Comprensión Dialéctica Del Proceso Educativo

To conclude this study, I will return one more time to Guido Davico Bonino’s idea of an ever-evolving game that a Renaissance author played with the past. With every new work, a playwright began a new match, negotiating new meanings between classical models and his contemporary landscape. Rendering more difficult this conciliation were the diverse, and

sometimes contrasting, elements of this contemporary landscape: fluctuating social and political realities, the will and favor of his prince or other noble sponsor, and emerging canons of literary and theatrical models. As is natural, not all his individual battles were won. Yet as the common phrase goes, it was worth the fight. Comedy is an endless assemblage of old and new, rearranged for (hopefully) maximum effect according to each shifting sociopolitical context.

What I have attempted in this dissertation is to demonstrate that a fresh look at material and literary sources can release more Renaissance playwrights again from their prison of “slavish imitation.” I have shown that mine is not the only attempt in this field. The difference between my study and that of other scholars lies in my focus on culinary professionals and the type of cultural studies considered. The material culinary history included in this dissertation centers on the position of working class individuals in society and their qualities. Others, such as Salvatore Di Maria, have included historical accounts of recent events in their analyses of classical and modern elements of the theater. But these historical accounts are very different from the type of material history referenced here. Historical accounts of social and political events are often written by – and for – the courts, and rarely do they recount ordinary events. They are chiefly

concerned with battles. We recall, for example, that the setting for Machiavelli’s Mandragola

has been dated through Callimaco’s mention of the invasion of Italy by Charles V or that many later comedies make reference to the Battle of Lepanto. Instead, the information left to us about cooks and other culinary professionals of the “popolo minuto” describes the regular, quotidian functioning of households and city centers.

The Introduction has addressed current scholarship and inserted my research into debates on Early Modern food studies and Renaissance theater. Cooks and deliverymen have a special place in the combination of anthropological and literary histories. In fact, the same material history of foodways cannot be applied to the parasite. His role in comedy is too defined by tradition to represent the inclusion of realistic contemporary elements. The same reasoning applies to the alimentary discourses of old and young noblemen, young maidens, and most servants of both sexes. Yet the cook is also not completely free of tradition. Careful source studies, such as the ones researched for this dissertation, must be done in order to assess the contemporary aspects of his characterization. Once completed, we can begin to interpret the playwright’s intentions and messaging through the insertion of a culinary professional.

This dissertation has offered a renewed consideration of sixteenth-century theater culture through the avenue of gastronomy and profession. Playwrights who choose to include culinary professions on stage participate in the innovation of comedy, contaminatio of sources, and portrayal of contemporary culture on stage. One of Chapter Two’s main accomplishments is acknowledging the cook as comically ambivalent. While Ariosto’s Dalio may be laughed at for his simplicity, we laugh alongside Firenzuola’s Grattugia. Piccolomini’s Cornacchia proves, moreover, that laughter is not always corrective or satiric. These two cooks – Grattugia and Cornacchia – are not downtrodden or beaten (as was apparently common in Plautus’ Rome and

possible for Ariosto’s more classically-modeled Dalio). Instead, the inclusion of most cooks and deliverymen can delight audiences and bring them to laughter through a variety of social

positions within each comedy.

The analysis of deliverymen in Florentine Renaissance comedy demonstrates much of the same findings. Gelli’s Polo is quintessentially free in society, as is manifested by his social and economic mobility and in his use of the Florentine vernacular. Other unnamed deliverymen are decisively less respected in society; their interactions confirm common negative stereotypes of culinary professions. Finally, Cecchi places his zanaiuolo Gian Pitto somewhere in the middle. Regardless of social status, deliverymen inhabit the city more than a specific home. They are emancipated from a profession that resembles servitude, as is the case for cooks. In this way, deliverymen help us imagine the city as they wander about fulfilling their duties in one job or another.

In fact, as I have argued, the presence of zanaiuoli in more or less spontaneous scenes on the streets near homes works as a catalyst for dialogue among diverse members of society. In the last decades, many culinary histories of Europe and studies of Renaissance feasts, actual and imagined, have cast new light on the contamination of high art and low culture and a desire to transgress genre and social boundaries through the creative exploration of foodstuffs. Through this analysis we see that the cultural project of the Florentine Academy – stemming from popularizing ideologies – promotes a similar unification of high art and low culture that contribute original works to the corpus of Renaissance comedies. In this light, mid sixteenth- century comedies are anything but stagnant imitations of their predecessors.

One additional culinary profession – l’oste (innkeeper) – found only in the Accademia degli Intronati’s Gl’Ingannati, confirms this theory. Innkeepers are most revealing and comical

as they compete for customers, marketing their foods loudly in the streets. However innovative and important their inclusion is to the messaging of Renaissance playwrights, innkeepers are exceedingly rare on the stage. A viable path forward for this study might be to expand the coterie of culinary professionals and to evaluate their presence also in novella. In such a study, tavern owners (tavernai) and bakers (fornai) may further prove the originality of playwrights and

novellieri and, at the same time, shed light on the role of culinary professions in contemporary society. For example, Boccaccio’s Decameron VI.2 centers on a male baker, Cisti fornaio, who gets the best of a servant and gains the favor of the servant’s master. Cisti fornaio reflects a normalized social structure in fourteenth-century Florence, yet he is not lacking in wit, using a clever motto to jab at the servant, a lower class individual than himself. We may interpret the evolving place of self-employed artisan/alimentary workers in society: superior to a servant’s but not granted the liberties of a nobleman or mercantile entrepreneur. The consequences of both cook Chichibio and baker Cisti in novelle on Day Six (the day of the risposta pronta) might play a larger role in their influence on later interpretations of the professions. In all, both additional professions are peculiar. Tavern owners are found exclusively in Early Modern novella, not on the Renaissance stage, and only female bakers exist in comedy. A theory of their inclusions in comedy and novella might prove the same conclusion of increased dialogue across strata of society, or their representations might simply be a source of comparison for research that seeks to combine material and literary studies. For now, the cuoco and the zanaiuolo (cook for hire/deliveryman) are truly the great go-betweens of Renaissance gastronomy.

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