The Cassandra Project investigates the representation of a particular case of prophetic furor as a cultural form of construction of female otherness on the ancient model of Cassandra, studying its mechanisms of exclusivity/inclusivity pertinent to various cultural discourses and their literary and theatrical re-elaborations.

Cassandra is emblematic of femininity wounded by the violence of the divine masculine and who, although at the centre of the social and political life of Troy as a member of the royal family, undergoes a process of marginalisation: neither understood nor believed, she is at once princess and priestess, within and without the community to which she belongs. Her language speaks misunderstood and incomprehensible visions and, in the Aeschylus’ tragedy, is sum of tongues and glossolalia (Heirman 1975, Crippa 1990, Mazzoldi 2001). For Ratcliffe (1995), the inability of others to understand her raises questions of discourse articulation, as well as reception, of rhetoric and hermeneutics, invoking questions of ‘justice’ (73-4). In modern times, her otherness was identified as a psychological syndrome by Gaston Bachelard (1949), and was later studied, among others, by Melanie Klein (1963). The model referred to Cassandra identifies a constellation of emotional dysfunctions rubricated as typically female and referable to disorders such as hysteria (Layton Schapira 1988) and autism (Yergeau 2020).  

The project aims to explore the appropriation and reinterpretation of this feminine model in a selection of literary texts in the English language, from the earliest medieval attestations (Geoffrey Chaucer and Robert Henryson) and sixteenth-century Senecan translations to seventeenth-century receptions, including Richard Barnfield’s Cassandra (1595) and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602?; printed 1609). It will then go on to analyse examples of ‘modern Cassandras’ in the following centuries, with a particular focus on the Victorian period, up to the present day, examining a large corpus of texts including, significantly, female rewrites such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Fire Brand (1987), Barbara Wood’s The Prophetess (1996), and more recently Sharma Shields’ The Cassandra (2019) or Pat Barker’s The Voyage Home (2024) (cf. Corpus). The research will also look at representations of Cassandras on stage, with a focus on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (2005) and modern English representations of ancient Cassandras (see for example Macintosh et al. 2018). The research, although focused on a corpus of texts and performances in English, situates itself within a broader framework that requires a transdisciplinary and comparative approach.

Starting from the study of the irrational and prophetic furor in the ancient world with attention paid to the specific case of female furor and the Cassandra figure in its various ancient articulations (e.g. Dodds 1951; Guidorizzi 2009; Pillinger 2019), we will explore its receptions in the (early) modern, modern, and contemporary ages, with a particular focus on the construction of a psychological, and more specifically psychiatric, female model and the dialogical relationship this has with literary texts and theatre. Our approach is mainly comparative and encompasses Reception stances, including Translation, Adaptation, and Performance Studies, Disability Studies, as well as Feminist and more broadly Cultural Studies.