Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 4916
  • Author(s)/Creator(s):
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  • Title: Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of Fifteenth-Century Italy
  • Source: Renaissance Quarterly 55, 2 (Summer 2002): Pages 379 - 433.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Journal Article
  • Subject (See Also): Beauty Brides Classical Influences Courts- Literary Activity Epithalamium, Literary Genre Humanism Latin Literature Laudatory Literature Learning and Scholarship Marriage Politics Rhetoric Sexuality Weddings Women
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: Italy
  • Century: 15
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  • Abstract: In the fifteenth century, Guarino Guarini, Luovico Carbone, Francesco Filelfo, and other humanists composed and delivered Latin orations at courtly weddings in Ferrara, Naples, and Milan. In these epithalamia, which are mostly unpublished, orators adapt a classically inspired conception of marriage to Italian court culture. They defend physical beauty and sexual pleasure, praise learned brides, and assert the importance of mutual affection, revealing a complex picture of ideal gender relations in courts. Against the ancient and Christian anti-marriage ascetic traditions, humanists offer biblical, philosophical, political, economic, and hedonistic arguments in defense of marriage. [Reproduced by permission of the Renaissance Society of America.]
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  • Year of Publication: 2002.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: 00344338