / Valeria Finucci
1. Theories of Reproduction
Generation, Degeneration, Regeneration: Original Sin and the Conception of Jesus in the Polemic between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum / Elizabeth A. Clark
Maternal Imagination and Monstrous Birth: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata / Valeria Finucci
2. Boundaries of Sex and Gender
Contradictions of Masculinity: Ascetic Inseminators and Menstruating Men in Greco-Roman Culture / Dale B. Martin
Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine / Gianna Pomata
The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris, or The Reemergence of the Tribade in English Culture / Valerie Traub
3. Female Genealogies
Genealogies in Crisis: María de Zayas in Seventeenth-Century Spain / Marina Scordilis Brownlee
Incest and Agency: The Case of Elizabeth I / Maureen Quilligan
4. The Politics of Inheritance
In Search of the Origins of Medicine: Egyptian Wisdom and Some Renaissance Physicians / Nancy G. Siraisi
The Conflicted Genealogy of Cultural Authority: Italian Responses to French Cultural Dominance in Il Tesoretto, Il Fiore, and La Commedia / Kevin Brownlee
Hauntings: The Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance Stage / Peter Stallybrass
Index