Caterina and the Humanists: Gender, Patronage, Monarchy in Humanist Writings for Caterina Corner

• In Event: Legitimation and Subversion: Humanism and Renaissance Statebuilding II

Abstract

Queen Caterina Corner posed a series of challenges for the humanists, mostly lesser known Veneto figures, who wrote to or about her. This presentation will use orations by Giovanni Battista Appiani and Taddeo Bovolini and poems by Pietro Lazzeroni and Filippo Galli to consider three interconnected sets of issues: the sex of their dedicatee; the political and patronage ambitions of these authors (two of whom were residents of subject cities in the Venetian terrafirma); and Caterina’s status as the former monarch of the “jewel in the crown” of the Venetian stato da mar, Cyprus. Consideration of these texts will allow the group to consider how these humanists understood power through the lens of gender and that of center/periphery politics inherent in imperial projects such as that of Venice.

Author

• Holly S. Hurlburt, Southern Illinois University