Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

Interests

Research

Literature, gender, and politics in the Early Modern period and the era's literatures (French and Italian); interconnections between art, music, and literature

Teaching

French and Italian Renaissance literature and culture, French and Italian novel and theories of the novel, French existentialism and the absurd in their social and political contexts, French and Italian theater, French conversation through film, French composition

Courses

No activities entered.

Scholarly Contributions

Presentations

• Zegura, E. C. (2014, April). Bradamante's Legacy: The Extraordinary Afterlife of an Early Modern Feminist Icon. Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Graduate Romance Association, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, UNC-Chapel Hill.
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  Abstract: When a picture is “both odd and intriguing,” or “a theory is at once fresh and convincing,” says Jacob Bronkowski, “we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We … ourselves make the discovery again.” While these insights elucidate the synergistic relationship between science and the arts, they also help us understand the afterlife of iconic texts and characters that fuel our imaginations and hone our problem-solving skills long after their initial publication. One such character is Bradamante, a female warrior who appeared briefly in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1482), before capturing the imagination of readers with her pivotal role in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532). As a fictional character created centuries ago, Bradamante might easily have passed into obscurity. Yet she has reappeared in diverse genres ranging from baroque theater to opera, cinema, and contemporary fashion design. Richly interdisciplinary, these post-Renaissance incarnations of Bradamante relate not only to Gender Studies, but to Political Science and Peace Studies as well: for in addition to figuring as a symbol of female empowerment, Ariosto’s Amazon is a founding “mother” of the Estense dynasty who offers an androgynous model of governance -- and a cautionary tale about the dangers of resolving conflicts with violence – to both the Ferrarese dukes and future political thinkers. My goal in this paper is to examine both Bradamante’s original identity and her refigurations in Garnier’s Bradamante (1582), Handel’s Alcina (1735), and modern popular culture, while exploring more fundamental questions about the interaction between literature and its sociopolitical context.Relevant time period & Country(-ies): early modern to modern; France, Italy, modern U.S.Key words (limit 6): gender, women, politics, androgyny, music, violence
• Zegura, E. C. (2014, May). Maternal Death and Patriarchal Succession in Renaissance France. Symposium on Death and the Culture of Death-11th International Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona.
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  Queen Claude of France, daughter of Louis XII and the first wife of François Ier, died in 1524 at the age of twenty-four. Although she was a frail woman with a hunched back who likely suffered from scoliosis, she had given birth to seven children in less than eight years— beginning with Princess Louise in 1515, when Claude was not yet sixteen, and ending with Margaret of France in 1523. Little more than a year later, the queen herself would be dead , although not technically from childbirth in its narrowest sense, which the World Health Organization today defines as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within forty-two days of termination of pregnancy.” Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Claude’s numerous pregnancies, undertaken for the glory of France and the House of Valois’s patriarchal succession, contributed to her early death. Indeed, the fact that Claude was not pregnant in the summer of 1524, when she succumbed to a brief illness and died, probably relates more to François’s absence for military matters than to concerns about her health and excessive childbearing: for notwithstanding his numerous mistresses, the king is reputed to have slept with his young queen every night when matters of state and war did not separate them. In 1524, however, François was already deeply embroiled in his ill-fated Italian campaign, which would result in his defeat at Pavia (1525) and subsequent imprisonment in Spain until 1526. During this interim, Claude’s embalmed body remained at Blois, where her posthumous contributions to French nationhood reputedly included miracles among the faithful who venerated her. Unlike Rabelais’s Gargantua, who opted to carouse at home and celebrate his son’s birth rather than attend his wife’s funeral, however, the King of France would eventually mourn his consort’s loss in a ceremonial procession, mass, and burial in early November, 1526, following his release from captivity—more than two years after she had died. In death, more than in life, Claude became an icon of French motherhood.In this paper, I propose to use the model of maternal mortality and sacrifice emblematized by Queen Claude as a springboard for examining the mother’s death in two slightly later literary texts: that of Badebec, Gargantua’s wife, in Chapter 3 of Rabelais’s Pantagruel; and that of the new mother in nouvelle 23 of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, whose rape by an impious Cordelier precipitates her own suicide, the deaths of her son and husband, the indictment of her own brother for murder, and the collapse of her family. While examining the condition of women, and the incidence of and attitudes toward maternal mortality, in early modern France, I will also explore the ambivalent relationship between life and death in the icon of the dying mother, gendered responses to maternal mortality and motherhood in the above texts, and the figurative resonances of matriarchal death within the context of France’s patriarcal culture, patrilineal succession, and nation-building efforts.