| This dissertation explores representations of silence and deception in Italian literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, the religious tragedies of Federico Della Valle (Iudit, Ester, La reina di Scozia), and Traiano Boccalini's satires (Ragguagli di Parnaso ). I analyze how these different works portray strategies of deception as a morally legitimate means of achieving religious and political independence from the increasing control of State and Church. Although such strategies are not explicitly theorized until a few decades later in Torquato Accetto's Dissimulazione onesta (1641), my close examination of the historical, social and literary contexts of these works explores the cultural practices that helped to shape philosophical inquiry into the moral ramifications of silence and deception, a quest that involved heretics, rulers and even missionaries of the same period. In addition, I devote particular attention to issues of gender, as some of the female characters in these texts play an essential role in the construction of what I term "moral simulation.";Ultimately, I claim that silence and deception alter traditional representations of reality in different genres, resulting in more porous boundaries between genres. Although rooted in the necessity to protect the life of the authors and the dissemination of their works, the use of allusive and oblique rhetorical strategies becomes a literary code for any text which discusses the interaction between politics and religion. Such a direct reference to the fictive nature of literature shares significant points of intersection with the baroque celebration of ingegno as the fundamental means of achieving aesthetic pleasure. By challenging the limits of rhetoric, the authors of the Counter Reformation explore the unattainability of transparency in human relationships. |
