Generation and Degeneration Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe

Valeria Finucci is Associate Professor of Italian at Duke University. She is the editor of Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, also published by Duke University Press and the author of The Lady Vanishes.

Kevin Brownlee is Professor of French and Italian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machau.

"The glory of this collection is the way it tackles quite abstract issues corporally. It reminds the reader how fundamental is the relation between human physiology and human ideas of history."- Susan Noakes, author of Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation "What gives this collection of essays its aura of novelty is a theological underpinning to political, literary, and existential issues and its ensemble of motifs is not simply cast in currently fashionable psychoanalytical language. It displays a wide array of critical perspectives yet homogeneity of viewpoints and ideological bents occur through its disparate contributions. A truly unified piece of scholarship."- Giuseppe F. Mazzotta, author of The Worlds of Petrarch