Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy

Exploring individual and collective formation of gender identities, this book analyses plays in the genre of 'erudite comedy' (commedia erudita), which was extremely popular among elite sixteenth-century Italians. Author Manes investigates five erudite comedies-one each by Ludovico Ariosto, Antonio Landi and Giovan Maria Cecchi, and two by Niccolò Machiavelli, to consider how erudite comedies functioned as ideological battlefields where the gender system of patriarchy was examined, negotiated and critiqued.