Jelena Bakic gives lecture on Paratext and Privacy
In June we had the pleasure of welcoming Jelena Bakic to the centre. Jelena is a researcher at the Free University of Bolzano and affiliated with the University of Porto, Transdisciplinary Research Center for Culture, Space and Memory (CITCEM) and PRIVACY.
Jelena gave a lecture at the centre titled Paratext and Privacy in Renaissance Italy: Researching Privacy through the History of Emotions. We have interviewed Jelena about her approach to paratexts and the history of emotions, how it relates to privacy, and her affiliation with PRIVACY:
Can you start by describing what paratext is, and how you work with it theoretically and practically?
Paratext is a text and space around the main text of the book. There is that famous Genette’s definition “Paratexts = peritext + epitext”. Genette (1987) defines it as the combination of liminal elements connected with the book. The ‘peritext’ includes titles, dedicatory epistles, or dedications to the reader, and the ‘epitext’ is defined as text outside the book “or under cover of private communication (letters, diaries, and others)”. Methodologically, I assume that early modern paratexts need particular attention and I approach them by applying the method of ‘slow close paratextual reading’ combined with a PRIVACY methodological approach within the specific historical context, genre and prevalent rhetorical conventions, focusing on the texts as material objects. Especially useful is PRIVACY's focus on areas where notions of privacy and the private are negotiated; the heuristic zones (society, community, household, chamber, body, soul/self). By focusing on these zones, the interconnected boundaries or thresholds between public and private become more visible. Theoretically, I approach the paratexts in the context of history of emotions and privacy studies. In my research, I followed ideas by Julie Eckerle, who argues that for women, who already wrote from the social margins, the marginal space of the book represented one of the strategic ways to express ideas that could not be formulated either in the main text of the book or in some other form. That allowed authors to express personal commentary and to refer to some private aspects of their life that they could not express elsewhere. I need to say that this can also be applied to paratexts of other authors who wrote from the social margins, and that will hopefully be shown in my future research.
What do you get out of studying texts as material bodies? What does the materiality give you that the text itself omits?
This is a very important question, as I believe that we get a lot. I am very grateful that we live in a digital age, and I can just imagine how much researchers from previous centuries would be jealous of us, who with one click can find a rare book, download it, and analyze it into detail. However, when doing archival research, you always get more from the physical source than when you approach it in digital form. Not only are many features not visible without the archival investigation, but also the emotional part cannot be taken into consideration without taking the same book that was in the hands of the author or reader 500 years ago. When the book is analyzed as a material object it is possible to trace more about readers, owners, cultural practices, and printing houses. If you download the book from google books, usually there is no cover, and the cover of the book can offer important clues for understanding it. Here, I think, we come to the importance of the history of emotions and emotions of the researcher. At the moment, I have the privilege of going to the Italian archives to consult many books in search of the texts. By September this year an online catalogue containing around 100 paratextual elements connected with female authorship in the 16th century should be available.
Every time I take a Renaissance book or manuscript in my hands I feel some kind of quite new emotion; a mix of responsibility, admiration, connection with the past, gratitude, happiness, fear, frustration, and love, which is difficult to explain but must influence my interpretation and representation of that work.
How do the paratexts relate to demarcations of public and private?
When a book is published, we can agree that all paratexts are public. But that ‘publicity’ should be questioned, in my opinion. Especially in the 16th century (the transitional century between the manuscript and print). Let’s take the example of the dedicatory epistle. In most cases, the dedicatory epistle is written separately and added to the book later, therefore it has its own autonomy. As already mentioned, in some cases it represented a safe space to say certain things (we have examples where we can see that the Inquisition in the 16th century did not consider it as important as the main text). So our task as researchers, would be to find those things that refer to the private space, domestic, house, secret, and to try to figure out where it is a rhetorical strategy and when it is not, if possible. In some cases we have other archival material, which can prove the historicity of the statement in the paratexts, meanwhile in other cases we need to compare them with the other paratexts produced in the same historical period, same language, and only then we could come to some specific conclusions.
How is studying paratexts and dedicatory epistles related to privacy specifically?
Well, firstly we have private and public dedicatee. In some dedicatory epistles there are dedicatees completely unknown to the public, but with whom the person who dedicates is connected by personal, familiar or friendly bonds. In other cases a dedicatory epistle is signed ‘from home’ or ‘from villa’ and the importance of social distancing is pointed out. The epitext is in some cases unpublished and appears in the form of private letters. The errata in some cases has strong references to the authorial I, to the self, when the author tries to correct certain mistakes. But mostly, I think, the reference to privacy is obvious in the transitional 16th century.
What is querelle des femmes, and how did it become a part of your research?
The notion of the querelle des femmes or ‘debate about women’ by itself covers the vast literature concerning women and their roles within society during the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe. The first book signed by women in a defence of women was La Cité des dames (1405), by Christine de Pizan. The female and male authors wrote about new questions regarding gender roles, the intellectual and moral equality of men and women, the female position within the domestic economy, providing arguments to defend female equality or superiority in relation to men. It was written polemically, in the form of dialogues, treatises, conduct books, or sometimes in the form of oral discussion at the universities, academies, courts or salons. These texts appeared on the Italian peninsula as well as in other parts of Europe. Its peak in the Italian context was during the 16th century, particularly around 1580, in literary academies in Veneto. It lasted until 18th century.
I became interested in it during my doctoral programme “Text and Event in Early Modern Europe”. My doctoral thesis was focused on three dedicatory epistles signed by women, in Italian, in the 16th century. Three of them used the dedicatory epistle to express the ideas of female equality with men, but also in some cases they defended the female superiority. And although I studied Italian culture and literature, did my MA in gender studies and my PhD in Early modern Italian studies, I have realized that almost no one spoke about that, and unfortunately also now when I mention querelle des femmes in academic circles, it is rarely known. However, during my MA in Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Bologna, prof. Patrizia Caraffi taught an important course on medieval women, with strong emphasis on the importance of The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, which strongly influenced me. And after many years, prof. Caraffi invited me to take part in a project called Men for women, studying men, who wrote about the female position in the early modern period, which is an important contribution to our understanding of querelle des femmes. Although according to some scholars that was a pure rhetorical exercise without historical or social significance, these texts represent important testimonies, especially for us today, I think, on how the ideas of sex and gender were analyzed long ago. In the Italian context, two women Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte gave the most important contribution to the debate.
How specifically do you view querelle de femmes in relation to privacy?
At the moment I can follow the ideas of the querelle des femmes in the dedicatory epistles and as such connect it with privacy. If we go deeper and follow the arguments on how female equality or superiority was defended, we can find many connections for example in terms of education and space, women were kept out of the public world and kept within prescribed gender roles, which varied from place to place, at home. Women’s inferiority was mainly argued for by Aristotle’s thought, bodily weakness, the authority of the Bible, the idea that she was made of Adam’s rib, and by common and statutory law.
How would you characterize the history of emotions and its object? How did you get interested in it?
During my PhD I became very interested in the history of emotions, when my friend and colleague Jamila Kadi in her research analyzed her sources from the perspective of history of emotions. My doctoral dissertation was based on three dedicatory epistles by three women, and I noticed that they were connected by the strong emotional language, which they used to react against the injustice they felt in their private life. That injustice was strongly connected with their gender. I returned to the history of emotions when I got a postdoctoral fellowship in 2022 at the University of Western Australia with Prof. Diana Barnes as my supervisor. According to the history of emotions, there are two main assumptions that should be taken into consideration in understanding the historical past: 1. the importance of emotions in human actions and, 2. the instability of emotions; they change as the historical context changes. Culture shapes people’s emotions and they vary across time and culture. As we read in Hamlet “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”, which reminds us that thinking about emotions is important.
How would you characterize the relationship between privacy and the history of emotions?
Paratexts, and especially dedicatory epistles are marked by strong authorial self-promotion, they stand in between the public and the private, and provide us with more insight into understanding the private and public roles of the author or writer.
It is important here to point out that when we study emotions, we cannot know how the historical subject really felt and often what people admit to experience and feel may not accord with what they really feel. However, we are not looking for that, but are interested in emotional norms, emotional concerns, emotions reflected in social practices, and in emotional silence. The interpretation of the emotion is an integral part of emotions, thus in the sources we are in fact following thoughts about emotions. Also, I think that the history of emotions has the ability to make us feel the likeness with or difference from our fellow humans.
How did you get affiliated with the Centre for Privacy Studies and how has this influenced your work?
My affiliation with the Centre for Privacy Studies happened after two years of intensive collaboration. I got to know about the Centre for Privacy Studies from my dear friend Natacha Klein Käfer. She invited me to send a proposal for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme in affiliation with PRIVACY. Natacha sent me her proposal and I was thinking that I would never manage to write something like that. But then, I realized, what it means to have serious institutional, administrative, academic, but also friendly support. My one-page project proposal was accepted by PRIVACY, Prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun accepted to be my supervisor, Natacha was always there to support me in every stage of the process, and then I embarked into the PRIVACY adventure. I submitted my project PARITY – Paratext and Privacy in Renaissance Italy to the MSCA programme in 2020 and it got on the reserve list and was labelled with the Seal of Excellence. As my wish was to come to PRIVACY to develop the project, I decided to reapply the following year, and I got the same score and the second label of Seal of Excellence. This time I decided to send the project to other universities. The University of Bolzano in Italy accepted my research proposal, and now I am entering the final phase of it, under the supervision of prof. Elisabeth Tauber.
All these meetings with PRIVACY colleagues in relation to my MSCA project had a huge impact on my work. It was during Covid that I had my first online meetings with prof. Mette, Natacha, and Nátalia da Silva Perez, and in those moments of uncertainty it was very important for me to have a feeling of belonging to an academic community. It was an important environment for me, both academically and personally. My proposal was read many times by PRIVACY colleagues and friends, and they gave me important advice and ideas e.g. Nátalia suggested how I could include digital humanities in the project, and I exchanged ideas with Liam Benison, whom I have also collaborated with on the symposium "Impressions of Privacy in Early Modern Paratextual Sources”. So, it was clearly collaborative work. Later, I was invited to give a talk for an online conference at PRIVACY, which resulted in the volume Women’s Private Practices of Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe, edited by Natalia and Natacha, to which I have contributed a chapter. This conference and volume paved the way for new collaborations, which led to me co-organizing the conference Practices of Privacy: Vestiges of Dialogue with PRIVACY-colleagues held in Academia Belgica, Royal Netherlands Institute, and The Danish Institute, in Rome. We are now working on the book Vestiges of Dialogue. So somehow, I would say that it was from the first online PRIVACY conference until this more recent one that I have grown as a PRIVACY researcher.