Victorian Uses of the Italian Past: The Case of Camilla Rucellai in George Eliot's Romola

George Eliot’s Romola is, arguably, the most ambitious Victorian attempt at revisiting the Italian Early Renaissance. Its lofty concerns with ethics and a philosophy of history, and the impressive scholarly erudition with which the novel is laced, are intertwined with George Eliot’s own personal anxieties with novel writing as a successful, remunerated profession. The feeling that the writing of an historical novel involved treading new and potentially dangerous ground and the extensive and lacerating haggling with her publishers over prices, serialization and advertising are obliquely reflected in the text of Romola, where issues such as the chagrins of authorship, the commodification of culture and cultural objects, the legitimacy of female authority and the morality of vision are debated through the main characters, as well as through the minor ones. Among the latter, Camilla Rucellai, the hysterical ‘prophetess’ who figures as a vilified female counterpart of Savonarola, seems to embody the ‘seer of visions’ at her/his most fraudulent and despicable. Starting from these premises, in my essay I focus on the historical as well as the fictional Camilla, with a view to highlighting George Eliot’s meticulous reliance on, and visionary deployment of, sources in her reconstruction of Renaissance Florence and its turbulent public life.