Knots, Or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence

Book excerpt: ""This book is about hair," writes Emanuele Lugli in the first sentence of this innovative cultural history of hair as seen through the lens of Lorenzo il Magnifico's Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers and artists naturalized religious prejudices, circumscribed social practices, and propagated gender and class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and political writings, and in poetry. What, he asks, may've compelled Sandro Botticelli, for example, or the young Leonardo da Vinci and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess about hair? Why take such care in depicting the braids, knots, and textures in their portraits of women specifically? Lugli dives deeply into the cultural production of notions about hair in this period of Florentine history, the way artists, poets, natural philosophers, doctors, politicians, and theologians thought about it, and how they depicted it in their art and writings. From this varied archive, Lugli gathers rewarding insights from practices and beliefs across the disciplines and genres at a crucial time when Renaissance humanists were attempting to define what it meant to live-and be-human. Lugli recuperates overlooked perceptions of hair at the very moment when hair came to be identified as a potential vector for liberating culture, and he corrects a centuries-old prejudice that sees hair as a trivial subject, as a mere female occupation kept on the margins of relevance, relegated to passing fashion or the decorative. As Lugli shows, such oversight is anachronistic, a product of modern biases, and he corrects this by elucidating hundreds of fifteenth-century sources that engage with hair as a fundamental element in the definition of genders, morals, and the laws of nature, and the exercise of power. It is a book that will surprise and delight a wide audience of scholars and anyone interested in the hidden, systemic, creative power that relied on something as unsuspected as hair to coerce people into thinking and behaving according to a code of conduct"--