"Valeria Finucci's book questions the traditional concepts associated with the Italian Renaissance (harmony, spiritual perfection and beauty, etc.) and addresses much less 'luminous' aspects of sixteenth-century Italian culture."--Armando Maggi, author of "Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology"

Valeria Finucci is Associate Professor of Italian at Duke University. She is the author of The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto. She is editor of Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso and coeditor of Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, both published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Body and Generation in the Early Modern Period 1
1. The Useless Genitor: Fantasies of Putrefaction and Nongenealogical Births 37
2. The Masquerade of Paternity: Cuckoldry and Baby M[ale] in Machiavelli's La mandragola 79
3. Performing Maternity: Female Imagination, Paternal Erasure, and Monstrous Birth in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata 119
4. The Masquerade of Masculinity: Erotomania in Ariosto's Orlando furioso 159
5. Androgynous Doubling and Hermaphroditic Anxieties: Bibbiena's La calandria 189
6. The Masquerade of Manhood: The Paradox of the Castrato 225
Selected Bibliography 281
Index 307