Center for Early Cultures Winter Quarter Luncheon Talk:
Tearing God Apart: Cursing and Laughing in Renaissance Italy
with
Pantalea Mazzitello
Professor of Italian Studies, UCI
Humanities Gateway 1010
Friday, January 24, 2025
12:00-1:30pm
Please RSVP here
As historian Peter Burke states, the literary landscape of sixteenth-century Italy offers a “colorful spectrum of oaths.” This paper will discuss the use of blasphemy in Italian Renaissance literature to elicit laughter from the audience and as an identification marker to define marginalized groups on the fringes of society. The presence of humor in invectives is a prominent characteristic of medieval and early modern insults, and by acting as a form of derision of God and Its authority, blasphemous language conveys violence and comedy together. The analysis of the literary representation of figures of blasphemers and expressions of blasphemy is relevant as it reveals critical changes in the social and intellectual life of 16th-century Italy.
