The Bernabò case
3. Tyranny's feast

To understand the relationships between equitable tyranny, cruelty and the exercise of judicial power in the fictional posterity of Bernabò Visconti, and as an extension of the reflections developed in the previous year's lecture on the imaginary of devouring and cannibal power, the lecture explores the theme of symbolic inversion between tables of derision and tables of seduction. From Domitian's macabre banquet (Dion Cassius, Roman History, LXVII, 9) to the medieval poetry of the Eaten Heart, the aim is to approach a genealogy of power. We propose an analysis based on a broad corpus, from the Pogge's jokes to the revival of the motif of the captive woman, the beheaded knight and the healed king, from Sercambi to Masuccio of Salerno and Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti. But how to cure the prince of the fear he arouses? That's the question at stake in Matteo Bandello's story of the jester Gonella, where the controbeffa goes awry, proving that power can no longer play innocently with fear.

Contents

• Domitian's macabre banquet (Dion Cassius, Roman History, LXVII, 9): "all were seized with fear and trembling"
• The first gift of living under tyranny is to have one's life saved: "the process of survival is thus captured" (Elias Canetti, Masse et puissance)
• Turning the symposion table upside down (Konrad Vössing, "Mensa Regia . Das Bankett beim hellenistischen König und beim römischen Kaiser, Munich, 2004)
• Mets noirs et sarcophages: la subversion des rites et des espaces des funérailles romaines (Manuel Royo, in Banquet du monarque dans le monde antique, Rennes, 2014)
• Surviving terror means not living more, but less than living
• Derangements of theimitatio Augusti : "the triumphs, or rather, as the crowd said, the funerals that Domitian celebrated for those who had died in Dacia and Rome" (Dion Cassius)
• "(Pliny the Younger, Panegyric of Trajan) "What a joy to throw those superb faces to the ground, to run over them with iron in hand, to break them with the axe, as if those faces had been sensitive and that each blow would have caused blood to gush out!
• Back to Bernabò Visconti: equitable tyranny, cruelty and the exercise of judicial power
• Where the wheels come off: "Although he was cruel, there was a great deal of justice in his cruelties" (Franco Sacchetti, Trecentonovelle, 4)
• La florentina libertas and civic humanism: imperial monopolization and conceptual confiscation
• Does Bernabò, a character in the Tuscan novellistica , embody the imposed of seigniory?
• From Vito Vitale(Archivio storico lombardo, 1901) to Luigi Barnaba Frigoli(Archivio storico lombardo, 2007): a journey and a corpus
• Tables de la dérision et tables de la séduction : le cœur mangé (Jean-Claude Mühlethaler in Nelly Labère dir., Être à table au Moyen Âge, Madrid, 2010)
• Le seigneur qui coûteait vingt-neuf deniers, ou les quatre questions posées au faux abbé (Sacchetti, Trecentonovelle, 4)
• Ruthless, bloody and exemplary justice: an overview
• Genealogy of power: it does not pass without remainder in the act, "but is preserved as power in the act itself, and as such can open up to other uses, other acts, other ends" (Gwenaëlle Aubry Genèse du Dieu souverain)
• On the razor's edge: the peasant and his donkey (Lodovico Domenichi, Facezie, motti e burle)
• Citoyen et ambassadeur de Bologne si vobis placet : les Facéties du Pogge
• Per volontà bestiale : la femme captive et le chevalier décapité et le roi guéri, de Sercambi(Novelle, VI) à Masuccio de Salerne et Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (after Anna Fontes Baratto, in L'après Boccace, Paris, 1994)
• Le seigneur et son bouffon: la peur qui guérit et celle qui tue (Matteo Bandello, Novelle, IV, 17)
• When the controbeffa goes wrong, or when power can no longer play innocently at frightening (Romain Descendre, in Chroniques italiennes, 2013)
• "Power finds its limit in the fact that it cannot really call the dead back to life; but grace long suspended often gives the sovereign the impression that he has crossed this limit" (Elias Canetti, Masse et puissance)