Lisa Sampson

The essay explores the socio-cultural role of the main academy in Parma, the Innominati (1574-160... more The essay explores the socio-cultural role of the main academy in Parma, the Innominati (1574-1608), which flourished in the years when the Farnese dynasty was beginning to assert more forcefully its political control over the new state of Parma and Piacenza. The Innominati was from the start associated with the ruling dynasty, who must have recognized the importance of its cultural activities to strengthening their regime, particularly in the absence of a strong local university. This essay explores the institution’s contested position within the cultural landscape – as reflected also in its membership of courtiers, clergymen, and feudal aristocrats with more ambivalent relations with the Farnese. In particular, the focus falls on the theatrical activities of the group during the 1580s, a decade which saw the establishment of the Parma Index (1580) and the succession of the internationally celebrated Duke Alessandro Farnese (1587). Based on the little surviving evidence it is argue...

Database of Italian Academies (1525-1700)

The Italian Academies Themed Collection provides a detailed searchable database for locating prin... more The Italian Academies Themed Collection provides a detailed searchable database for locating printed material relating to the Italian learned Academies published by Italian Academies between 1525 and 1700, and now held in the collections of the British Library. . The Academies in question were active in Avellino, Bari, Benevento, Bologna, Brindisi, Caltanissetta, Catania, Catanzaro, Enna, L’Aquila, Lecce, Mantua, Naples, Padua, Palermo, Rome, Salerno, Siena, Syracuse, Trapani, and Venice. You can search the database for information on: 1) Academies – their names, activities, interests, location, dates, emblems and mottoes 2) Books – titles, authors, publication details, illustrations, censors 3) Persons names, nicknames, dates, nationality, mottoes, emblems, portraits and roles Records may contain images in addition to text. Historical, bibliographical and critical information is listed in a Notes field in each record.

Performing female cultural sociability between court and academy: Isabella Pallavicino Lupi and Angelo Ingegneri’s Danza di Venere (1584)

in Chivalry, Academy, and Cultural Dialogues: The Italian Contribution to European Culture. Essays in honour of Jane E. Everson, ed. by Stefano Jossa and Giuliana Pieri, Italian Perspectives series, pp. 107-22 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2016), ISBN: 978-1-78188-457-7, 2016

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Imitations and Innovations after Tasso’s Aminta: Accommodating a Female Voice

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 2017

Tasso’s Aminta: Raising the Profile of the Pastoral Play

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 2017

Pastoral Drama in the Seventeenth Century and Beyond

Amateurs Meet Professionals: Theatrical Activities in Late Sixteenth-Century Italian Academies

This chapter explores the complex and still obscure relationship between Italian literary academi... more This chapter explores the complex and still obscure relationship between Italian literary academies, which often engaged in amateur theatricals, and professional actors who formed part of the new theatrical companies (commedia dell’arte) which emerged on the theatrical scene at around the same time (1540s). By exploring particularly the cases of the professional actors Adriano Valerini, Isabella Andreini and her son Giovan Battista Andreini, it is argued that some academies by the end of the sixteenth century showed greater openness to comici and particularly to female virtuose performers. This would lead at the start of the following century to changes in the relation between professionals and amateurs, especially where academies themselves became more hybrid. This essay opens a new area of research by making connections between ‘learned’ and ‘professional’ theatre, which are typically studied discretely. The evidence is drawn extensively from new archival data as well as early pri...

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“Finally the Academies”: Networking Communities of Knowledge in Italy and Beyond

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2019

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Review: Pierre Bense-Dipius: L'Apollon italien ( 1644)

French Studies, 2004

The Italian Academies 1525-1700

The intellectual societies known as Academies played a vital role in the development of culture, ... more The intellectual societies known as Academies played a vital role in the development of culture, and scholarly debate throughout Italy between 1525-1700. They were fundamental in establishing the intellectual networks later defined as the ‘Republique des Lettres’, and in the dissemination of ideas in early modern Europe, through print, manuscript, oral debate and performance. This volume surveys the social and cultural role of Academies, challenging received ideas and incorporating recent archival findings on individuals, networks and texts. Ranging over Academies in both major and smaller or peripheral centres, these collected studies explore the interrelationships of Academies with other cultural forums. Individual essays examine the fluid nature of academies and their changing relationships to the political authorities; their role in the promotion of literature, the visual arts and theatre; and the diverse membership recorded for many academies, which included scientists, writers, printers, artists, political and religious thinkers, and, unusually, a number of talented women. Contributions by established international scholars together with studies by younger scholars active in this developing field of research map out new perspectives on the dynamic place of the Academies in early modern Italy. The publication results from the research collaboration ‘The Italian Academies 1525-1700: the first intellectual networks of early modern Europe’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is edited by the senior investigators.

Chivalry, Academy, and Cultural Dialogues: The Italian Contribution to European Culture. Essays in Honour of Jane E. Everson

Modern Language Review

Guarini’s Pastor fido: The Establishment of an Ethical and Political Model of Pastoral Drama

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy

Performing Pastoral Drama

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy

Barbara Torelli Benedetti, Partenia, a pastoral play. A bilingual edition edited with notes and translation

This edition presents for the first time in print what is probably the earliest known secular, &#... more This edition presents for the first time in print what is probably the earliest known secular, 'regular' play by a woman in Italy. As suggested in the introduction to the work, Torelli's play offers a fascinating example of female dramaturgy and creative adaptation of the pastoral genre in the context of late sixteenth-century Parma. Critical textual study is combined with new biographical material on the author and her literary milieu. The edition provides the first detailed palaeographical study of the complex Cremona manuscript of the play, which unusually includes emendations thought to be in the hand of the author herself (besides others). The transcription also describes for the first time in detail a newly discovered second manuscript of the play in Rome. The play-text is presented in the original Italian with a new facing English translation. Also included is the first transcription of the paratextual verse from the Cremona manuscript and the first transcribed co...

Staging the Pastoral: Tasso's Aminta and the Emergence of Modern Western Theater (review)

Renaissance Quarterly, 2007

accepts without demur the reconciliation of Rinaldo and Armida, which has struck generations of r... more accepts without demur the reconciliation of Rinaldo and Armida, which has struck generations of readers as contrived and abrupt. While critics agree that Armida’s echo of the Annunciation (“Ecco l’ancilla tua,” GL 20.136) is intended “to underline the inseparable wedding of love and faith in the restored moral order at the end of the poem” (110), many have observed that the biblical echo intrudes awkwardly. Ruggiero ignores the problem, since he interprets the episode entirely via Tasso’s contention in the Discorsi that epic and romance are essentially one genre: Rinaldo and Armida rewrite Aeneid 4 as a romance ending for Dido and Aeneas, transcending both Vergilian epic and the historic destruction of Carthage. The reconciliation of Rinaldo and Armida is indeed a “reflection on literary genre,” but it necessarily involves more genres than epic and romance. The best way to make Armida’s biblical evocation less disruptive is to read it against the narrator’s lyric allusions, which de...

L’Accademia Palermitana degli Accesi: un esempio di petrarchismo nel tardo Cinquecento irene bagni

Routledge, Apr 14, 2016

The Accademia di San Luca between Educational and Religious Reform peter m. lukehart

“Deggio ferma tener la santa fede”

Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation, 2020

The Earliest Examples of Pastoral Drama: The Self-Conscious Evolution of a New Genre

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 2017

Drammatica secreta: Barbara Torelli’s Partenia (c. 1587) and women in late sixteenth-century theatre

Reforming theatre in Farnese Parma: the case of the Accademia degli Innominati (1574-1608)

Database of Italian Academies (1525-1700)

Performing female cultural sociability between court and academy: Isabella Pallavicino Lupi and Angelo Ingegneri’s Danza di Venere (1584)

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Imitations and Innovations after Tasso’s Aminta: Accommodating a Female Voice

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 2017

Tasso’s Aminta: Raising the Profile of the Pastoral Play

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 2017

Pastoral Drama in the Seventeenth Century and Beyond

Amateurs Meet Professionals: Theatrical Activities in Late Sixteenth-Century Italian Academies

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“Finally the Academies”: Networking Communities of Knowledge in Italy and Beyond

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2019

Download

Review: Pierre Bense-Dipius: L'Apollon italien ( 1644)

French Studies, 2004

The Italian Academies 1525-1700

Chivalry, Academy, and Cultural Dialogues: The Italian Contribution to European Culture. Essays in Honour of Jane E. Everson

Modern Language Review

Guarini’s Pastor fido: The Establishment of an Ethical and Political Model of Pastoral Drama

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy

Performing Pastoral Drama

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy

Barbara Torelli Benedetti, Partenia, a pastoral play. A bilingual edition edited with notes and translation

Staging the Pastoral: Tasso's Aminta and the Emergence of Modern Western Theater (review)

Renaissance Quarterly, 2007

The Italian academies 1525-1700: networks of culture, innovation and dissent, ed. by Jane E. Everson, Denis V. Reidy and Lisa Sampson (Oxford: Legenda, 2016)

by Lisa Sampson and Jane E. Everson

The intellectual societies known as Academies played a vital role in the development of culture, ... more The intellectual societies known as Academies played a vital role in the development of culture, and scholarly debate throughout Italy between 1525-1700. They were fundamental in establishing the intellectual networks later defined as the ‘République des Lettres’, and in the dissemination of ideas in early modern Europe, through print, manuscript, oral debate and performance. This volume surveys the social and cultural role of Academies, challenging received ideas and incorporating recent archival findings on individuals, networks and texts.

Ranging over Academies in both major and smaller or peripheral centres, these collected studies explore the interrelationships of Academies with other cultural forums. Individual essays examine the fluid nature of academies and their changing relationships to the political authorities; their role in the promotion of literature, the visual arts and theatre; and the diverse membership recorded for many academies, which included scientists, writers, printers, artists, political and religious thinkers, and, unusually, a number of talented women. Contributions by established international scholars together with studies by younger scholars active in this developing field of research map out new perspectives on the dynamic place of the Academies in early modern Italy.

The publication results from the research collaboration ‘The Italian Academies 1525-1700: the first intellectual networks of early modern Europe’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is edited by the senior investigators.

Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: the making of a new Genre, Italian Perspectives 15 (Oxford: Legenda/MHRA and Maney, 2006). 270pp.

Emerging in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, pastoral drama is one of the most characteristic ... more Emerging in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, pastoral drama is one of the most characteristic genres of its time. Sampson traces its uneven development into the following century by exploring masterpieces by Tasso and Guarini, and many lesser known works, some by women writers. She examines the treatment of key themes of love, Nature and Art, and the Golden Age against the background of the textual and stage production of the plays. An investigation of critical writings associated with the genre further reveals its significance to the contemporary literary scene. Sampson argues that pastoral drama stimulated not only ‘modernizing’ attitudes towards the canon but also new enquiries into the function and possibilities of art.

‘“Non lasciar così facilmente publicar le cose mie”: manuscript secular drama in sixteenth-century Italy’, Italian Studies, special issue Scribal Culture in Italy, 1450-1650, ed. by Brian Richardson and Filippo de Vivo, 66: 2 (2011), 161-76

Literature, Theatre and the Arts in the Italian Academies, 1525-1700: one-day workshop, Reading (UK)

by Lisa Sampson and SIMONE TESTA

Programme for one-day conference organized by the AHRC Italian Academies project. The conference ... more Programme for one-day conference organized by the AHRC Italian Academies project. The conference provided a stimulating exploration of the significance of the Italian academies as cultural laboratories in the development of new literary, visual and theatrical forms and practices. The programme featured a keynote presentation by Roberto Gigliucci and interventions by seven other speakers from Italian and UK institutions. They presented wide-ranging and new, interdisciplinary insights into how academies stimulated the production of innovative and often hybrid literary and theatrical genres, and the complex interrelations between literary works, the visual arts and spectacle across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The papers are available as podcasts from the website:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc/events/emrc-italian-academies-conference-2013.aspx

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