ABSTRACT
Androniki Dialeti discusses the formation of Renaissance ‘citizenship’ on the models of classical antiquity, medieval scholasticism, civic humanism, and republicanism. The concept of citizenship in the Italian republican regimes, such as Venice and Florence, maintained the dichotomy between male and female natures and affirmed the incompatibility of ‘femininity’ with public life. Political subjecthood and individualism, Dialeti argues, were construed as male attributes associated with newly established forms of hegemonic civic masculinity and the Renaissance ideals of patriotism, moderation, rational thinking, and brotherhood. Supported by arguments offered by religion, medical science, and political philosophy, male educated elites of the republican regimes sanctioned the exclusion of women from politics (along with certain groups of men, including youth, the socially inferior, foreigners, etc.) and reinforced masculinity as an organizing principle of political power with a powerful array of discourses, literary loci and visual representations. Glorifying the republican ethos as a self-evident virtue, male educated elites idealized the contemporary socio-political edifice, politically and discursively produced and enforced inclusion and exclusion in terms of gender and social class.
