A public lecture sponsored by CHE and the Faculty of Arts
(University of Melbourne)
Paper Title:
"Machiavelli the Wimp: Mocking One's Emotions and
Self-Presentation in the Renaissance"
Guest presenter:
Professor Guido Ruggiero (University of Miami)
Time and Date:
Monday 19th November 2012, 6.30pm - 7.30pm
Venue:
Theatre A
Elisabeth Murdoch Building
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010
RSVP
Admission is free but bookings are essential as numbers are
limited.
Please RSVP to:
http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/
guidoruggiero
For further information please contact Catherine Kovesi, c.kivesi@unimelb.edu.au
Ph: 03 8344 8160
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Further Details:
A poem, written by Machiavelli, when he was 56 with the help of
his young mistress, the noted Florentine singer Barbara Salutati,
suggests that we might rethink the mythic Machiavellian
Machiavelli. The poem was designed to be sung between the acts of
his famous comedy, The Mandrake Root, that celebrated love and
adultery, and seems to literally sing of a different
Machiavelli:
Love, the person who doesn't try
Your great power, hopes in vain….
Nor will such a person know what it means
in the same instant
To live and die….
And they'll never know how….
Fear and hope freeze and burn our hearts,
Or understand how both men and gods
Tremble before the arrows with which you're armed.
Machiavelli trembling before love's arrows? Machiavelli
overwhelmed by emotion? Who was this Machiavelli? This lecture
proposes a decidedly different Machiavelli from the mythic
dominating male. Looking anew at the whole range of his literary
production, a distinctive more passive and more emotional
Machiavelli emerges, if not as a wimp, at least with a self-mocking
laugh.
Biography:
Guido Ruggiero, Chair of History at the University of Miami, is a
notable historian in the fields of gender, sex, crime, magic,
science and everyday culture, in Renaissance and early modern
Italy. His innovative approaches include microhistory, narrative
history, the melding of literature, literary criticism, and
archival history. Amongst his publications are The Boundaries of
Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice; Binding
Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the
Renaissance; and Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in the
Italian Renaissance.
