Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance

by Guido Ruggiero

Mining the rich Venetian archives, especially the unusually detailed records of Venice's own branch of the Roman Inquisition, Guido Ruggiero provides a strikingly new and provocative interpretation of the end of the Renaissance in Italy. In this boldly structured work, he develops five narrative accounts of individual encounters with the Inquisition that illustrate the double-edged metaphor of how passions were both bound by late Renaissance society and were seen in turn as binding people. In this way new perspectives are opened on magic, witchcraft, love, marriage, gender, and discipline at the level of the community and beyond. Witches, courtesans, prostitutes, women healers, nobles, Cardinals, and renegade priests and monks speak from these pages describing their lives, beliefs, hopes, fears, and lies. With an imaginative flair for storytelling and impeccable scholarship, Ruggiero exposes the rich complexity of the culture and poetics of the everyday at the end of the
Renaissance and illuminates a previously unexplored chapter in Italian history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Guido Ruggiero, Professor of History and Cooper Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences, was born in Danbury, Connecticut and grew up in Webster, New York, a small rural town along the old shore line of Lake Ontario. After earning a B.A. with a heavy focus on ancient history and philosophy at the University of Colorado, he went on to UCLA where as a University of California Regent's Intern Fellow he earned an M.A. (1967) and a Ph.D. (1972). As a Regent's Fellow he began his long love affair with Venice and the Venetian Archives in 1970 and has been returning there for his research ever since. He makes his home in Treviso, Italy, when he is not teaching at UM.

Professor Ruggiero has published on the history of gender, sex, crime, magic, science and everyday culture, primarily in renaissance and early modern Italy. Early in his career he focused on social science history, but his interests have expanded toward yet more interdisciplinary approaches, including microhistory, narrative history, and the melding of literature, literary criticism, and archival history. His new book, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento, published by Cambridge University Press recently won the AAIS (the American Association for Italian Studies) prize for the best book of 2014 on premodern Italy. A radical rethinking of the period, it has been hailed as a work that offers an exciting paradigm for the Italian Renaissance both as a period and a movement. He has also published Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (Rutgers, 1980), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1985), Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the Renaissance(Oxford, 1993), Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (Johns Hopkins, 2007); as well as Sex and Gender in Historical Perspectives (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Johns Hopkins,1991), and History from Crime (Johns Hopkins, 1993), edited with Edward Muir. In addition he has edited The Blackwell Companion to the Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) and Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 2003) translated with Laura Giannetti. He also edited the series Studies in the History of Sexuality (1985-2002) for Oxford University Press and was a co-editor of the six volume, Encyclopedia of European Social History for Scribner's (2002). In addition to being a fellow or visiting professor at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence (1990-1991, 2012), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1981-82; 1991), and at the American Academy in Rome (Fall, 2011), he has won a number of grants and fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1990). Ruggiero regularly teaches classes on the Italian Renaissance, the new social and cultural history, and the uses of literature for history.

Reviews

[Jo Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thing about Ruggiero is that he's not only doing fascinating research on interesting subjects but he's also brilliant at pulling everything together in an engaging way, and to top it all off he's a terrific writer.

This is a book about a bunch of people doing love magic in Venice and the Veneto in the sixteenth century. That already sounds fairly neat, right? But this is a riveting book about it, and one that looks at gendered issues of power and possibility.

This is the third of Ruggiero's books I've read, and the least relevant to my actual research, but it's still just great. My admiration for him just keeps on growing. (One of the heroes of Orlando Furioso is called Ruggiero. I'm only not about to argue that he's an ancestor of Guido Ruggiero because I'm not entirely sure they're not the same person.)

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Binding Passions is a fascinating microhistory that is both serious scholarship, and also might have been substantially more interesting in the hands of a narrative non-fiction writer rather than a historian.

The subject is Venice in the late 16th century, as revealed by the archives of the Venetian Inquisition, and relating to matters of marriage, sex, and magic. Of these, marriage in a society defined by Catholicism and aristocratic lineages is a big deal. The wrong marriage can cause a spiral of ruin, wrecking not just the lives of the people involved, but also the fortunes of their families. Matters of class, promised engagement, and willing consent all were tested in these times. One of my favorite cases involved a claimed marriage between two young people, where the man was found in bed with the woman by her father and brothers, was hastily married that night, and took off for the hinterlands with a "uh, sike!"

While marriage is bound by time and place, horniness is a human universal. Another area that gets covered is how people have sex, and in particular female sexuality in a deeply patrichal era. At the top are courtesans, who can choose their suitors, relying on looks and good culture. The best venetian courtesans had a different man for every night of the week in a long term stable arrangement, and absolute freedom in their days. The book opens where one of them was accused of bewitching a young noble into marrying her, a sudden social catapult that threatened the peace of the Most Serene Republic.

Which leads to magic. In the pre-scientific 16th century, there is a blurring between esoteric real knowledge, prayer, and sorcery. People made figures of wax, wrote up contracts selling their soul to the devil, and used enchanted oils as love potions. And as a quote goes, 60% of the time, it works every time.

This book is dense, a fascinating exploration through the archives, but it fails to give a real sense of what it was like to live in these times. I wanted to know why a young woman might turn to magic to resolve difficulties in her love life, or how a pater familias might worry about his wife's strange friends. And the book was a little too scattered and objective to give me that sense

[Mania · Rating 4 out of 5]

Με αφορμή συγγραφή εργασίας πάνω στο κυνήγι των μαγισσών διάβασα αυτό και το Eros του Ruggiero, μεταξύ άλλων.
Ο Ruggiero είναι εξαιρετικός στην αποτύπωση της προφυλακτικής μαγείας και ειδικά ερωτικού περιεχομένου. Για μένα έχει ακόμη περισσότερο ενδιαφέρον καθώς εστιάζει στην Ιταλία, και πιο πολύ στη Βενετία, σε περιοχές δηλαδή που δε συζητάμε συνήθως όταν μιλάμε για κυνήγια μαγισσών (βλ. Αγγλία, Σκωτία, αποικιακή Αμερική).
Είναι δομημένο σε κεφάλαια- ιστορίες και αυτό το κάνει πολύ ευχάριστο ανάγνωσμα καθώς διαβάζεται περισσότερο σαν ιστορίες-παραμυθάκια παρά σαν ακαδημαϊκό "βαρύ" βιβλίο.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is compelling history. Not only does it do an exemplary job of making social history accessible and relevant, it employs a storytelling technique rarely seen among serious historians. Just as important is the bigger picture this volume presents, the shifting morals and values of the period and attempts to enforce them through the offices of the Church. Splendidly researched, the endnotes themselves make for vital reading. Many of the cliches and stereotypes associated with late renaissance Italy, or Venice, disappear as Ruggiero reveals a much more intricate and evolving culture relating to magic, systems of honor, the law, and even communal gossip than heretofore had been presented to the wider public. A terrifically good and important work.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

It wanders a bit and could use a good editor. But reading about sex and magic is always fun.

[Cherie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. Blows away our stereotypes of magic and witchcraft in the 16th century, at least in the very pragmatic Serene Republic.