Jacobkcarpenter

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Hello, Jacobkcarpenter, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Marc'Antonio Pasqualini

I've reverted your edit to the above article. That is not a suggestion that the edit or the assertion are wrong but things like that should be decided by consensus with a discussion on the talk page. The content in question is sourced to a reliable academic publication so you would need to demonstrate why it is wrong or otherwise unreliable beyond your own opinion. If you have a different source that substantiates why that one should be disregarded then you should put it up for discussion. Cheers, St★lwart¹¹¹ 23:03, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

I have never been skilled with Wikipedia's controls to cite and such; it has caused several arguments between other users and me. The source is an email I received from Doctor Murata last year: http://i62.tinypic.com/11lj02d.png I addressed Marc'Antonio Pasqualini and his patron as lovers myself from Doctor Freitas' article; however, as Doctor Murata has written the most about the particular castrato, I look to her as the mainstay authority.

Doctor Freitas has shown poor scholarship in his textbook about the infamous castrato Atto Melani as well. The three Roman singers highlighted in the 1712 treatise Eunuchism Displayed are the aforementioned mezzo-soprano Pasqualini, mezzo-soprano Paolo "Paoluccio" Cipriani, and the soprano(?) Girolamo [Jeronimo] "Momo" Zampetti who prematurely left his singing career. I have not personally seen music written for Melani when he was an alleged soprano, so I cannot speculate his proper voice type.

Jacobkcarpenter (talk) 23:51, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately, an email like that could never be considered a reliable source by our standards. Your personal research and subsequent conclusions, likewise, aren't reliable sources. To counter scholarly opinion we really need equally reliable scholarly opinion. Even then, the two sources would likely still be provided as opposing views on the subject, rather than one being used as justification for deleting the other. Your personal opinion of Freitas' scholarship (like mine) doesn't carry much weight. If Murata publishes her view in a scholarly manner then it's a different story. St★lwart¹¹¹ 01:11, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

You'll find that email is not readily accepted as a reliable source here; it's not published professionally with editorial oversight or pee review because it is personal correspondence. The work you mention may indeed provide some answers but we would need access to a copy (to verify the claims made) and it would need to deal with the subject (as Freitas' does) with the concept/issue in detail, such that we can use it as a source for a proper account of Murata's view. It also wouldn't be sufficient for you to publish an email with your synopsis and her agreement, in general terms, with the assertions made. That, too, would suffer the same issues with regard to reliability. You'll see from my user page and contributions history that I have spent a significant amount of time editing articles about 17th century Italian culture and history, especially the Barberini. There are a great many things in the subject area that we (myself and editing colleagues) "know" but we cannot include for lack of reliable sources. I'd love to have additional academic sources that, a) provide a greater insight into related topics, and; b) provide us with additional sources that we can cite to (finally) verify particular things.

From a purely logical perspective, there is extensive evidence to suggest Antonio Barberini maintained homosexual relationships, to the point of drawing attention from foreign dignitaries who believed him too indiscreet. There is also evidence that Barberini was a patron of Pasqualini. There is cultural precedent for a patronage relationship that extended into the personal, beyond the platonic. And Freitas is not the only academic to have drawn the conclusion (though, arguably, others like Rietbergen may have come to the same conclusion with his assistance). Freitas' is not a "bolt out of the blue" view; it is based on both academic analysis and logical inference-drawing. That said, an opposing view that the logic is perhaps faulty should not be rejected out of hand. I'm going to move this discussion to Talk:Marc'Antonio Pasqualini to allow others to contribute. Feel free to continue there. St★lwart¹¹¹ 03:02, 17 October 2014 (UTC)