Heiress of Fiction: Marfisa and the Macabre Legacy of Chivalric Ferrara
Date
2024
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Repository Usage Stats
views
downloads
Citation Stats
Abstract
<jats:p>This essay traces parallel developments in the myths and legends associated with the historical noblewoman Marfisa d’Este (1554–1608) and her literary counterpart Marfisa, the warrior knight from chivalric romance epic poetry. Through the Este princess’s embrace of her cross-dressing fictional double in courtly performance, alongside the evolution of the figure “Marfisa bizzarra” in Italian mock epic, the intermedial afterlives of these two figures reinterpreted the women’s brazen, autonomous agency as nefarious, destructive desire. Fantasies of decadent-turned-grim Ferrara, Marfisa’s native city in poetic and historical terms, guided overlapping acts of reception and transmission between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries.</jats:p>
Type
Department
Description
Provenance
Subjects
Citation
Permalink
Published Version (Please cite this version)
Publication Info
Driscoll, Kate (2024). Heiress of Fiction: Marfisa and the Macabre Legacy of Chivalric Ferrara. Renaissance Quarterly, 77(4). pp. 1134–1183. 10.1017/rqx.2024.432 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32379.
This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
Scholars@Duke
Kate Driscoll
Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. She works on early modern Italian literature, chivalric epic poetry, women's writing, gender studies, performance history, and opera studies.
Dr. Driscoll is completing her first book, Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
This is a study of collaboration and collectivity between Torquato Tasso and the women writers, patrons, and performers with whom he interacted.
Her most recent articles include:
- "Heiress to Fiction: Marfisa and the Macabre Legacy of Chivalric Ferrara," Renaissance Quarterly 74.4 (2024).
- "Marfisa’s Requiem, Merlinesque and Atlantean: Undying Spectacle in Twentieth-Century Ferrara," Letteratura cavalleresca italiana 6 (2024).
- "Renewal and accoglienza in Tasso's Rome," California Italian Studies 13.1 (2024).
- "Curse, Growl, Hiss, Wail: The Limits of Language in Ariosto's Rodomonte," I Tatti Studies 27.1 (2024).
She is the author of "'La donna di poche parole' from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera" (The Italianist, 41.1) and "Italian Chivalric Epic Poetry and Female Readers," published as part of Routledge Renaissance World. She is a co-author, along with Michela Ardizzoni and Carmela Scala, of "Building Space for Belonging: The Critical Race, Diasporas, and Migrations Caucus (CRDM)" (Forum Italicum, special issue on Critical Issues in Transnational Italian Studies, 2023).
Her other publications for edited collections include essays on female ambassadors in Torquato Tasso and Antonio Vivaldi, representations of New World masculinity in Baroque opera, and the intersections between acoustics and affect in Tasso and Monteverdi.
Before arriving at Duke, Dr. Driscoll was Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Colorado College and a postdoctoral research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin’s Cluster of Excellence, “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.”
Her research has been supported by the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Modern Language Association, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the German Excellence Initiative, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
From 2022-April 2024, she served as co-editor of the Italian Studies Channel on the New Books Network. Her conversations with authors can be found here.
Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.