Much of the work that has been done on leavetaking has focused, not surprisingly, on the experience of death, and much of it by historians, ranging from the work of Craig Koslofsky’s The Reformation of the Dead to that of Bruce Gordon and others on funerals, last rites, and the new positioning of cemeteries in early modern Europe (The Place of the Dead). Social historians since Cristiane Klapisch-Zuber have also turned attention to the rituals of leavetaking regarding women entering into marriages that meant their departure from familial homes and communities. Literary scholars in turn have focused on the lament as a genre, often with an eye to its classical roots (Katharine Goodland), or on the partings of lovers in Renaissance epics (Ann Rosalind Jones); and elegy, especially in its rich English examples, has received a great deal of attention (Ramie Targoff’s work on Donne; Peter Sacks’ book on English elegy). A full-scale consideration, however, of leavetaking as it affected the constitution of literary and other forms – letters, albums, testaments, as well as poems, plays, and music - has yet to be launched, and in particular the attention that individuals give to their own works as they sent them out into the world of manuscripts or of printed books, has not been studied. And finally, given the mournful quality we tend to associate with the act of leavetaking, the positive effects and impact of departures are often minimized. How, in short, does the formal announcement of a ‘good-bye’ become in itself an enabling gesture that creates rather than effaces identity?
This panel is an attempt to begin to remedy this lacuna in the literature, theory, and history of Renaissance leavetaking. It seeks to situate three specific genres within this rubric - the album, the letter, and the poetic canzoniere or prose confessional - while keeping a close eye on the human dimensions of departures: the threshold-like space that is constituted through the act of saying goodbye itself. Deanna Shemek will consider the rash of sudden decisions by young women in Italy and France to defy their parents’ wishes by taking the veil and withdrawing into monastic life in the early 16th century. This rather unprecedented move was recorded in the correspondence between Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua, and Lucrezia Borgia, duchess of Ferrara. Modern scholars often assume that young women’s departure from the secular world was imposed by families eager to avoid the dowry expenses they would have incurred if all of their daughters married. Shemek will explore letters regarding girls’ insistence that they preferred monastic to secular life, treating these texts both as historical sources and as persuasive performances of the threat, and the promise, of monastic enclosure as a retreat from the realm of marriage and family in early modern Europe. Far from seeing the departure for the convent as enforced by parents, this form of willed leavetaking is about opening rather than closing doors, and the young women who are commemorated in Isabella’s and Lucrezia’s correspondence become, in these letters that give their works new meaning, early modern agents of their own lives.
Margaret Rosenthal considers the fascinating example of the illustrated album amicorum (manuscript of friends). While her focus has been on the notion of “fashion” that these albums reveal within their pages, her intervention will address the role that materiality plays in the recorded process of “leaving home” (one’s country; one’s family; one’s identity; one’s group of friends) when going on a pre-Grand Tour of Europe as a (male) student in search of a university degree. The collection of “fashions” along the way assembles an identity that is brought home upon the conclusion of a university degree. The images assembled in their albums document a process of relinquishing a national identity and discovering a new one that is a collection of fragments from other cultures, social groups, and illicit experiences of everything that is foreign and disallowed. In this way, the albums negotiate the complex process of both taking leave of what is familiar and one’s own, and coming to terms with a new identity that forces a reconsideration of what it is, in fact, that has been left behind, and whether the ‘goodbye’ is as absolute as it might initially appear.
Jane Tylus examines the importance of the congedo or goodbye in Renaissance literature and how this formal device that began as the closing stanza of the medieval canzone eventually became an indispensable part of many writers’ final words with respect to printed texts that would circulate without them. The technical definition of the congedo - from the Latin commiatus - is permission to take leave. Thus from Sannazaro’s touching envoi “A la sampogna” - appended to his Arcadia, a work that was originally printed without his permission - through Cassandra Stampa’s mournful release of her deceased sister’s poems at others’ requests, we see the poet or editor taking control of the distribution of their own or others’ words. Such forms of control culminate in the creation of one of the most original prose works of the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne's Essais. The detailed letter in which he recounts the final days of his friend Etienne de la Boetie -- culminating in Boetie's cry asking Montaigne why he would not give him permission to die ('me refusez-vous doncques une place') -- becomes the opening to a new project in which Montaigne creates that place through his published essays, showing how goodbyes can give way to beginnings.