Grisotto

Luigi Speranza


W. Rebhorn

Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.


The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press,

Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Modern Language Association for the
best book on Italian literature for 1988-90.

Courtly Performances:
Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978. 238 pages. Portions of this book have been reprinted
in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. James P. Draper and James E. Person, Jr. (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1990), pp. 117-20; and in Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch (New Tork: Norton, 2002), pp. 366-76.

EDITED COLLECTION
(with David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, and G. W. Pigman, III) Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992. 441 pages.

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

"Between Foundations and Ruins: Machiavelli's Prince and the Epic Tradition," in The
Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming).

“‘His tail at commandment’: George Puttenham and the Carnivalization of Rhetoric,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 96-111.

“Outlandish Fears: Defining Decorum in Ancient and Renaissance Rhetoric,”
Intertexts 4 (2000): 3-24. .

“Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani: Charismatic Spectacles and the Irony of History,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity and Early Modern Studies, Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo, ed. Peter Herman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 54-82.

“Rhetoric, the Body, and the Absolutist Court: Centers and Margins in Antoine Furetière’s La
Nouvelle allégorique,” in Educare il corpo, educare la parola nella trattatistica del
Rinascimento, ed. Giorgio Patrizi and Amedeo Quondam, “Europa delle Corti,” Centro
studi sulle società di antico regime, Biblioteca del Cinquecento, 80 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998),
393-413.

“La lingua d’Ercole: l’Umanesimo e la politica della retorica rinascimentale,” Annali di Storia
Moderna e Contemporanea 1 (1995): 77-91.

“Petruchio’s ‘Rope Tricks’: The Taming of the Shrew and the Renaissance Discourse of
Rhetoric,” Modern Philology 92 (1995): 294-327.

“Baldesar Castiglione, Thomas Wilson, and the Courtly Body of Renaissance Rhetoric,”
Rhetorica 11 (1993): 241-74.

“The Emperor of Men’s Minds: The Renaissance Trickster as Homo Rhetoricus,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed.
David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman, III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn
(Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 31-65.

“The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 75-111.
Reprinted in Julius Caesar: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Richard Wilson
(London: Palgrave, 2002), 29-54.

“Re-defining the Beffa: Boccaccio’s Challenge to the Reader in Decameron VIII, 7,” Forum
Italicum 22 (1988): 204-22.

“Circle, Sword, and the Futile Quest: The Nightmare World of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi,”
Cahiers élisabéthains 27 (1985): 53-66.

“Machiavelli at Carpi: Confidence Games in the Republic of Wooden Clogs,” Italian Quarterly
24 (1983): 27-40.

“The Enduring Word: Language, Time, and History in Il Libro del Cortegiano,” Modern
Language Notes 96 (1981): 23-40; reprinted in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in
Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983), 69-90.

“Du Bellay’s Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Petrarchist Sonnet Sequence,”
Renaissance Quarterly 22 (1980): 609-22.

“Jonson’s Jovy Boy: Lovewit and the Dupes in The Alchemist,” Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 79 (1980): 355-75.

“After Frye: A Review-Article on Recent Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Comedies and
Romances,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (1979): 553-82.

“Baldassare Castiglione,” “Giovanni della Casa,” and “Renaissance,” short articles in A
Dictionary of Italian Literature, ed. Julia and Peter Bondanella (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1979).

“Mother Venus: Temptation in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Studies 11
(1978): 1-19.

“Erasmus as Cosmopolitan Christian Humanist,” in The Renaissance and Reformation in
Rebhorn: Vita 5
Germany, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), 83-97.

“Thomas More’s Enclosed Garden: Utopia and the Humanist Tradition,” English Literary
Renaissance 6 (1976): 140-55.

“The Metamorphoses of Moria: Structure and Meaning in The Praise of Folly,” PMLA 89
(1974): 463-76.

“The Humanist Tradition and Milton’s Satan: The Conservative as Revolutionary,” Studies in
English Literature 13 (1973): 81-93.

“Erasmian Education and the Convivium religiosum,” Studies in Philology 69 (1972): 131-49.

“Ottaviano’s Interruption: Book IV and the Problem of Unity in Il Libro del Cortegiano,”
Modern Language Notes 87 (1972): 37-59.

“The Burdens and Joys of Freedom: An Interpretation of the Five Books of Rabelais,” Études
rabelaisiennes 9 (l97l): 71-90.

“Notes Toward a Department of Literature: A Reply to D. S. Carne-Ross,” Arion 7 (1968): 515-
20.

REVIEWS

Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. In
American Historical Review 111 (2006), 274-75.

Trevor McNeely, Proteus Unmasked: Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric and the Art of Shakespeare
(Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2004). In Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005):
99-102.

Joseph Marino and Melinda Schlitt (eds.), Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern
Intellectual History: Essays in Honor of Nancy S. Struever (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 2000), and Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (eds.), Rhetoric and Law
in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). In Renaissance
Quarterly 55 (2002): 291-94.

Paula Blank. Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings
(London: Routledge, 1996). In Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101(2002):
125-27.

Lynne Magnusson. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatiuc Language and Elizabethan
Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). In Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 270-72.

Maurizio Viroli. Machiavelli. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). In
Rebhorn: Vita 6
Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 563-64.

Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1996).
In Modern Philology 96 (1998): 80-84.

Pier Massimo Forni, Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narrative in Boccaccio’s
“Decameron” (Phliadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). In Speculum 92
(1997): 514-16.

John M. Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori
Letters of 1513-1515 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). In American Historical
Review 100 (1995): 549-50.

Valeria Finucci, The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). In Comparative Literature 47 (1995): 375-78.

Stefano Pillinini, Bernardino Stagnino: Un editore a Venezia tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento
(Rome: Jouvence, 1989). In Libraries and Culture 28 (1993): 81-83.
Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). In Criticism 32 (1990): 531-34.
Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). In The
New York Times Book Review (November 5, 1989): 25.

François Laroque, Shakespeare et la fête: Essai d’archéologie du spectacle dans l’Angleterre
élisabéthaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). In Cahiers élisabéthains 34
(1988): 115-18.

Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986). In Modern Philology 86 (1988): 202-5.
Thomas M. Greene, The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986). In Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 346-50.
David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). In Comparative Literature 38 (1986): 384-86.
Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984). In
Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985): 351-53.
Zoja Pavlovskis, The Praise of Folly: Structure and Irony (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983). In
Renaissance Quarterly 37 (1984): 620-22.
Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare
Rebhorn: Vita 7
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). In Renaissance Quarterly 36 (1983): 471-
74.

Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979). In Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 474-76.

J. R. Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of “The Courtier” (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1978). In Italica 57 (1980): 295-97.
Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, intro. J. H. Whitfield
(London: Dent, 1974). In Italica 53 (1976): 166-69.

INVITED LECTURES/PRESENTATIONS

Led a seminar (with Frank Whigham) on our edition of George Puttenham's Art of English
Poesy at the University of Maryland and at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare
Association of America (at which I also presented a paper on the Sexual Politics of
Puttenham's book), 2009.

"Between Foundations and Ruins: Machiavelli's Prince and the Epic Tradition," an invited
lecture presented at the Université de Paris – 1 (La Sorbonne), 2007.

"Machiavelli's Hands," a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of
America, 2007.

"'His Tail at Commandment': Geroge Puttenham and the Carnivalization of Rhetoric," an
invited lecture delivered at Princeton University, 2003.

"The Sexual Politics of George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy," a paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, 2003.

“Susenbrotus and Puttenham: From Learned Rhetoric to Courtly Poetics,” a paper presented at
the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, 2002.

“Comparative Literature, Intertextuality, and the Future,” an invited lecture delivered at Texas
Tech University, 2002.

“‘You are not blocks, you are not stones’: Teaching and Moving in the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of
America, 2001.

“Outlandish Fears: Defining Decorum in Thomas Wilson and George Puttenham,” a paper
presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1999.
Rebhorn: Vita 8

“Machiavelli’s Castruccio Castracani: Charismatic Self-Fashioning and the Ironies of History,”
one of two keynote speeches given at the University of South Carolina’s conference on
Comparative Literature, “Constructions of the Self: The Poetics of Subjectivity,” 1999.

“Outlandish Fears: Defining Decorum in Ancient and Renaissance Rhetoric,” an invited lecture
delivered at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago, 1997.

“All the World’s a Con-Game: Tricksters, Identity, and Politics in European Renaissance
Literature,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Comparative
Literature Association in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, 1997.

“Political Ambiguity in the Rhetoric of the Renaissance” (in English) and “Le corps comme
image et comme métaphore, et le corps politique, dans les traités de rhétorique de la
Renaissance” (in French), invited lectures delivered at the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, 1996.

“Dioneo’s Challenge: Turning the Decameron Topsy-Turvy,” a paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, 1996.

“Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani: Charismatic Spectacles and the Irony of History,”
an invited lecture delivered at the conference on “Machiavelli diplomatico, politico e
storico” held at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, 1995.

“Rhetoric, the Body, and the Absolutist Court: Centers and Margins in Antoine Furetière’s La
Nouvelle allégorique,” an invited lecture delivered at the conference “Educare il corpo,
educare la parola nella trattatistica del Rinascimento” at the Università di Roma “La
Sapienza,” sponsored by the the Centro Europa delle Corti and The Folger Institute, 1995.

“The Belly Talks: The Politics of the Body in Renaissance Rhetoric,” a paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1995.

“The Sexual Politics of The Taming of the Shrew,” an invited lecture delivered at the University
of Alabama, 1995.

“‘A long-haired speech is always sodomitical’: The Sexual Politics of Renaissance Rhetoric,”
an invited lecture delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, New York
University, and Barnard College (as one of the keynote speeches at the annual Medieval
and Renaissance Studies Conference), 1995. A short version was also presented at the
annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, 1994.

“Lazarillo de Tormes and the Pleasures of Pain,” a paper presented at the annual Meeting of the
Modern Language Association, 1993.

“Castiglione, Thomas Wilson, and the Courtly Body,” an invited lecture delivered at the
conference on “Manners Treatises in the Renaissance” at the Folger Library, 1993.
Rebhorn: Vita 9

“Hercules’ Tongue: Humanism and the Politics of Renaissance Rhetoric,” the keynote speech at
the annual Comparative Literature Symposium at Texas Tech University, 1993. Also given
(in Italian) as “La lingua d’Ercole: l’Umanesimo e la politica della retorica rinascimentale,”
an invited lecture at the Università Cattolica in Milan, 1993.

“Petruchio’s ‘Rope Tricks’: The Taming of the Shrew and the Renaissance Discourse of
Rhetoric,” a paper presented at the Anglistentag in Stuttgart, Germany, 1992, the biennial
meeting of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, 1991, and the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1990.

“Katherine’s ‘Womanly Persuasion’: Rhetoric and The Taming of the Shrew,” a paper
presented
at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, 1992.

“The Emperor of Men’s Minds: The Renaissance Trickster as Homo rhetoricus,” an invited
lecture delivered at the University of Colorado, 1991, and at the Claremont Graduate
School, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at San
Diego, 1989.

“The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” an invited lecture delivered at the University
of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, 1989, at the annual meeting of the Renaissance
Society of America, 1987, and at the annual meeting of the Association des Anglicistes de
l’Instruction Supérieure (France), 1988.
“Le ‘Trickster’ dans la Renaissance européenne,” an invited lecture delivered at the Université
Paul Valéry, 1988.
“Dioneo's Challenges and the Shape of the Decameron,” a paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1986.
“Killing Remirro de Orco: Machiavelli’s Prince in the Theater of Terror,” a paper presented at
the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America and the American Association
for Italian Studies, 1986.
“Machiavelli’s Heroic Prince,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Association for Italian Studies, 1985.

“Boccaccio Recalls the Inferno: Decameron VIII, 7,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of
the Modern Language Association, 1984.
“Machiavelli at Carpi: Confidence Games in the Republic of Wooden Clogs,” a paper presented
at the annual meeting of the American Association for Italian Studies, 1984.
“The Confidence Man in Renaissance Italy and England,” a paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1983.
“Machiavelli’s Prince: The Confidence Man as Hero,” an invited lecture delivered at Cornell
Rebhorn: Vita 10
University, 1982.

“The Confidence Man and the Crisis of Authority in Renaissance Culture,” a paper presented at
the conference on “Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation” at the Center
for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, at the State University of New York at
Binghamton, 1982.

“Tricksters and Dupes in Machiavelli’s La Mandragola,” a paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1982.

“Machiavelli’s Prince in the Theater of Cruelty,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Association of Professors of Italian, 1981.

“Du Bellay’s Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Petrarchist Sonnet Sequence,” a
paper presented at the conference on "Rome in the Renaissance" at the Center for Medieval
and Early Renaissance Studies, at the State University of New York at Binghamton, 1979.

“The Enduring Word: Language, Time, and History in Il Libro del Cortegiano,” an invited
lecture delivered at the symposium celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of
Castiglione’s birth at the Casa Italiana of Columbia University, 1978.

“Courtly Love and Courtesy in Castiglione’s Cortegiano and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language
Association, 1977.

“High Renaissance Portraiture: Castiglione and Raffaello,” a paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1974.

“Castiglione’s Cortegiano, the Symposium, and the Courtly Tradition,” a paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1973.

“Ottaviano’s Interruption: Book IV and the Problem of Unity in Il Libro del Cortegiano,” a
paper presented at the annual meeting of the South Central Modern Language Association,
1971.

“Humanist Education and the Erasmian Garden,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the
South Central Modern Language Association, 1969.

TEACHING
Graduate Courses:

Bakhtin’s Renaissance:

The View from Below;

Renaissance Humanism
and Its Discontents;

Renaissance Rhetoric and Literature;

Renaissance Tricksters and
Confidence Men; Shakespeare; Shakespearean Comedy; Milton and the Epic; Renaissance
Humanism; Seminal Texts of the English Renaissance; Comic Masterworks of the
Renaissance; Jacobean and Caroline Drama; Introduction to the Study of Comparative
Literature; Mannerism.
Rebhorn: Vita 11
Undergraduate Courses: Renaissance Comedy; Shakespeare; Italian Renaissance Literature;
English Drama to 1642; The Poetry of Milton; Elizabethan Poetry and Prose; Renaissance
Art and Literature; Alienation in Literature; various lower division surveys and composition
courses.
LANGUAGES
French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, German.
PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
The Modern Language Association
The American Comparative Literature Association
The Renaissance Society of America
The International Society for the History of Rhetoric
The Rhetorical Society of America