"This provocative and complicated work about sex and self-fashioning sits at the nexus of historical and literary studies... It challenges readers to rethink both traditional literary interpretations and historical understanding."
(
Choice)
"Ruggiero's intent in Machiavelli in Love is much more than a recasting of Machiavelli: it is to examine self and identity in the Renaissance... One can applaud his insertion of the playful into our sense of the Renaissance."
(Thomas Kuehn
Renaissance Quarterly)
"Add to your reading list Johns Hopkins' study of sex, self, and society."
(
Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance)
"Innovative in its technique, subtle and revealing in its arguments, and whenever it turns to the theme of sodomy, throws off brilliant light."
(Randolph Trumbach
American Historical Review)
"Readers of Machiavelli in Love will certainly come away with a feeling for the playfulness of Renaissance sexuality. One of the book's achievements is that it shows the extent to which the literature of high culture had deep roots in everyday experience. Few will ever again doubt the importance of sex in creating Renaissance identity."
(William J. Connell
Journal of Interdisciplinary History)
"Ruggiero provides challenging accounts of public ethics and private morality by analysing a selection of literary and archival material. Armed with humour and determination, he deciphers the subtle codes of Renaissance narratives, and comments on the various ways in which identity and sexuality were constructed, understood and politicised."
(Stamatoula Panagakou
Political Studies Review)
"This is a veteran historian’s book of literary speculation... It is also, I suspect, a teacher’s book. It favors texts that enliven an English-speaking classroom on Italian history both because they support good lessons and because they bring students into engagement with the Italian past. How better to stir up Anglo-Saxon students, after all, than with tales, tragic or comical, that touch on passion, tenderness, deception, loss, or ribaldry!"
(Thomas Cohen
H-Italy, H-Net Reviews)
"Written in the accessible narrative style that Ruggiero’s readers will recognize, the study is a lively investigation that raises a central question about how the construction of self was dependent on sexual reputation."
(Gerry Milligan
Annali d’ Italianistica)
"A book that no one will be able to ignore in historical, gender, and Italian literary studies. Here Ruggiero breaks new ground, especially with his keen eye for connecting fiction with social experience."
(Edward Muir, Northwestern University, author of
Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice and
Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance)
"Ultimately makes a remarkable case for the integration of individual and societal identity within an understanding of the Italian Renaissance."
(Jason Hardgrave
European History Quarterly)
