On the last day of August, 1397, Carlo Malatesta, Count of Rimini and commander of the Florentine League, won a battle outside Mantua. He entered the city and shortly afterward ordered the destruction of a statue of Vergil which had stood there “for centuries” upon the poet's tomb. In Bologna and Florence, humanists were alarmed. Carlo was no ordinary military vandal: he was a cultivated man, trained in the virtues of the bonae litterae; members of his family had been friends with Petrarch; the chief men of his league were enthusiastic about the new literary culture. Yet here he was, desecrating the memory of the king of poets. To desecrate Vergil was to desecrate poetry itself—or so the humanists construed it when they responded to the event.

The relationship between hermetic beliefs and Renaissance court festivity is by no means a novel object of study. Both literary and intellectual historians have been aware of its interest for many years, and this awareness shows no signs of declining. Although in practice the presence of occult beliefs in the intentions of a court impresario is not always easy to demonstrate, what we know of the court productions and what we know of the culture that generated them suggest that we should be alert to this potential presence. Recently Roy Strong's revision of his book Splendour at Court (1974) under the new title Art and Power (1984) places heightened emphasis on this element in Renaissance courtly and civic festivity.

Born in 1960 with the publication of Philippe Ariès's L'enfant et la vie familiale, family history as we know it has been tremendously fertile. Although the succession is disputed, its progeny are legion. It is not my intention here to trace the complex genealogy of Ariès's descendants or to separate dutiful heirs from rebels who have renounced their patrimony. The family tree is too prolific, its internal divisions too complex. I hope rather to focus on two main themes in the history of the family, themes which seem to me particularly fruitful where our understanding of the Renaissance is concerned. The first theme involves the fundamental structures of family life— ties of kinship and patterns of residence. The second is marriage and the role of women in the family. In both cases, I am particularly interested in the cultural values represented by these structures and behaviors.

Family, marriage, and sex—although it seems to me that the sequence is uncertain—are naturally interrelated in life but not always so in art or, for that matter, in art history. While family and marriage have been much discussed in recent years by historians, they have received very little attention indeed from art historians. Sex, on the other hand, we have always had with us. And while all of one's work is self-referential to some extent, whether one is an artist or an historian of art, it may be that this psychological truth carries a particular danger when one is dealing with matters that are so intimate as family, marriage, and sex. Moreover, there is another issue involved when one is concerned with works of art, at least in the Renaissance or in any period when art was made for patrons, and that is precisely the presence of another psyche in the mixture, in addition to that of the artist himself and that of the historian-observer.

Within the conventions of Renaissance drama and within the protocol of the Tudor court, being a messenger was hazardous duty. Inevitably, it fell to the messenger to hazard the wrath of the powerful by delivering precisely the information that no one really wanted to hear. However, since I could find no way to survey the trends in Shakespearean scholarship on the family without stumbling right into the politics concurrently going on in the “family” of Shakespearean scholars, my analysis of Renaissance literary research on the family, marriage, and sex commits me, I fear, to the hazards of playing the messenger. My title beribbons itself with the de rigueur deconstructive chiasmus and that most trendy of opening entitlements, “The Politics of… . “ It finally arrives, however, at what serves for both the title's ultimate deconstruction and the paper's ultimate subject: “The Politics of Politics.”

The initial impression given by the foregoing papers is of sharp differences between the approaches of historians, art historians, and Shakespeare scholars to family, marriage, and sex. It is quite en historien, for example, that Barbara Diefendorf chooses to dwell on the collective, outward-looking institutions of family and marriage, rather than the intimate, individual, hard-to-plot matter of sexuality. Historians traditionally have been more accustomed to concerning themselves with groups, above all with traceable patterns in what groups do, than with the private quirks of individual actors in the past. This makes an intriguing contrast with Rona Goffen's emphasis on individual sensibility: of the artist, of the patron, and of the modern interpreter of visual evidence.