Three people in a marriage: a woman and two men. This was the eighteenth-century Italian aristocratic model of marriage, characterized by the presence of the cicisbeo, the escort of another man's wife. Was it a brazen depravity or a complex and refined social institution, revealing aspects of Italian civilization in the Age of the Enlightenment?

Roberto Bizzocchi's book, first published in Italian in 2008, is a welcome, first serious study of this most distinctive and puzzling feature of Enlightenment Italy. reader will be rewarded with a rich, insightful, and beautifully documented treatment of a fascinating phenomenon, long noted but little formally studied. (P. Renée Baernstein, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 89 (2), June, 2017)

Autorentext
Roberto Bizzocchi teaches Early Modern History at the University of Pisa, Italy. Among others, he has written In famiglia. Interessi e affetti nell'Italia moderna (Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2001), and Genealogie incredibili. Scritti di Storia nell'Europa moderna (Bologna, il Mulino, 2009 2nd. ed., French translation: Paris, Editions Rue d'Ulm 2010).

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Who were the Cicisbei? 2. In the World of Enlightenment 3. In the Eighteenth-Century Society 4. The Geopolitics of Cicisbeism 5. The Erotic Implications of Cicisbeism 6. The Cicisbei Banned