Circular definitions: configuring gender in Italian Renaissance festival.

The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the "other side" of its power of looking.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty(1)

In a memorable passage on the philosophy of art, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that the human subject's power to act and to perceive as a separate being arises from a body at once discrete unto itself, yet continuous with the world around it. "This initial paradox cannot but produce others," he continues. "Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself."(2)

The subject's paradoxical continuity with and difference from its surrounding world likewise became a recurring motif in the seminars of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan attempted at various times in his career to theorize the intricate social relations between vision, corporeal experience, subjectivity, and gender identity, deriving several of his formulations from his critical reading of Merleau-Ponty.(3) Subjectivity or the sense of self, Lacan argues, is constituted by the gaze. As Lacan defines it, however, this gaze is not the look each of us directs out into the world, but rather the presence of an exterior Other who looks back, corroborating our existence as subjects resembling, but distinct from, that Other.

Such a view of human selfhood is likely bound by historic conditions; but these conditions began to coalesce in the early modern thought of humanists, merchants, and teachers who devoted their writings not only to the powers of individual subjects to "make" themselves but also to the importance of performance in the constitution of one's social, political, and ethical persona. From Pico to Alberti, Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Ignatius Loyola - to name only some cardinal figures - we trace the rise of a modern subject not only aware of the disjuncture between interiority (soul, character) and external appearance, but also engaged in the modeling and social display of that interiority for instrumental purposes.(4) In Lacanian terms, we might go so far as to say that what the Renaissance integrated was the power of the gaze. Nowhere is the political manipulation of this power more apparent than in the visual culture of early modernity, where painting, theater, and public pageantry constructed both spectacle and audience in the service of princely state legitimacy and expressly masculine power.

Focusing on a public festival in Renaissance Ferrara, with particular interest in the communal dynamics of political ritual and gender construction, this essay explores a circularity of gaze peculiar to the experience of the festival's female participants. The specific celebration examined below, Ferrara's Palio di San Giorgio, offers a colorful illustration of Lacan's and Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of a subjectivity that comes from the outside, front the gazes of others, and it suggests some ways in which the force of the gaze constructs notions of the self and the community. In the case of the palio, a ritualized, judging male gaze reinforced not only hierarchical models of power for the family and the state but also traditional standards of feminine conduct. As any complex cultural phenomenon, particularly from the past, strains against the methods of a single academic field, I shall employ a variety of historical, anthropological, and theoretical approaches in modulating between imagined performance, written documents, and political context. As my point of departure, I take an object that would have especially appealed to both Merleau-Ponty and Lacan: a picture.

High on the crumbling frescoed walls of Ferrara's Palazzo Schifanoia, visitors today discover a curious scene from Renaissance city life. Above the door in the east wall of its Sala dei mesi (Salon of the Months) loom the arresting profiles of scantily clad women and men running within a cityscape, apparently chasing a group of mounted jockeys (fig. 1). Above these figures, in the same panel, placid onlookers gaze from courtly spaces on two higher planes: just over the group involved in the chase, city officials preside from a raised platform, while still further above, noble ladies nod blankly toward the spectacle from high palace balconies, the expressions on their faces half erased by time.

These painted figures record a favorite feast in the civic calendar of Duke Borso d'Este (d. 1471), who commissioned the entire Sala dei mesi as a monumental tribute to his own rule over Ferrara. The scene of the Palio di San Giorgio described above forms an inset detail in the panel Francesco del Cossa painted for the month of April between 1467 and 1469 (fig. 2).(5) As a whole the composition depicts twelve months under Borso's good government in mythological, astrological, and political images, resulting in a remarkably intricate panorama of political power, myth, and community. I happily concede the full explication of this enormous ensemble to specialists in its medium.(6) My own interest lies rather in the enigmatic historical referent of the city scene described above: the annual races held on the feast day of Saint George, Ferrara's patron saint. To Cossa's rendering in the Schifanoia fresco I return in the final section of this essay.

Like other celebrations of its kind in early modern European cities, Ferrara's palio was a public relations extravaganza organized by the local governors.(7) Typically for such city-sponsored holidays, the program of amusements was orchestrated to impress the populace with the beneficence, wealth, and power of the ruling family.(8) Thus, though clearly intended to entertain, these feasts were more like official pageantry than the carnival events celebrated by Mikhail Bakhtin which were "offered not by some exterior source but by the people to themselves."(9) The introduction of statutes pertaining to the palio shortly after the inauguration of Estense rule tie its administration, if not necessarily its historical origin, to this regime.

In 1279, just twenty years after the Este came to governing power, city statutes specified the prizes for a horse race "in festo beati Georgi": to the first place rider a piece of elegant cloth (palio); to the second a pig (porchetta); and to the third a cock (gallo).(10) Borso's reformed laws of 1456 indicate that by then the original horse race had expanded into a kind of festive tournament: a race of barbari (Arabian horses) in the afternoon was to be followed by races of asses, men, and women in the early evening after vespers. The entire affair commenced with a morning mass, itself the culmination of preparatory blessings of all participants (both human and equestrian) at sign-up on the eve of the races.

Nineteen years later the chronicler Ugo Caleffini describes in his Diario an essentially unchanged palio. For 24 April 1475 Caleffini records: "Festa di S. Giorgio. La mattina si corse il palio di panno d'oro. Nel pomeriggio corsero gli asini con fanti a cavallo, . . . gli uomini con premio di sette braccia di panno rosso e infine le donne con quello di sette braccia di panno verde." ("In the morning the palio was run for the gold cloth. In the afternoon, the asses ran with the mounted jockeys, . . . [then] the men for a prize of seven ells of red cloth, and finally the women for that of seven ells of green cloth.")(11) A quarter century later, another important Ferrarese chronicle mentions that for St. George's Day, "furno per barbari corso il palio de brocato d'oro . . . Et dopoi desinare corseno li homini, femine, et aseni, juxta solitum." ("The race for the palio of gold brocade was run, and after dinner ran the men, women, and asses, as usual.")(12) Such descriptions indicate the enduring solidity of the palio as institution. They also reveal that Cossa's panel alludes not to a single race between all the figures pictured (as some have assumed), but rather it conflates four contests occurring over a whole day of celebration.

Social anthropologists have argued that practices like performances, exhibitions, and rituals primarily symbolize relations: relations among a community's members and relations between rulers and their subjects.(13) Public ritual particularly serves this function, for its cyclic repetition and grand scale at once evoke power relations within a community and reproduce those relations, binding them within an authorized, controlled frame of meaning. This frame is especially effective in rituals of hierarchy, which magnify invented authority by projecting it onto a cosmic stage where it attains the weight of nature and inevitability. Moreover, public ritual both embodies and enacts a regime of power through its enforced positioning of individual bodies in a super-individual spectacle.

Seen in this context of social construction, the first event in Ferrara's Palio di San Giorgio would seem to reaffirm the Este family's oligarchic rule over the city. The flamboyant race of prize military steeds displays the superior power, wealth, and elegance of the ducal family before breathless popular spectators, clearly exhibiting the dominance of an aristocratic, masculine state power. The race of the asses, which according to the statutes follows this martial display, might be read as a whimsical or even parodic repetition of the first contest. The majesty of the ducal steeds is nowhere more evident than in contrast with the sturdy but less graceful asses, who may serve here to figure the Court's bemused disdain of any contenders for its powers.

The rhetorical force of the other contests, however, remains more obscure and complex. The men's and women's races within this festive frame raise intriguing questions about the relations being reinforced among groups within the populace. For while the first two contests function as displays of a general courtly power "at play," which basks in self-regard before its subjects, the latter two races have political and social connotations that remain ambiguous, at least to the modern viewer.(14)

Who are the characters running in this display, and whom do they represent within the community? Identifying the palio players is in fact no simple task, since the chronicles and statutes refer to its contestants simply as women (donne or femine) and men (huomini).(15) Twentieth-century sources observe a similar decorum. Guido Angelo Facchini's 1939 history of the palio, for example, an otherwise valuable reference, aims to reinstate the historic festivities in modern-day Ferrara. It thus depicts a thoroughly idealized event, expressly tailored to the grandiose patriotism of Fascist Italy. But if Cossa's fifteenth-century fresco is even vaguely documentary, a number of questions arise. By all accounts of the social customs of early modern Italy, while men of various stations played in public sports and contests, "respectable" women did not run through the streets, except perhaps in flight from danger.

Facchini himself offers some unintended assistance. Unable to resist a coy remark about some of the historic race's participants, he suggests an important detail in the rhetorical function of the early Palio di San Giorgio: "We can be certain that in its earliest versions the women's race had a distinctly . . . 'Boccaccesque' flavor, since we know that participating in that contest, in brief costumes, were those women whom the Ferrarrese called 'mingarde,' and who belonged to a rather equivocal class."(16) Traveling the road not taken by Facchini, I shall explore in the following pages the likelihood that the palio's runners (at least for a time) were anything but respectable to the Ferrarese and that the contestants' social station was not an incidental detail but rather a significant theme in the Palio di San Giorgio. A principal rhetorical aim of the races, I will argue, was to reaffirm a social hierarchy in Ferrara that encompassed the moral, political, and sexual domains.(17)

Chronicles from other cities indicate, in fact, that throughout Italy and other European territories, from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, members of that "equivocal" female class - the local prostitutes - regularly performed in several types of public races. The prostitute's role in civic palios, as Richard Trexler's work has shown, follows upon an earlier practice by the women who accompanied medieval Italian armies in their assaults on rival cities.(18) Attacking armies customarily staged elaborate theatrical exhibitions outside the gates of towns weakening under siege. In these charades the city walls marked a point of inversion. While threatened citizens cowered inside their city, the attackers took liberties outside its borders. Customarily, they cut down the largest tree beyond the city walls and began minting victory coins near its stump. Such symbolic gestures aimed to humiliate and demoralize the besieged inhabitants: they taunted the desperate populace with specters of a future day when, their great city toppled, coins would circulate as commemoratives of its capture.

At the same time the mounted soldiers, looters, and prostitutes of the aggressing army took turns competing in races outside the embattled city's gates. This sport may have been a mocking mime play of the beleaguered opponents, now "on the run," who were thus forced to witness repeatedly a symbolic enactment of their own defeat. Akin to Freud's fort/da game played out on a grand scale, these games served to accustom the besieged populace to the imminence of loss.(19) In addition, the spectators must have perceived acutely the contrast between their own entrapment and immobility and their attackers' freedom to move and act.

Upon returning to its own city, the victorious army sometimes put the enemy's palio (or banner) in a prostitute's hands. She would carry the cloth upside down, signifying the sexual as well as the military subjugation of the defeated enemy. The prostitutes' role in these ceremonies was, of course, an ambivalent one: they represented the very lowest rung in a social hierarchy, but their lack of respectable status lent them a relative honor in this moment. Their abject position, in other words, made them the ideal means by which to humiliate the vanquished in a carnivalesque inversion. "Even the prostitutes of the victorious army," the ceremony clearly implies, "are superior to the warriors of the defeated one. The least of our citizens can run freely about the weak enemy's territory and mock its most cherished symbols."

Through most of the fourteenth century Italian cities explicitly connected the civic races they held on feast days to these military insult displays.(20) A look at the Villani chronicles, for example, reveals that early races on the feast day of Florence's patron saint, San Giovanni, often took place not at home, inside Florence as they do today, but outside the walls of her rival cities Pisa, Lucca, and Arezzo.(21) In October 1330 the Florentines ran races outside Lucca "per vendetta di quelli che fece correre Castruccio a Firenze" ("in revenge for those Castruccio had instigated at Florence"). As Villani describes this performance, the first race was run by horses for a prize of twenty-five gold florins, "e l'altro fu di panno sanguigno, che'l corsono i fanti a pie; e l'altro di baracane bambagino, che 'l corsono le meretrici dell'oste" ("and another [race] was for crimson cloth, which was run by the footsoldiers; and another was for sheepskin cloth, and was run by the whores of the army").(22) In another year, 1363, the Florentines ran their San Giovanni races outside Pisa in retaliation for feast day races held by the Pisans outside Florence in 1362.(23)

The form of these displays remained ritually consistent and hence recognizable by all witnesses. Giovanni Morelli recounts in his Ricordi for 1363 how Galeotto Malatesti, on the day of the Palio di San Vittorio, having performed all other possible insults in the traditional repertory including the felling of the tree and the proleptic minting of coins outside Pisa, finally resorted to the "palio de' barattieri e pelle meretrici" ("the race of the gamblers and the whores") as the ultimate derision against the enemy city.(24) For all its regularity, however, the pattern of offenses in these performances is intricate: the overlays of insult and honor even include races performed by oppressing armies on the feast days of the victim cities. Like the minting of coins, these spectacles anticipate and symbolically enact the full incorporation of the threatened city's identity.(25)

Such accounts hint at a gap between official Ferrarese records of the palio as a civic celebration and the event's far less benevolent overtones as a traditional rehearsal of military power. In their textualization of an idealized image of Estense rule, the chronicles written under ducal supervision reinforced a "controlled frame of meaning" dictated by public statutes and government edicts.(26) The Este dukes, we surmise, intuited what Machiavelli would later so frankly observe to his prince: that the political rewards of public ceremony depend on its successful manipulation. In the case of the Estense government, this manipulation included the decorous elision, from all official accounts, of the context of war and subjugation that formed the historical backdrop for the games on Saint George's feast day. Integral to both this military past and the evolving demands of urban rule were the negative exemplars of community morality who found themselves performing in exhibitional games on many public feast days.

Contemporaneous with the first races by infamous groups on Italian military fields were the earliest documented races run by prostitutes and other social marginals inside European cities. Though the military insult races disappeared from documents around the mid-fourteenth century, the festive races that bore close affinities to them continued in many European cities for centuries.(27) Since the well known Roman races instituted under Pope Paul II in 1467 featured a derisive race for Roman Jews, many have assumed that in Ferrara's palio and others the male runners were also Jews.

As both Jews and prostitutes represent marginal elements of the community, this attribution has a certain plausibility. Both were stigmatized in Ferrara and other cities by laws forbidding them to touch foodstuffs in public markets and requiring them to wear distinguishing signs on their clothing.(28) Like other forms of racism, moreover, antisemitism traditionally invests the object of its hatred with legendary sexual excesses that are both envied and despised; this type of association may be one more tie between Jewish men and prostitutes in the imagination of early modern Christian Europe. But probably a more compelling link would have been the economic fact that both groups profited financially from their willingness to transgress Christian mores - the prostitutes by selling sex and the Jews (who were actively recruited to medieval cities to practice their banking trade) by loaning money. The source of each of their profits was considered "endless," insofar as both prostitute and lender make their incomes (at least in theory) at a zero expenditure rate. Thus each group represented an alternative type of "productivity" that compounded the significations especially of urban festivals dedicated to fertility, or "reproductivity," and plenty.

Earlier sources recounting the military races, however, suggest a different community furnished the male runners in many urban contests. Competing in many festive races, it appears, were men from another social group known as the ribaldi.(29) Ribalds were the lowest dregs of the army. Together with the prostitutes, they were responsible for collecting the spoils after assaults on enemy cities. One man selected from among these ranks held the title of the King of the Ribalds, which conferred the added responsibility of supervising the operations of prostitutes and pimps in the army's employ. Once the practice of military palios died out, this governing role for the King of the Ribalds was transferred to the city, where he often held the additional office of town executioner.(30)

If the men in Ferrara's palio were ribalds, then their sexual and financial violation of the general morality is clear enough, and their association with the prostitutes is one of direct management and cooperation. The ribald was defined by some Italian statutes as "someone who undressed down to his underclothes while gambling"; and ribalds were apparently known for going into battle barely clad.(31) This evidence suggests that Cossa may have been signaling a social type as well as recording the attire worn by the men in Ferrara's palio when he painted the figures of his male runners. It may even be that Dante's reference to the Veronese palio at the pilgrim's encounter with the sodomites in Inferno 15 served as an obvious reference to contemporaries regarding the sexual transgressions of this same group.(32)

Many cities featured the ribalds in their festive races. A 1329 statute in Ivrea regulates a race on May Day by that city's public women for the prize of a drinking bowl purchased by the King of the Ribalds out of his annual salary.(33) A Pavian chronicle of 1330 mentions that races by ribalds and prostitutes were run in conjunction with the horse races that annually honored the city's patron, San Siri.(34) These domestic contests may have followed directly upon the tradition of the military field races by the same groups; in this connection they seem to signify the cities' internalization of their wars against foreign enemies.

In fact, certain features of the races themselves disturb the surface of glamor painted by the chronicles. The awarding of prizes might suggest that prostitutes participated voluntarily in the games. But consent in the case of the prostitute tells us little about her experience of these events, conditioned as it must have been by need. The prostitute, after all, is a figure at once sought and despised by societies that place high value on feminine chastity. Her role in the community is consequently susceptible to frequent and violent reversals. A grim example of this ambivalence comes to us from the military field races. On one occasion in 1390, when Bologna's army returned defeated rather than victorious, two of the prostitutes who under happier circumstances might have carried the enemy city's palio to the cheers of their welcoming town were instead "recast" as internal representatives of the foreign enemy. They were publicly stripped and flogged so violently that one of them later died.(35)

Such ambivalence thoroughly characterizes urban prostitution itself. Recent histories of medieval prostitution chart a common shift in the legal strictures regarding sexual trade in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italy and France.(36) These years witnessed the transfer of sexual trade from outside the city walls to inside. Accompanying this relocation were new laws that required prostitutes to wear distinguishing marks - typically yellow sleeve bands and bells - in an effort to sort out the "public women" for visual distinction from the rest of the female populace. These divisions were also embodied in a new organization of city space as towns throughout Europe designated special districts in which they obliged prostitutes to live as well as work.(37) In exchange for their compliance with the law, however, the women received some legal protections against rape and permission to practice their trade within the city walls, which was generally considered safer.

Toward the end of the fourteenth century many cities, including Ferrara, designated a single postribulum as the only legal house of prostitution in the municipality.(38) City governments regulated the public houses through taxation, health inspection, and restrictions on allowable clientele. Increasingly repressive measures in later years, however, culminated in the closure of most municipal brothels by the early sixteenth century. At this point many governments took steps to expel prostitutes and their trade from the cities altogether.(39)

These long-term developments in urban prostitution indicate an initial pragmatic appreciation by early modern rulers for the advantages of administrated sexual commerce in urban areas. In the first phase municipal leaders welcomed prostitutes and even actively recruited them from other cities, often on the stated assumption that legal sex trade protected the community's marriageable women from assault. According to this logic the brothels provided a necessary outlet for men who might, for want of such services, resort to sexual aggressions against townswomen. Violence of this sort, legislators argued, would upset the marriage market in which chastity was the only asset most women could claim. In effect, the prostitutes functioned as surrogates for the local female community, circulating as the signs of a submerged male aggression which, in official eyes at least, was manageable only through provision of some female object on which to vent itself.(40) The official preference for prostitutes from distant towns or even foreign countries also discouraged any association of sexual availability with women of the home community.

This period of relative tolerance was followed, however, by a growing recognition of both the ideological contradictions of such policies within a professedly Christian state and, more practically, the difficulties of controlling the sexual marketplace. Yet the policies in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries of sponsoring limited sexual trade on the one hand and later state gestures to banish prostitution on the other may represent more a continuum than a reversal of government policies. Trexler argues that the apparent permissiveness of the fifteenth-century transfer of prostitution inside the city walls of Florence, for example, resulted not from a relaxation of moral surveillance on the part of the government but rather from instrumental, even repressive aims. The Ufficio dell'Onesta (Bureau of Decency), established in Florence in 1403 to regulate public morality, favored prostitution for two explicitly stated reasons: because it discouraged homosexuality, which was perceived as a pervasive danger, and it "promoted" heterosexual activity, which helped increase the plague-depleted population.(41)

In Florence and Ferrara as elsewhere throughout this period, the importance of maintaining the distinction between the "public" women and the rest of the (presumably "private") female populace became a recurring legal theme. Many statutes aimed to enforce dress codes among marriageable women in order to keep them visually distinct from the women of the trade. Ercule d'Este complained that proper women, if their dress was not regulated and they were not kept at a distance from immoral feminine examples, could be mistaken for prostitutes or even enflamed to lascivious corruption through unwitting contact with such negative models.(42) An unexpected disturbance of these visual and spatial boundaries arose in Florence when, to the dismay of city officials, prostitutes there began to dress as "respectable ladies." Similarly, the Florentine effort to promote male heterosexual activity through legal prostitution backfired when women in the brothel found that their business improved if they themselves dressed up as men.

The express illegality of this cross-dressing indicates again the government's strenuous efforts to fix gender boundaries in early modern cities as well as its concern to reinforce a single model of acceptable behavior for marriageable women.(43) For their part, by crossing class and gender lines "in disguise," the prostitutes employed an early version of the mimicry that Homi Bhabha identifies in colonial societies. The subalterns' imitation of the ruler is, for the dominant class which assigns them their "proper place," both resemblance and menace. Mimicry confuses stable identification through a resemblance that repeats with ironic literalness the outer signs of the original model. It thus allows an authorized version of otherness (like licensed prostitution) to interrupt a discourse of power. Mimicry is the site of a potential reversal, Bhabha notes. "The look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed," and the identity of power suffers a momentary threat.(44)

These moments of disturbance were brief, however. The legislators' frank observations connecting the marriage and prostitution markets in early modern cities testify to a systematic commodification of women coinciding with the rise of the modern family. Feminist theorist Luce Irigaray's remarks on the capitalist economy of masculine sexuality serve to illuminate the connection further. Irigaray observes that the prostitute is crucial in this economy: while the virginal woman functions between men as pure exchange value and the mother must be excluded from exchange in order to maintain her worth, the prostitute's body is valuable precisely because it has already been used. "In the extreme case the more it has served, the more it is worth. Not because its natural assets have been put to use this way, but, on the contrary, because its nature has been 'used up,' and has become once again no more than a vehicle for relations among men."(45) It is precisely the difference between the prostitute's body as commodity for one kind of exchange among men and the virgin's body for exchange between fathers and husbands on the marriage market that early modern merchants and rulers sought to maintain.(46)

The proclamations on moral offenses issued by Borso and his successor Ercule suggest growing anxiety regarding sexual activity and other behavioral trespasses in ducal Ferrara. Borso's 1462 document begins unceremoniously with the Duke's commands, but Ercule's proclamation of 1496 opens with an inflated, moralizing preamble: "The most illustrious Lord Ercule, desiring over all else that in this his city and duchy of Ferrara and in all of his dominion people live well and courteously and according to the Christian faith, . . . has deliberated to extirpate all vices totally from the rest of his domain as well as from this city and duchy."(47) Ercule's rhetoric of moral absolutism coincides with a general increased surveillance of the bounds of all public behavior in Ferrara and other cities in these years. It also recalls the dukes' perennial efforts to "clean up" the palio. Useful as the civic insult races may have been to the Este in general as a message to both the mainstream community and the city's marginal underworld, the prostitutes' contest in particular inspired official ambivalence as early as Borso's reign. He reportedly sought to eliminate the women's race from the festival in 1456 but was unsuccessful.(48) Twenty years later Ercule issued an edict calling on families to send their daughters under the age of twelve to run in the palio the next day. His solicitation of "pute honeste et da bene" ("honest and proper young girls") registers its full reascriptive force only if we bear in mind the event's traditional participants, whom Ercule was attempting to exclude from public view.(49)

We are left to wonder what forces compelled the continuance of this rehearsal of power and erotic display in the years spanning Borso's and Ercule's reigns despite their documented attempts to eliminate or change it. As I observed earlier, the palio was generally not a carnivalesque event. Controlled and orchestrated as it was by its institutional frame, it reinforced existing power relations without the topsy-turvy role reversals and transgressions described by Bakhtin and his revisors; it appears to have served most effectively as a mirror in which the Este could enjoy a moment of despotic self-regard. Its popular appeal as a holiday may nonetheless have posed the threat of community violence if the festivities should be toned down. Reinforcing this conjecture are records of contemporary edicts forbidding the wearing of masks during any public celebrations, where disguises afforded anonymity to spectators tempted to engage in unlawful behaviors.(50)

If the women's role in the Renaissance palio is somewhat unclear today, it is both because that role was being redefined and because it was a source of embarrassment within the moralizing decorum that characterized the project of early modern statebuilding. The palio was, among other things, a locus of tension and doubt regarding the effects of foregrounding a "heterogeneous social element" within the city.(51) As Steven Mullaney observes, in early modern cities, "Ceremonies of power were ceremonies of loss as well. . . . When it did not exile or execute them, early modern power licensed those things it could neither contain nor control"; and this licensing often took the form of public performance.(52)

In Italy's case, the 1494 invasion of the peninsula by Charles VIII of France commenced an unprecedented period of political anxiety over lack of order and control, confirming the vague dread that runs through earlier chronicles. Throughout the following century Italy suffered almost continuous invasion by Spanish and French forces and was often represented by prominent cultural spokesmen as "feminized" in its political helplessness.(53) At the same time Reformation tendencies chipped away at Italy's claim to centrality in a universal Church. The Council of Trent (1545-63) and the re-established Roman Inquisition are just two measures of Italy's new investment in the values of social surveillance and reform. In my view, this same desire for order and renewed hierarchical value fueled the reappearance of the querelle des femmes in Renaissance writings of all genres. In what appears to be a displacement from the disordered sphere of public political relations, writers rehearsed and rehashed the proper relations of sexual and domestic order.(54)

But the palio was not so easily schematized. As the military connotations of festive contests faded, the public's possible interpretations of such events appeared perhaps too multifarious. The surplus meanings generated by the prostitutes' bodily presence, together with the women's possible agency in this irrepressibly salacious ritual display, threatened the dukes' capacity to limit the palio's polysemy on the stage of hierarchic society. Prostitutes in some cities, for instance, took advantage of the spectacle by using it to advertise themselves, thus enraging local citizens. Of course, the mixture of titillation with insult was potent in the race from its earliest days, however mystified by politics or religious ceremony. A seventeenth-century Perugian account, for example, recalls a race in 1335 in which "prostitutes raised their clothes up to the belt" as a sign of contempt before the enemy. This gesture (not surprisingly) "gave marvelous pleasure to all [the Perugian] soldiers," the historian continues, "since it's only natural for soldiers to be happy at the moment that vendettas are executed."(55)

The display of the genitals is a traditional warrior's gesture of contempt, but it acquires far more complex (and less controllable) meanings when practiced by women, in this case women whose trade relies on sexual intercourse. It not only recalls Caterina Sforza's infamous taunt, as she lifted her skirts, that if her children should be killed by her enemies, she could always make more.(56) It also resonates with mythological fertility legends like that of the old hag Baubo who raised her skirt and made the mourning Demeter laugh, thus moving her to release the season of spring, and the Celtic goddess of fertility Sheela-na-Gig who typically smiles as she reaches down to open for display an enormous vagina.(57) Unmistakably, this detail of exposure reappears in Cossa's fresco ([ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]) where the dress of one female runner flies well above her bare genitals.

The vicissitudes of feminine participation in the Palio di San Giorgio, I have argued above, were intricately tied to the process of Estense statebuilding and the political fortunes of early modern Italy. They reflect not only the transformation of unwieldy popular festival into more dignified state display during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also the contemporaneous legal codification of boundaries for sexual behavior within early modern cities, and the sometimes incomprehensible resort to nearly empty public ceremony.(58) The social context for the palio shifted over several generations from a minimal frame of codification (represented by the reticent chronicles and statutes, which speak only of "women" and "men" running the traditional contests) to the heavy textualization of ducal edicts regulating not only prostitution but other sexual conduct as well.

The Diario ferrarese, for example, offers a panorama of the sexual violence and demoralization that characterized Ferrara in the year 1500. On 4 May the author records the invasion of the home of a "good man" and the attempted gang rape of his daughter. When the rapists were unsuccessful, they beat the girl's parents with clubs. On 8 June Ercule issued more laws against sodomy and the keeping of concubines. In the month of October there were frequent formal processions, "and no one could understand why, other than that the Duke was ordering them." Finally, in November the demoralized diarist complains especially of the working class: "Today in Ferrara and almost anywhere, boys and girls are more miserable than old men and women have ever been, and there's no one in Ferrara who does good things, and good serving girls are not to be found; and those one finds, if they're young, are whores; and if they're old, they're ruffians; and they'd rather go begging than work for others."(59) In April 1501 Ercule restricted the prostitutes to the neighborhood behind the church or Sant' Agnese.

It was apparently in the earlier context of government tolerance of prostitution as a useful evil that the women's participation in public festivals like Ferrara's Palio di San Giorgio became routine. One of the most common races, which combined support for the prostitutes with their surveillance, was the animal prostitutes' race held in various cities on the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of their profession.(60) These festivities often included a census of all the women practicing the trade and featured a perfunctory sermon by a priest urging their repentance. Less congruous, but just as frequent, were races for prostitutes on the feast of the Virgin's Assumption, on the Pentecost, and on many other saints' days.(61)

This conspicuous alliance between the interests of military despotism, Christianity, and carnal pleasure, complex as it is, does not yet complete the set of motifs operating in palios like the one pictured on the Schifanoia wall. The feast's namesake Saint George is known through a mixture of historical record and Christian legend dating back to the Crusades; but little more than his name appears to survive in the palio held yearly in Ferrara on his feast day.(62) Instead, like many festivals of early modern Europe (and today), the Palio di San Giorgio combined motifs from the Christian tradition with those of Roman antiquity. The feast's association with some traditional Roman rites reinforces the sexual connotations implicit in the military and Christian practices I have discussed here.

23 April was for the Romans a festival of wine originally dedicated to Jupiter but later associated with Venus.(63) On that day the goddess of love received offerings from the prostitutes of republican Rome, who also took a holiday from work in her honor. Another goddess associated with fertility festivals was Flora, at whose celebration the prostitutes of Rome ritually displayed their vulva.(64) In the Floralia, the women's running or racing in circles was believed to bring fertility to the soil, and this may be another source for the later palio's structuring as a race.(65) At the same time rabbits and goats were allowed to roam as examples of randiness and fertility. The placement of Venus in the upper third of Cossa's April fresco, where we also see many rabbits hopping about among the young people who kiss and flirt with each other in the goddess's company, suggests the presence of these associations in Ferrarese culture as well.(66) Also supporting this reading is the young man kneeling in the group on the right, who increases the erotic tension in this portion of the detail by venturing his hand between the thighs of his companion while kissing her check and encircling her neck with his other hand [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED].

Some palio commentators refer to derision or peltings of the runners in Ferrara's race.(67) These accounts suggest a further connection between the palio and the Roman lupercalia. That festival, held in February, featured young boys who ran naked on a course through the city striking female bystanders with reeds. The precise connotations of the lupercalia remain obscure, but these gestures almost certainly signified both purification and an awakening of fertility in the women.(68)

Yet the peltings or derisions in Ferrara's palio, if they are not simply a conventional reference to antiquity, may have had a more contemporary resonance. Any practice of striking the passing runners would have evoked an unmistakable association with the standard criminal punishment known as la scopa, or "running the town." That punishment, which was generally reserved for adulteresses and prostitutes and procurers who broke the laws of their trade, required the offender to run through the streets naked or barely dressed, enduring blows from rotting vegetables and other objects thrown by spectators on the sidelines.

Despite its obvious cruelty, this display seems to have been a favorite event for courtly as well as popular urban audiences. Thus Michele Catalano in his celebrated biography of Ludovico Ariosto remarks of courtly entertainments in Ferrara:

Among the amusements we regretfully must also recall some atrocious and repelling corporal punishments. Very common was the punishment of la scopa. In 1496 the wife of a police captain was scopata because she was guilty of illicit love affairs. The unfortunate woman was forced to run through the principal streets of the city on foot, wearing on her head a mitre on which were painted some devils; and finally she was conducted before the courtiers, who covered the penitent woman, as well as the hangman, and the justice officer's horsemen with tomatoes, turnips and rotten squash.(69)

Catalano appends to this anecdote an excerpt from a letter to Isabella d'Este from her favorite correspondent at court, Bernardo Prosperi. Prosperi, who kept the Duchess informed of all the Ferrarese news she missed while residing in her husband's palace at Mantua, remarks of this event: "La festa qua fue grandissima, el romore grande cum la mostra de le carne della povera dona et fortemente battuta dal boglia et bersagliata dai putti et etiam da multi grandi." ("The celebration here was just grand, and there was a great noise upon the display of the flesh of the poor woman, who was both forcefully beaten by the executioner and targeted for blows by little children and by many adults.")(70) Whether or not Saint George's holiday featured similar treatments of its contestants, the festive spirit in which Prosperi describes this punishment for sexual misconduct brings it very close as a performance to the palio race in which the "professional" violators of the Christian code of feminine behavior ran through the same city's streets.

The complex play of associations in the Palio di San Giorgio - celebrations of civic pride, military domination, and fertility combined quite possibly with exhibitions of cruelty, punishment, and humiliation - mark the festival's tremendous multivalency as a cultural event. As Trexler observes, if in the early military field races the prostitutes and ribalds allied themselves with their cities in the vituperation of an external enemy, in the domestic races they themselves, as outsiders to the official Christian mores being celebrated, represented forces threatening the moral code of the community from within. Moreover, these dangerously heterogeneous elements thematized within the social order could, in turn, be symbolically brought under control, temporarily licensed and homogenized with the reigning power structure through their objectification in civic festival. In the festive performances, prostitutes and other moral outcasts were compelled to exhibit their subjection to the values of the Christian community that served the political aims of the Estense court. By dramatizing that subjection, the palio inscribed - within the space of the city, the time of both the natural and religious calendars, and the collective memory of the populace - a dichotomy between its mainstream members and those who strayed from its accepted social bounds. The festival thus reaffirmed a set of social divisions already operating firmly within the city, at the same time as it recorded deep official ambivalence regarding the relation between these licensed marginals and a ducal reign of power.

Significantly, women functioned not only as performers subject to the race's theatrical subjugation. They also played an important role as one group of the spectacle's addressees. As we see both in Cossa's image and in statutes of cities like Brescia, which instituted the prostitutes' race "ad . . . bonarum mulierum exemplum" ("as an example for good women"), the feminine audience to this spectacle was of particular importance.(71) On the occasion of the race, the "good" women of Ferrara played their part in the celebration by literally looking down upon and standing in judgment over the women who strayed from a sovereign moral code. Kept at a noteworthy distance, they gaze from the protection of the domestic structures afforded only to women who complied with confinement within the Christian family and ultimately, of course, only to women of a certain class. Their separation reaffirms a traditional, fundamental difference between obedient women and those who transgress their place at the same time as the game, by its very nature as spectacle, posits a brief identification between all of the town's women (or womanhood itself) and those running the race.

It is here that I would locate the circular definitions referred to in my essay title. The two classic categories of womanhood represented in the palio are gathered into a single circle of female subjectivity as they define each other through opposition but also through implied likeness. Importantly, the male spectators of the palio stand outside such circular or binary schemes. For while humanist culture and proto-capitalist economic developments offered men an ever-broadening spectrum of identities as individual actors, "Renaissance" reflections on women returned with a vengeance to the dualism of chastity and non-chastity as the only choices available to women. As Margaret King observes:

While the bearers of ideas - preachers and theologians, philosophers and physicians, lawyers, humanists and poets - defined men in terms of their worldly activity, they defined women in terms of their sexual role. The male world could be schematized, using the feudal hierarchies of those who fought, prayed, and worked; or, as those traditional categories broke down on the threshold of the modern era, as judges, merchants, and lawyers, pilgrims and invalids, peasants and artisans, monks, friars, and prelates, noblemen and gentlemen. Women, with very few exceptions, were categorized in terms of their relations to the female ideal of virginity and the nightmare of sexuality.(72)

Alongside humanist writings on the dignities of "man" which exulted in the infinite possibilities for differentiation within the human race, there flourished that separate literature on women which revealed their exclusion from such infinitude. The querelle des femmes' discussions of women's worth and proper roles in society revolve emphatically around the issue of chastity, the cultural linch-pin of capitalist inheritance patterns.(73) With remarkable efficacy, in the Palio di San Giorgio the traditional association of fertility with the circular course draws the reproductive themes of this race like a tight cord around the community of women as a whole, binding them ritually to the state-condoned procreative functions of the feminine body while threatening community expulsion for sexual transgression.

In Lacan's essay on the "mirror stage" as constitutive of the "I," he describes how the infant forms a full corporeal image as the locus of selfhood in a process of self-alienation and reappropriation before a mirror. Yet this process requires not just the child and its reflection but also another subject to perform the confirming function of the gaze - in Lacan's ideal narrative of origins, the one who holds the child up, points to baby's reflection in the mirror, and exclaims, "Yes that's you!"(74) Lacan elsewhere argues that woman as a general category functions in western culture as the "absolute Other," a necessary construction in contrast to which the male is able to define himself as rational, strong, productive, and authoritative. Women's historic problem in this male-oriented representation of the world, argues Lacan, is that there is no "Other of the Other": woman has only male culture's projections of her identity on which to build her own subjectivity since the most forcefully organized category operating to define her is the category of the "not man."(75) For early modern women this lack of a discourse defining them as anything but man's undesirable opposite bound together promiscuous and chaste women as different and yet the same in a sharing of essential gender limitations that did not impose itself in analogous ways on the male category.

Anthropologist Victor Turner also conceives of events like the palio in terms of mirroring. For Turner, ritual and aesthetic forms "represent the reflexivity of the social process, wherein society becomes at once subject and object; it represents also its subjunctive mood, wherein suppositions, desires, hypotheses, and so forth all become legitimate."(76) While a growing chorus of guidebooks on marriage and family life repeatedly warned men that all women are susceptible to excessive sexual desire, and as dress codes strained to keep their differences visually clear, ritual contexts like the palio and the punishment of the scopa brought the prostitute and the wife desirous of extramarital sex into close proximity in the social imaginary. "There but for the grace of social constraint," says the feminine voice of this festival's subjunctive mood, "go I."

The contestants in the footraces of these palios were clearly the marginal, outcast members of their communities, at least until legal reforms sought to erase their presence from the festive imaginary. The remapping of the ducal city as a field of play functioned generally to carve out the relations of power between the dukes and their subjects, but this power consolidation also reinforced differences among the subjects themselves. By virtue of its regularity and the space in which it unfolded, the festival placed those social relations along with the moral oppositions that supported them within a ritual order that fused the ancient with the everyday, the mythological with the sacred, the tragic with the burlesque.

The Palio di San Giorgio is richly significant not only because it draws on so many sources for its meanings but also because in a strikingly concrete way it followed ritual's general path toward reification and amnesia. Just when the Palio di San Giorgio and public theater itself began to seem inappropriate as social exercises for the elite (a moment contemporaneous with the development of the more privatized genres of the Italian courtly theater) the event literally became an object under the painterly hand of Cossa. The progressive interiorization of the palio races - from the gates of enemy cities to the gates of home cities to the streets within domestic city walls - ended in the intimate chambers of the Estense pleasure palace. Borso's apparent attempts to reform the races into a more wholesome civic event gave way, ironically, to its preservation as a visual text, but its message would be directed now expressly to Borso himself and to the members of his coterie: a final flourish of sovereign self-regard, Cossa's grand panorama of power, order, and sexual and social difference played continuously for their eyes only.

Twenty-four meters long and eleven meters wide, with ceilings seven-and-a-half meters high, the Sala dei mesi presents walls almost entirely covered by the multi-authored fresco cycle from which it takes its name.(77) Common to all the panels is a tripartite subdivision. The upper section of each bears a scene depicting one of the Olympian gods riding in a triumphal chariot and flanked by figures practicing the arts he or she favors. These are complemented by figures recalling both the deities' classical attributes and the associations assigned to them by ancient authorities on magic. A center band features the zodiacal figure governing each month along with additional figures which, according to sources of Hellenistic, Persian, and Arabic astrological origin, dictate the fortunes of those born in the first, second, and third decade of each month.(78) The bottom section of each panel, finally, constitutes Borso's political apotheosis.

A gesture toward modern politics, these lower sections display not the military exploits common to compositions of similar genre but rather the duke's ability to govern and please his subjects. Different months picture Borso listening to petitions from the people, receiving ambassadors, hunting, riding, and participating in celebrations. The lower bands also feature scenes of local town life and images of the seasonal feasts and agricultural occupations particular to the various months. According to Aby Warburg, the design of the cycle reflects a spherical structure laid out in two dimensions. Hence the entire ensemble may be imagined as Borso's projection of global governance: a top section of the sphere depicts the idealized realm of mythological rulers; the middle girth refers to the order of the planets and stars; and in an earthly zone of civic management Borso projects his own powers as natural parallels to those of celestial deities and sciences.(79)

The April palio detail repeats this tripartite division in miniature by depicting a three-tiered hierarchy of urban society. In light of the cultural associations I have described above, from military spectacles of dominance to the Christianization of fertility rituals, from the management of prostitution for the satisfaction of male sexual license to the official promotion of monogamous marriage for women, the palio detail also discloses its interest in a visible social order of sex and class. In the lower band appear the contestants in the April race: violators of Christian sexual custom; in the middle band the courtly guards and officials; and in the highest band the ladies of the nobility, who peer down from the proverbial pedestals (here, the balconies) to which courtly lore, Christian rhetoric, and mercantile inheritance patterns traditionally relegated chaste females. Mediating the two poles of women looking and women running is thus a group of men (including Borso himself) who might be viewed as the institutional glue (or the outside corroborating gaze) that binds such firm oppositions as that between good and bad sexual behavior for women [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].

In its evocation of an internally divided and culturally dispossessed female subject, the Ferrarese palio builds both dynamics identified by Lacan together in a single ritual form. Without a cultural ground on which to distinguish herself more specifically, the female spectator is here cast only as Other to the male governing community located in the detail's center band. That community, in its official discourse, "holds up" the images of prostitute and wife as distant mirror inversions of each other ("Yes, that's you!") while reserving for itself a non-polar and more differentiated range of symbolic positions.

Cossa gives particular weight to the middle group by enlarging its figures beyond common conventions of perspective.(80) The upper and lower bands nonetheless continue to draw the eye as their interaction sets up a series of striking tensions [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Contrasting with the full clothing and the shell-like balconies of the women above the spectacle is the skimpy dress and head-to-toe visibility of the female runners. The noble women stand immobile or tilt their heads slightly while the women below are represented in full body movement. One of these, the most physically exposed of the female figures, sets the entire palio tableau off balance by twisting around to look behind her as her arms flail forward: perhaps a gesture of alarm or reluctance to proceed on the race's path [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. She passes before a doorway, a visual trope on the genitals revealed by her uplifted dress. Less subtly, her bare legs offer a striking counter-image to the enclosure of the noble ladies' lower bodies [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The latter are bound not just within balconies but also behind the tapestries adorned with family coats-of-arms, a perfect image of Bakhtin's early modern "closed body."(81) The system of paternal inheritance thus not only hides the sexual "half" of the woman, substituting for her sexuality a public, patriarchal legacy; it also displaces her sexuality onto the public prostitute running the race below. The tottering turn of this prostitute may in effect be Cossa's figuration of her later expulsion from the spectacle, for who else could the taller, clothed, athletic male and female figures in the fresco be but the "puti onesti" who would replace the more salacious runners in later editions of the race? Cossa's conflation of both the different rounds in the race and its several historical versions here anticipates a civic narrative in which Estense propriety was, at least officially, victorious.

The women's roles, to be sure, constituted only one of many facets in the intricate cultural artifact the Palio di San Giorgio and its surrounding discourse represent. This embeddedness of gender politics within other (sometimes more explicit) discourses and activities is typical; for the shifting roles of women in Renaissance culture intersected inevitably with broader developments in European early modernity. Among its other functions, thus, Ferrara's springtime celebration of fertility contrasts two kinds of sexual activity: the state-condoned, family-oriented, contained sexuality of lawful society and the punishable transgressions of open and ignoble sexual commerce. In addition, the Schifanoia fresco re-institutionalizes the exemplary relations it records, placing us as viewers in the position of spectators, more and less consenting, to its ultimate historical authority. At once participatory and monolithic, the early modern Palio di San Giorgio drew spectators forcefully into its logic. Cossa's painterly version of this logic now exerts a less violent, yet more enduring power as monumental art: a thing among things, caught with us in the fabric of our world.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ 

1 Merleau-Ponty, 159-92.

2 Ibid., 162-63.

3 See in particular the section entitled "Of the Gaze as Objet petit a," 67-122 in Lacan, 1978; and idem, 1982.

4 I am indebted to Harry Berger, Jr. for his lucid and far-reaching discussion of early modern subjectivity in an unpublished essay entitled "Graphic Imperialism." For an important discussion of the appropriateness of psychoanalytical critical practices to early modern texts, see the introduction to Schiesari, 1992.

5 The Sala dei mesi is unofficially reputed to have been a banquet room. There were no kitchens in the Schifanoia palace, the name of which derives from schivare (avoid, shun) and noia (cares, boredom, annoiance); but chroniclers tell of banquets being brought there from the ducal palace for serving.

6 On the Sala dei mesi, see Varese, 1984, 309-20; and idem, 1970; Warburg; Bargellesi; Zorzi; Mercier; and Venturi.

7 On such festivities in general, see Burke; and Stallybrass and White, especially the introduction. Stallybrass and White's first chapter, "The Fair, the Pig, Authorship," though concerned primarily with market fairs in England and not state-orchestrated games, is also very informative. For Renaissance official pageantry, see Rosenberg.

8 On the rise of the Estensi in Ferrara, see Tristano.

9 Bakhtin, 1984, 246. Much recent work on the "carnivalesque" seeks to temper Bakhtin's optimism regarding the subversive possibilities of masquerade, carnival, and traditions of festival role reversal (e.g. Stallybrass and White). Still, the palio appears distinct from such events as market fairs and mardi gras festivals, as participation in it by Ferrara's populace was minimal and apparently highly controlled. See Fradenburg's study of the related tradition of the tournament.

10 Facchini, 6-7, supplies a photo reproduction of the relevant page from the 1279 statutes, which are held in the Archivio di Stato di Modena. See also Visentini, whose principal source is Facchini's study. Both volumes have as an explicit aim the restoration of the Palio di San Giorgio as an annual event in Ferrara; thus they tend to elide the unsavory aspects of the early palio. It is possible that the second place prize, the pig, was considered the "booby prize" for the race's loser. On second place being last, see Dundes and Falassi, xi. For extensive reflection on the cultural significance of the pig, see Stallybrass and White; but also Winkler, 188-209.

11 Pardi, 1938, 87. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

12 Emphasis added. Ibid., 251 (23 March 1500). It is not clear whether the apparent change in the order of the contests signals a flexibility in the palio's diachronic structure or simply a mistake in the chronicler's record. This discrepancy forestalls me from insistence on any rigid "pairings" in the sequence of the races, but a certain symmetry emerges from both of these structures. Steeds-asses-men-women suggests (perhaps) that asses are to steeds as women are to men (i.e., inferior, laughable imitations); the late chronicle's recorded sequence of steeds-men-women-asses might establish the same set of relations, this time in chiasmus. Such a reading requires assigning to the male runners the sign value of "masculinity," however, a reading regarding which I have many doubts.

13 See Turner, 1987, 99; and idem, 1977 [1969]. Also Berger, 1987, 144-66; and idem, 1992.

14 I borrow the phrase in quote from the suggestive essay of Mazzotta.

15 In most contexts, donna constitutes a term of respect (or at least lack of disrespect), carrying with it the noble connotations of the Latin etymon domina. The meaning of femina (which derives from the same Latin root as fecundus) ranges from that of simple biological sex - in animals for example - to its common use as a denigratory reference to woman. This small slippage proves more significant as the palio's history becomes clearer.

16 Facchini, 12-14: "E' da ritenere per certo che nelle prime edizioni la corsa delle donne avesse uno spiccato carattere . . . boccaccesco poiche sappiamo che a tale competizione partecipavano, in vesti succinte, quelle donne che i Ferrarresi chiamavano mingarde e che appartenevano ad una classe piuttosto equivoca."

17 A reputed source dated 1371 (and perhaps known to Facchini) provides further encouragement for such a reading, as it too records a race in the Palio di San Giorgio by mingarde, the Ferrarese equivalent of the Italian meretrici (prostitutes). See Enciclopedia dello spettacolo 5:174. Discussions of Cossa's fresco panel regularly note that the women represented in that image are the prostitutes of Estense Ferrara and that the men are either Ferrarese Jews or members of some other marginal social group, but they present no documentation ou this point. Even the Enciclopedia does not identify this source directly and, unfortunately, all other secondary sources settle on this question by referring back to the Enciclopedia. My own efforts at tracking down the original citation have been unsuccessful thus far.

18 Trexler, 1984. This rich and perceptive essay has been a principal guide to my palio explorations, without which many of the interpretations offered in the discussion that follows would have remained unsubstantiated conjectures. See also Rodocanachi; and Boiteux, 1976.

19 On games as "repetition" of future loss in preparation for its psychological impact, see Freud.

20 Trexler, 1984.

21 See, for example, Giovanni Villani's entry in Capitolo 132 for the Palio di San Giovanni run outside Arezzo in 1288 (Villani, 162-63). For further examples, see Trexler, 1984, 862-64.

22 G. Villani, bk. 10, 167, 355. Baracane bambagino, or goatskin cloth, was the third place prize in the women's race in Ferrara's Palio di San Giorgio of 1496. The first place women's prize was the palio verde, in second place a piece of pignola, or cloth suitable for making mattresses and flour sacks; for third place the bambasina; for fourth place a pair of shoes and cloth for making simple headcoverings; and to each of the other runners a coin worth 36 quatrini. Food prices listed in this same chronicle during the same year indicate that sausage cost 8 quatrini per pound, fish five to six quatrini, ricotta four quatrini, oil nine quatrini. See Pardi, 1938, 148 and 191. Machiavelli, 623, also records one of these races in his Vita di Castruccio Castracani: Castruccio, "[fece] in dispregio de' Fiorentini battere monete, correre palii a cavagli, a uomini e a meretrici."

23 Francesco Villani, 11:97. See Trexler, 1984, 863, for further examples.

24 Morelli, 308.

25 Trexler, 1984, 863-64.

26 Berger, 1992.

27 In Ferrara as elsewhere the races became progressively more "wholesome," but they continued well into the nineteenth century. See Facchini, 43-47. Trexler indicates that prostitutes were still running races in Germany toward the end of the seventeenth century and in Lucerne up until the French Revolution. As late as 1519 prostitutes raced in the Pauline races of Rome. Trexler, 1984, 885 ff. Facchini (36-37) recalls the Ferrarese boat races of 1598 on the occasion of Pope Clement VIII's visit, for which thirty women were recruited from another city: "Le barchette furono sei e corsero tre alla volta. In ciascuna stavano quattro donne che remavano e una sedeva a poppa suonando il cembalo. Tutte erano inghirlandate di fiori e indossavano succinte vesti a sei colori, secondo le barchette. Durante la corsa alcune di esse, per maggior divertimento, fingevano di cadere nell'acqua e poi nuotando si rimettevano sui legni." Facchini's allusive term succinte vesti and the women's comic antics, as well as the fact that they were brought in from another town suggest the women's profession, although the boat races described above appear more akin to chorus girls' slapstick - or perhaps mud wrestling? - than to derisive moral display.

28 See Milano; Roth, 25, 77, 211, 217, 289; Otis, 70. On the Jews' role in derisive festivals, see Fontana, esp. 828, n. 2; Boiteux, 1977; and Toschi.

29 Trexler, 1984, 848-57, provides an extended discussion of the ribalds' military and civic role, with helpful reflections on the etymology of their name.

30 For provocative reflections on this figure, see Caillois, 1988.

31 Trexler, 1984, 849, n. 7, cites a number of references to the scant clothing ribalds wore into battle. For the statutes, see Pertile, 229. I cite from Trexler, 853.

32 Condemnations of sodomy are frequent in the chronicle and legal sources I have cited throughout this chapter. Among the secondary sources, see Pavan; Trexler, 1981; Ruggiero, 1985 and 1989; Gundersheimer, 1972; and Boswell.

33 Trexler, 1984, 882, cites the Statuti . . . Ivrea, 2:12.

34 Again I rely on Trexler, 1984, 882, who cites Rerum italicarum scriptores II, pt. 1, 40.

35 Trexler, 1984, 898, cites the Rerum italicarum scriptores 33, pt. 2, 62. As Trexler notes, the "productivity" of the prostitute was in fact a principal motive for the reversal of fortune and the beating of the Bolognese women. The chronicle relating this account specifies taht the women's flogging was triggered by their bragging about how much money they had made in their trade, despite the army's defeat. Oddly conscious of the sacrifices and contradictions prostitution imposed upon women, the chronicler offers that the woman who died finally expired from the pain of the flogging, or perhaps from shame at having her breasts exposed (my emphasis). Matteo Bandello's preface to his novella 4, 16 alludes to a similar reversal of fortune. Bandello gives as the source of his story some soldiers' remarks on thc courage of a military prostitute named Margheritona, who had demonstrated remarkable valor in armed combat and the capture of prisoners but was subsequently burned at the stake. Bandello adds, "La cagione poi di far abrusciare essa Margheritona variamente fra i soldati si diceva, percio che ci erano di quelli che affermavano quella giustamente essere stata arsa e altri che incolpavano Messer Paolo Nanni proveditore, insieme col conte di Gaiazzo." Bandello, 2:742.

36 See Otis; Rossiaud; Canossa and Colonello; Larivaille; Ruggiero, 1985 and 1989. Though all of these studies are valuable, none contains specific information about Ferrara. For insights regarding the ancient precedents for medieval prostitution practices, see Halperin, 1985 and 1990.

37 The persistence of this urban map is evident in any modern city, where prostitution is typically concentrated in the outermost perimeter of a city's streets. The alternative area surrounding train and bus stations substitutes the ancient crossroads (trivio) in this function, while today's drug traffic supplants the earlier versions of contraband mercantilism that also characterized these urban zones. On early modern Ferrara, Cittadella observes the designation of prostitution districts in Ferrara and the institution of the bells (sonagli) in 1382. The city imposed the yellow armband in 1438. Cittadella adds, "Nel 1482 fu loro dato luogo fra s. Agnese e s. Clemente; nel 1569 si cangia la loro localita; nel 1610 loro viene proibito andare in carozza od in calesse; nel 1598 vi era gia imposto un Dazio sul loro esercizio" (291, Citadella's emphasis). A Ferrarese proletarian culture magazine includes in its local history column the notice. "Le Gance o luoghi di prostituzione, furono per molto tempo confinate fuori della citta, oltre il fiume Po. . . . In seguito furono poste a s. Agnese e a s. Clemente; e dovevano pagare un Dazio nel loro commercio!" "Effemeridi ferraresi," 15 April 1977. The same column in an earlier volume, 2 December 1917, recalls. "In un tempo lontano passato [via Romiti] era denominata strada del Postribolo; poi prese il nome di via dell'Inferno; muto nome la terza volta e prese quello di via del Bordelletto; con questa ultima denominazione si appellava il tratto che da via Spronello (or delle Scienze) va a via Buonporto."

38 Rossiaud. 59, observes, "It was between 1350 and 1450 that the cities institutionalized prostitution, setting up a postribulum publicum when the city did not already have one. The Castelletto in Venice opened its doors in 1360 (not long after the municipal brothel in Lucca). . . . Florence took a similar decision in 1403; Siena in 1421."

39 In Rome these measures were directed also at the celebrated courtesans. See Larivaille, 184-201. History would be well served by a revaluation of the much romanticized lives of early modern courtesans, for which project the studies of Larivaille and Rosenthal make an excellent beginning. Veronica Franco's letter to a friend on the pains and dangers faced by common prostitute and courtesan alike provides a sobering first-hand corrective to the popular view of the courtesans' carefree liberties and honors. See Franco, 35-38.

40 The first chapter of Rossiaud's study provides some chilling statistics of the frequency of gang rapes in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dijon. He adds, "Literature, legend, and popular mythology have retained only the more benevolent aspects of these youth solidarities. The champions of a popular culture largely defined by laughter and what is called the Gallic tradition would do well to look twice, for these groups of grotesque maskers who resemble the comic characters of farces and sotties lead us to forget the victims, most of whom were 'abandoned' to a life of vagabondage and prostitution" (26).

41 Trexler, 1982, provides in n. 12 a relevant passage from the Statuta populi et communis Florentiae of 1415, printed in a modern edition (Freiburg, 1778-83): "Nefandi facinoris ipsique naturae contrarii, et enormis criminis putredinem abhorrentes, quale est vitium sodomiticum, et volentes in hoc pro extirpatione huius modi criminis in augmentum aliorum ordinamentorum possetenus providere, discernimus quod . . ." Statuta, 3:41. It bears noting that the documents refer not to a sexual orientation but to an act. Halperin's remarks on the ahistorical use of the term homosexuality in our references to practices pre-dating the nineteenth-century theorization of "sexuality" are pertinent. See his 1990 volume's title essay, 15-40.

42 Cittadella, 291, 296.

43 Trexler, 1982, 995. Over a century later, a similar scandal over androgynous dress would break out in England with the publication of the pamphlets, "Hic Mulier" and "Haec Vir." See Woodbridge, 139-51.

44 Bhabha, 129; and Lacan, 1978. See also Irigaray, 76: "To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself - inasmuch as she is on the side of the 'perceptible' of 'matter' - to 'ideas,' in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make 'visible,' by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language."

45 Irigaray, 186.

46 For an excellent overview of these relations among men, see King, ch. 1.

47 "Desiderando sopramodo el m. Ill. Sig. M. hercule ecc. che in questa cita et ducato de ferrara et in tuto el suo dominio se vive bene costumatamente et secondo la fede et religione cristiana . . . ha deliberato totalmente extirpare cusi del resto del suo dominio come de questa cita et ducato tuti li vitij." Cittadella, 291-97, reproduces in their entirety the proclamations of 1462 and 1496 on prostitution and several other public offenses, as well as several repressive laws against women in the 1440s. Bernardo Prosperi's letter to Isabella d'Este Gonzaga of 7 April 1496 refers with approval to the grossi punitione [sic] Ercule's edicts reserved for these offenders. On the expulsion of the prostitutes from Rome, see Larivaille, 184-201. For Venice, see Pavan; and Ruggiero, 1985. For historical background on the more general question of moral and sexual tolerance, see Boswell.

48 Facchini, 14, cites a 1456 manuscript in which the jurist Ugo Trotti expresses interest in the women's race and speculates on whether a prince has the right to forbid such contests, as Borso had recently done. Trotti's remarks indicate that Borso sought to repress the race on the grounds that it was immoral: "Sic diebus nostris fecit Dux nosier illustris et verissimus patriae patens Divus Borsius Estensis ut effraenatam a lascivam adolescentium multitudinem a prodigalitate avertecet et ad virtutes veras et frugem meliores vitae revocaret."

49 Facchini, 14, cites the ducal edicts of 23 April 1476. Caleffini's Diario entry for 24 April 1476 records that "pule insino a 14 anni" ran that race. The editor of Caleffini's diary infers from this entry that all accounts of the races featuring women must be referring to runners who were really young girls. Chronicle and historical evidence suggests to me the contrary: that Caleffini may be remarking an innovation in the format of the palio. See Pardi, 1938.

50 In Ferrara as elsewhere masks were often the object of early modern legislation because they functioned well beyond their immediate instrumental value in individual crimes: disguises struck at the base of the ruling class monopoly on visual symbols, permitting political subjects to throw up barriers to a ducal gaze that demanded the transparency of the social whole. See, for general information, Gundersheimer, 1972; and "Il Palio di San Giorgio nelle norme penali e di polizia degli statuti."

51 See Georges Bataille's (1985) remarks, 137-60, on heterogeneity and kingly power which, despite the chronological distance of the period they address, are far from irrelevant in the Ferrarese context. Also highly suggestive are Bataille's reflections on prostitution in idem, 1986.

52 Mullaney, 23.

53 Two examples are Machiavelli who, throughout The Prince refers to models of political failure as feminine (e.g., the Medes in ch. 6, cowardly men in ch. 15, a despised prince and Alexander in ch. 19, disarmed subjects in ch. 20) before exhorting the Medici to seize Fortuna (also a woman) and turn Italy's fate around; and Castiglione's emasculated Duke Guidobaldo, who as a figure for the Italian courts is supplanted by the Duchess, a feminine surrogate, in The Book of the Courtier. On Castiglione, see Kelly; and C. Freccero. On the broader political language of the downtrodden Italy as feminine body, see Brose, who traces this identification back to Dante and Petrarch: "In . . . poem 128 of the Rime sparse, the figuration of Italy as a vilified female body serves both to enable a specifically male poetic language and to justify the call for a rebirth of Italic political consciousness" (1).

54 See Frigo.

55 Trexler, 1984, 870, cites P. Pellini, Dell'historia di Perugia, pt. 1, Venice, 1664, 534.

56 Caterina's taunt is recounted by Machiavelli in his Discorsi 3:6. See J. Freccero. My thanks to Julia L. Hairston for discussion of her work in progress on Machiavelli's revision of this anecdote to emphasize Caterina's reproductive role. On the Freudian reception of this imagery of female genital exposure, see Hertz.

57 Lurker, 57 and 319.

58 On another aspect of political power as reflected through women's performance in public ritual, see Strocchia.

59 Pardi, 1928-33. 263: "Hogi di in Ferrara et quasi da per tuto sono piu tristi li puti et pute che gia non erano li vechi et vechie. et non e in Ferrara qui faciat bonum, et non se trova massare a stare cumaltri, et quelle che se trovano, se sono zovane, sono putane, et se sono vechie, sono rofiane, et potius le voleno andare apitochiare che a stare con altri."

60 For Florence, see Trexler, 1984, 884-85.

61 For races on Pentecost and Saint Mary Magdalene's day (22 July), see Otis, 71; and Trexler, 1984, 884-86. Otis mentions in addition a race in Foligno on Saint Felix's day. Trexler documents races on the feast of the Virgin's Assumption in Brescia and Padua and similar races for different saints' days in Rome and Pienza.

62 Biographical information about Saint George relies heavily on legendary sources. His cult seems to date from the sixth century, when monasteries and inscriptions appeared in his honor in Jerusalem, Jericho, and Beirut as well as in cities in Ethiopia and Egypt. An officer in the Christian militia, he is thought to have been martyred under either Dacian the Persian emperor or the Roman emperor Diocletian. Many spectacular legends arose recounting miracles he performed while in the custody of his executioners. The celebrated tale of his defeat of the dragon to save a young girl originated during the Crusades, after George was thought to have aided several Christian victories in 1089. See Toschi.

63 Scullard, 76-79.

64 Ibid., 110-11.

65 See Duerr, 303, n. 39, who refers to Scullard, 172 ff.

66 On Aphrodite's association with city-sponsored prostitution in classical Athens and Corinth, see Halperin, 1989.

67 Zorzi refers to the Palio as a "contest of humiliation." See also Varese, 1980: "Vi partecipavano, o erano costretti. prostitute, scemi di borgata a cavallo di asini, ebrei forzati a correre ignudi, confusi tra loro, obbligate a subire le belle del popolo e il disprezzo paternalistico dei nobill," cited in Mazzacurati, 304. Insofar as they evoke but do not document the scene of palio violence, these scholarly sources require the same scrutiny as the earlier. popularizing monographs.

68 See Dumezil, 28: "The flagellation of female passers-by referred to another, more scabrous incident in the Romulus story: having kidnapped the Sabine women for his men, the young leader discovered, to his annoyance, that they were sterile. He consulted an oracle, which replied, 'Let a he-goat penetrate the Roman women!' An augur then rendered a somewhat more decorous interpretation of this robust injunction: the women were struck with goatskin thongs, and they conceived." Dumezil sees the winter and end-of-winter maskers of modern Europe as, in part, a bastardization of this tradition. See also Rykwert, 92-96.

69 Catalano, 106: "Fra gli spassi di corte spiace di dover annoverare anche i supplizi, che erano atroci e ributtanti. Molto comune il castigo della scopa. Nel 1496 fu scopata la moglie di un capo di birri, rea di illeciti amori. La disgraziata fu costretta a percorrere a piedi le principali vie della citta con una mitra in capo, ov'erano dipinti alcuni diavoli, e infine fu condotta dinanzi ai cortigiani, che coprirono di pomi, di rape e di zucche marce la penitente, il boja e i fanti del capitano di giustizia." It bears noting that in modern Italian, the verb scopare means not only to sweep with a broom, but in its common slang usage denotes the sex act, for either sex.

70 Catalano cites from Bernardo Prosperi's letter of 21 September to Isabella. On "running the town," see the Ferrarese statutes reproduced by Cittadella, 291-97. Bandello's novella (4:16) abut the Roman prostitute Isabella, whose punishment for refusing to pay a debt was, "che dal boia su la publica strada le fossero date su il culo ignudo cinquanta buone stafilate," also describes a festive atmosphere in which, "concorse mezza Roma a cosi nobile spettacolo." Bandello, 2:745. On public tortures more generally, see the fundamental work of Foucault.

71 Zanelli, 17. Cited in Trexler, 1984, 887. Renaissance exemplarity for women nearly always involved public punishment for transgressions in the sexual sphere or, in the case of positive exemplars, heroic self-destruction as a preferable alternative to loss of chastity. Among the many literary examples is Ariosto's Isabella, who tricks her would-be seducer Rodomonte into slaughtering her; see Orlando Furioso 24. See Castiglione, Book of the Courtier 3, for many further examples. On exemplarity for male humanists, see Hampton. On the centrality of violence against women in humanist m}ths of foundation, see Jed. The 1425 case of Ugo and Paresina in Ferrara provides another instance of this vast public discourse on women's chastity. After Paresina's betrayal of her husband Niccolo d'Este with her stepson Ugolino, Niccolo not only had his wife and son beheaded (privately) but also ordered the public execution of a number of other noble women in the city who were known to be "serving" their husbands as Paresina had served him. To what extent Niccolo's order was carried out is unknown. See Solerti, 45-46; and Gardner, 36-39.

72 King, 23.

73 Again, to take the simplest and most accessible example, see Castiglione 3 (e.g., ch. 37: "[Alle donne] sia lecito mancare in tutte l'altre cose, accio che possano mettere ogni lor forza per mantenerse in questa sola virtu della castita, senza la quale i figlioli sariano incerti.").

74 See J. Rose; as well as Lacan, 1977, 1-7.

75 See Lacan, 1978, 105-22; and 1982, intro. by Jacqueline Rose, 27-58.

76 Turner, 1977 [1969], vii-viii.

77 See Bargellesi; and Warburg.

78 It was Warburg who broke the long tradition of seeking allegorical significance in these enigmatic middle bands of the cycle and in 1912 attributed their meanings to systems explicated by the Arab astrologer Abu Ma'shar (d. 886), which were based on ancient Indian and Egyptian sources and passed faithfully into medieval European thought. Pellegrino Prisciani, Ferrara's premier humanist in Borso's day, who may have conceived this design for the sala and who oversaw the painters' progress, was Professor of Astrology in the Studio di Ferrara. I thank James Sutton for sharing with me his unpublished work on Prisciani. See also Gundersheimer, 1973, 234-35.

79 On this sort of extension, which Berger would call reascriptive reversal, see his 1992 essay.

80 On perspective, Zorzi, II, notes, "La liberta della concezione spaziale consente all'esecutore un rovesciamento prospettico, secondo il quale le dimensioni dei cavalieri in corsa risultano inferiori a quelle dei cavalieri fermi in secondo piano. Le figure del duca a dei cortigiani sovrastano, con intento espressionistico, la fila sgranata dei concorrenti; al di qua di questa il popolo e assente, o meglio, si situa all'esterno del quadro, coincidendo con gli occhi di chi osserva il dipinto."

81 Bakhtin, 1984. See also Stallybrass.

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