The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani

Clorinda Donato is Professor of French and Italian at California State University, Long Beach, where she holds the George L. Graziadio Chair for Italian Studies and directs the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies. She is an eighteenth-century scholar who researches knowledge transfer through translation and genre adaptation in encyclopedic compilations. She also works on gender in medical and literary accounts. She has published 'Enlightenment Spain and the Encyclopédie Méthodique',(OSE, 2015:11) with Ricardo Lopez. Forthcoming with University of Toronto Press is Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations, 1680-1830, co-edited with Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink.

‘Bringing together histories of the Grand Tour, anatomy and dissection, sexuality and gender, translation studies, and much more, this book weaves together a fascinating narrative about Vizzani/Bordoni, biographer Giovanni Bianchi, and English translator and commentator John Cleland. The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani makes available a new critical text for the growing field of trans eighteenth-century studies, and its discussions of women’s sexuality and bodies make it a valuable addition to women’s history and sexuality studies more broadly.’ Ula E. Lukszo Klein, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

• List of figuresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Giovanni Bianchi, John Cleland and the Breve storia: an overview of Italian and English eighteenth-century sexualitiesGender in translationSynopsis of Giovanni Bianchi’s Breve storiaSynopsis of John Cleland’s translation of the Breve storia: [An] His[toric]al and phy[s]ic[al] dissertation on the case of Catherine Vizzani (1751) / The True history and adventures of Catharine Vizzani (1755)Female masculinityGenesis of the projectAnatomical study in Italy and HollandReading and writing Vizzani: Cleland’s translationA preliminary note on translationPlace, space and agencyThe cicisbeoGender studies, queer studies and the Italian peninsulaGeographies of sexualities: mapping sexuality in Bianchi’s life and the Breve storiaChapter 1: Situating Giovanni Bianchi: the biography of an anatomist man of lettersThe geopolitical landscape of Italian science: academies, universities and intellectual life in Rimini and SienaA contested reputation in Siena: Bianchi’s university careerChapter 2: An apology for same-sex love: Bianchi’s discourse to the Academy of the DefectiveChapter 3: The literature of science and sexuality in eighteenth-century Italy and its fourteenth- to seventeenth-century European precedentsDutch and Italian precursors in the discourse of generation and the practice of autopsyReligious autopsies, domestic autopsies and science: Bianchi’s parodyA 'chaste' performance of militant gender-crossing in seventeenth-century Rome: Spanish warrior Catalina de Erauso, the monja alférezThe evidence: the materiality of Vizzani’s guilt and exonerationChapter 4: Technologies of gender identity in eighteenth- century Italy and England: the story of Catterina Vizzani’s autopsyThe structure of the Breve storiaMedicine and autopsy in the Breve storiaTaking 'a freak of this kind into her head': Cleland on dissection, cause and blameChapter 5: Novelistic prose in eighteenth-century Italy: Cleland in Italy, Bianchi in England and the cultivation of Boccaccio among men of science and lettersGozzi’s 1764 La Meretrice, the 1810 La Meretrice inglese and the debate over the novel and moralityThe novel in eighteenth-century ItalyNarrating anatomy: anatomists and BoccaccioBianchi and BoccaccioChapter 6: The transgendered familial and working spaces of Catterina Vizzani/Giovanni Bordoni and their narratorsCleland’s reimagined spaces of English domestic transgressionChapter 7: Translating transgender: Giovanni Bianchi and John Cleland writing queer desire in the eighteenth centuryEighteenth-century gender trouble and its textual resonanceQueering eighteenth-century proseNarrating Catterina/Giovanni’s lifeTranslation samples comparing Giovanni Bianchi’s text in my translation with John Cleland’s translationChapter 8: Cleland’s motivation: Catterina Vizzani as Lady Mary Wortley MontaguChapter 9: The entangled lives and writings of John Cleland and Giovanni Bianchi: biographical synergies and a shared sexual visionGiovanni Bianchi’s doing and undoingIn Lode dell’arte comica (1752)Appendix: the textsA note to the three Vizzani texts: John Cleland’s translation, my translation and Giovanni Bianchi’s originalJohn Cleland’s translation: [An] His[toric]al and phy[s]ic[al] dissertation on the case of Catherine Vizzani, containing the adventures of a young woman, born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the habit of a man, was killed for an amour with a young lady; and being found on dissection, a true virgin, narrowly escaped being treated as a saint by the populace. With some curious and anatomical remarks on the nature and existence of the hymen. By Giovanni Bianchi, Professor of Anatomy at Sienna, the surgeon who dissected her. To which are added certain needful remarks by the English editorClorinda Donato’s translation: Brief history of the life of Catterina Vizzani, Roman woman, who for eight years wore a male servant’s clothing, who after various vicissitudes was in the end killed and found to be a virgin during the autopsy of her cadaverGiovanni Bianchi, Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani Romana che per ott’anni vestì abito da uomo in qualità di Servidore la quale dopo vari Casi essendo in fine stata uccisa fu trovata Pulcella nella sezzione del suo CadaveroBibliographyIndex