Sex and Marriage in Machiavelli’s <i>Mandragola</i>: A Close(t) Reading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article carries out a close reading of Niccolò Machiavelli’s play Mandragola (The mandrake root) from the perspective of sex and gender studies. In so doing, it takes into consideration what the play says or suggests about sexual desire, sexual practices, and conjugal life. This somewhat less conventional examination reveals that, under cover of entertainment and humour, Machiavelli was raising important questions about contemporary marriage conventions and sexual practices that ranged from the difference in age between the spouses to the difference in their sexual interests, from a couple’s desire for progeny to the partners’ (un)willingness to pay the marriage debt, from the matter of a man’s “honour” to the question of a woman’s “worth.”
 Cet article propose une lecture approfondie de la pièce de théâtre Mandragola (La Mandragore) de Nicolas Machiavel du point de vue du sexe et des études de genre. On y considère ce que cette pièce exprime ou suggère à propos du désir sexuel, des pratiques sexuelles et de la vie conjugale. Cette approche quelque peu non conventionnelle fait apparaître que Machiavel, sous les apparences du divertissement et de l’humour, y soulève d’importantes questions quant aux conventions de mariage et aux pratiques sexuelles de son époque, depuis la différence d’âge entre les conjoints jusqu’à leurs différences d’intérêt sexuel, en passant par le désir de procréer et le consentement à payer la dette de mariage, ainsi que par le sujet de « l’honneur » de l’homme et les interrogations sur la « valeur » de la femme.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".