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2 - Masculinity as Competence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2024

By
Thomas V. Cohen
Edited by
Konrad Eisenbichler  and
Jacqueline Murray
Konrad Eisenbichler
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Jacqueline Murray
Affiliation:
University of Guelph, Ontario
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Summary

In January 1557 in Rome, a notary of the governor's court deposed a young woman lying in bed sorely injured. After having lost her virginity amidst group sex to a soldier at her village of Santa Fiora (so she claims), Camilla had come to Rome and moved in with a Signora Margarita, and then made her living trading sex for income. Camilla said that, shortly before, she had fallen in with a Frenchman. Naming him she then tells what happened next.

Mons. Basi, a Frenchman, brought me to the inn La Fortuna, where he stayed three nights, and two nights I slept with him, and one night I slept alone, and those nights he did it to me two times a night from in front. And, I don't know if it was three or four nights ago, the police came, along with Signora Margarita, a dry-goods seller, and they knocked on the door. And when I went to open it, that gentleman who was staying with me said to me, “Oh, you no-good whore, do you want me to be massacred instead of you.” And so he made me climb up into a window sill, and he gave me a push, and I began to shout, “Help me! Help me!” and I fell [out the window]. And the police picked me up and they brought me here more dead than alive. And when I was here, Signora Margarita said that I was in terrible shape, and that I had broken my arms and legs and thighs.

Camilla then adds that, with treatment, she is recovering.

This is clearly an ugly, tawdry story of unfeeling sex and callous harm. Rome's criminal records teem with such tales of cruelty, where men inflict harm on those weaker, be they women or other men who have less strength or social backing, or who just suffer momentary disadvantage. It would be easy, using records such as these, to depict masculinity as a toxic distillation, much unkind sex, and far more violence. But we should not.

Type
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Information
Premodern Masculinities in Transition , pp. 31 - 52
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2024

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