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Podcast: New Books in Italian Studies
Episode: Paola Ugolini, "Court and Its Critics: Anti-Court Sentiments in Early Modern Italy" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
Description: The fashionable and decorous men whom we recognize in portraits and letters from the Italian Renaissance penned some of the most scathing critiques of the courts in which they served. Such anti-courtly discourse furnished a platform for discussing pressing questions of early modern Italian society. The court was the space that witnessed a new form of negotiation of identity and prestige, the definition of masculinity and of gender-specific roles, the birth of modern politics and of an ethics based on merit and on individual self-interest. In The Court and Its Critics: Anti-Court Sentiments in Early Modern Italy (University of To...