In the twenty-first century, it is increasingly common to understand gender and sexuality as fluid. Ours is not, however, the first generation in history to arrive at this insight. The popular Renaissance mythography by Vincenzo Cartari (c. 1531–after 1571), Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi (Images of the Gods of the Ancients, 1556), is an example of the extent to which early modern readers felt at ease in the unsettled expanse between traditional markers of gender. In his catalogue of the iconographic tradition of Venus, beside the helpful marginal marker Venere con la barba (Bearded Venus), Cartari describes how sometimes the ancients represented the goddess with facial hair, as in a sacred statue found on Cyprus “whose face and mien appeared to be that of a man, but who was dressed as a woman.” In the 1571 edition, a woodcut was added, which provided a double portrait of Venus, side by side in two guises: on the left, shrouded in traditional women's mourning garments for Adonis, her fallen lover; on the right, the bigendered, bearded Venus, with male face and feminine attire (fig. 0.1).

An early modern, gender-fluid portrayal of the goddess of love is a fitting opening for this book, which reveals how Italian men and women used Petrarchism as a vehicle with which to move fluidly between the poles of conventionally constructed masculinity and femininity. What is surprising is not so much that these poets worked in the space between prescriptive gender norms. The presence of the bearded Venus in a text as widely circulated as Cartari’s, without commentary or caveat, is evidence enough of comfort with that ambiguity. Rather, it is the willfulness with which they challenged traditional models, exploring radically alternative concepts of what it meant to be a man or woman in early modern Italy.

In the history of Western gender, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted the patriarchal attachment to hierarchical, binary thinking.