Book contents
- History of Poetry in Italy
- A History of Poetry in Italy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Letter to the Reader
- Chapter 1 Positioning Poetry
- Part I 1200–1450
- Chapter 2 The Sonnet and the Sonnet Sequence
- Chapter 3 Gender and the Voicing of Sexuality
- Chapter 4 Versified Hagiography and Praise of Women
- Chapter 5 Adventures in Narrative
- Chapter 6 Boccaccio’s Experiments in Form
- Chapter 7 Commentary and Canonisation
- Chapter 8 Editing and Visualising Poetry from the 1300s to the Present
- Part II 1450–1600
- Glossary
- General Index
- References
Chapter 3 - Gender and the Voicing of Sexuality
from Part I - 1200–1450
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2025
By
Book contents
- History of Poetry in Italy
- A History of Poetry in Italy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Letter to the Reader
- Chapter 1 Positioning Poetry
- Part I 1200–1450
- Chapter 2 The Sonnet and the Sonnet Sequence
- Chapter 3 Gender and the Voicing of Sexuality
- Chapter 4 Versified Hagiography and Praise of Women
- Chapter 5 Adventures in Narrative
- Chapter 6 Boccaccio’s Experiments in Form
- Chapter 7 Commentary and Canonisation
- Chapter 8 Editing and Visualising Poetry from the 1300s to the Present
- Part II 1450–1600
- Glossary
- General Index
- References
Summary
This chapter explores gender and sexuality in the earliest Italian lyrics, via the themes of love and religion, positioned through modern creative critics such as Anne Carson and the medieval Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas. Howie shows how reading these poems can become a mutually constitutive interpretative exercise, thereby liberating new meanings. The chapter reads a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poems by authors including Lapo Gianni, Dante Alighieri, Guido Guinizzelli, the so-called Compiuta Donzella, Antonio Pucci, Iacopone da Todi, and the anonymous authors of a Jewish-Italian elegy and Christian nativity poem, exploring how religious and poetic erotic discourse interact with each other. Through examples of the nursing baby Jesus and St Francis’s stigmata, Howie invites us as readers to participate in these accounts of embodied desire. Howie thus explores the materiality of secular, sacred and supernatural bodies, both within the medieval and within contemporary frames of reference.
Keywords
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Poetry in Italy1200–1600, pp. 97 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
References
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante, Vita nuova e Rime, ed. Bonino, Guido Davico (Milan: Mondadori, 1985)Google Scholar
Aquinas, Thomas, Summa theologiae, 61 vols. (Oxford: Blackfriars, 1968), ix: Angels, trans. and ed. Foster OP, Kenelm (1964)Google Scholar
Bloch, R. Howard, Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonaventure, , ‘The Life of Francis’, in The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St Francis, trans. Cousins, Ewert (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1978), pp. 177–327Google Scholar
Bowe, David, ‘Versions of a Feminine Voice: The Compiuta Donzella di Firenze’, Italian Studies 73.1 (2018), 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burgwinkle, Bill, Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo Corpus (New York: Garland, 1997)Google Scholar
Carson, Anne, ‘The Gender of Sound’, in Glass, Irony & God (New York: New Directions, 1995), pp. 119–42Google Scholar
Cestaro, Gary, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cestaro, Gary, Queer Italia (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cherchi, Paolo, ‘The Troubled Existence of Three Women Poets’, in The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, ed. Paden, William D. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 197–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Luibheid, Colm and Rorem, Paul (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1987)Google Scholar
Gaunt, Simon, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, Bob, ‘Ecce Homo’, in Gender and Holiness, ed. Riches, Samantha J. E. and Salih, Sarah (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 152–83Google Scholar
Poesia del Duecento e del Trecento, ed. Muscetta, Paolo and Rivalta, Carlo (Turin: Einaudi, 1956)Google Scholar
Walker Bynum, Caroline, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker Bynum, Caroline, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar
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