La politica dell'apparenza può far dare i numeri, e non solo agli intellettuali del dissenso. Già Petrarca, per esempio, in De sui ipsius ignorantia, se l'era presa con gli aristotelici educati nelle università per le loro pretensioni, e Aretino, Ariosto e Bruno avevano compilato sferzanti satire contro l'ampollosità e le pedanterie dei pedagoghi. Galileo, si è detto, ha scritto il capitolo Contro il portare la toga per castigare l'eccessivo sfoggio e desiderio di distinzione dei professori pisani, obbligati a portar la toga per strada, ma compiaciuti, si pensa, dall'obbligo dello sfoggio. È vero, commenta Galileo argutamente, ci sono occasioni in cui l'abito potrebbe dare fastidio, come quando il professore va nei postriboli, ma quanti altri salamelecchi si prende, giorno dopo giorno, svolazzando per strada con la sopravveste regolamentare di velluto nero! La vena satirica del Berni (per non parlare della scrittura spregiudicata dell'Aretino, del Pulci, del Grazzini, del Franco e perfino del Maffio Venier) 1 , più che la semplice poesia "del mal dire", colora questa goliardica denigrazione del mondo accademico espressa in capitoli ternari e scritta in punta di penna nel 1589-92 da un Galileo in vena giocosa. 2 1 Sull'influenza nella composizione di questa poesia di

The Manly Masquerade      /  The Manly Masquerade unravels the complex ways men were defined as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century evidence: medical and travel literature; theology; law; myth; conduct books; and plays, chivalric romances, and novellas by authors including Machiavelli, Tasso, and Ariosto. Valeria Finucci shows how ideas of masculinity were formed in the midst of acute anxiety about paternity by highlighting the beliefs-widely held at the time-that conception could occur without a paternal imprimatur or through a woman' s encounter with an animal, or even that a pregnant woman' s imagination could erase the father' s "signature" from the fetus. Against these visions of reproduction gone awry, Finucci looks at how concepts of masculinity were tied to issues of paternity through social standing, legal matters, and inheritance practices.

Some years are pivotal in the history of publishing. Take, for instance, 1543. This was the year that Nicolaus Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) transformed the way man understood his place in the macrocosm; likewise, this was the year that Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the Fabric of the Human Body) excavated man's microcosm to see what makes a human being " tick. " 1 In the medical world, knowledge was no longer to be gained by pouring over the books of revered past physicians, Vesalius claimed, but by uncovering with one's hands, layer after layer, the unexplored mysteries of the human body. Dissection became a performative act that required a large audience and a theater. Such performances turned out to be so successful that they had to be repeated, and an array of books came out, whose fron-tispieces visualized a splayed male or female cadaver, revealing its cavities to a voyeuristic assembly of male onlookers. In the process of peeling away identities, eager anatomists opened for all to see the new human continent that once proclaimed only God's handiwork. These decades were also the times of discoveries of new regions, different people, novel ways of life. As Columbus and European navigators rushed to locate, conquer, and name new lands — or to rename them for the kings, princes, and noblemen sponsoring their navigations — so the rush to get hold of bodies to dissect legitimized the desire of the new anatomists — the Columbuses of the fleshly terra firma — to see, check, finger, cut, discover , and then name or rename flesh, bones, muscles, organs, nerves, and tissues that knew no boundaries. For Vesalius, the question that tantalized him as a newly minted professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua (his title was explicator chirurgiae) was staged in the title-page image of his watershed opus, the Fabrica: how to understand and master the human body, starting JMEMS481_01Finucci_1PP.indd 1 9/1/17 8:47 AM