From the time Catterina Vizzani, a young Roman woman, began wooing the woman she was attracted to, she did so dressed as a man. Fleeing Rome to avoid a potential trial for sexual misdeeds, she became Giovanni Bordoni, transitioning and becoming a male in spirit, deed, and body, through what was the most complete physical change possible in the eighteenth century. This volume features Giovanni Bianchi’s 1744 Italian account of Vizzani/Bordoni, published for the first time together with a modern English translation, making available to an English-speaking audience the objective, scientific exploration of gender conducted by Bianchi. John Cleland’s well-known, albeit fanciful, 1751 version of the story has also been reproduced here, shedding light on the divergent sexual politics driving Bianchi’s Italian original and Cleland’s greatly embellished English translation. Through a close examination of Bianchi’s work as anatomical practitioner and scholar, Clorinda Donato traces the development of his advocacy for tolerance of all sexual orientations. Several chapters address the medical and philosophical inquiry into sexual preference, reproduction, sexual identity, and gender fluidity which Enlightenment anatomists from Holland to Italy engaged with in their research concerning the relationship between the mind and the reproductive organs. Meanwhile, it is the social implications of gender ambiguity which may be analysed in Cleland’s condemnation of women who “pass” as men. Drawing on the biographies produced by Bianchi and Cleland, the volume reflects on the motivation of each author to tell the story of Vizzani/Bordoni either as a narration of empowerment or a cautionary tale within the European context of evolving sexual opinions, some based on scientific research, others based on social practice and cultural norms.

Table of Contents:
List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Giovanni Bianchi, John Cleland and the Breve storia: an overview of Italian and English eighteenth-century sexualities Gender in translation Synopsis of Giovanni Bianchi’s Breve storia Synopsis 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 masculinity Genesis of the project Anatomical study in Italy and Holland Reading and writing Vizzani: Cleland’s translation A preliminary note on translation Place, space and agency The cicisbeo Gender studies, queer studies and the Italian peninsula Geographies of sexualities: mapping sexuality in Bianchi’s life and the Breve storia Chapter 1: Situating Giovanni Bianchi: the biography of an anatomist man of letters The geopolitical landscape of Italian science: academies, universities and intellectual life in Rimini and Siena A contested reputation in Siena: Bianchi’s university career Chapter 2: An apology for same-sex love: Bianchi’s discourse to the Academy of the Defective Chapter 3: The literature of science and sexuality in eighteenth-century Italy and its fourteenth- to seventeenth-century European precedents Dutch and Italian precursors in the discourse of generation and the practice of autopsy Religious autopsies, domestic autopsies and science: Bianchi’s parody A 'chaste' performance of militant gender-crossing in seventeenth-century Rome: Spanish warrior Catalina de Erauso, the monja alférez The evidence: the materiality of Vizzani’s guilt and exoneration Chapter 4: Technologies of gender identity in eighteenth- century Italy and England: the story of Catterina Vizzani’s autopsy The structure of the Breve storia Medicine and autopsy in the Breve storia Taking 'a freak of this kind into her head': Cleland on dissection, cause and blame Chapter 5: Novelistic prose in eighteenth-century Italy: Cleland in Italy, Bianchi in England and the cultivation of Boccaccio among men of science and letters Gozzi’s 1764 La Meretrice, the 1810 La Meretrice inglese and the debate over the novel and morality The novel in eighteenth-century Italy Narrating anatomy: anatomists and Boccaccio Bianchi and Boccaccio Chapter 6: The transgendered familial and working spaces of Catterina Vizzani/Giovanni Bordoni and their narrators Cleland’s reimagined spaces of English domestic transgression Chapter 7: Translating transgender: Giovanni Bianchi and John Cleland writing queer desire in the eighteenth century Eighteenth-century gender trouble and its textual resonance Queering eighteenth-century prose Narrating Catterina/Giovanni’s life Translation samples comparing Giovanni Bianchi’s text in my translation with John Cleland’s translation Chapter 8: Cleland’s motivation: Catterina Vizzani as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Chapter 9: The entangled lives and writings of John Cleland and Giovanni Bianchi: biographical synergies and a shared sexual vision Giovanni Bianchi’s doing and undoing In Lode dell’arte comica (1752) Appendix: the texts A note to the three Vizzani texts: John Cleland’s translation, my translation and Giovanni Bianchi’s original John 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 editor Clorinda 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 cadaver Giovanni 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 Cadavero Bibliography Index