Possessing Angelica and the Renaissance Calculus of Self in a Bandello Tale

Abstract

Abstract:How was premodern identity determined, externally by social evaluation or in terms of an internal sense of self? Asking this much-debated question about women makes things even more problematic, for modern studies of identity have tended to overlook women until recently. Melding historical methods building upon Natalie Zemon Davis's suggestions on fiction in the archives and feminist literary criticism, this article offers a more complex understanding of this question, focusing on a close reading of a literary text analyzed critically as a historical document, the novella of Angelica Montanino. Caught in the webs of class demands, family values, honor concerns, and gender imperatives, she resisted becoming a concubine—a sexual possession—with long internal soliloquies, insisting on her own inner self-conception, revealing a complex calculus of external forces and inner reflections that offer a deeper perspective on what it meant to be a woman and a woman possessed in her day.