Articles by Jennifer Mackenzie
Renaissance Quarterly, 2019
In 1433, Lorenzo Valla attacked contemporary jurisprudence with a treatise attributed to the civi... more In 1433, Lorenzo Valla attacked contemporary jurisprudence with a treatise attributed to the civilian lawyer Bartolus of Saxoferrato, the De insigniis et armis [On insignia and arms]. This was considered Europe's first treatise on heraldry or coats of arms, until a team of legal historians in recent years questioned its subject matter and authenticity: What was the tract really about, and di Bartolus himself even write it? Visual culture meanwhile has long been seen as peripheral to Valla's critical agenda as a humanist and a Latinist. This article proposes that Valla did engage with images, especially insofar as they manifested regimes of authority and the persistence of their malleability though historical time. Valla's epistle against the "medieval" jurist via his tract on insignia and arma participates in an intellectual history through humanist philology and antiquarianism to modern anthropologies of images, with their proposed readings or decodings of the visual languages of Others. Heraldry found its definition in this history as a feudal visual language, integral to that Other civilizational configuration that the humanist tradition first brought into view as the Middle Ages.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2019.376
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
California Italian Studies, 2011
The 1998 publication of Carla Benedetti’s Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura [Pa... more The 1998 publication of Carla Benedetti’s Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura [Pasolini vs. Calvino: For An 'Impure' Literature] provoked a series of attacks in the Italian press, mostly aimed at its polemical contraposition between authors and author-functions: One the one hand, Pasolini the activist, who took on personal risk to speak truth to power through the medium of his art; and on the other hand Calvino the aesthete, darling of the international postmodern literary establishment. Debates in Italy today about the cultural legacy of the twentieth century, the state of postmodernism, and the future of Italian literary culture are still haunted by the opposition of these two figures. The debates are often compounded by a perceived opposition in the field of criticism between Benedetti’s radical supporters and conservative critics. My essay compares Benedetti’s provocative call for an impure literature alla Pasolini with one of the foundational histories of Italian literature, that of Francesco De Sanctis, where in particular the sixteenth-century figures of Machiavelli and Ariosto are opposed and the former championed. Through this double comparison, I argue that Benedetti and De Sanctis are “Machiavellian” literary critics whose future-oriented strategies of expression represent one of multiple ways that the unprecedented challenges Italian culture faces today are being confronted with tools from its past.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Calls for papers by Jennifer Mackenzie
Philological Communities in Context(s) in the Early Modern World (1400-1850) ——— In recent years... more Philological Communities in Context(s) in the Early Modern World (1400-1850) ——— In recent years, scholarly collections such as World Philology (2015, Ed. Pollock, Elman, and Chang) and Philology and Its Histories (2010, Ed. Gurd) have brought philology to the foreground of humanistic study " not just [as] a mode of scholarship " but as " one of its objects " (Gurd, Introduction to Philology and Its Histories, 5). Questioning teleological histories that trace how philology achieved a modern and scientific status in the nineteenth-century European university, these studies call for a broad canvas to account for the multiplicity and complexity of textual practices over time and space. They include, within the study of philology, not only the study of the transmission and editing of texts, but also of hermeneutical activities more generally, from textual readings to historical and cultural interpretations. Our RSA panels seek to contribute to these efforts by examining philological practices in the early modern period (1400-1850) on a micro-historical scale, in their various social, institutional and/or political contexts. The aim is to bring to bear on the analysis of these practices recent developments in the history of academies, patronage, princely courts, universities, salons, libraries, and schools. On the premise that philological work often takes place in communal settings and practically always in relation to structures of power, we seek papers that illuminate these settings, and the exchanges they generate in specific early modern contexts. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine the effects of these circumstances on the development of specific philological practices or hermeneutic perspectives. Individual papers might shed new light on communities which have been overlooked, having not generally been associated with the most (proto-)modern representatives of the development of philology as a scholarly discipline. Or they might open newly contextualized perspectives on communities that have already played leading roles in philology's historiography. In either case, we hope to enrich our methodologies for studying philological communities in context(s), with the goal of gaining a greater appreciation of philology's political stakes in the early modern world, and of the varieties of its institutional incarnations.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Reviews by Jennifer Mackenzie
Speculum 98/2, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Renaissance Quarterly, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Annali d'Italianistica, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Conference Papers by Jennifer Mackenzie
Borderless Italy: 15th Annual Conference of the California Interdisciplinary Consortium for Italian Studies. UC Santa Barbara, 26-27 February 2016
This paper is about some of the geographical and cultural border-crossings that went into the mak... more This paper is about some of the geographical and cultural border-crossings that went into the making of a sumptuous 15-volume armorial representing the territories and illustrious houses of the Italian peninsula in the middle of the sixteenth century.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Sacred and the Civic: From the Medieval City to the Modern Metropolis. NYU Villa la Pietra, 23 March 2015
This paper follows the story of a conflict between travelers over an image. From a 14th century l... more This paper follows the story of a conflict between travelers over an image. From a 14th century legal treatise produced in northern Italy, it follows the fortunes and modifications of the story as it makes its way into a legal dialogue in France and then comes back to Italy in the form of a novella.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Emblems and Enigma: The Heraldic Imagination. London Society of Antiquaries, 26 April 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Teaching Documents by Jennifer Mackenzie
Berkeley Language Center , 2017
We have grown accustomed to perceiving the arts and language as very different kinds of engagemen... more We have grown accustomed to perceiving the arts and language as very different kinds of engagements: the arts are transgressive, future-oriented, global, and creative; while language-study is structured, rule-based, and oriented towards the past and the nation. Pushing against these binaries, this advanced Italian language course approaches language and design as analogous processes. Tracing how the coordinates of space and time are reconfigured in a series of four historically-positioned case studies, students are introduced to synchronic and diachronic dimensions of language and are led to experience some of the manifold ways that languages both embody convention and generate innovation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Dissertation by Jennifer Mackenzie
Heraldry is a well-defined subject and, almost by definition, a narrow one. It is a “feudal langu... more Heraldry is a well-defined subject and, almost by definition, a narrow one. It is a “feudal language” with codified rules, attributes, and a well-consolidated history. Originating in medieval Europe around the invention of full-body armor, the culture of jousting and tournaments, notions of heredity, strong corporate institutions, and the practice of genealogy, heraldry was common throughout the so-called ancien régime. Its fortunes are widely thought to have declined in the Italian Renaissance because of its incompatibility with some of the very features that have characterized the Renaissance as a distinctive cultural configuration and revolution: the rise of the humanism and return to classical antiquity; the emergence of the individual; the emancipation of the artist; the rise of new visual genres including the portrait 'from life', the emblem, and the impresa.
Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms on the Italian peninsula of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and with evidence that "medieval heraldry" as we know and call it today was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture, tied to the construction of the very concept and study of the Middle Ages. My point of entry into the subject is not the point of origin, or the origin (his)story, of heraldry. Instead, it's a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). Boiardo brings us also to one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where he was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty.
Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its continuation and reception in the Renaissance, are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a spectrum of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The words these images were called by (arma, impresa, insegna, etc.), the attributes they were said to possess, their histories, meanings, cultural and territorial associations, and the protocols governing their use, were actively questioned and contested. The technologies of philology and antiquarianism shaped the answers, and the means of arriving at them, that we are most familiar with today; our “grammars of signs,” as I call them here. However, the Este dynasty at times - as Boiardo's example demonstrates - nourished humanisms that brought different resources to the task of organizing and reproducing signs from the past; different philologies, antiquarianisms, historiographies and poetics.
In conversation with research that has emphasized the particularities and contributions of the so-called 'Rinascimento Estense' from different disciplinary points of view (Marco Folin's marriage of the political and cultural history of the Este States, Stephen J Campbell's de-centered history of the art of Renaissance Ferrara, etc.), this dissertation project investigates the resources that (re)invented the heraldic image around the Este capital between 1430 and 1598. In the process, it brings to light some vital contributions of this culture to anachronic thinking and (a)historicisms centering creativity and affect, materiality, desire, and kin.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Articles by Jennifer Mackenzie
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2019.376
Calls for papers by Jennifer Mackenzie
Reviews by Jennifer Mackenzie
Conference Papers by Jennifer Mackenzie
Teaching Documents by Jennifer Mackenzie
Dissertation by Jennifer Mackenzie
Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms on the Italian peninsula of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and with evidence that "medieval heraldry" as we know and call it today was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture, tied to the construction of the very concept and study of the Middle Ages. My point of entry into the subject is not the point of origin, or the origin (his)story, of heraldry. Instead, it's a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). Boiardo brings us also to one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where he was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty.
Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its continuation and reception in the Renaissance, are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a spectrum of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The words these images were called by (arma, impresa, insegna, etc.), the attributes they were said to possess, their histories, meanings, cultural and territorial associations, and the protocols governing their use, were actively questioned and contested. The technologies of philology and antiquarianism shaped the answers, and the means of arriving at them, that we are most familiar with today; our “grammars of signs,” as I call them here. However, the Este dynasty at times - as Boiardo's example demonstrates - nourished humanisms that brought different resources to the task of organizing and reproducing signs from the past; different philologies, antiquarianisms, historiographies and poetics.
In conversation with research that has emphasized the particularities and contributions of the so-called 'Rinascimento Estense' from different disciplinary points of view (Marco Folin's marriage of the political and cultural history of the Este States, Stephen J Campbell's de-centered history of the art of Renaissance Ferrara, etc.), this dissertation project investigates the resources that (re)invented the heraldic image around the Este capital between 1430 and 1598. In the process, it brings to light some vital contributions of this culture to anachronic thinking and (a)historicisms centering creativity and affect, materiality, desire, and kin.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2019.376
Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms on the Italian peninsula of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and with evidence that "medieval heraldry" as we know and call it today was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture, tied to the construction of the very concept and study of the Middle Ages. My point of entry into the subject is not the point of origin, or the origin (his)story, of heraldry. Instead, it's a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). Boiardo brings us also to one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where he was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty.
Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its continuation and reception in the Renaissance, are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a spectrum of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The words these images were called by (arma, impresa, insegna, etc.), the attributes they were said to possess, their histories, meanings, cultural and territorial associations, and the protocols governing their use, were actively questioned and contested. The technologies of philology and antiquarianism shaped the answers, and the means of arriving at them, that we are most familiar with today; our “grammars of signs,” as I call them here. However, the Este dynasty at times - as Boiardo's example demonstrates - nourished humanisms that brought different resources to the task of organizing and reproducing signs from the past; different philologies, antiquarianisms, historiographies and poetics.
In conversation with research that has emphasized the particularities and contributions of the so-called 'Rinascimento Estense' from different disciplinary points of view (Marco Folin's marriage of the political and cultural history of the Este States, Stephen J Campbell's de-centered history of the art of Renaissance Ferrara, etc.), this dissertation project investigates the resources that (re)invented the heraldic image around the Este capital between 1430 and 1598. In the process, it brings to light some vital contributions of this culture to anachronic thinking and (a)historicisms centering creativity and affect, materiality, desire, and kin.