Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During his visit to Venice in the first decade of the seventeenth century, English traveller Thomas Coryat famously remarked both on the number of Venetian prostitutes (rumoured to be twenty thousand) and on their alleged licentiousness.Perhaps unconsciously, Coryat echoed Giordano Bruno's 1582 comedy Il candelaio which contained an ironic interpretation of Venice's famous myth of liberty: "because of the magnanimity and the liberality of the illustrious Republic, whores are exempt from every hardship […]."(12) Venice's legendary libertinism is well known to Renaissance scholars, yet these audiences and others will embrace Courtney Quaintance's ingenious reconsideration of the prostitute as a literary cipher for pornography in Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice.Quaintance recreates in detail the literary circle or informal academy of Venetian patrician Domenico Venier, which included his brother Lorenzo (until his death), his nephew Maffio, other Venetian elites such as Benedetto Corner, and notable outsiders, including Girolamo Parabosco and Pietro Aretino.Quaintance shows that Venier's group coalesced in the years before formal academies existed, and probably drew inspiration from the Compagnia della Calza, male youth clubs of the fifteenth century that provided entertainments at Venetian social events and civic rituals.The notion of brotherhood may have been particularly pervasive both in the Calze and in Venier's group because of Venice's political identity: a republic that by its very nature excluded women.They formed what the author calls "a literary fraternity […] relationships between men that were constituted through literary and social gatherings, companionship and conversation, and especially, the practice of exchanging texts about women" ( 27).In addition to performing masculinity through their civic engagement, dress, and comportment, Venier and his cohort did so by possessing, controlling, exchanging, and sharing women-in their lyrics if not in real life.In print, they maintained their respectability and demonstrated their erudition, elaborating on the themes of love and female beauty manifested in Petrarch's sonnets.However in the relative privacy of their (mostly) unpublished manuscripts,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".