Stephanie Jed
Wings for my Courage
sjed@ucsd.edu
On the eve of January 6, 1537, after many years of studying classical
stories of tyrants and tyrant-slayers, Lorenzino de‚ Medici
assassinated his cousin Alessandro de‚ Medici, the duke of Florence.
And in 1978, I became interested in this relation between literary
study and political action in Rome, where I tried to reconcile my
visits to the Vatican Library with my profound political experiences
of that year the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, large-scale
anti-Red Brigade demonstrations organized by the Italian Communist
Party that invoked the legacy of the Italian Resistance to fascism,
my first encounter with feminism and feminists. I developed this
interest in the rhetoric of conspiracy and the tyrannicide of
Lorenzino in a doctoral dissertation (1982).
I have been interested in the ways my persona as a researcher has
changed so much during the course of this project. In the early
years, I was an activist in Central America solidarity projects also
endeavoring to understand my Milanese documents about Lorenzino in
relation to testimonios circulating in solidarity networks and to
literature. For one year (1992), I wrote a monthly column
critiquing the Los Angeles Times for the journal The Lies of Our
Times. In that context, I was intensely interested in my Milanese
documents as an ideological project to preserve imperial stability in
the face of those dissidents who critiqued Charles V’s meddling in
Florentine politics. After the births of my children, I realized
that I wanted to write a book without an argument, a story-telling
book that would somehow include stories of my relationship to those
who conserved, classified, and transmitted the documents I was
interpreting.
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