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"... as the friar continued to beg the damsel to satisfy his love, and the young priest continued to refuse, the friar became all inflamed with desire. And unable to change his mind with prayers, gifts, and extravagant promises, he seized him and threw him on the bed. Now the young priest, finding himself on his back and thinking it was time to reveal his identity, suddenly changed his fake Florentine accent and spoke in the accent of Arezzo, saying: "My dear sir, don't overexert yourself, for I am more a man than you are." Amazed and wanting an immediate explanation, the friar put out his hand and felt that the "young lady" was a very well-endowed young man. But seeing how handsome he was, feeling all aflame with desire, and determined to satisfy his unruly appetite, he said: "Very well I like you no less as a man than as a woman." Then the young priest, rather alarmed by this, quickly pushed his feet against the friar's shameless breast, knocking him backward, and jumped off the bed... From 'Friar and Priest'"
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An Italian Renaissance Sextet is a collection of six tales offering a unique view of the history of Renaissance Italy, with fiction and fictional modes becoming gateways to a real, historical world. All written between 1400 and 1500 - among them a rare gem by Lorenzo the Magnificent and a famous account featuring Filippo Brunelleschi - the stories are presented here in lively translations.As engrossing, fresh, and high-spirited as those in Boccaccio's Decameron, the tales deal with marriage, deception, rural manners, gender relations, social ambitions, adultery, homosexuality, and the demands of individual identity. Each is accompanied by an essay, in which Lauro Martines situates the story in its temporal context, transforming it into an outright historical document. The stories and essays focus mainly on people from the ordinary and middling ranks of society, as they go about their ordinary lives, under the pressure of a highly practical, conformist, pleasure-loving (but often cruel) urban society. Revealing the concerns of a searching historical work with a combined anthropological, demographic, and cultural slant, An Italian Renaissance Sextet shines a probing light on Italian Renaissance culture.
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Not long ago there lived in this glorious city of ours [Florence] a very beautiful young woman named Ricciarda, who was no less endowed with virtue than with beauty. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Not long ago there lived in this glorious city of ours [Florence] a very beautiful young woman named Ricciarda, who was no less endowed with virtue than with beauty. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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1 review
Delightful tales
13 July 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
It is unfortunate that this book, first published in 1994, has had no prior reader reviews, because that suggests that it has had few readers. Its six tales from 15th-century Italy are delightful, if forgettable; they are light, like those in Boccaccio's Decameron. The essays by Lauro Martines that follow each one place the stories in their historical context, and are easy to read.
The first story, "Ricciarda," is about a young women who is so good in bed on her wedding night that her husband wrongly concludes that she is not a virgin. The second, "Scopone," is about "a peasant of uncouth appearance: miserly, loutish, ignorant, ungrateful," who gets his comeuppance. The third, "Friar and Priest," is described in the editorial review, above. The fourth, "Bianco Alfani," is about a prison warden who is tricked into believing that he has been elected captain of the guard. The fifth, "Giacoppo," by Lorenzo de' Medici, involves one man tricking another so that the first may sleep with the wife of the second. The sixth, "The Fat Woodcarver," is yet another tale of tricking someone, in this case tricking a man into believing that he is another man.
The trickery in these tales were, in Renaissance Italy, considered to be hilariously funny, whereas today, they seem cruel. Lauro Martines discusses this change in attitude.
The first story, "Ricciarda," is about a young women who is so good in bed on her wedding night that her husband wrongly concludes that she is not a virgin. The second, "Scopone," is about "a peasant of uncouth appearance: miserly, loutish, ignorant, ungrateful," who gets his comeuppance. The third, "Friar and Priest," is described in the editorial review, above. The fourth, "Bianco Alfani," is about a prison warden who is tricked into believing that he has been elected captain of the guard. The fifth, "Giacoppo," by Lorenzo de' Medici, involves one man tricking another so that the first may sleep with the wife of the second. The sixth, "The Fat Woodcarver," is yet another tale of tricking someone, in this case tricking a man into believing that he is another man.
The trickery in these tales were, in Renaissance Italy, considered to be hilariously funny, whereas today, they seem cruel. Lauro Martines discusses this change in attitude.
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