Within eighty years before and after 1600, two large collections of tales appeared in Italy which were patterned after Boccaccio’s Decamerone: a gathering of people brought together by circumstances entertain each other by taking turns in storytelling. In Straparola’s Piacevoli Notti (1550/1555), seventy-three stories are told, mostly by young ladies, in the course of thirteen consecutive nights during the Venice carnival season. In Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti, five times ten tales in Neapolitan dialect are told by old crones to satisfy the craving of the pregnant wife of a prince; they were first published in 1634–36, a couple of years after the author’s death. Here the frame is itself a fairytale: the pregnant woman was a usurper, a Negro slave who had replaced Princess Zoza when the prince woke up from his magic sleep; she is put to death when the truth comes out at the end.
While in Italy the literary establishment rejected such “old wives’ tales” as worthless, they fed into the vogue for contes de fées that spread in the eighteenth century from France, and in the nineteenth century they became part of the new interest in folk literature instigated by the Grimm Brothers. It was recognized that these were individually fashioned literary tales, not tales recorded from oral tradition; but since in many cases they were the earliest witnesses of tales later found all over Europe and beyond, most researchers were interested in their plots only, for comparison.
Magnanini wants to correct this by firmly putting the tales in their social and intellectual context. Especially, she makes it her task to show how they intersect with scholarly literature dealing with monsters and marvels. In a period still relying more on written sources (Holy Writ and Classical literature such as Aristotle and Pliny’s Natural History) than on experiment and observation, the borderlines between the natural and the supernatural, fact and fiction, were anything but clear-cut. Taking her clue from a catalog title, she calls the period 1550–1700 “The Age of the Marvellous,” a most apt description, as this reviewer can confirm from one of his areas of specialization, Icelandic literature. There are still crude linear notions about the “Dark Ages” being followed by the more rational and man-centered Renaissance, leading to the Age of Enlightenment and then to industrialization and the triumph of science. In fact, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period of light in most of Europe, followed by superstition and a taste for the fantastic; witch-hunts (for example) were an Early Modern, not a medieval, phenomenon.
Magnanini is not the first researcher to have noticed such connections, and she gratefully acknowledges her debt to authors such as Nancy L. Canepa (From Court to Forest, 1999), L. Daston and K. Park (Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750, 1998) and Paula Findlen (Possessing Nature, 1994). But she must be the first one to have followed the reflections, in the two tale collections, of contemporary discussions about unusual parturitions, sex changes, hermaphrodites, and bestiality in such a thorough and systematic way, and she uses illustrations from medical and zoological treatises of that period to great effect.
In the short chapter 1, “Facts and Favole,” she presents the “boom in teratology” that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and shows that men of letters and men of science had not yet gone their separate ways, thus making it likely that Straparola and Basile were familiar with the discussions that were going on (few facts are known about Straparola’s life). The more substantial chapter 2, “Wonder Tales in the Age of the Marvellous,” discusses the ambiguity of the word meraviglia, which meant (like English marvel) not just a miracle, but anything astounding. Collections of “marvellous” tales were like Wunderkabinette, which became such a fixture of courts and private collections in that period, and which mirrored both scientific curiosity and a fascination with freaks of nature. She examines what sort of wonders occur in Straparola, and how they are used for the typical fairytale rise or restoration of a tale’s protagonist(s), and the kind of hybrids (such as the monstrous flea in “La Polece”) Basile presents and how he mixes high and low literary culture to comic effect. The Council of Trent and the ensuing Counter-Reformation put renewed stress on religious miracles and exploited them in art, the theatre, and literature, but also drew the line as to what was to be rejected as superstition. This meant that “old wives’ tales” were put in a cultural ghetto, and a man who undertook to write such tales had to resort to tricks to mark his distance from a despised genre.
This is shown in chapter 3, “‘Co l’une el l’altro sesso’: Gender, Genre and Monstrosity in Straparola’s Frame Tale.” She takes up the tale of the sex change of a certain Filomena of Salerno that a man, Molino, tells on the last of the Piacevoli Notti, insisting that it was not a favola but a caso, a fact, and that it happened not as a wonder of nature but with a surgeon’s help. The implication is that the author does the same thing to the favola, “masculinizing” it by giving it an anchor in reality. In chapter 4 she goes into the medical background of Basile’s frame tale, the widespread belief that voglie materne, the craving of pregnant women, could in fact lead to monstrous babies, thereby giving substance to the human/animal hybrids that occur in fairy tales. In similar fashion, as Basile speaks in his own voice at the end, the public is invited to see the story of the false bride unmasked and removed not as an old wife’s tale, but as “a beautiful parturition of the author’s wit.”
Chapter 5 deals with “bestiality and interclass marriage in Straparola’s ‘Il re porco’,” a Beauty and the Beast tale interpreted as reflecting social and psychological problems inherent in the strictly class-structured Venetian society. While daughters of respectable families were married off early, young men married much later, and in view of the narrow marriage market (they were supposed to marry within their class), their unsatisfied sexuality could prove unsettling. In the tale, the “pig” prince’s father, in view of the undoubted fidelity of his wife, decides to recognize the “pig” prince as his offspring and raise him as a human being. The elder two of three sisters plan to kill their future “pig” husband on the wedding night; only the third accepts him in his “piggishness” and thus can liberate him of his animal shape; with that, the “monster” is erased.
In chapter 6, the author presents “foils and fakes” and the discussion surrounding their authenticity—artificial monsters seem to have been quite an industry, especially in Venice, and a few of them are presented here. She reads Basile’s “Lo mercante” (I.7) as a two-brothers tale where the slaying of the dragon, usually the precondition for the hero’s getting the princess and half the kingdom, is not to be taken seriously. Her main argument is stylistic: the metaphors used in connection with the dragon and its slaying are consistently taken from diminutive objects, and she calls the manufactured monster “an apt metaphor for Basile’s hybrid tales. Patched together from different cultural elements, their humor and delight derive from discerning the seams of the author’s handiwork and the inability of others, be they characters or other readers, to do so” (143). This is conjecture, but is worth considering.
The shortish chapter 7, before the summary of the epilogue, takes up Basile’s farcical tale “Viola” (II.3), where a gentle ogre believes that he has produced a girl he finds in his garden by farting, based on what he has heard students say about mares in Spain—but gradually he has to come around to trusting observation rather than hearsay, and the author puts this into the context of Basile’s ties to the Accademia dei Lincei, the “Lynx-Eyed,” who made it their job to advance the understanding of science.
Fairy-Tale Science is a very professional job, using a wide range of sources and profiting from having individual chapters published and ventilated separately. That makes for some repetition, but not excessively so. It is also generally well-written, but with a preference for the academic high register. She will say “quotidian” rather than “everyday” or “daily,” “squamous” rather than “scaly,” “discursive move” rather than “argument,” and she does not waste any time explaining what “(extra)diagetic” means. When she speaks of “the myriad citations and references” (34) or “myriad theories” (145), does she realize that this means 10,000 each? The two languages she is familiar with are English and Italian, and she will preferably quote works in other languages in English or Italian translation. The Classical languages are unsafe ground for her, and German seems to be a black hole. Rudolf Schenda, an authority on Basile, only appears with one translated article; Max Lüthi and Hans-Jörg Uther equally pop up only with English bits. More surprisingly, she seems to be unaware of the thoroughly revised edition of The Types of International Folktales (2004). An American reader will call the book well-annotated, a non-American one over-annotated; the citation indices of some of her mentors and colleagues will soar. A dozen misprints are not much of a blemish in a book of this size.
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[Review length: 1557 words • Review posted on March 2, 2010]