Born of Monsters, Trees and Caves: Amazons and the Wild

Speaker

ISA Visiting Fellow - Eleonora Stoppino

Full Professor University of Illinois

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In the Teseida, Boccaccio’s epic poem, the Amazon is connected to alternative generations and monstrous births: her threat, the protagonist Queen Ippolita herself admits, is that she is born of monsters, trees, and caves, that she bears the marks of nonhuman nature. The lecture follows the intertwined natures of amazons and wild beasts in the chivalric poems of the Quattro and Cinquecento, identifying the parallel and often tangled threads of domestication and contamination. In the constant process of distinction and reconceptualization of what it means to be human and not to be human, there are pressure points and breaking points. This lecture focuses on one such pressure point: the nonhuman nursing of the hero, the animal nursing a human child. The lecture will focus in particular on a set of Quattrocento texts on bestial upbringings to test their qualities as experimental narratives, as forms of speculative fiction that allow thought experiments to enter Cinquecento chivalric literature. The lecture will engage an interdisciplinary audience by addressing questions such as the instability of gender in a historical perspective; the historical nature of the debate between birth and upbringing, nature and nurture, gene-environment interaction; and the centrality of ecocritical concerns to an only apparently detached literary genre as the chivalric epic.