Mr. Longinotti, your research project is titled “Weaponizing Italian Renaissance Literature: Catholicism, Gender, and Race in Colonial Latin America.”  How did you decide to work on this topic?

It began with my dissertation on Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), a fourteenth century Italian poet who presented himself as the pioneer of the Renaissance, single-handedly ushering in a new era. Building on that, I traced how the idea of the Renaissance changed and spread to other parts of the world. In their conquest of mainland Central and South America, Spain and Portugal encountered people with vastly different histories and trajectories.

I became keenly interested in this question: What happened to this European idea in a foreign context? To what extent was Italian literature weaponized (or not) in this colonial project?

What precisely do you mean when you say that literature is being weaponized?

For example, in the early seventeenth century, the Spanish poet Diego Dávalos y Figueroa wrote a fictional dialogue with his wife in which they discuss European culture, particularly the concept of love. They describe love as a sublime feeling accessible only to refined, well-educated people. In doing so, they draw on the model of love presented by Petrarch and Dante.

In the second part of the work, this very concept is used to pass judgment on the Indigenous population. The wife asks: Can Indigenous people actually love? Her husband’s answer is quite categorical: No, because they are practically like animals, without higher feelings, completely stuck in the moment. Everything that is refined is European. I have found several such instances in which a cultural concept is used to portray Indigenous peoples as less human.

The Renaissance is generally regarded as the golden age of European culture. Should it not be celebrated as such?

No, I would not put it that way. It was undoubtedly a cultural peak. But postcolonial studies have demonstrated how closely colonization is linked to the Renaissance, an era already full of conflicts and tensions. At that time, Europeans began to believe that the history of all of humanity could only be told from one perspective, namely the European one, and the Renaissance was its pinnacle. All cultures that were not perceived as up to this standard were labeled as barbaric.

What particularly fascinates me about Latin America is that many colonial authors, even though they wrote in Spanish, sought to legitimize themselves through Italy rather than Spain. They presented themselves as heirs to the Roman Empire and used this connection to ancient Rome and the Catholic Church to justify modern colonialism.

The Italian poet Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547) is considered an early voice for feminist thought avant la lettre. Nevertheless, her work appears to have been used in Latin America to create an idealized image of the Christian woman: married, chaste, and devoted to her husband even after his death. How does this all fit together?

Colonna was one of the first significant female poets in European literature. Her work is strongly Christian in character; well over half of her poems deal with religious themes. However, in Latin America, very specific aspects of her writing come to the fore. She was married, faithful to her husband, and even after his death she wrote exclusively about him.

Precisely this was then presented as a model for Latin American women. The ideal Catholic wife, rather than the authorial poet, put on a pedestal. The emancipatory dimension of her work is obscured, while the conservative aspect is emphasized. This is not a coincidence, but rather a conscious decision.

Has the research project changed your own view of Renaissance literature?

Many lesser-known works can still tell us a great deal. Latin American literature from that period helps me learn how to appreciate the great texts of the Italian Renaissance anew. Seeing how Latin American authors engage with Petrarch, Ariosto, or Colonna allows me to recognize the brilliance of these original works from a completely different perspective, continually revealing new aspects.

At the same time, I read texts today more attentively, paying attention to gender power dynamics and how the “other” is portrayed.

What has surprised you the most in your research?

I found a curious thing in Dávalos’s work: there is an entire chapter on horses and their role in European culture. I read it the summer that Barbie was in the theaters, a film in which men are obsessively associated with horses. Shortly after that, I watched Oppenheimer, whose protagonist dreams of riding horses on his ranch in New Mexico while working on the Manhattan Project, the US military nuclear research project in the 1940s.

There I was, sitting with a text from the seventeenth century that made the same connection: horses as a symbol of male identity. This continuity across the centuries amazed me. Sometimes history reaches out to us in unexpected ways.

Christopher Ferner conducted the interview. 

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The original German version appeared in German in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin.