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Speaker: Ramie Targoff (I Tatti / Brandeis University)
In Peter Paul Rubens’ monumental set of paintings on the life of Maria de’ Medici, commissioned in the early 1620’s for the former queen’s new residence at the Luxembourg Palace (and now in the Louvre), the panel dedicated to the wedding between Marie and King Henri IV at the Duomo in Florence does not include the actual groom. This paper explores the history of the proxy wedding, dating back to the ancient world and practiced regularly among royal families in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. It also will consider, by way of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, the implications of the proxy for the affective bonds imagined between spouses.
Ramie Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Co-Chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion (2001), John Donne, Body and Soul (2008); Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (2014), all from University of Chicago Press; Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2018), and the translator of Colonna’s 1538 Rime. Her latest book, Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance was published in 2024 by Alfred A. Knopf in NY, and Riverrun/Quercus Books in the UK; an Italian translation was published in 2025 by Mondadori. She has recently received a multi-year grant from the NOMIS Foundation in Switzerland for her collaborative project, “Petrarch in Global Translation: A Genealogy of Western Love.”
Image: Peter Paul Rubens, The Wedding by Proxy of Marie de’ Medici to King Henry IV, 1622–25, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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