Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court: Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te. Maria F. Maurer. Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 9. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 242 pp. €95

The primary sources from which she draws include contemporary Renaissance chronicles, letters, and courtesy books, with particular attention given to Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier and his concept of male sprezzatura and female sprezzata purità. [...]the bawdy, sexually charged image of Pasiphae and the bull in the Sala dei Psiche may have fostered a homosocial bond between Federico and his male guests at the banquet and ball held in honor of Charles V in 1530; offered a model of female agency for court ladies at the same event; or, in Margherita Farnese's case, provided a metaphor for her imminent transformation from virgin to wife. [...]the notion of the malleability of interpretation is also applicable to the discipline of historical analysis itself, as Maurer's decision to focus on gender and her use of the present-day argot of feminist theory illustrate.