Tullia d'Aragona, "The Wretch, Otherwise Known As Guerrino" (Iter Press, 2024)

This week, it pays extra to be a MyLo's rewards member. Through October 14, members get $10 MyLo's money. When you spend $200 or more on an eligible purchase during MyLo's money days. Also, using your MyLo's rewards credit card, even better. That's an additional $20 MyLo's money. Use it to save on your next Lo's haul. Exclusions, restrictions, and more terms apply. C-Lo's.com/MyLo'sMoneyDays for details. MyLo's money expires 30 days after issuance, subject to change. Credit offers subject to credit approval. Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello, and welcome to the new Books Network, the Italian Studies Channel. I'm your host, Kate Driscoll, assistant professor of Italian at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. I have the special pleasure today to be joined by two guests on today's episode. Julia Harston and John McLukas, who have just completed a monumental bilingual edition. The wretch, otherwise known as Guerrino, by 16th century poet, Tulia Deregonna. The work was just published this year with Eter Press, part of the other voice in early modern Europe. It's a pleasure to be with both of you this morning, the full collaborative team. So, John and Julia, welcome and thank you so much for being here. Thank you, thank you for having us. Thank you. So, Julia, I want to start with you because you mentioned in the introduction that this has been a project in the making for quite some time, 20 years, you name it. So, it's a really extraordinary achievement in patience and perseverance. And I know that you've worked on Tulia for quite some time and in other respects too on her lyric poetry, on her letters. So, I'm wondering if you could give us an introduction to how Tulia first landed on your desk and what your journey with her has been like over these 20 plus years. Okay, great. Well, Tulia really was born out of a project for a conference that I co-organized with Franca Camis at the American Academy in Rome in 1998. And the topic of the conference was women in papal Rome. I did not present a paper at that conference, but in the aftermath, we were planning on doing an edited collection. And so, I started looking around for a woman, a, and b, someone who was related to Rome, and quite frankly, at least in that period that I was interested in, which was mostly the 16th century. The choices were two women at two very different spectrum. One was Tulia that had gone out of the court of zen, poet, later poet, and the other was Vittoria Colonna. And looking at the two, although Vittoria really has probably, we all didn't, not probably, but has definitely wielded much more influence in the world of Italian letters. I was drawn to Tulia. So, in the aftermath of that, the book actually never came to fruition. But then I applied for a fellowship at the Ville Tatti, which I won, and not being on a tenure track, I continued to work on the fellowship proposal that I had made, which was Tulia. Also, I should mention, at the time, there was a very important point institute, a summer institute that had been organized by Albert Raeble. And I participated in that, and that was, I think, very important to me. And it was, I actually wrote the proposals for both her sonnet sequence, as well as her, as her epic poem, the, the reds, and received instructions from them. We had to do first the, the sonnet sequence, her songbook, her Kenzoniere. So, that's, that's what happened. And over time, I have to say that I, I believe very much in working in archives, which is very, very curious, and requires also talents that I really don't have such as incredible paleography skills. But it has been really fruitful so far in terms of reconstructing Tulia's life, which is also something that began. Also, I've had a number of different scholars who have generously passed along information to me, and I, I have to mention Philippa Jackson and Marcello Simoneca have been wonderful. And anytime, anytime they come up, I'm like, did Tulia in the archives, they just send me an email, and that has been very fruitful. That's so fantastic. I love that the story both starts and ends with collaboration. These conferences that lead to lingering questions for decades with new interlocutors. But I'll ask you the same question, right? What really brought you to Tulia's work? Well, I was a Latin major in college, Latin classics. And so, when I decided to pursue a graduate degrees in Italian, it was natural for me to have kind of an attraction to, let's say, long form poetry. I'd written a thesis about Vienniet as an undergraduate. And when I got to Yale Graduate School in 1976, and almost immediately realized I would be working with Paolo Valeseo as my supervisor, he liked my conversancy with Latin classics, and he liked my interest in narrative poetry. Let's put it that way. The author of my heart, if you want to call him that, is Adiosto. So I had a very, very fruitful several years of study of Adiosto leading to my dissertation on gender roles in the Orlando Furioso. And that, I think, instinctively put me in sympathy and solidarity with what was then a very, very new reality in Italian literary studies. The reading list of Italian authors, which my cohort members and I were expected to start studying the first day we enrolled to prepare for our comprehensive four years later, we already noticed in 1976 that there was one female author, let's say one and a half prior to the late 19th century. I say half because the computer on Zella was on the list. But if you looked at literary histories of that time, many scholars thought that she was not a woman, but that that was a male poet mimicking the female voice. And Vitoria Colonna obviously was a great canonical poet. And the people in my cohort were already starting to research women authors, especially in the Renaissance, Tito Rosenthal, and they don't need a chronicle and so forth. So when the Tito Lia project came along, I found it fascinating. And it matched my interest in epic and my not professional interest in women's writing, but it was a good match for things I cared about. And so fantastic to thinking about how the people that you met in graduate school contributed to the early on to the same series that is still so thriving today with the other voice that now it's under like we will we don't have one and a half we have a hundred and a half hundred and half plus of women writers and still more to be worked on and your volume just allows that to happen. And it's in a particular genre. So with the second question, I'll go back to you Julia because, you know, epic is so particular for a genre, John was just giving us right to the long literary history of it back to the classical period. So it's really rare that early modern woman of the 16th century would have these resources and the time to dedicate it to it. So I'm wondering if for our listeners, you could contextualize historically what this means, what what is she doing in epic. She spent so long as you were telling us right up in in the lyric tradition, the epistlery tradition, and this pivot is is both unique and and how does she make it her own does she make it her own. Thank you. I think the pivot in her life occurs in 1537, which is also an important year. In terms of Italian history and that is when her, then I don't want to say supporter or or but certainly someone who had helped her along the way. People's thoughts you was captured at the battle of Montemurlo and in prison and within a year and a half, he was dead. It seems that he committed suicide. And it's that point that Julia actually pivots from being what Georgina my son had already had always called her the intellectual court of sin and became what I call a woman of letters. We know she wrote poetry before that there are many instances of people referring to it. It's only after that point that she becomes more significantly involved in writing and in writing in different genres, as you had said. So I think probably most of the people who are listening here today know her as a woman philosophy because of her dialogue on the infinity of love, which was published in 1547. And even the Medici court and the Medici Duke of Florence, causing the first recognized her as both the poet and a philosopher. And that is written plain and clear in a document in the Archives and Florence. So as she pivots in this regard, she publishes in 1547 both those works that you mentioned, her song book and her dialogue. And at the end of her song book, it's divided into different sections. And the last section includes not poems by her, but a number of poems by other people writing to her, praising her naturally. And one of them talks about her turning her desire towards Caliope and Cleo. So the muses of Epica and history. And soon after this, so that's in '47, we're assuming that it was before then that this event had occurred. We don't really have, besides, I'd have many records of people referring to her writing in Epicorn. So recently, a letter has surfaced, which talks about when she wrote to the Marguerita Daustria, who was the first wife of Elisandre de Medici, who was then murdered. And she later went on to marry and moved to Piazzanza. That her brother-in-law is Cardinal Elisandre Fernese. And there is a letter that exists somewhere in the world, and my appeal to ever hear this if they happen to know where it is to let me know. And it was mentioned in an auction catalog in the early part of the 20th century. And it had been in the hands of the Corvizieri, who was a paleographer and a man who worked in the State Archive in Rome. And the catalog says that in this letter, Tulia writes to Marguerita Daustria asking her to thank her brother-in-law, Cardinal Elisandre Fernese, for allowing her to leave the adventurous life. So the idea is that she had a stipend of some sort, and she knew very well a number of people that he was, in fact, promoting, although the Fernese area famous for being stingy. But at any rate, it would have allowed her the time and the space in order to write. Which, in fact, that letter was from January of 1551. She died in March of 1556. She had already started the poem. So we're talking about a good number of years that she had to write the poem. And of course, it's a time that is incredibly interesting because it's in the midst. It's in the beginning of when there's a huge debate surrounding the text that John mentioned earlier. A little if you go out of your hostels, Orlando Furioso, complaints about it, people writing in favor, even, but there were many years before Taso actually published. And so she's writing right at a time when there is a great deal of discussion regarding what an epic poem should be, how it should, you know, what kind of hero it should have. This is also at the same time when the works of Aristotle, the poetics, is being reproposed in translation. Now, we actually know that Tolia didn't know Latin, but, you know, I think it also, even those of us who do know Latin, it's a whole lot easier to read it in our own language than it is in English. So in that regard, I think she was struggling to find a place and, you know, I think literary history assumes that the epic poem is the highest of writing that one aspires to. So it only makes sense that having experimented in other genres, she then took on the epic poem. So that brings to mind, too, just how much Adiosto, and this is attribute also to John's dissertation, right, and how rich the field is, subfield is of women's and gender studies in Ayosu's poem, really opened up a lot, look at a bit of floodgate for women to intervene, and then it sounds like also in this time, to Laura Terecinas commenting and working through Adiosto, right? So there's a lot of entry points into epic for women after 1532, as early as 1537, as you mentioned with that letter. So with how women reached epic, I'm curious, John, in your translation, you know, of 28, 10,000 lines of poetry. I think that rivals, Adiosto's quite admirably, right, 36 cantoes, a little bit less than his 42, right? This is no small feat. So many congratulations, both to you and Natalia, on that matter. So Julia just gave us this great overview of how Natalia found epic, and I'm curious in your own life, how did you find the translation, what were your goals as you approached it, and did it change over time as you were working on it? I'd like to start by contributing a couple observations on the question of genre, because as an Adiostoista, I arrived at Julia, forgetting how unusual Adiosto was in his own terms, because he's now considered a canonical master, however, yes, he was highly controversial in his generation, and in fact, Julia names him in her introduction, objecting that she mentions him with great admiration, but she objects to his occasional indecency, and his not being a pure chased work, such as the one she's undertaking. What is intriguing to me, as I've mentioned in other contexts, because there's a lot of quite racey material in the mesquino, but what there also is, which is clearly a deviation from Adiosto, and of course, Tosva didn't exist yet, so to speak, is the fact that she limits herself quite strictly to the tragic tone, that she doesn't have the overtly ribbled or hilarious shifts of diction, which make Adiosto so kind of quicksilver and dazzling. She has in particular, as a deviation from her immediate Italian language source, Andriata Barberino, by writing in poetry and dividing the text into Kanti, she gives herself almost the responsibility of writing a dignified poem to each Kantil. And her diction in those is extremely different from the narrative sections of each Kantil, that is, that the Kantil begins with this very lofty, usually invocation of some kind, in which the verse is naughty, it's proto-baroque in its complexity and sort of striving for effect and dignity. And then she goes into a much more discursive style in the actual storytelling. What I did find very early on was that I had to translate her into prose. I needed to get the content across. And the content, to me, is extremely interesting, varied, rich, intriguing. And her actual compositional style would be an obstacle for most readers in English. She plays very, very, I wouldn't say she plays fast on what I would say, she takes extreme advantage of the ability of Italian poetry to reverse the subject and the direct object of a verb in the word order. And there were countless passages which were completely opaque to me until Corsietti's critical edition of Andrea was published in 2005. And if you read Andrea's prose, it's obvious who's the subject of the verb and who's the direct object. I mentioned in my note also at the introduction of this volume, she's very free in her use of possessive pronouns. So the word "soul" in all its forms might refer to any of seven people present in the episode she's talking about. If you read Andrea, it's obvious who's sword it is. In Turia it's often not, and I think between footnotes and occasional bracketing, Julia and I have pretty well clarified that. The thing I faced as a translator, I guess my decision was I need to get the story across legibly. And there were times when, frankly, and I think any translator will understand my pain in this. There were times when I thought I am improving this book. A person can read this octave and understand the literal meaning much better than if they were reading the Italian even with native Italian. So, and then you think if I clarify and I falsify, am I depriving the reader of the pleasure of deciphering the meaning with the tools which Tulea's first readers would have had? So that was kind of my communal with the translation. And I worked very methodically, I just started at the beginning and went straight through. And the most drastic revisions came first when Corsietti came out and I was able to understand the literal meaning in some places where I had not previously. And then second, when Tulea successfully negotiated for the book to be issued in a bilingual edition, which I think immensely, a measurably increases its value to the academy, the knowledge that the reader would have the Italian on the left page made it possible for me to eliminate about 500 notes where I might have put, might have quoted the Italian in my note because I wasn't absolutely positive how to translate it. And that becomes unnecessary if the reader has access to the Italian text. So that was a really joyous process of eliminating notes that were no longer required. Absolutely. And so, congratulations, Julia and John, and for getting more bilingual editions of Italian texts on the market, because as you say, John, it just facilitates reading and going between the two languages much more easily. So I want to pivot on two words that you just said, John, to describe the plot. You said it's varied and that it's rich. So if we can speak for a little bit about the plot, this is a question for both of you. And this epic hero, Misquino, is on the move a lot throughout this story. And you describe him, Julia, as a thoroughly religious hero. And he does as all good epic heroes do, which is go out in the world to try to find his sense of self channeled through his family origins. And he's participating in this tradition of epics that are about displacement and exile and the search for where does the individual fit in a broader community. And along the way, as you detail so carefully and as John, you render so clear in the translation, is that Guadino has this massive appetite for travel. It's about self-knowledge, but it's also about experience of the world and all of its latitudes and longitudes. So in this travel, he's also hungry to learn about customs and he ventures kind of everywhere. He goes from Constantinople to India, to Mecca, to Ethiopia, to Egypt, to Rome, and then onto Ireland because he has to, of course, descend into the underworld. And the list goes on and on. And for you both, I'm just curious, what does Guadinos, what do Guadinos travels? How do they make the poems of rewarding? And given where we are right now in Italian studies, what do they reveal to us about these early modern encounters that Tully is sleeping herself right in with difference, with other and this, with alterity? How is that translated or facilitated through this ambitious travel? Well, I think one thing that I would mention, and I was looking at this earlier, is I'm wondering to what degree, and I'm only, it only occurred to me this afternoon, and you would think, after 20 years, why hadn't this occurred to you earlier. Is to what degree he is also emulating Alexander the Great? Because he is so many times making references to Alexander the Great, I'm thinking also of the, you know, the Petrarchan reference as well. And so, I mean, there is something with that. There's also, obviously, the fact that she was following a plot that had been given to her bandre, the Barbidino, so in one sense, it's really, as you put it, Kate, talking about the hero rather than talking about specific choices that Tully made, one choice that Tully had did make, that's an issue that has to do with difference, is that she, you know, she differentiates from, from, and a couple of different instances, but one in particular regards her use of different biographies of Muhammad. And she says, specifically, that although her source text says one thing, she thinks another, and then she goes on to give two different versions of Muhammad's life, as one might expect in those years, a condemnation of Islam. And I should also say that she, several times, makes condemnations of Islam that have to do with its treatment as regards women. So there are some sort of feminist gestures on her part as regards the role of women, and the fact that, you know, in Christianity, you can only have one wife instead of two. I, you know, one thing that I would, that I would like to return just a little bit to what John said earlier, you know, he is thoroughly religious indeed, her character. And I have gone so far as to say almost that sometimes I find him a bit unlikable in that he, he never has moments of temptation. And he, he always makes the right choice, the moral right choice. Now, is this an indication of the time period that she was writing in, is this an indication of, I mean, she's writing during Trent, basically, or is this an indication of a former court of son who needs to be properly moral in some ways? And, and finally, the last aspect of this that, again, it's a difference between her text and, and, and that is, is that she writes, except for the preface, she writes in the third person. And, or is Andrea writes in the first person? And I, I think it allows the reader to some degree to feel closer to him than we do with an omniscient narrator that she uses. In that regard, she, she made an interesting choice in adapting Andrea, and of course, she doesn't name Andrea at any point, but you can prove textually that she was looking at is, is Italian text. Um, she, she unlike Andrea sticks to one narrator and Andrea has passages in which there's the omniscient narrator who we might call Andrea. And then almost without, um, transition, he will quote directly from Guarrino's memoirs. And so, there are passages in the Guarrino, Andrea, which are in, in Guarrino's own voice. Um, and it's, I think it's awkward. It makes it seem sort of like it wasn't written by a professional. He does say at one point early on, oh, and by the way, I have a manuscript here, but he doesn't say, and now getting back to on to the Guarrino's voice, here's what he says, he just suddenly shifts voice. Um, and that, that would be not only chaotic, but maybe less, um, it wouldn't fit with the tragic tone that she's adopting the seriousness of her, of her text. Um, and I, I would note also that she, she introduces two systematic, thematic, um, elements which are not present in Andrea. First of all, she constantly emphasizes the extraordinary beauty of Guarrino. Um, that is, you know, there's a passage I love where Andrea says that a young woman admired Guarrino because he was strong and his armor was very becoming to him. And Tullia says, because he had born beauty since his cradle. Wait, just because he's very good looking. Um, that's not what Andrea says at all. And then also, um, well, in a, in an interesting woman's voice way, uh, Tullia concentrates much, much, much, much more on the feelings of women in the story than Andrea does. Uh, at this, and feelings in general, she's much more sentimental about epic friendship, like the relationships between Guarrino and his three or four best friends that he travels with and journeys with emotionally. Um, those descriptions are much more intense than in Andrea. But downside, she is, uh, harshly critical of women's immorality in ways that Andrea is not, um, that is really a, a sub-feme that goes exactly with what Julia just said about her presentation as a woman who formerly led a different kind of life and who is in harmony with with the church. - Great, if I'm right. here so we've made greedy no out to sound like someone who's thoroughly unlikable and I don't think that's true. Also getting back to the question of the narrator I think that we should say one is that she makes and although she has no rival at sort of events taking place or any kind of slapstick humor but she does have an ironic voice. That's a description. She'll say something that it's just a little. when you're reading it you pause and you think "did she do that on purpose or not?" but so it's very subtle. The other thing that is not subtle at all and is very interesting and has garnered quite a bit of discussion is the fact that her narrator oscillates genders between being a male and being a female and it is a systematic. it occurs systematically of all 36 Kanti, so she'll. and she at one point says that you know she's. although she's talked swords and blood even though she's a woman and at other times. and a lot of times of course with the Italian you can't tell what the gender is because it's being hidden either by a present tense or but I. I mean if you look at all Kanti it is systematically one, the other, the another and it goes back and forth throughout the entire text which is very interesting. I think. I think the teachable text is the poem "Taccanto III Diagridulio" in which she literally embeds a masculine adjective between two feminine adjectives referring to herself and and it I think that was you know very skillfully ambiguous in the writing. One thing about Guerrino that strikes me. he's not exactly likeable or unlikable but compared to our modern concept of what travel is for he does not change. Guerrino on page one is identical to the Guerrino on page million and and he doesn't like learn from the Muslims or develop sympathy for the giants or and some of Tulea's comments that Julia just referred to her little Fricettine. Sometimes anthropologically she will. she the narrator will be sympathetic. For instance if these people reading dinner seated on the floor in one context she might say that's in decent you know you can see the men's private parts if they're not careful but in another context she'll say well that's similar to what we saw in Rome during the Jubilee or something like the pilgrims in Rome when they stay in inexpensive hostels that eat on the floor sometimes. So there are things like that where she's very comparitivist and by Zikivai kind of in other places where she's quite strict and judgmental and Guerrino is impervious to change she's just Guerrino always. But it's so fascinating to think about those ways that she's exploiting I think I hate to always bring her back to our Yosto but it does seem so fascinating the this relationship between the big US ambivalent narrator and in Tulea's case the author that wants to tell you at least from the get go how to read the text and who she's writing it for. So I want to pivot now to kind of from the plot to the paradox and get into one of these elements that I think makes this text so delightfully unique and something that I really gravitate to selfishly because of my own research but this is Tulea's address to her readers at the very beginning and I want to quote your translation itself in two parts. So in this address to the reader Tulea reflects quote in reading we can direct ourselves independently following our own will entirely whether a lone company briefly or at length without expense risk harm or fatigue and to our own full satisfaction and happiness and then towards the end of the note she continues assertively I am confident that I have produced for the world a book which will be very welcome on all sides such as can be read with delight and usefulness by every kind of honorable and virtuous person so it seems interesting here that that she's imagining this great every kind of honorable and virtuous person this diversity and also kind of singularity and and whether or not her her hero gets to participate in in that mix so I think we can say kudos to Tulea for imagining reading in this really capacious way transformational and imagining kind of its universal applicability to all audiences and I want to then bring this question to where you imagine this text how it working with readers today I can't help but think I teach always on epic and on women writers so I can't wait to bring it into my own class is that one space where you see this text functioning it's bilingual nature makes it accessible to readers of either Italian or of English ideally of both so have you brought this text into classrooms have students looked at it what do you how do you envision the readers the way that Tulea does well I I have occasionally taught passages of the of the mesquino I my whole career was a Towson University which is personally I wish we could just wave a wand and change the name to Maryland State but that's what it is it's the second university in the public system of Maryland but literally none of my students ever became an Italian professor and I taught Italian 101 probably 40 or 50 times in the course of my career and then in the junior or senior years of students who continued we would do things like a literary survey one and two and at that time of course our text wasn't out so my students would read photo copies of passages of the 1561 edition of the SESA edition original edition of Tulea and to my surprise I would almost say they liked it better than I did places I would say you know notice the word repetition in these octaves and they would say well she's just she's declaring a theme she's she's you know it's not unartful it's it's philosophical or it's content and the students also they had fun because they were learning to decipher the 16th century print with the ligature on the double S and the use of V and U as capital or minuscule letters um you know so they were enjoying that but the the beginning of kind of three you know we all agreed was was more than playful it was intriguing and kind of bold and it worked now I do have to say that I never in my teaching career because I did not have students who were majoring in Italian or playing to go to graduate school in Italian um I always dealt with questions of do you like this book or does this book affect your life you know when we read Dante they would talk about the roommates having obsessions that they thought were unhealthy and that helps them understand how to run Francesca without saying that adultery is a sin you know things like that so we were very what is this book mean to you and um given that they were reading only maybe two or three pages total out of the book because it would be part of a survey course and it was not focused on women they loved the fact that it was written by a woman that they never heard of they might have heard of Vitoria Colonna even with their level of general reading that they never heard of Tulia and then they they they kind of thought of they thought it is maybe her or her voice has been kind of a good sport they thought it was fun or they thought it was intriguing or you know so it was it teaches you know it it works in the classroom if my students had been more and had a broader deeper bibliography I think I would have taught it a completely different way but it works is and I sidebar about Adiosto um when I taught him in English in the English department one time I was astonished at how how carefully and and and graspingly these students read Orlando Frioso in the Barbara Reynolds translation they knew every twist of plot to more than I did after studying him for you know decades and the friend of mine said well they read Harry Potter and and I went duh yes um and I think I think Tulia benefits from that same world my experience has been more um teaching as you preface really in the the context of an ego document. and in the expansion of life writing, and that just really happens to do, happens to occur because of the particular classes that I have taught. I too have almost virtually always taught and although I'm delighted to hear that you have taught entire epics, I can't say that I would ever take that on in the sense of one really, you know, I feel I'm one of those people who feels like you need to read something in its entirety. And so for years, since we're maybe teaching one or two books of Castelloni's books of the courtier, I would always have my students read the entire thing. Of course, they complained, they complained about it, but later said, you know, it was useful because I spoke to that. So I think that there is a possibility of teaching the text in an undergraduate context. I think it more likely also because of the nature of the poetry itself that it was useful to in the context of courses on women's writing and at the sort of delve more into the possibility of looking at issues of intertextuality between women writers. I mean, that's something I think that is occurring now certainly with some, not always with others. Of course, we don't really have a lot of information about the reception of the mosquito or the wretch. It was published once. As John said in 1561, although the frontispiece says 1560, archival information has revealed that it was in the early 1661. And of course, it was almost 20 years before another woman wrote or tried to write epic, at least that we know of. Now, as we mentioned before, you head back into the archives and things begin to surface, but you know, more than that, the fonte es Floridoro is 1581, and we have a number of different examples since that. So Tully was very much of a trailblazer in that regard. Although, you know, we don't really have a sense so far of how many lightbulbs she turned on and others. I think I think we can brag about that more than we do because we say first Italian woman epic. And I think I'm not aware of books of any genre in any country written by women of this massive length. I mean, this is a huge, huge book. And it's not like, oh, there were 17 epics by women in Poland already, but she was the first in Italy. It's like, no, she was maybe the first in the world to sit down and write a book of this length. You are right. We are being careful scholars because some people have hypothesized that in the 13th century, there was a German epic poem that was possibly written by a woman, although it was, you know, there's we don't really know. So I vote for Tully. I agree. I do too. And as you say, Julia, I mean, how many lightbulbs she turned on? There are also these intertextual lightbulbs. And John gave us that great anecdote about Tully describing Guirino with all of this, this language about how attractive he is. I mean, that is what gets eaten up by the women starting with foam day in 1581 on. And they're caught in the moment where those Tossabetic verses that he hosted debates are on fire. And so there, there's a lightbulb, we don't know how bright, but it's there. And your volume will encourage those electricians, the literary scholars to to dive in. So we've reached our last question, which is asking about the future in a way. So we know readers are going to dive into this book. Classrooms are going to get to Tully somehow, but I'm curious for you both what lingers next as Tully as stay on your desks, or do you sail onto other waters? Well, I am still working on Tully. I'm very much so. In fact, that was just before this, planning a trip to the archives in Florence to because every time I go, I find something. It's really quite extraordinary. And a lot of it has to do with you were talking about the preface. I have an essay on her, her preface to the readers, which is coming out in a volume that I co-edited with Milena Sabato, who's an Italian historian, on women as readers in early modern Italy. And that will be out in the fall of 20, and I look at length at her, at her preface and kind of what she's trying to do with it. And the source of advice she's giving to women readers in general. Project is to write an intellectual biography of Tully. The title is The Thornie Laurel, Tully of the Regona as Woman of Letters. There are some issues here that the archives in Ferata have been closed now for five or six years because of architectural reasons. But I'm hopeful that there and find something because we know that a lot of interesting things happened when she was in Ferata. And that was pretty much from 1537 to 1542, 43. We're not quite sure. At any rate, yes. So I'm all about with a great title, no less. I love the title. Yeah. Looking forward to reading the book. So I am fully retired from academics, so I'm not planning on working on Tully or any author, certainly for publication. I do, something that I wish we knew more about was Tully's attitude to the manuscript at the time of her death. And I think there may be, I mean, did she leave a fair copy ready for the printer? Or did she, we know that Julia mentions in the introduction the possible reduction of the manuscript before it went to Cess off or to be set up. But some issues that intrigue me and that I would be happy to have someone else study there are two noticeable discontinuities in the plot towards the end of the book. And I didn't do enough analysis from one actor to the next to see if there might be pages missing. Or if it's just that she chose not to do those episodes that are present in Andrea or possibly did she have a defective copy of the Quirino. But on a Sandra who is one of the best friend companions of Quirino is absent from the action and then suddenly is back without explanation. And this is, you know, he's been a companion of travels, but then he went home to Constantinople. And then suddenly he's just like saying hi and nobody says where have you been or oh my god, we were so worried or how's your father or you know, it's just like he's back. And you think that's explained in Andrea. And the death of Vestila Dorol who's the wicked king who BC just Constantinople in the first books, his death in battle is described in Andrea and absent in Tulia. And I think there's, there might be clues that could be teased out of the existing texts as to the or text, you know, the manuscript. So I think that's there's some pending questions. So although John very modestly did not say so, he also has a life as a novel writer and I would urge you you can look on Amazon and buy one of his three novels that are published and he continues to write. So if you like his prose, you know where to go. You have to be over 21 to read most of them, but I think that that word should look there. We might be there with this group. Those sound like such lively projects and such promising cues for future research. Thank you both so much. I have so loved learning about Tulia. I loved reading this poem. I look forward to spending more time with it. It has been a delight and pleasure speaking with you. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Yeah, it's been lovely to talk about Tulia. [Music]