Ann Rosalind Jones

Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe

Focusing on Portuguese traders in the areas inhabited by the Akan people, Pietz traces the word fetish to the pidgin Fetisso, which can in turn be traced to the Portuguese feitifo, meaning magical practice or witchcraft. The fetish, Pietz shows, came into being above all as a term of religious abuse, by which Europeans rejected objects that were attributed with animating powers. African amulets, for instance, used for protection against disease or sorcery, were demonized by Portuguese Catholics, who

Contentious Readings: Urban Humanism and Gender Difference in La Puce de Madame Des-Roches (1582)*

RECENT RESEARCH INTO EARLY modern social groups in which women gained access to literary language has focused on the coteries in which they learned to perform alongside men, improvising poems later printed in books.I The typical coterie in Italy, through which women such as Veronica Franco made their way into print, was the humanist academy centered around a court or a group of urban noblemen, such as the Venier academy in Venice. In sixteenth-century France such groups took two forms: the provincial salon attended by professional men-humanist lawyers, diplomats, doctors, publishers-as in Lyon and Poitiers, and the aristocratic salons linked to the court. One mark of the class dif-

Of Busks and Bodies

Despite the chorus of scorn that followed “Camillagate,” Charles and Camilla’s notorious 1989 telephone conversation was one of their finest moments, in which they revealed themselves as the unabashed imitators and creative perverters of themes in Catullus and Donne. Camilla imagines Charles as the knickers that she can perpetually wear. Charles imagines himself as the man forever inside the woman, endlessly erect. But no, in this wonderful perversion of a perennial heterosexual fantasy, he is soft and, alas, disposable after all. Camilla rescues the fantasy (“what a wonderful idea!”) only to be met by Charles’s self-mocking “my luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on, forever swirling round on the top, never going down.” An eternity of activity, but never even going down (the lavatory) — let alone into Camilla. But again, Camilla rescues the fantasy, picking up on Charles’s ambiguous “until the next one comes through.” The next tampon? And through what? The lavatory? Camilla? Camilla turns it into the latter. Charles may not be endlessly in her, but, like a box of tampons, he can multiply himself so as to be in her again and again and again: “you could just keep going,” “repeating yourself.” Like the best of fetishes, this is repetition without a difference: more of the same, a same that is wanted obsessively, repetitively, but now. “Oh, darling I just want you now.” An impossible now for two people separated by the distance of a telephone call or a letter or a poem. Or rather a now that can only be achieved prosthetically. Othello away, Desdemona still kisses him in the form of the handkerchief that was his first gift to her. Catullus imagines himself as his beloved Lesbia’s pet sparrow.

The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620.

Foreword by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar Acknowledgments Introduction: Imitation, Negotiation, Appropriation One The Mirror, the Distaff, the Pen: The Ideological Climate of WomenOs Love Poetry Two Writing to Live: Pedagogical Poetics in Isabella Whitney and Catherine des Roches Three The Poetics of Group Identity: Self-Commemoration through Dialogue in Pernette du Guillet and Tullia dOAragona Four Feminine Pastoral as Heroic Martyrdom: Gaspara Stampa and Mary Wroth Five Eros Equalized: Literary Cross-Dressing and the Defense of Women in Louise Labe and Veronica Franco Notes Bibliography Index