Siena, 1531: Birth of a European Heroine

The Deceived, or Gli Ingannati, first performed in Siena during Carnival 1532, inspired plays and prose throughout Europe, in fact, more than any other sixteenth-century Italian comedy. The protagonist, Lelia, is ultimately the model for Shakespeare’s Viola, the transgressive heroine who dons pants to serve the man she loves in Twelfth Night. The talk focuses on the political tumult in Italy and especially the Sack of Rome in 1527, which have a role in the genesis of Lelia and Viola, the comedy itself, and the rebirth of European comedy in Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century.

Nov. 1
4:40 p.m.

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Speaker:

Laurie Shepard is an Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College (Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts). Her research focused on Medieval and Renaissance literature, and she has published on Medieval Latin epistolography (Courting Power: Persuasion and Politics in the Early Thirteenth Century, Garland, 1999), and lyric poetry, including an edition the trobairitz (Bruckner, M., Shepard L. and White, S. Songs of the Women Troubadours, Garland, 1995; paperback, Taylor & Francis 2000). Her current projects also include sixteenth-century comedy, and she is working on a website that will reconstruct the communities that produced, performed and published comedies as part of the cultural politics in the early decades of the sixteenth century in Italy.