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Grice
e Modio: l’implicatura conversazionale del disonore sessuale -- la filosofia
del Tevere – filosofia italiana – Luigi Speranza (Santa
Severina). Filosofo italiano. Grice: “Only in Italy a philosopher writes a
treatise on a river – although the Isis would not be out of place for some
Magdalenite!” – Grice: “His convito is a jewel!” – Seguace di Neri. Originario
di Santa Severina, borgo collinare della Calabria Ulteriore, fu avviato agli
studi di filosofia presso l'Archiginnasio di Napoli; in seguito passò a Roma,
dove si avviò agli studi in medicina divenendo allievo di Fusconi. Modio frequenta gli ambienti accademici, dove
entrò in contatto con alcuni dei maggiori esponenti di spicco di quell'epoca
come Molza e Tolomei. Pubblica la sua
prima opera letteraria più famosa dal titolo I”l convito; overo, del peso della
moglie: un dialogo diegetico” (Roma, Bressani) -- ambientato a Roma durante il
carnevale della città capitolina, in cui viene trattato il tema delle corna
durante un convivio presieduto dall'allora vescovo di Piacenza Trivulzio e a
cui parteciparono anche Gambara, Marmitta, Benci, Selvago, Raineri e Cesario. E
altresì grande estimatore degli saggi di Piccolomini. Durante la stesura in lingua volgare di un
Operetta de’ Sogni, si ammala di febbre altissima. Si spense dopo qualche
giorno a Roma, nella tenuta di palazzo Ricci in via Giulia. Altri saggi: “Il Tevere, dove si ragiona in
generale della natura di tutte le acque, et in particolare di quella del fiume
di Roma” (Roma, Luchini) “Origine del proverbio che si suol dire "anzi
corna che croci" (Roma, A. degli Antonii,” Jacopone da Todi, I Cantici del
beato Iacopone da Todi, con diligenza ristampati, con la gionta di alcuni
discorsi sopra di essi e con la vita sua nuovamente posta in luce” (Roma,
Salviano). Prospetto autore, su edit16.iccu.. Modio, Il Tevere, cit., c.
45r Anno di pubblicazione della medesima
opera. G. Cassiani, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.Sex, Gender and
Sexuality in Renaissance Italy explores the new directions being taken in the
study of sex and gender in Italy from 1300 to 1700 and highlights the impact
that recent scholarship has had in revealing innovative ways of approaching
this subject.In this interdisciplinary volume, twelve scholars of history,
literature, art history, and philosophy use a variety of both textual and
visual sources to examine themes such as gender identities and dynamics, sexual
transgression and sexual identities in leading Renaissance cities. It is
divided into three sections, which work together to provide an overview of the
influence of sex and gender in all aspects of Renaissance society from politics
and religion to literature and art. Part I: Sex, Order, and Disorder deals with
issues of law, religion, and violence in marital relationships; Part II: Sense
and Sensuality in Sex and Gender considers gender in relation to the senses and
emotions; and Part III: Visualizing Sexuality in Word and Image investigates
gender, sexuality, and erotica in art and literature.Bringing to life this
increasingly prominent area of historical study, Sex, Gender and Sexuality in
Renaissance Italy is ideal for students of Renaissance Italy and early modern
gender and sexuality. SEX, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN RENAISSANCE ITALY Sex,
Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy explores the new directions being
taken in the study of sex and gender in Italy from 1300 to 1700 and highlights
the impact that recent scholarship has had in revealing innovative ways of
approaching this subject. In this interdisciplinary volume, twelve scholars of
history, literature, art history, and philosophy use a variety of both textual
and visual sources to examine themes such as gender identities and dynamics,
sexual transgression and sexual identities in leading Renaissance cities. It is
divided into three sections, which work together to provide an overview of the
inf luence of sex and gender in all aspects of Renaissance society from
politics and religion to literature and art. Part I: Sex, Order, and Disorder
deals with issues of law, religion, and violence in marital relationships; Part
II: Sense and Sensuality in Sex and Gender considers gender in relation to the
senses and emotions; and Part III: Visualizing Sexuality in Word and Image
investigates gender, sexuality, and erotica in art and literature. Bringing to
life this increasingly prominent area of historical study, Sex, Gender and
Sexuality in Renaissance Italy is ideal for students of Renaissance Italy and
early modern gender and sexuality. Dedication This collection is dedicated to
Konrad Eisenbichler, a true Renaissance man who produces bold and prodigious
scholarship in multiple research areas with grace, ease, and erudition. For
Konrad, sociability is correlated with scholarship. He has spent his career
creating communities and networks of scholars around the world. These networks
have been brought together through his tireless work for learned societies,
publication series, and journals. Konrad not only produces scholarship but is
also heavily invested in disseminating the scholarship of others. Scholarly
interests often have unusual and serendipitous origins. In a certain sense,
this collection began with a codpiece. Konrad’s first scholarly contribution to
the field of sex, gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy developed out of a
casual conversation with a colleague who provided enthusiastic encouragement.
What resulted was a presentation playfully entitled “The Dynastic Codpiece” to
the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies in 1987. He revised and published
it as “Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere” (Renaissance
and Reformation, 1988), an article still cited thirty years later. In this
truly groundbreaking interdisciplinary piece, Konrad examined the overly large
codpieces worn by Renaissance men for the social and familial messages they
conveyed, showing how the messages passed between the generations in competing dynastic
portraits. The article established Konrad as a new and powerful voice in the
study of sex, gender, and sexuality in the Italian Renaissance. It also
illustrated beautifully how his scholarship is inherently interdisciplinary,
bridging and incorporating history and literature with artistic
representations. Konrad greets friends, colleagues, and students with warmth,
good humor, and generosity. A significant manifestation of his academic
hospitality is revealed in the multitude of conferences he has organized: forty
between 1983 and 2018. These are special events, international in nature, and
ref lecting the hostorganizer’s generosity. They are venues conducive to the
exchange of ideas and the formation of friendships. It is most appropriate that
the most recent of these focused on “Early Modern Cultures of Hospitality.” The
themes generally ref lect Konrad’s sense of the discipline and where it is
going; these conferences most often culminate in a significant collection of
essays, including Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern
West (1996; co-edited with Jacqueline Murray) which helped to promote the study
of sex, gender, and sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Konrad has
made myriad contributions to individuals and institutions. His contributions to
Renaissance scholarship span social history, women’s history, religious
history, and literature. He publishes equally in Italian and English,moving
easily between scholarly cultures. A scholar with a global reach, he interacts with
colleagues spread across North America, to Italy and Europe more broadly, as
well as Australia and South Africa. The heart of his many contributions to the
study of Italian Renaissance society lies in his research on sex, gender, and
sexuality. In recognition of that, some of his friends and colleagues joined to
celebrate Konrad’s creativity, scholarship, and friendship with essays that
demonstrate the creative developments in the field since that fateful codpiece
three decades ago. We are honored to dedicate this volume to Konrad
Eisenbichler in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to Renaissance
society and culture. Sex, gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy: themes
and approaches in recent scholarship Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstraix
xi xii1PART ISex, order, and disorder192 The lord who rejected love, or the
Griselda story (X, 10) reconsidered yet again Guido Ruggiero213 Sexual violence
in the Sienese state before and after the fall of the republic Elena Brizio354
In the neighborhood: residence, community, and the sex trade in early modern
Bologna Vanessa McCarthy and Nicholas Terpstra535 Though popes said don’t, some
people did: adulteresses in Catholic Reformation Rome Elizabeth S. Cohen Sense
and sensuality in sex and gender 6 “Bodily things” and brides of Christ: the
case of the early seventeenth-century “lesbian nun” Benedetta Carlini Patricia
Simons 7 In bed with Ludovico Santa Croce Thomas V. Cohen 8 Aesthetics, dress,
and militant masculinity in Castiglione’s Courtier Gerry Milligan9 The sausage
wars: or how the sausage and carne battled for gastronomic and social prestige
in Renaissance literature and culture Laura Giannetti Visualizing sexuality in
word and image18110 Gianantonio Bazzi, called “Il Sodoma”: homosexuality in art,
life, and history James M. Saslow18311 Vagina dialogues: Piccolomini’s
Raffaella and Aretino’s Ragionamenti Ian Frederick Moulton21112 Giovan Battista
della Porta’s erotomanic art of recollection Sergius Kodera22713 “O mie arti
fallaci”: Tasso’s saintly women in the Liberata and Conquistata Jane
Tylus247Bibliography of Konrad Eisenbichler’s publications on sex and gender The editors would like to thank Vanessa
McCarthy who donned two hats for this project, that of an author and that of
editorial associate. Her scholarly knowledge and administrative expertise
contributed significantly to the preparation of this volume, and we’re grateful
for her dedication and expertise. We would like to thank the editorial team at
Routledge for their support and guidance over the course of this project. Laura
Pilsworth guided it through its inception and commissioning, while Lydia de
Cruz shepherded it through the final stages of preparation and production,
assisted by Morwenna Scott. The University of Guelph and the University of
Toronto provide generous support for the research activities of Jacqueline
Murray and Nicholas Terpstra respectively. Thanks as well to the congenial
group of scholars whose work is collected here. While editing collections is
sometimes likened to herding cats, these colleagues were responsive, generous,
and patient. Above all, they were enthusiastic about the opportunity to
contribute to a collection which could serve as a gift to a friend and
colleague, Konrad Eisenbichler, who has himself been the soul of generosity. We
are honored to have worked with you all. Themes and approaches in recent
scholarship. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the
Italian Renaissance was approached almost exclusively as a period of learning,
elegance, and manners as ref lected by the arts and letters of the time. In The
Book of the Courtier Castiglione’s perfect courtier embodied virtù and
sprezzatura, the two qualities that epitomized Renaissance masculinity. Elite
men were celebrated for their bravado, skill, and insouciant nonchalance,
whether these were exercised on the fields of battle, the production of art or
poetry, or the seduction of women. Castiglione also details the qualities of
the ideal court lady, a woman valued for her beauty and affability along with
her manners, intellect, and ability to please men. These qualities were
appreciated equally in another group of notable women, the courtesans whose
beauty and literary accomplishments were acclaimed by poets and artists alike.
Thanks in part to the enduring inf luence of Jackob Burckhardt’s Civilisation
of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; English translation 1878), this idealized
portrayal of sixteenth-century Italian men and women dominated
twentieth-century historiography and shaped how a number of generations
understood sex, gender, and sexuality in the Renaissance. The idealized
creations of Castiglione and Burckhardt, their princes and poets, court ladies
and courtesans, appeared as the bright stars in the Renaissance firmament, and
contributed to the lure of the field. Yet all along they were chimeras,
stereotypes created by Renaissance elites and perpetuated by modern scholars of
Renaissance culture. Even when individuals appeared to embody these ideal
qualities, they were the exceptions, standing apart from thousands of their
contemporaries, urban and rural, rich and poor, educated and illiterate,
respectable and disreputable. The idealized courtier, court lady, and courtesan
obscure everyday life in Renaissance Italy. In the 1970s, scholars began to ask
new questions that ultimately led to a recalibration of research on the history
of sex, gender, and sexuality in the2Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas
TerpstraRenaissance. One of the earliest collections was Human Sexuality in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance (edited by Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, 1978), which
includes topics that are wide ranging and represent a variety of disciplinary
perspectives. They include sexuality within marriage, sexual sins and
eroticism, celibacy, hermaphrodites, homosexuality, and how the human body was
understood. These essays from the 1970s foreground important questions about
sex, gender, and sexuality in the past. Yet their scope and insights are
constrained. Most essays are based on close, summative readings of literary
texts from Dante and Chaucer to Shakespeare and other imaginative authors, but
these close readings of texts lack the contextualization or critical
perspective to enhance their insights. While the occasional essay engages with
multiple sources and genres, the absence of critical theoretical and
interdisciplinary analysis inhibits the development of a more comprehensive
picture of how issues of human sexuality were actually addressed at this time.
Significantly, however, the authors did identify emerging themes that would
become central to the study of sex, gender, and sexuality. This collection
opened the way to the study of topics such as the nature of the sexed human
body, the complexities of celibacy as a sexuality, and the f luidity of
sexualities and genders. While prescient in research subjects, the authors did
not employ the theoretical and methodological tools that developed soon after
publication, tools that were necessary for deeper and more complex analyses of
sex, gender, and sexuality. These tools were being forged with the new theories
and methodologies of the 1970s that were opening new research subjects and that
led to innovations and new definitions of the individual and the self. A series
of studies in that decade revolutionized scholarship and have continued to have
a transformative inf luence on the understanding of the history of sex, gender,
and sexuality into the twenty-first century. The most inf luential authors
behind this work perceived the Renaissance to be more complex both in the
quotidian aspects of daily life and also in extraordinary behaviors. In 1978,
the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality occasioned both
excitement and consternation among historians of sex. Foucault, a philosopher and
leading post-structuralist scholar, wrote extensively on social construction
and social control in European society, including studies of prisons, madness,
and surveillance. These perspectives informed his ref lections about the
construction and control of sexuality in the European past. Indeed, Foucault’s
intervention challenged scholars to reexamine their approaches to sex and
sexuality. Another major contribution to the recalibrating of historical
studies of sex, gender, and sexuality was John Boswell’s Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980). Boswell demonstrated that in the premodern
world there were men who engaged in homosocial and/or homosexual relationships,
although traditional history had obscured them behind the ecclesiastical
rhetoric of homophobia. Boswell argued that there were gay men throughout
premodern Europe but his methodology and conclusions were criticized as
essentialist and lacking the appropriate consideration of context and cultural
inf luences such as Foucault had urged. Nevertheless, despite criticismsSex,
gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy 3about essentialism, Boswell did
uncover homosexual (sodomitical) and homoaffective men across society,
integrated into both clerical and secular societies. In this way, Boswell
forged a path for scholars to search for and analyze multiple sexualities that
had been overlooked by traditional history or were obscured by the absence of
explicit evidence. One of the most telling criticisms levelled at both Foucault
and Boswell was their neglect of gender as a category of historical analysis.
Arguably, men and women experience the world differently according to how
society evaluates and constructs women. This applies equally in the realm of
sex and sexuality, which is neither natural nor essential. Foucault paid scarce
attention to women’s alternative experience of social construction and
surveillance of sex and sexuality. Similarly, while lauded for opening the past
for research on homosexuality, Boswell was criticized for eliding lesbians and
other non-normative women under the category “gay,” thus perpetuating their
invisibility. A more refined and incisive analytical framework emerged out of
these debates. What began as women’s history in the 1970s, with the goal of
recuperating women in the past, transformed into the critical lens of feminist
studies, which analyzed the institutions and structures that restricted or
shaped their lives, or contributed to their invisibility in historical
scholarship. The other significant theoretical contribution to the new study of
sex, gender, and sexuality falls under the rubric of cultural studies. This is
a multifaceted approach emerging from literary studies, postmodernism,
discourse analysis, and other theoretical perspectives that provided scholars
with new linguistic and analytical tools. This versatile and complex
perspective also encouraged explicitly interdisciplinary research which suits
the intricate nature of sex, gender, and sexuality. As a result, there is a
richer sense of the possibilities that were available for the lived reality of
sex, gender, and sexuality and an expanded ability to study and evaluate the
values, beliefs, and experiences of people in the past. These innovations
emerged at a time when the traditional Burckhardtian narratives were being
widely criticized by political, social, and intellectual historians, and by the
mid-1980s new scholarship was appearing that brought new insights to sex and
gender in the Italian Renaissance. They applied methodologies that bridged
differences in social and economic status, sex, sexuality, and gender,
geography, and religion. While the traditional sources of high culture—art and
literature in particular—continued to provide a valuable foundation for
understanding the rich cultural life and artefacts of the Renaissance, new
analytical approaches yielded new insights. Diverse sources of evidence—court
records, letters, chronicles, and Inquisitorial documents, among
others—provided access to new populations including servants and prostitutes
and the inhabitants of the streets and taverns of myriad Italian towns and
cities. These new critical studies were a prelude to the research that would
appear in the next two decades. Guido Ruggiero’s The Boundaries of Eros: Sex
Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985) early on demonstrated how new
methodologies and new sources were able to reveal hitherto unexplored worlds of
Renaissance sex, gender, and4Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstrasexuality.
Ruggiero examines the wide variety of sex crimes that were committed in Venice
and he analyzes the various courts and disciplinary councils which enforced the
laws, including those pertaining to sexual transgressions. The records reveal
an intricate and contradictory approach to regulating sexuality that extended
from conventional acts such as adultery and fornication to more egregious
behaviors including rape and sodomy. Ruggiero’s essays meet the challenges and
opportunities posed by Foucault and Boswell, by feminist history and gender studies.
His interdisciplinary reading of the evidence, ranging from the many cases
discussed by the criminal courts, along with careful analysis of individual
testimony, widened the scope of enquiry. Ruggiero’s discussion reveals the rich
detail about individuals, as they negotiated the social norms of sexuality and
gender. He brings readers to an understanding of the social context and how
individuals were integrated into their local communities and that of wider
Venetian society. The movement towards more sophisticated, nuanced, and focused
considerations is also ref lected in Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and
Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (1996) by Michael Rocke. In many ways,
Rocke took on the challenge presented by John Boswell to identify men who had
sex with men in their social contexts. Rather than othering them or pulling
these men out of their community, Rocke engages with homosexuality as an
integral part of Florentine society and culture. He examines seventy years of
documentation from the “Office of the Night,” which was established to oversee
denunciations of homosexual (sodomitical) activity. This allowed Rocke to trace
the nature of relationships between men, how they were treated by society, how
and why they were denounced to the court, and the penalties levied. His
scholarship reveals that, despite the harsh evaluation of sodomy in
ecclesiastical law and in various secular jurisdictions, Florence displayed
remarkable tolerance. Where Boswell’s research had scanned 1000 years of European
history, seeking to identify men who were possibly homosexual, Rocke analyzes
deep and focused sources to identify a specific group of men, applying
sophisticated theoretical and methodological tools to reveal new understandings
of non-normative sexuality in the Italian Renaissance. Judith Brown’s Immodest
Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (1986) similarly
contributed to the new approaches to sexuality and identity. She focused on
non-normative sexuality, although in a unique context. Here the background is
not the streets, homes, and markets of the large, cosmopolitan cities of
Renaissance Italy. Rather, Brown’s subjects lived within the walls of a
convent, separated from the worldly temptations of secular life. Yet, even in a
community of women vowed to chastity, Brown finds convoluted self-identities
and a sexual relationship between two women that was transgressive and
multivalent. The case of the “lesbian nun” Benedetta Carlini was instantly
controversial. Could two nuns possibly have a conscious lesbian sexual
identity, given the social norms and religious context in which they lived?
This is the same criticism that greeted John Boswell’s assertions about “gay”
men in premodern Europe.Sex, gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy 5There
was widespread agreement that categories such as gay or lesbian were products
of late twentieth-century Western society and to impose them back in time was
anachronistic and misleading. Moreover, in this case, the individuals evoked
far more questions than those of sexual identity or sexual activity, with a
relationship complicated by angelic possession and mystical visions. The debate
surrounding Carlini’s activities and identities continues, as Patricia Simon’s
essay in this collection demonstrates. Yet one of the most enduring
contributions of Brown’s study, for the history of sexuality and gender, is her
ability to cross 600 years and engage intimately with individuals of the past.
This is a history of two nuns, in an out-of-the-way convent, who experienced
rich and problematic inner lives, beyond what might be expected. Whether the
women can be categorized as “lesbians” does not dispel the impact of
recuperating lost women and a lost past, the meaning and implications of which
continue to attract scholarly analysis. The profound transformation that
occurred between 1978 and 1996 in the study of sex, gender, and sexuality in
premodern Europe began with the recognition of new topics and moved to a more
rigorous application of the intervening theoretical and methodological insights
of Foucault and Boswell, of feminism and cultural studies. If the former
approach is exemplified by essays collected in Human Sexuality in the Middle
Ages and Renaissance (1978), the latter is evident in the essays in Desire and
Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (edited by Jacqueline
Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, 1996). This volume stresses that human behavior
manifests both continuities and transitions that can be independently evaluated
and separated from arbitrary and obsolete periodization. Many essays integrate
traditional periods moving seamlessly into a premodern world. Some essays rely
on traditional Renaissance evidence but deploy law, art, and literature to
examine new research questions. Rona Goffen examines Titian’s frescoes to
explore misogyny. Other authors address innovative, even bold or cheeky themes.
Feminism and critical theory are deployed throughout the collection. The
usefulness of interdisciplinarity to reveal new aspects of society and cultural
experience is equally evident. Dyan Elliott’s reexamination of the reciprocity
of the conjugal debt, the notion that a husband and wife have equal call on
their spouse for sexual access jostles the foundations of premodern marriage.
Rather than accepting the idea that a married couple’s sex life was balanced
and equitable, Elliott concludes that wives were subordinate even in bed and
had no right to refuse sexual intercourse. Ivana Elbl examines the doubly
transgressive sexual liaisons among Portuguese sailors to Africa. Sailors, who
were often already married with families in Europe, frequently formed enduring
relationships with African “wives,” transgressing both Christian monogamy and
establishing irregular relationships with non-Christian women. Significantly,
in Africa these unions were ignored or tolerated by Portuguese leaders,
ecclesiastical as much as secular. More theoretically adventuresome is Nancy
Partner’s exploration of the psychological dimensions of sexuality. She applies
contemporary psychological theory, in particular Freud, to assess the sexual
dimensions6Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstraof mystics and their ecstatic
visions. Even the realm of masturbatory pornography is probed through Andrew
Taylor’s critical reading of marginalia and other physical marks and stains on
manuscript pages which could ref lect the sexual responses of readers to the
texts. The essays in Desire and Discipline reveal the richness, diversity, and
intellectually invigorating research that in just two decades had made the new
field of sex, gender, and sexuality one of the most exciting areas in
Renaissance studies. While ref lecting new research areas, the roots of which
can be found in the theoretical and methodological innovations in the late
twentieth century, the essays in Desire and Discipline build upon traditional
topics and themes and frequently employ conventional Renaissance sources, to
stimulate a metamorphosis of old research perspectives into new and innovative
ones. Thus, the ideal courtier has become a man subject to gender-based
analysis while the lens of feminist analysis reveals the court lady to be not
so much an equal but rather a pale, subordinate shadow to the courtier.
Similarly, freed from her artificial manners and learning, the courtesan is
revealed as a masculine fiction sanitized from the precarious and harsh life of
Renaissance prostitutes. The last quarter of the twentieth century, then, was a
watershed for the historiography of sex, gender, and sexuality. Pioneering scholarship
foreshadowed issues that would preoccupy later scholars and set the trajectory
for subsequent research. This scaffolding of new research questions, theories,
and methodologies has resulted in creative approaches that are rapidly
transforming the field. While monographs have been, and continue to be, written
about sex, gender, and sexuality in the Renaissance, it seems that these
topics, at this point in the evolution of scholarship, lend themselves more
readily to the genres of essays or journal articles. The essay form allows
scholars to analyze focused bodies of evidence and arrive at conclusions that
are precise and demonstrable. Presumably, at some point these focused studies
will coalesce into broader discussions leading to more generalized conclusions.
For the moment, however, the essay collection remains the most significant
means for the dissemination of research. Two essay collections in particular
demonstrate the very promising new approaches to research into sex, gender, and
sexuality in the twenty-first century. In A Cultural History of the Human Body
in the Renaissance (2010), Katherine Crawford provides a chapter that offers
redirection from the perspectives of Foucault. She points back to the important
role of classical literature, mediated by Christian values, in the formation of
beliefs about sexuality and marriage, and classical medical literature which
defined the sexed body. In A Cultural History of Sexuality edited by Bette
Talvacchia (2011), nine essays address a wide variety of questions about
Renaissance sexuality as they emerge from diverse sources. Essays focus on the
troubled categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and sex with respect
to religion, medicine, popular beliefs, prostitution, and erotica.
Collectively, this collection opens wide the possibilities in the study of sex,
gender, and sexuality.Sex, gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy 7In order
best to demonstrate how recent work has reshaped and advanced the field of sex,
gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy, we have organized the essays of
this collection into three sections. The first, “Sex, Order, and Disorder,”
deals primarily with issues relating to legal and political themes, and
particularly with efforts by authorities both political and ecclesiastical to
channel or control sexuality. The second section, “Sense and Sensuality in Sex
and Gender,” highlights recent work that has taken some of the turns that are
rewriting historical narratives generally, above all histories of the senses,
of the emotions, and of food. The third section, “Visualizing Sexuality in Word
and Image,” considers how we work with early modern f luidity around identities
and boundaries, and whether we might now be more restrictive than they were in
categories that we bring to our analysis.Sex, Order, and Disorder One of the
most obvious sites of sex and disorder in Renaissance Italy surely lies with
the buying and selling of women’s bodies. Burckhardt’s perspective that
courtesans were elegant, intellectual companions, surviving more on sexual
titillation than selling their bodies, has endured, despite the inf luence of
feminist research. In particular, Veronica Franco was seen as an elegant,
ideal, and appropriate companion for Renaissance princes.1 Much research on
courtesans has focused on Franco and her courtesan sisters. It highlights the
courtesan’s learning, ability to write poetry and sing pleasing songs, and,
most importantly, to entertain men while avoiding becoming common sexual
property and losing their allure and their living. Tessa Storey adheres to the
older view, assessing the social status of courtesans, suggesting that they
were linked to “elite manhood and male honor,” idealizing the relationships
between clients and courtesans who were certain that proximity to powerful men
would protect them.2 However, the other side of courtesan life was a precarious
one of dependence and fear of falling into common prostitution. Social and
criminal vulnerability highlights the lives of all prostitutes, include high status
courtesans. Even Franco was called before the courts to account for her
behavior. More vulnerable courtesans and prostitutes lived precariously, prey
to men of all sorts, accosted in the streets, and struggling to support
themselves and maintain their dignity. The records of their appearances before
the courts reveals they often managed without protectors or financial security.
3 Early on Elizabeth Cohen examined the rough and ready life of prostitutes on
the streets of Rome, revealing a form of sociability and social integration.4
Diane Yvonne Ghirardo brings an innovative approach to the role and experience
of urban prostitutes. She examines urban planning in Ferrara, revealing the
city’s ongoing attempts over decades to maintain prostitutes in the same
locales.5 Focusing on the economics of prostitution in Venice, Paula Clarke
finds that regulation of prostitution became less rigorous over time, with
women experiencing more freedom and the concomitant growth of the sex
trade.68Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas TerpstraGuido Ruggiero opens the section
“Sex, Order, and Disorder” in this collection with a broader approach to order
and disorder in sexuality. He offers a rereading of Boccaccio’s often-studied
story from the Decameron of Griselda, a woman who patiently endures the series
of humiliations that her husband Gualtieri devises in order to test her
faithfulness. The critics and creative artists who have puzzled over the tale
and its meaning for centuries have focused mainly on Griselda and on issues of
class and gender. Ruggiero moves a step further to ask how those who heard it
in the fourteenth century might have received it as a political message.
Gualtieri is not only a cruel husband. His willingness to be cruel and unjust
to his spouse Griselda highlights the dangers that all may encounter when
societies fall under the control of rulers who are narcissistic, vain, and
insecure. Florentines could look around to other cities where lords treated
citizens as Gualtieri treated Griselda; sexual and political violence were
interchangeable and marriages were contracted for money rather than love. There
was no reason to suppose that Florence would be exempted from that kind of
cruelty and exploitation. The Griselda story offered the lessons of a Mirror
for Princes, but it was also a Mirror for Merchants, warning them of what would
happen when love did not animate their closest personal relationships. What
Boccaccio warned the Florentines about in the fourteenth century was precisely
what the Sienese were experiencing in the sixteenth. Elena Brizio observes that
sexual violence remained common across Italy. Men used it as a tool to control
girls, boys, married women, and widows. In the context of the wars of the
1550s, when Florence annexed Siena, its political “use” expanded greatly.
Sexual violence was a means of imposing or confirming power over subordinates,
and men across the political, ecclesiastical, mercantile, and professional
spheres considered sexual violence a legitimate mode of operating in their social
sphere, and so exercised it freely. In contrast to what Boccaccio described,
the absolute ruler who came to dominate mid-sixteenth-century Siena positioned
himself on the opposite side of the dynamic. Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici
proclaimed strict punishments for sexual violence against both men and women in
a law of 1558, threatening either death or galley servitude for those
convicted. Brizio describes this setting and moves from metaphor to practice as
she reviews archival sources, judicial records, and public reports to see how
sexual violence was perceived before and after the law issued in 1558. Duke
Cosimo I was dealing with more than just a different political milieu, and
Brizio also explores whether the changes in the normative codes brought about
by the Council of Trent had an impact on social attitudes to sexual violence in
Siena and its locale. Normative codes were becoming more explicit and
restrictive across Italy in the sixteenth century, but did they have much
actual effect? Like Cohen, Ghirardo, and Clarke, Vanessa McCarthy and Nicholas
Terpstra document and analyze the sex trade in a particular city. Their focus
is on working-poor prostitutes’ residential patterns in early modern Bologna,
and they find that on the whole these women were integrated into, rather than
pushed to the margins of, their local neighborhoods and the wider city.
Bologna’s activist and ambitiousSex, gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy
9archbishop Gabriele Paleotti was rebuffed when he attempted to impose Tridentine
norms for public sexuality. The Bolognese instead approached regulation as a
matter of market rather than morals, allowing those prostitutes registered with
a civic magistracy to practice prostitution almost anywhere within the city
walls. While about half of the 300–400 women registered clustered in specific,
unofficial red-light neighborhoods, the other half lived on streets with only
one or two other registered prostitutes, where their neighbors were more often
workingpoor men and women. In spite of the strict normative codes that
continued to be preached and publicly posted by ecclesiastical authorities,
prostitutes were seldom actually shunned or marginalized because of their sex
work. They were more often incorporated into the working-poor neighborhoods and
the larger social fabric of early modern Bologna. These tensions between norms
and practice certainly intensified as Tridentine rules became more specific,
and as ecclesiastical and public regimes worked to determine whether and how to
implement them. In Rome, these authorities came together in particularly
complicated ways. Elizabeth Cohen explores how they attempted to address and
adjudicate the various forms of sexual impropriety that their normative codes
were describing in ever more precise detail. Sexual misconduct came under the
jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, but the records of these courts do not
survive in Rome. Criminal court records do survive, however, and since these
took charge of some sex offenses we can see how people responded to the new
rules. Cohen looks in particular at cases of adultery, which was often defined
by the married status of the woman and which, like sodomy, could actually cover
a broader range of actions than might be grouped today under the term.
Reviewing some trials of real or imagined adulterous relationships, Cohen finds
that it is impossible to determine how effective the “reforms” actually were.
There was simply more driving these relationships forward than any narrow
definition allows: romance, exploitation, assault, and sheer comedy all shape
the court testimonies, and show that the parties in many so-called adulterous
relationships were thinking less often of sex—or the pope—than authorities
thought.Sense and Sensuality in Sex and Gender The possibilities for research
on sense and sensuality in the Italian Renaissance are myriad. The richness and
abundance of voices, producing or employing sensual outcomes, and the voices of
desire and of sex and of pleasure combine into a garden of delights. Here again,
recent essay collections prove particularly valuable for the variety of forms,
voices, and experiences that they are able to convey. In The Erotic Cultures of
Renaissance Italy (2010) Sara Matthews-Grieco gathers eight essays that ref
lect upon the various ways in which visions of sensuality could circulate,
including on painted furniture, decorated bedroom ceilings, or musical
instruments, erotic language, or pornographic engravings. So, too, cultural
practices are explored such as sensuality within marriage, music in
domesticcontexts, and sexual innuendos in writing or in doodles in a book. This
collection, then, reveals how creative Renaissance people could be in
demonstrating desire and articulating their sensual pleasures. Sexual
orientation and sexual desire have also come under scrutiny. A significant
collection of essays edited by Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll, and
Katherine A. McIver, Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern
Italy, brings together nine essays that explore sexual desire and sexual
orientation through multilayered and intersecting interpretations of art,
music, and texts. The result is an intriguing collection of scholarship that
maximizes opportunities for interdisciplinary, collaborative research across
the disciplines, as an outgrowth of work on critical theory and
intertextuality. In a more literary context, marriage orations have revealed
some writers not only praised marriage in conventional terms for political
ends, social expediency, and the delights of family. Alongside extolling the
pleasures of the marriage bed for a husband, some extend that vision of
sensuality and sexual pleasure to the wife as well, challenging conventional
notions that only prostitutes took pleasure in sex, and not respectable matrons.7
The sensual possibilities of homosexual activities, especially related to male
prostitution, were part of Michael Rocke’s study Forbidden Friendships. He
argues that male prostitution was harshly condemned, especially anal
penetration, as something no adult man should permit. Nevertheless, an
examination of some contemporary writers reveals an appreciation of homosexual
sensuality along with defenses of sodomy and male prostitution which harkened
back to the superior evaluation of homosexuality in classical literature.8 The
role of pedagogical pederasty and its celebration within Renaissance mentoring
systems has equally been explored in literary sources by Ian Moulton who
demonstrates the currency of such studies to both a popular and educated audience.9
These studies show that while male sexuality has been visualized, both in the
Renaissance, and by scholars of the Renaissance, as virile and active, it was
also vulnerable and contingent. For example, castration was always a
possibility in war, for medical reasons, as a consequence of vendetta, or for
social or aesthetic reasons.10 Impotence also was part of male sexuality, with
extensive social, economic, and political ramifications. Some of these issues
are explored in Sara F. Matthews-Grieco’s edited volume Cuckoldry, Impotence
and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th century) Impotence could be implicated in
social unrest among urban dwellers or occasion political turmoil among the
elites. It could be physiological, subject to medical intervention, or magical
leading towards the Inquisition and the Renaissance’s fear of witchcraft. Six
essays focus on various aspects of the social, cultural, political, medicinal,
and literary discussions of impotence in Italian courts and cities, together
providing an integrated and provocative view of male sexuality and sensuality.
The essays in this collection’s second section, “Sense and Sensuality in Sex
and Gender,” traverse back and forth between literature and the lives of men
and women. Our literary accounts span what was formerly cast as the division
ofhigh and low, including both Castiglione’s serious prescriptions on when a
sleeve is more than just a sleeve, and also some more comic accounts by
lesser-known poets of when a sausage is more than a sausage. We pair these with
two microhistorical accounts of sexual pairings, one grown notorious in recent
decades by the controversies that erupted when it was first published, and the
other more obscurely quotidian. We aim in bringing them together to revisit
what scholars may bring to such accounts, and how that shapes our readings in
ways we may want now to rethink. In the first of these microhistorical studies,
Patricia Simons re-examines the case of Benedetta Carlini, the early
seventeenth-century nun and abbess described above and made famous in Judith
Brown’s Immodest Acts (1986). When Brown identified Carlini as a lesbian, on
the basis of documents that showed her as having regular orgasmic sex with a
younger nun under her supervision, her work stirred controversy. Historians
like Rudolph Bell firmly rejected the description of Carlini as “lesbian” on
the basis that sexual activities did not imply sexual identities. Simons takes
the discussion a step further, arguing that the question of identity is less
important now than one related to sense and emotion. Did they—and should we—see
their sex as mainly physical? Or were there registers of erotic mysticism that
would have led both Benedetta and Mea to frame their contact together as
expressions of a spiritual relationship? While some of their contemporaries,
like some of ours, may see their religious language as pretext, what happens
when we take it seriously and take them sincerely? As the example of their
congregation’s patron saint St. Catherine of Siena showed, medieval mysticism
provided enough of a language and model for the erotic potential of religious
imagery. Thomas V. Cohen then explores another example of when we need to ask
whether a transgression is always a transgression, by looking at the case of
Ludovico Santa Croce, and the gang he gathered around him to prowl the streets
of Rome. The life lived well needed witnesses for validation, and Ludovico’s
ego amplified his other drives as he led a group of young conversi to visit the
statuesque courtesan Betta la Magra. They shared food, drink, and more, and
Ludovico’s boundary crossing brought him to court. But what were his
transgressions? Was it just proper and improper sexual practices, was it
individual intimacy moving to group sex, was it about commoners and nobles, or
about Christians and those who, despite having been “made Christian” were still
considered in some way ebrei ? If transgression lies in in the eyes or voices
of the witness, we have here a complicated intersection of identities and
codes, values and practices. The questions here, as in Benedetta Carlini’s
convent, lie with what those in the bed and those around it thought about norms
and deviances. Gerry Milligan brings us to what many consider the uber code of
the early modern male, Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, the
canonical text that we noted at the beginning of this essay. Milligan looks in
particular at the relation Castiglione draws between clothing and masculinity.
Clothing was fundamental to Renaissance discourses of gender and sexuality.
While it wascommon to read that what men wore was critical to discussions of
violence, military preparedness, and virtue, it’s not at all clear just how
clothing was supposed to do what it did. Was it cause or effect, or sign and
symbol of masculinity or effeminacy? Castiglione saw clothing choice as
potentially one of life or death, and that not just for reputation alone. As
Italy suffered through the invasions of French, Spanish, and Germans, it was
common, albeit perhaps too easy, to correlate a soldier’s effectiveness to what
he had worn. As Milligan asks, might a focus on clothing show us how aesthetics
and militarism functioned in Renaissance projects of social control? Laura
Giannetti then takes us from dead seriousness to dietary satire with approaches
to a question that Freud might well have faced: is it ever the case that a
sausage is just a sausage? Italians valued word play as much as sexual play,
and found the convergence of the two absolutely compelling. Carne was meat, f
lesh, and inevitably the male organ, and while mendicant preachers may have
condemned all of them together, most Italians appreciated them individually for
each of their meanings. Religious authorities never managed to expand the
imaginative forms of their dismay at the gluttony and carnality that sausages
represented; the most they could do was draw on Galen’s counsel of moderation
to reinforce their message of self-denial. Yet Gianetti shows that authors and
artists who were more aesthetically than ascetically driven began to explore
the imaginative potential of sausages as symbols of vitality, fertility, and
prowess. Their poems and stories disseminated messages of a humble meat that
grew into a powerful cultural symbol.Visualizing sexuality in word and image As
early as 1978, Thomas G. Benedek’s article “Beliefs about Human Sexual
Function” examined ideas about the sexed body, noting in particular the
persistence of the one-sex theory that women and men had parallel sex organs,
with the male organs externalized and female organs internalized. Moreover, the
balance of the humors—hot, cold, moist, dry—also impacted the nature of any
individual’s sexual makeup. Thomas Laqueur, like previous scholars, based much
of his argument on medical texts. It was not only the words, but also the
images that seemed to portray inverted genitals. Laqueur’s analysis went
further, however, to the conclusion that the one-sex body and the humors meant
that both women and men needed to ejaculate semen for conception to occur.11
Laqueur’s suggestion that Renaissance doctors and others believed in the
two-seed theory was controversial and stimulated a great deal of scholarship on
both science and medicine and gender and the body. Interest in the sexed body
and the physicality of sex and sexuality has continued to expand, embedding
medical perspectives of the sexed body into a cultural context. In her study
The Sex of Men (2011), Patricia Simons extended the critical study of men’s
history to focus on the physiological construction of men. Her analysis is
based upon exhaustive, interdisciplinary research includingtheoretical,
textual, and visual evidence. Simons re-focuses attention on the centrality of
semen to masculinity and fertility, thus rebalancing the dominant phallocentric
evaluation of premodern gender. Sexual acts and sexual pleasure have embraced
topics and methodologies that would have been unthinkable by earlier scholars.
The collection Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy (2010), edited by Allison Levy,
includes an amazing array of topics that illuminate sexual activities in new
detail. Renaissance images and objects portray an imaginative array of sexual
positions in sources, both textual and physical, ranging from Aretino’s writing
on sexual positions to their portrayal on medicinal drug jars. Patricia Simons
pushes the cultural history of sex and sexuality further in her essay about the
dildo. An analysis of the physical objects is set against descriptions of their
imagined use. Renaissance books were sufficiently explicit, however, that the
need for visualization was unnecessary. In Machiavelli in Love (2007), Guido
Ruggiero challenges some of the fundamental ideas about the history of sex and
sexuality proposed by Foucault and which have subsequently dominated research.
Rejecting Foucault’s assertion that sex and sexual identity were modern
inventions, Ruggiero demonstrates that in fact there was Renaissance sex and
Renaissance sexual identity, dismissing earlier theoretical obstructions. Using
a combination of court documents and imaginative literature, he highlights the
complexities of mind, body, and desire, and the formation of masculine
identity. In many ways, this book moves the historical study of premodern
sexuality onto a new and more sophisticated plane, one that reveals individuals
in their uniqueness. In The Manly Masquerade (2003), Valeria Finucci presented
one of the earliest analyses of Renaissance men as an inf lected category
deploying not only feminist theory but also psychoanalytic theory to understand
the constructions of masculinity from both a psychological and cultural
perspective. One of the most violent and sexually problematic figures of
Renaissance Italy was the brilliant goldsmith/artist Benvenuto Cellini.
Margaret Gallucci presents a new twist to traditional biography by integrating
a multidisciplinary analysis of Cellini, his artistic brilliance, his penchant
for violence and disorderliness, and his transgressive homosexuality that was
sufficiently public to result in criminal proceedings and house arrest. Following
new literary criticism and sexuality and gender studies, Gallucci tries to move
beyond simplistic evaluations of homosexuality and misogyny to make sense of
Cellini’s complex artistic life and disorderly behaviors.12 The third section
of this collection, “Visualizing Sexuality in Word and Image,” takes up these
questions of sex acts, the body, and identity by focusing on four cases of
creative artists who employ sexuality and gender in ways that challenge social
norms and expectations, and that raise questions both then and now about
identity and voice. James M. Saslow returns to the questions around sexual acts
and sexual identities that emerged in disputes around the “lesbian” nun
Benedetta Carlini, and to which Castiglione’s sartorial strictures allude. He
argues that the case of Italian painter Bazzi contributes to the larger ongoing
controversy in queer studies over whether we can locate an embryonic homosexual
self-consciousness in Renaissance culture. Bazzi’s fondness for young men gave
him the nickname “Il Sodoma” and he never shied away from making this a central
part of a very public persona. We have little documentary evidence for his
private feelings, yet his art embodied and transmitted homosexual desires, and
it is clear from the series of commissions that he attracted an audience which
read and sympathized with those clues. Saslow reviews Sodoma’s artworks,
patrons, and reputation over a few centuries and ref lects on what the larger
stakes are both methodologically and ideologically as we weigh whether these do
indeed provide sufficient evidence for a homosexual self-consciousness. Sexual
agency and identity are complex enough when we are aiming to interpret what an
individual says in a court room or inquisitorial investigation, or conveys in a
painting or poem. What do we do when men pretend to adopt the voice of women
and project desire, intent, and agency? Ian Frederick Moulton compares two such
works, Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti and Alessandro Piccolomini’s La Raffaella,
both of them written in the 1530s, and both featuring an experienced woman
mentoring a younger woman on the finer points of sex and sexuality. In both,
the older woman assures her younger companion that her desires are legitimate
and should be acted on to the fullest, even when transgressive. In both these
desires are essentially projections of male fantasies. Moulton explores what we
learn from male projections of female speech, identity, agency, and
particularly how male visualization and ventriloquizing exposes larger issues
around the place of women and the articulation of sex and gender in early
modern society. While we often emphasize the transformative effects of
printing, early modern culture continued to value the oral and visual, and it
brought these together in the art of memory. Sergius Kodera reaches back to
classical texts that recommended erotic images as particularly memorable, and
to the early modern author Giovan Battista della Porta’s L’arte del ricordare
(1566) which specifically advised stories of sex between humans and animals as
aides memoires. Myths of Leda, Europe, Ganymede, and others were all drawn into
this work, though more overtly in the vernacular than the Latin version. Kodera
follows this visualization of intercourse between humans and animals beyond the
arts of memory and on to texts on cross-breeding and to the paintings of
Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, seeing all of these as examples of a
distinctively early modern embrace of variety, engagement, and hybridity in
sexuality. In the final essay, Jane Tylus traces how Torquato Tasso depicted
women in both the Gerusalemme liberata (1581) and the Gerusalemme conquistata
(1593). While he felt that his powers as an epic poet were expanding, the later
work reduces the role and influence of female characters. The shift underscores
how the Liberata was more radical in its conception and execution. As he aimed
to style himself more self-consciously as an epic poet in the classical
tradition, Tasso moved from Virgil to Homer as his model, a move at once
stylistic and also insome sense moralistic – he saw this as an answer to
criticism of his language and of what he called the “fallacious artistries”
that had marked the earlier poem. Gender become critical to his conception of
what is true in art, though with ambivalent results – the woman who intervened
with power was superseded by the woman who intervened with tears. These essays
explore themes that were only emerging two decades ago. Their authors’
commitment to taking both an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach
allows re-evaluation of interpretations which were in danger of becoming too
rigid and which may have imposed too much on what the voices in stories,
trials, letters, and images were aiming to express. Contradiction, ambivalence,
and ambiguity abound. Recent work in all three areas that we have singled out
has explored just how widely the gaps between prescription and reality yawn in
the period, in part because of ambivalence on the part of those promoting
normative regimes. Yet gaps more often emerged because these regimes aimed too
far beyond what people expected and were willing to live with in their
neighborhoods, their relationships, and expectations. As we move forward
undoubtedly there will be new insights gleaned about the lives and loves of
Renaissance people. The intellectual and evidential foundation outlined here in
letters, court records, poems, pamphlets, and artworks will continue to support
a rich and diverse research culture. And there are new questions on the horizon.
The literary, philosophical, artistic, and existential implications of
transgender are only in a nascent stage of investigation, despite the initial
and hesitant foray made in Human Sexuality. Some topics and themes will
percolate until new sources and new perspectives allow new insights and
conclusions. As the study of sex, gender, and sexuality moves forward, the
dialogue between past and present will continue, animated by sharp
disagreements, punctuated by moments of clarity, and moving steadily towards a
deeper understanding of lives lived in a period of creative foment. The voices
gathered here, and the creative exchange they offer, advance that discourse on
the lives of those who made the Renaissance a fascinating period of critical
change.Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan. Storey, “Courtesan Culture.” Cohen and
Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome. Cohen, “Seen and Known.” Ghirardo,
“The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara.” Clarke, “The Business
of Prostitution in Early Renaissance Venice.” D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual
Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of Fifteenth-Century
Italy.” Rocke, “‘Whoorish boyes.’” Moulton, “Homoeroticism in La cazzaria
(1525).” See Finucci, The Manly Masquerade. Laqueur, Making Sex. Gallucci,
Benvenuto Cellini.Bibliography Benedek, Thomas G. “Beliefs about Human Sexual
Function in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” In Human Sexuality in the Middle
Ages and Renaissance. Edited by Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, 97–119. Pittsburgh:
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1978. Boswell, John. Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the
Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980. Brown, Judith C. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian
Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Burckhardt,
Jackob. The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. Translated by S.G.C.
Middlemore. Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky, 2003. Castiglione,
Baldassarre. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by Charles S. Singleton.
Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1959. Clarke, Paula. “The Business of
Prostitution in Early Renaissance Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly 68, no. 2
(2015): 419–64. Cohen, Elizabeth S. “Seen and Known: Prostitutes in the
Cityscape of Late-SixteenthCentury Rome.” Renaissance Studies Cohen, Thomas V.
and Elizabeth S. Cohen. Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials Before the
Papal Magistrates. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. D’Elia, Anthony
F. “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of
Fifteenth-Century Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2002): 379–433.
Finucci, Valeria. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration
in the Italian Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Foucault,
Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by
Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Gallucci, Margaret A. Benvenuto
Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ghirardo, Diane Yvonne. “The Topography of
Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara.” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 60, no. 4 (2001): 402–31. Kalof, Linda and William Bynum, eds. A
Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance. Volume 3. New York:
Berg, 2010. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Levy, Allison M., ed. Sex
Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Marshall, Melanie L., Linda L. Carroll, and Katherine
A. McIver, eds. Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy:
Playing with Boundaries. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Matthews-Grieco, Sara
F., ed. Cuckoldry, Impotence, and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th century).
Farnham: Ashgate, The Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy. Farnham: Ashgate,
2010. Moulton, Ian Frederick. “Homoeroticism in La cazzaria The Gay &
Lesbian Review Worldwide Murray, Jacqueline and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds.
Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1996. Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas, ed. Human
Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, Rocke, Michael.
Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence.
New York: Oxford University Press, ‘Whoorish boyes’: Male Prostitution in Early
Modern Italy and the Spurious ‘second part’ of Antonio Vignali’s La cazzaria.”
In Power, Gender, and Ritual in Europe and the Americas: Essays in Memory of
Richard C. Trexler. Edited by Peter Arnade and Michael Rocke, 113–33. Toronto:
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008. Rosenthal, Margaret F.
The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century
Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Ruggiero, Guido. The
Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the
Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Simons, Patricia. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Storey, Tessa. “Courtesan Culture:
Manhood, Honour, and Sociability.” In The Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy.
Edited by Sara F. Matthews Grieco, 247–73. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Talvacchia,
Bette, ed. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance. Oxford: Berg,
2011.PART ISex, Order, and Disorder. One of the last works that Francesco
Petrarch wrote was a short story in Latin which he claimed to have translated
from the Italian of the final tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron —the novella of the
patient Griselda, who accepted every cruel test her husband, Gualtieri, tried
her with to assure her worthiness as a wife. In Petrarch’s version Griselda was
a humble peasant and Gualtieri the esteemed Marquis of Saluzzo, a prince loved
by all for his wise rule. Tellingly, he claimed that he was translating the
tale because it was so very useful as a lesson on how to treat a wife that it
needed to be in Latin to gain the wider circulation that the universal language
of learned men merited. And, in fact, Boccaccio’s original version has been
long read in that light, almost as if Petrarch’s Latin retelling determined its
meaning for future generations. Recently, moreover, with more sophisticated discussions
of gender, his perspective has garnered even greater purchase, with Boccaccio’s
tale being criticized for its misogynistic vision of matrimony and support for
a husband’s absolute power over a wife. In turn, this perspective has even
colored the way some read the Decameron itself, discovering behind its laughing
stories and powerful, clever women a conservative defense of traditional
patriarchy. But in this essay, I want to suggest with a historian’s eye that
the story of Griselda’s ideal wifely qualities and her husband’s wisdom is in
reality not there in the Decameron (X, 10). For while that tale has been often
read as an account of Griselda, and her virtually biblical acceptance of her
husband’s will, it may well have read at the time as a story much more about
the many negative qualities of Gualtieri.1 For he is presented throughout as a
dangerous tyrant moved by a misguided sense of honor and a rejection of the
emotion of love, which meant that he was incapable of being either a good husband
or a good ruler from the perspective of fourteenth-century Florentine readers.
Thus, this tale is not just concerned with love and marriage, but also
crucially with rule and the rule of princes, in this casenegatively portrayed
as tyrants. In a way, then, I want to argue that it is Boccaccio’s “The Prince”
a century and a half before Machiavelli. Even the language of the day nicely
sets up this theme: for the term signore (lord) had multiple meanings that
could span the gamut of power relationships from the everyday husband as
signore/lord over his wife and household, to the local signore/lord/noble with
power over those below him, on to the signore/lord/ ruler (either a prince or a
tyrant depending on one’s perspective), and, of course, finally on to the ultimate
signore, the Signore/God. As we shall see, all these meanings are at play in
Boccaccio’s version of this tale. The teller of this story of multiple signori,
the irrepressible Dioneo, suggests its negative tone right from the start,
immediately warning that he finds Gualtieri’s behavior in general and towards
his wife “beastly.”2 He states f latly, “I want to speak about a Marquis, not
all that magnificent, but actually an idiotic beast. . . . In fact, I
would not suggest that anyone follow his example. . . .”3 This,
obviously, is hardly the wise prince Petrarch created in his supposed
translation of the tale. Dioneo then more subtly attacks him as a ruler
(signore), remarking that he was a young man who spent all his time “in hawking
and hunting and in nothing else.”4 Here we have echoes of an earlier tale in
the Decameron, the third tale of day two, about spendthrift Florentine youths
who threw away the riches left them by their aristocratic father by living the
thoughtless life of young nobles hunting, hawking, and living like signori.5
Significantly, those Florentine youths, after they lost their inherited
fortune, regained it by going to England and loaning money at interest to the
apparently even more foolish signori there, the English nobility, like many
Florentine bankers.6 Yet quickly they squandered their riches again, because,
as the story stresses, they returned to living like signori, eschewing the
virtù that made their Florentine merchant/banker contemporaries so successful.
What, one might well ask, was this virtù that had allowed them to remake their
fortune and that repeatedly brings success to the denizens of Boccaccio’s
tales? At one level the answer is simple. For Boccaccio’s contemporaries virtù
was a term that identified the range of behaviors that allowed one to succeed
and made one person superior to another. Simply put, it marked out the best.
But the simplicity of that definition quickly dissolves before the fact that
largely because it was such a telling term its meaning was highly contested and
f luid, in fact changing considerably over time, place, and across social
divides. Speaking very broadly, in an earlier warrior society many saw virtù in
aggression, direct action, often violent; and in physical strength, blood line,
and blood itself, even as at the same time moralists and philosophers often saw
it in more Christian behavior that rejected violence and aggression. In the
cities of northern Italy in the fourteenth century this traditional vision of
virtù was first expanded, then increasingly overshadowed by a vision more
suited to the urban life of the day and newer merchant/banker elites. For many
at the time, virtù required the control of passions—in contrast to an earlier
vision that privileged their moredirect expression—and included a strong lean
towards peaceful, mannered conduct that required reasonable, calculating (at
times sliding into cunning) behavior that controlled the present and
significantly the future as well.7 In sum, virtù, even as it was contested and
changed over time, was a word of power that helped to define an urban male
citizen and a truly good man. In the end, however, these youths were saved from
their un-virtù -ous behavior by a virtù -ous nephew, Alessandro, who first
re-established their fortunes via once again astute money-lending, and then
with his virtù won a bride who turned out to be the daughter of the king of
England, effectively overcoming all their foolish misdeeds. From this
perspective, it is clear that the signore Gualtieri, much like Alessandro’s
uncles, was not a virtù -ous or good prince, ruling as he should. Rather, by
not attending to anything but his own youthful pleasures, he was acting in a
way that Florentines would have easily associated with their fears about
contemporary signori/tyrants; for such rulers were seen by them as ruling all
too often merely to serve their own whims and selfish pleasures at the expense
of their subjects. And, in fact, proudly republican Florence had recently in
1342 experienced a brush with a signore/tyrant of its own, Walter of Brienne.
He had been appointed to a one-year term as ruler of the city in the hope that
he would be able to overcome an economic crisis caused by the failure of the
major banking houses of the city. But, as was often the case, he quickly
attempted to take power permanently as a signore and was just as quickly thrown
out after only ten months of unpopular rule. Almost immediately afterwards, a
popular government returned to power, and it remained wary of signori of any
type.8 Significantly, however, most Anglophone critics have failed to note that
the Italian for Walter is Gualtieri and thus that Florence had thrown out a
tyrannical Gualtieri of their own just a decade before Boccaccio completed the
Decameron. Tellingly the negative behaviors often associated with contemporary
tyrants are immediately linked to the tale’s Gualtieri and his marriage by
Dioneo, who notes that not only did he not pay attention to anything else but
his own selfish pleasures, he “had no interest in either taking a wife or
having children. . . .”9 This, then, had created problems with his
subjects. As they, like all good subjects, wanted him to take on the
responsibilities of a mature male and ruler by marrying; for marriage was seen
at the time as perhaps the most important sign of reaching full maturity and
taking on the sober responsibilities of an adult male.10 Moreover, with
marriage, a prince began to produce the heirs that would secure an ordered
passage of power at his death, something that for his subjects was crucial.
With Gualtieri’s rejection of this, in essence Dioneo had presented his readers
with a questionable signore/lord/ruler who refused to give up his youthful and
irresponsible ways to rule as an adult prince with virtù.11 In the end, then,
although he reluctantly gave in to his subjects’ demands, he decided to do so
by taking a bride without consulting with anyone. And once again this would
have troubled contemporaries. Arranged marriages were the norm in
fourteenth-century Florence and more widely and crucially theywere negotiated
by parents or relatives to secure broader family goals or, in the case of
rulers, meaningful alliances. The immature Gualtieri instead took his marriage
personally in hand to secure his selfish desires with no concern for his
family, his subjects, or even love. Moreover, his lack of love in selecting his
bride also evoked the negative presentation in Decameron stories of many
unhappy marriages where the lack of love had led to bad matches, especially for
women. Repeatedly the tales advocated avoiding this ill-fated situation by
marrying for true love, exactly what Gualtieri rejected. From his perspective
marrying for love and loving his wife would have endangered his un-virtù -ous
life, focused on his own personal pleasures. And at the same time, it would
have also signaled the end of his freedom from his responsibilities as a ruler
and declare that he had acquiesced in becoming the signore/prince that his
subjects desired and that Petrarch had rewritten him as being in his misleading
supposed Latin translation of the tale.12 Making his disgruntlement clear,
Gualtieri finally did knuckle under to his subjects’ demands, but warned them
that whoever he might chose, they must honor her as their lady or feel his anger.13
The reality behind that warning was soon dramatically revealed.14 For Gualtieri
had for some time been observing a pretty, well-mannered peasant girl who lived
nearby. Yet crucially what made her most attractive to Gualtieri was the fact
that as a humble peasant he was confident that he could dominate her so that
she did not interfere with his youthful lordly pleasures, the selfish key to
his marital strategy again.15 Following Gualtieri’s misplaced desires, we are
drawn ever deeper into the dark morass of unhappy marriages in the Decameron.
Having selected his bride without disclosing her identity to anyone and without
her even being aware of it, he insisted that his subjects come with him to
celebrate the matrimony. And so it was that one day they followed him to an
unlikely nearby village where the peasant girl, Griselda, lived in poverty with
her father. The scene is nicely set by the narrator of the tale Dioneo, as he
describes how the richly attired relatives of Gualtieri and his most important
subjects arrived on horseback before Griselda’s humble hut. When she, dressed
in rags, rushed onto the scene, anxious to see who their lord’s new bride would
be, to everyone’s surprise Gualtieri called down to her by name to ask to speak
with her father. She replied modestly that he was inside and accompanied him in
to the peasant hut to talk with her father, Giannucole.16 Even her father’s
name reeked of Griselda’s humble status, for Giannucole is the diminutive for
Giovanni. Using the diminutive for an adult male, and a pater familias at that,
essentially denied him any status or honor. Gualtieri underlined the point when
he did not waste any time with niceties on a person who, given that lack of
status, did not warrant them from his perspective. Thus, he did not ask
Griselda’s father for her hand as simple politeness required; rather he
announced that he had come to marry her. Then, continuing in his high-handed
ways, he turned to her and demanded that if he took her for his wife, “will you
always be committed to pleasing me and never do or say anything that would
upset me.”17 Once again the absenceof love in Gualtieri’s approach to his
future bride is stunning, especially for the tales of the Decameron; and
moreover, his lack of regard for her father, and for her is deeply troubling.
Turning to Florentine history and traditions once more it seemed almost as if
his way of treating Griselda and her father echoed what the citizens of
Florence most disliked in the high-handed ways of local nobles/lords that they
had rejected in the 1290s when they passed their revered Ordinances of Justice.
These laws were ostensibly designed to punish local nobles and their ilk
(labeled magnates) for just such high-handed behavior and mistreatment of
common folk. And these Ordinances had become a symbolic keystone of Florentine
republican government and its civic vision and would remain so across the
Rinascimento. In fact, one of the few times that the Ordinances were questioned
was when they were cancelled almost immediately after Walter of Brienne, the
other Gualtieri and would-be Signore of Florence, was driven out. After he was
expelled in 1343, the Ordinances were momentarily cancelled by a short lived
aristocratic government and then almost immediately reinstated by the popular government
that replaced both Gualtieri and that unpopular aristocratic moment, as a
strong reminder that the city would not allow signori of any type to mistreat
Florentines. And although Gualtieri did not himself revoke the Ordinances, the
black legends that grew up around his rule often made him responsible for their
momentary elimination and an attack on popular republic government.18 All that
this implies is underlined by the famous marriage scene that follows, for
Gualtieri, with his demands met, takes Griselda by the hand and leads her from
her home. There in front of the whole group of his elegantly dressed subjects
to their surprise and dismay he ordered her stripped naked.19 He then had her
re-dressed with the aristocratic clothing and the rich accoutrements that made
up a noble’s wardrobe and only then consented to marry her. As often noted,
this dramatic scene in its undressing and re-dressing of his bride essentially
symbolized and perhaps contributed to the rebirth that Gualtieri believed he
was engineering, transforming Griselda from a humble peasant to a noble wife,
using clothing as both a symbol and a tool. And indeed, the tale goes on to
point out how quickly and successfully she impressed the gathering, appearing
to take up easily the manner and bearing of a princess in her new noble
clothing. That impression was confirmed in the days following, when, as
Gualtieri’s wife, she displayed to all impressive manners and wifely virtues.
In sum, once redressed she was capable of being transformed from a humble
peasant to a noble princess—the very stuff of fairy tales and popular fantasy.
But it is also the very stuff of Florentine beliefs at the time—the elite of
the city had shifted from old noble families to a newer merchant/banker group
who dominated Florence both economically and socially. Thus, a humble peasant
who gained the opportunity and the dress to move at the highest social levels
was an attractive conceit, demonstrating that anyone with virtù could behave as
well as the old nobility. From that perspective Griselda had that delicious
quality of fulfilling contemporary fantasies, even if many rich Florentines
would havebeen comforted perhaps by the fact that such a leap for someone of
her status was highly unlikely. Yet there is a way in which the dramatic
stripping of Griselda—a theme that would have great popularity in the future in
literature and art—has masked a deeper honor dynamic involved in this troubling
marriage. In fact, the tale’s Florentine audience would have been aware from the
first that marriages were virtually always moments when issues of honor were
central. That was why fathers usually played such a significant role in such
affairs: they had, in theory at least, the mature judgment to evaluate the
complex calculus of family honor involved in a marriage alliance between two
families without letting youthful emotions interfere. Unfortunately, from this
perspective the young, selfish, self-centered Gualtieri fell far short of this
ideal, as the tale made abundantly clear. Nonetheless, Gualtieri was aware of
the honor dimensions of his marriage and was anxious to resolve them in his own
high-handed way. Anticipating the resistance of his subjects to his marriage of
a peasant and its implications for the honor of all involved—a marriage that he
saw as serving his interests and not theirs—from the first he insisted that
they accept his choice and “honor” it and him as their ruler. And, of course,
as long as his misguided honor was a driving force replacing love in his
approach to marrying Griselda, it crippled the relationship and his ability to
be a good husband and suggested a similar situation vis-à-vis his subjects as a
ruler where love for his subjects was also lacking. Crucially in this way of
seeing things, his behavior evoked strong echoes of other husbands and princes
in the tales of the Decameron whose lives were destroyed by their misguided
sense of honor. In turn, such behavior echoed Florentine fears about the
dangers of a central/northern Italian world where it appeared—in many ways
correctly—that the days of republics like theirs were a thing of the past. They
were being rapidly replaced by the one-man rule of signori who claimed to be
princes, but more often than not seemed to Florentines to be self-serving
tyrants like Gualtieri, more concerned with their misguided honor and selfish
pleasures than just rule. Yet in the short term things seemed to be looking up
for Gualtieri’s honor and his marriage. Not only did Griselda win over his
subjects, she soon became pregnant and produced a daughter. But not long after
the happy birth, the f laws in his personality and his treatment of his wife
began to reveal a deeper, darker truth. Almost as if he feared to succumb to
the success of his marriage, he decided to test his wife to assure himself that
she was ready to honor all his lordly wishes, no matter how cruel and
tyrannical they might be. Significantly, however, he defended these tests to
Griselda as a concern for his honor, complaining that his subjects were
murmuring about her lowly peasant origins and the similar baseness of her
daughter. In fact, his claim was presented as false by Dioneo. Gualtieri’s
honor was never questioned by his subjects in this context; actually, they are
portrayed as quite happy with his bride, even as they were surprised by her
success as a lady. Griselda, however, accepted his false claims, and, as a
result, unhappily understood the worries about his honor thatwere supposedly
tormenting Gualtieri. Thus, she replied obediently as a subject to such a lord
must: “My lord (Signor mio), do with me what you will as whatever is best for
your honor or contentment I will accept . . .”20 (1239). Once again
one wonders how this would have played for Florentine republican readers, who
saw in such one-man rule and unjust claims of honor the essence of tyranny—the
greatest danger to their own republican values and way of life. And in the
context of an unloving, unhappy marriage, we are faced with a man and a
relationship definitely gone wrong and a poor wife whose suffering Florentines
could feel.21 Things quickly go from bad to worse. Evermore the tyrant,
Gualtieri deceitfully uses his honor to excuse his most outrageous demands on
his wife/subject. First, he has a servant take her daughter away. And making it
clear that he is acting on the lord’s orders, the servant implies that he has
been instructed to kill the child. With great sadness Griselda hands over her
baby. Although Gualtieri is impressed by her obedience and strength in the face
of his horrible demand, nonetheless he allows her and his subjects to believe
that the child has been killed, while he secretly sends it off to relatives in
Bologna to be raised. Continuing his testing of her, when she gives birth to a
male child and heir, he once more claims the child’s life, using again the
excuse of fearing for his honor and his rule. Woman, because you have made this
male child, I cannot find any peace with my subjects as they complain
insistently that a grandson of Giannucole will after me become their Signore,
so I have decided that if I do not want to be overthrown, I must do with him
what I did to the other [child]. Moreover, given all this [I must sooner or
later] leave you and take another wife.22 Dioneo, however, makes it clear to
his listeners that once again this claim is false, noting that Gualtieri’s
subjects were not complaining about the boy’s humble background or the loss of
honor it implied. In fact, he points out that in the face of the apparent
murder of both children, his subjects “strongly damned him and held him to be a
cruel man, while having great compassion for Griselda.”23 Hardly the response
of those anxious to see an unsuitable heir or wife eliminated or those
enthusiastic about their exemplary prince, as Petrarch misleadingly portrayed
him. Still, as her lord and their tyrant, both she and they had no option but
to bow down before his cruel will, yet another lesson about the dangerous honor
of lords and their potential for heavy-handed tyranny that would not have been
lost on republican Florence. So, the second child joined the first in apparent
death—while Griselda lived on sadly under the shadow of her husband’s warning
that eventually he would end the whole problem of her humble birth besmirching
his honor and threatening his rule by putting her aside to take an honorable bride. And finally,
after twelve years Gualtieri decided that his daughter had grown old enough to
pass as his new bride; and it was time for the last tests of his wife. Thus, he
acted onhis earlier promise, informing her that he was ready to dissolve their
marriage in order to take a more suitable wife. Claiming that he had secured a
dispensation from the pope to put her aside, he gathered his subjects together
to make the announcement that he was sending her back to her father and her
humble life as a peasant. Evidently, he was not content to continue his cruel
testing of his wife in private; rather his cruel deeds had to be displayed
before his subjects. The power to rule and the honor it required were at play
and perhaps also a desire to warn his subjects that he was their signore as
well and capable of similar deeds to defend his honor and assert his control
over them. But considering what fourteenth-century Florentines would have made
of this new outrage is again suggestive; for almost certainly they would have
seen in this a cruel lord acting as a tyrant, mistreating his most loyal
subject in a way that no right-thinking republican Florentine would ever
accept—in sum Gualtieri was the model anti-prince. Gualtieri announced, then,
before his troubled subjects and the abject Griselda, that he was renouncing
her as his wife because in the past my ancestors were great nobles and lords of
these lands, where your ancestors were always laborers (lavoratori ), I wish that
you will no longer be my wife, but rather that you return to the house of
Giannucole . . . and I will take another wife that I have found that
pleases me and is befitting [to my status].24 In sum, his ancestors were nobles
and rulers and Griselda’s were humble laborers; therefore, their marriage was
unsuitable and he was literally suffering the dishonor of being a lord badly
married. The term “lavoratori ” used to describe her ancestors, while it could
be used as a synonym for a peasant, may well have suggested something more
troubling yet. The more normal terminology for Griselda’s ancestors would have
been contadini or villani,25 but by contrasting his nobility with her status as
descended from lavoratori, Gualtieri once again was asserting status claims
that would have ruff led Florentine feathers. For the people of Florence, who
had fought so hard across the thirteenth century to drive out high-handed
nobles like Gualtieri, had done so in the name of protecting the laborers of
the city from just such high-handed behavior. In fact, the Ordinances of
Justice labeled such behavior as typical of the nobility. And the Ordinances
were celebrated as wise legislation designed to discipline and punish the
nobility and protect lavoratori from their high-handed ways. Once again, the
recent attempt to eliminate the Ordinances in 1342 and the threat that posed to
the laborers of the city would have added weight to the negative valence of
Gualtieri’s speech.26 All this cruel testing of Griselda calls up echoes of another
person often associated with her and this tale, who had also suffered greatly
under his lord, the biblical Job. In fact, commentators have often pointed to
the parallels betweenGriselda’s patient suffering at the hands of her
signore/lord/husband and Job’s suffering at the hands of his Signore/Lord/God
as a reason for seeing her as an exemplary wife and loyal subject accepting her
husband’s rightful dominance, just as Petrarch later recreated her.27 There is
an immediate problem with this parallel, however, for Job’s Lord did not
actually deal out the setbacks that deeply wounded him. He merely withdrew his
protection and left the door open for Satan to attempt to destroy Job’s faith,
ultimately without success. From that perspective Gualtieri seems more to
parallel Satan than God. Despite that often-overlooked theological nicety,
however, the God (Signore) of the Old Testament who allowed the testing of Job
might seem to vaguely parallel at a higher level her lord (signore),
Gualtieri’s, testing of Griselda. But tellingly in the Trinitarian view of time
being preached aggressively in Florence when the Decameron was being written
and as war loomed with the papacy, that Old Testament God and His troubling
relationship with humanity following the original sin of Adam and Eve—often
portrayed as dishonoring that Signore —was seen by many as no longer the order
of the day. Christ’s love and his sacrificing of his honor to die as a common
criminal to save humanity was seen as inaugurating a new order and dispensation,
a view especially stressed by a powerful group of local preachers at the time.
And the Godliness of that new age, Boccaccio’s present, was totally alien to
Gualtieri and totally alien to his relationship with his wife and his
subjects—for crucially, he explicitly rejected love in favor of jealously
protecting his honor, much like the vengeful Lord of the Old Testament and
nothing like the God of Love of the New. In a work that over and over again
stresses the importance of love, love in marriage and in the best relationships
between men and women, Gualtieri becomes the cruel husband, the anti-prince,
the tyrant par excellence, and a ref lection of a relationship with the
wrathful God of the Old Testament that no longer obtained. And, of course, this
last tale of the Decameron is told by Dioneo—literally “Dio Neo,” the “new god”
of love—who makes it clear that he finds Gualtieri unsuitable as a husband,
ruler, and most certainly as any kind of a lover. But this was merely the
prelude to his last cruel testing of poor Griselda. For Gualtieri then demanded
that she return to prepare and oversee his wedding to his new bride. Once again
Griselda accepted this command. But significantly Dioneo insists on making a
critical clarification: Griselda accepted his cruel command not as a patient
ex-wife or as a loyal subject, but out of love for Gualtieri. He explains that
she accepted only because “she had not been able to put aside the love she felt
for him.”28 Thus she returned to the palace as a servant, to prepare the new
wedding for her beloved. Dioneo relates a number of humiliating moments in the
preparations and underlines once again their injustice by noting the deeply
troubled reactions of Gualtieri’s subjects to her abuse and their repeated
calls for a more just treatment of her. The humiliation comes to a head when
Gualtieri has his new bride brought to his palace for the wedding. Presenting
her to Griselda, he cruellytwists the knife of her humiliation in public again,
asking her opinion of his new lady. She answered, My lord . . . she
seems to me very good and if she is as intelligent as she is beautiful, as I
believe, I am certain that you ought to live with her as the most content
signore in the world. But still I would pray that those wounds that you gave
before to the earlier one [wife], you spare this one; because I doubt that she
could resist them, for she has been raised with great gentleness, whereas the
other was used to hardships from her childhood.29 Yes, Griselda has suffered
and finally even she has complained. Subtly, and without ever referring to
herself by name, she has pointed out finally the unjust nature of his rule over
her and by implication over his subjects. It would be satisfying to claim that
Griselda’s final faint demonstration of defiance caused Gualtieri to change his
ways, but Dioneo has already informed us that Gualtieri was ready to act even
before she spoke. Thus ignoring her comments, he declares: Griselda it is time
that you finally hear the fruit of your long patience and that those who have
held me to be cruel and unjust and bestial learn that it was all according to
plan, wishing to teach you how to be a wife and teach others how to pick and
keep a wife and [finally] to guarantee my peace as long as we would live
together.30 In the end, then, even Gualtieri admits that his lordly ways have
been cruel, unjust, and bestial, but he justifies them by claiming that he has
taught Griselda how to be a good wife. And many commentators, following
Petrarch, have taken this claim at face value, arguing that Gualtieri is the
demanding but just hero of the tale and Griselda the ideal wife fashioned by
his treatment of her. Yet, in fact, as the story makes clear over and over
again, his cruelty did not teach her anything. She came to him, as she has just
pointed out, already accustomed to suffering and accepting the hardships that
life brought her as a peasant. She was born into hardship and suffering and she
adapted quickly to her lord and his mistreatment because of her own inherent
peasant ability to suffer and lack of a sense of honor. Indeed, one would be
hard put to find a place where the tale or Dioneo suggest that she learned
anything from Gualtieri. And while the fourteenth-century Florentine readers of
this tale were more usually urban dwellers than peasants and thus theoretically
not as inured to hardship and suffering, they were proudly not nobles either,
and it is hard to imagine them accepting from local nobles the treatment that
Gualtieri dished out. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that they would have felt
sympathy for Gualtieri’s defense of his cruel ways, as they too would have been
unlikely to feel any need for such lessons from nobles or signori to learn the
patience necessary to survive as subjects (as they had recently demonstrated
throwing out their own Gualtieri) or for that matter even to survive as
wives.Actually, it might seem strange that finally after retaking Griselda as
his wife and explaining his whole plan to his subjects and her, the couple are
portrayed by Dioneo as living happily ever after. But providing an explanation
for that improbable happy ending is a startling and significant admission by
Gualtieri: for, as unlikely as it might seem, all his cruel tests have led him
finally to a crucial transformation— the decisive often overlooked climax of
the tale. He has finally discovered the emotion of love and has fallen in love
with his victim, Griselda. He confesses at the last: “I am your husband who
loves you more than anything and believe me when I say that there is no man
more content than I in his wife.”31 Crucially with that admission, and
Griselda’s ongoing love that survived his every cruelty, no longer is their
marriage simply an unhappy mismatch with a wife subject to her lord/husband
defending his misguided honor and selfish noble pleasures. Rather, now it is
exactly the kind of marriage that the Decameron advocates over and over again.
With love as its emotional base, the happy ending that the story, and the
Decameron itself, requires is possible and Gualtieri, his wife, and perhaps
even his subjects can live happily ever after—not a divine comedy perhaps but a
human one.32 For in the end Griselda survived a cruel lord, and with her
willingness to suffer and peasant patience, she, not he, for a moment at least
became the true teacher, teaching a tyrant who rejected love to love and to
become a true prince—in this she was perhaps more Christ-like than Job-like.
Let me suggest that by contemporary Florentine standards or those of the
imagined and real women listeners of Dioneo’s tale, Gualtieri’s mistreatment of
his wife was anything but a model of an ideal marriage until everything changed
with love at its conclusion, despite Petrarch’s claim to the contrary. In the
end, then, she was a victim, but in ways that many critics have had trouble
seeing. First, of course, at the hands of her cruel lord/husband. But also at
the hands of the would-be aristocrat and anti-republican Petrarch. For despite
his claims about what he saw as an ideal of marriage, he also retold her tale
in Latin to celebrate the honor of the often cruel signori—tyrants and
lords—that he cultivated for patronage and support far from the republican
Florence that claimed him at times with difficulty as an honored son. Still, in
the end she and love won out, a fitting conclusion to the new god of love,
Dioneo, and his tale, as well as to Boccaccio’s Decameron.Notes 1 I have used
for this tale and all citations from the Decameron the classic edition edited
by Vittorio Branca: Boccaccio, Decameron. In this reading that looks more
closely at the Marquis of Saluzzo, I am following the path breaking lead of
Barolini in her article “The Marquis of Saluzzo.” But I emphasize more a
Florentine perspective on the tale than Barolini and am less inclined to follow
her strategy of using game theory to explain what she labels as the Marquis’
beffa. I discovered after I wrote an early draft of this essay Barsella’s
excellent article “Tyranny and Obedience.” My account stresses more the marital
as well as the political side of the tale and looks more closely at the
Florentine political and social world of the day, while she offers a more
complete analysis of the ancient and medieval theoretical literature on
tyranny; but we both agree that the tale is more about Gualtieri as a tyrant
than about Griselda as a model wife.2 Decameron, 1233. “Beastly” often seems to
serve as code word or signal that the male so labelled has sexual appetites
that are “unnatural” by Boccaccio’s standards and hence like those of a beast.
If beastly is being used in that sense here, it would add another dimension to
the Marquis’ rejection of marriage and the love of women, one that Boccaccio
regularly paints in a negative light. Barolini provides an interesting
discussion of the term drawing similar conclusions but emphasizes its echoes of
Dante’s usage of the term, along with its classical and Aristotelian
dimension—a perspective that would undoubtedly have had its weight for learned
readers and listeners, but perhaps less for a broader audience at the time.
Barolini, “Marquis of Saluzzo,” 25–26. 3 Ibid., 1233; italics mine. 4 Ibid.,
1234. 5 The three are described as the young sons of a noble knight named
Tebaldo from either the Lamberti or the Agolanti families—both Ghibelline
families exiled from Florence in the late Middle Ages and thus suspect already
in fourteenth-century Florence with its strong Guelf tradition. 6 Although it
should be noted that the prospects of profits from loaning money to the English
had become less appetizing after the recent failure of Florentine banks in
1342, in part caused by the King of England’s reneging on his debts to them.
Actually, recent scholarship has argued that local bad loans in Tuscany and
debts built up in the ongoing wars in the region were more responsible for the
bank failures, but contemporary accounts tended to place a heavy emphasis on
the King of England’s actions—perhaps as a way to divert attention from the
more local issues involved. Barsella notes also this connection in “Tyranny and
Obedience,” 74–75. 7 Ruggiero, Machiavelli, 163–211. This vision of virtù and
its development across the Rinascimento in Italy is one of the central themes
of my effort to reinterpret the period in my book The Renaissance in Italy.
From this perspective, Boccaccio’s Decameron with its stress on virtù is a work
that fits more in the world of fourteenth-century Italy than as a work of
medieval literature as it is often characterized. Of course, many of his tales
have medieval sources and echoes, but significantly they are rewritten with a
very different set of values more characteristic of fourteenth-century Florence
and the city-states of central and northern Italy. 8 Walter (Gualtieri) of
Brienne actually makes an appearance in the Decameron in his own right as one
of the nine “lovers” of the Sultan of Babylon’s daughter, and a quite bloody
“lover” at that (II, 7). Boccaccio also wrote a quite uncomplimentary account
of his life in his De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, Lib. IX, cap. 24. 9
Decameron, 1234. Dioneo, however, does follow this comment with what appears to
be a compliment for this lack of desire to marry, “for which he was to be seen
as very wise” (1234). Yet what follows undercuts the force of this apparently
very traditional negative vision of marriage. And throughout the Decameron
Boccaccio seems to provide an unusual number of tales that see well-matched
marriages as positive and at least potentially happy. 10 For this see the
discussion in Ruggiero, Machiavelli, 24–6, 172–73 and Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 18,
131–34. 11 While the character Gualtieri had the same name as the recent
Florentine would-be tyrant, this is not to argue that he was the only tyrant
being referred to in the tale. In actuality Florence was surrounded by
dangerous and aggressive tyrants who were capable of instilling fear in the
city even if they were not named Gualtieri. As often noted, the fourteenth
century, following in the footsteps of the thirteenth, was a period where
republics were losing out to tyrants everywhere and Florence found themselves
surrounded by aggressive signori on virtually all sides. 12 This lack of love
also played a significant role in his lack of a positive relationship with his
subjects, once again the micro-level of life, in this case marriage, reflecting
the macro-level of life, in this case Gualtieri’s rule. Both lacked love and
that stood literally at the heart of his negative consensus reality for his
subjects and for the Florentine readers of his tale. 13 Clearly with the
repetition of “insisting” and Gualtieri’s will, the tale is playing on will as
a dangerous source of sin when misplaced as it is in this case. Of course, will
from a1415 16 17 181920 2133theological perspective is the basis of all sin,
which in the end is merely willing to turn away from the good and ultimately
God. In this case Gualtieri might be seen as willfully turning away from love,
the good and God much like Satan turned away from love, the good and God in the
greatest rejection of all. At this moment in the tale with his willing misdeed,
it might be argued Gualtieri confirms his fallen state. Barolini suggests that
in these demands Gualtieri, unhappy with his subjects’ calls for his marriage,
is setting up a beffa at their expense—a very typical form of Florentine joke
that in this case punishes them for forcing him to marry against his will—and
the key to the beffa is forcing them in turn to accept the peasant wife that he
will pick unbeknownst to them. Although there is a logic to this perspective,
it seems more likely that contemporaries would have assumed the driving force
in his decision to take a peasant as a wife was his belief that she would have
to be totally subservient to him, something that Barolini stresses as well.
Decameron, 1235. Although the text is clear that Gualtieri entered the house
alone, the discussion between Gualtieri, the father, and Griselda requires that
she had entered as well. Perhaps it is significant that she is so humble that
her entering the house with Gualtieri does not require mention. Ibid., 1237. The
Ordinances of Justice were first passed in Florence on January 18, 1293 and
while their meaning at the time has been much debated, they became with time a
kind of civic monument to the ideal of Florence as a republic ruled by the
popolo without the interference of the traditional Tuscan rural nobility,
labeled magnates, who had once dominated the city. For the debate and the more
complex reality of the Ordinances and the magnates themselves see my
Renaissance, 77–82 and 94–97 and the overview of Najemy in A History of
Florence, 81–89, 92–95, 135–38, and for a more detailed study see Lansing, The
Florentine Magnates. Suggestively, Petrarch in his rather different retelling
of the tale, softens this act of prepotency and male power that once again here
strongly underlines Gualtieri’s cruelty and lack of required manners. He adds
the telling detail that Gualtieri had Griselda surrounded by women of honor
before she was stripped. Here we see how the tale could be changed to make it a
hymn to a wise and careful husband anxious to arrange the right kind of
marriage that would assure a matrimony that functioned as it should with the
husband in command and the woman subservient and obedient. But Dioneo’s careful
scripting of Gualtieri’s boorish and self-centered behavior in line with his
high-handed ways that evoke the psychological violence of the old nobility,
strongly suggest a very different vision of Gualtieri and his marriage—a
negative vision in line with many of the tales about the injustices of arranged
marriages in the Decameron. Decameron, 1239. One might note here that although
Griselda is clearly a victim, she is hardly a heroine as often claimed by
critics. There are in fact any number of actual female heroines in the
Decameron whose tales were constructed to show their virtù and ability to
control their own lives and virtually always their goal of winning a meaningful
love in life and often in marriage. Perhaps the best example of this, and a
virtual anti-Griselda tale, that gives the lie to Petrarch’s and later critics’
vision of Griselda as a model wife is the tale of Gilette of Narbonne (III, 9),
who empowered by love cures the king of France and overcoming a series of
seemingly impossible trials (typical of medieval lover’s tales and more
normally male knights) in the end thanks to her virtù wins the love of the man
she loves, her husband, Bertrand of Roussillon. In this tale he is also
portrayed as a cruel lord, but Gilette is anything but passive and takes her
life in her own hands to win out in the end—a model of what a woman can
accomplish with real virtù in the name of love. It is suggestive also that
Gilette is an upper-class non-noble from an urban setting not unlike the
Florentine readers of the Decameron and much more easily accepted as active and
aggressive than the humble peasant Griselda. Similar virtù overcoming a husband
both cruel and foolish is presented also in tale (II, 9) where a Genoese woman,
who takes the name Sigurano da Finale, passes as a male and flourishes in a
series of adventures thanks to her virtù and in the end recovers the love of
the husband she loves despite his murderous misdeeds.Guido RuggieroDecameron,In
fact, this is the only use of the term in the tale, usually she and her father
are referred to as poor and it is noted that he is a swineherd not a laborer.
The title of the tale refers to her as “una figliuola d’un villano” and later
when referring to her unexpected virtù, her dress and by inference her status
is referred to as “villesco”: “l’alta vertù di costei nascosa sotto i poveri
panni e sotto l’abito villesco.” For this see Brucker, Florentine Politics,
114; Najemy, Florence, 135–37. On the Ordinances see note 18 above. Branca
actually points out the textual parallels noting that in the story of Job I:20
he states “Nudus egressus sum . . . nudus revertar” in reference to
Griselda’s “ignuda m’aveste . . . Io me n’andrò ignuda
. . .” In the New Oxford Annotated Bible, the famous lament of Job is
rendered “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return; the
Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job
I:20 [614]). Decameron, Critics have from time to time referred to the
Decameron as “The Human Comedy” playing on an apparent contrast with Dante’s
Divine Comedy, but I would suggest that Boccaccio’s comedy was more divine than
it might at first seem and Dante’s more human.Bibliography Barolini,
Teodolinda. “The Marquis of Saluzzo, or the Griselda Story Before It Was
Hijacked: Calculating Matrimonial Odds in the Decameron 10:10.” Mediaevalia
Barsella, Susanna. “Tyranny and Obedience: A Political Reading of the Tale of
Gualtieri (Dec., X, 10).” Italianistica Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. Edited
by Vittorio Branca. Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Brucker, Gene. Florentine Politics and
Society 1343–1378. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Giannetti,
Laura. Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance
Comedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Lansing, Carol. The
Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991. Najemy, John. A History of Florence,Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006. Ruggiero, Guido. Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society
in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins The Renaissance in
Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento. New York: Cambridg. Sexual
violence in Renaissance and early modern Siena was widespread, barely
manageable, and apparently accepted, though not always legitimized, especially
when it applied to particular social classes. Both the nobility and the clergy
considered it their “right” to engage in behavior that underscored their social
superiority.1 This included not only the use of weapons, but also brawls,
thievery, private vendettas, and sexual violence. Such behavior did not,
however, pertain only to them: commoners also forcefully imposed their
brutality, sexuality, and violence on less powerful victims who happened to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time, or whose only fault was their
vulnerability. But not all victims, whether male or female, endured violence
passively. For everyone whose voice was not heard, there were many others who,
in spite of their age or sex, protested the violence they had endured and described
it in detail. Unlike other Italian cities, medieval Siena did not have a single
government office charged with the social control of the population and the
suppression of behavior deemed to be unacceptable.2 This changed in 1460 when
the government established the office of the Otto di custodia (Eight in charge
of Protection) to oversee behavior and public health.3 After several changes to
its name and tasks, the office was abolished in 1541 by the Spanish
protectorate, and then reestablished in 1554 as the Ufficiali sopra la pace
(Officers in charge of the Peace) in order to settle citizen disputes and
prosecute both blasphemy and violence. Yet this incarnation was also
short-lived, and the office was abolished at the fall of the Republic in 1555.4
The administration of justice was entrusted first to the Captain of the People
(Capitano del popolo), and then to the Captain of Justice (Capitano di
giustizia), before being abolished in 1481. Some of its tasks were entrusted to
the Rota court in 1503, but in the event the 1481 suppression was not
definitive, and the Captain of Justice seems to have recovered some functions
in the first half ofthe sixteenth century. The office of the Captain of Justice
was formally revived when Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici issued an edict on the
“Reformation of the Government of the City and State of Siena.” in 1561, and it
acquired criminal jurisdiction over the city and the podesterie (the
administrative structures into which the countryside was organized).5 The
Captain of Justice also gained those tasks previously entrusted to the Criminal
Judge (Giudice dei malefizi ),6 and functioned under the supervision of the
Governor (Governatore).7 The Governor was now the top official in the new
administration. He enjoyed “broad political and administrative functions,
supervised the public order, issued regulatory actions and had the control of
all sentences of tribunals.”8 All other magistrates lost their jurisdiction
over criminal lawsuits.9 These frequent changes to judicial offices in Siena
help us understand why documentation on crime is scattered throughout many
different archival collections and series. It is also incomplete, because much
material has been lost. As a result, it is not possible to analyze the Sienese
records in as thorough a social or statistical way as it has been done for
Florence.10 The preliminary analysis presented in this essay—which uses Sienese
documents for the years just before and after the fall of the Republic
(1555)—will serve to illustrate at least some cases of violence at a time in
Sienese history that, from the perspective of the history of crime, still
awaits detailed analysis. A preliminary analysis reveals just the tip of the
iceberg. One of the questions that arises from a first glance at the documentation
is why so much of the surviving documentation refers to violence in the
countryside and not in the city. Perhaps extra-judicial agreements between the
parties, reached in order to avoid denunciation, were more common or widespread
in the city. Or, perhaps, much of the documentation for urban violence has not
survived to the present day. In Siena, and especially in the Sienese
countryside already devastated by war, famine, and other problems, Medicean
legislation over criminal activities took a long time to be applied and become
the norm. One of the reasons for this was that the countryside suffered from a
very slow reconstruction process. It took not only time, but a lot of effort,
to erode and limit local authorities and personal powers that, for decades
after the fall of the republic, continued to impose a social code that
penalized those on the lower levels of the social scale.What the law said The
rubric on sexual violence in the last republican Sienese statute (1545)
followed medieval precedent and listed only adultery, rape, and abduction, in
that order, as crimes of violence.11 Sexual intercourse with a married woman of
whatever social rank or with an unmarried virgin was punishable by the
imposition of a financial penalty; abduction for the purpose of sexual
violence, on the other hand, was punishable by death. The definition of sexual
violence required that the abductor (raptor) marry the victim, if the father or
the senior male members of her family deemed it appropriate, or alternatively
that he provide her withSexual violence in the Sienese state 37a dowry. If
sexual violence was perpetrated against someone’s wife or daughter, it damaged
the honor of the husband and the family, so the culprit had to, somehow,
adequately restore that damaged honor.12 Sexual violence by men on men,
described in the statute as “a dreadful kind of violence that is used against
nature on men,” demanded that the rapist be jailed and pay a fine, but if the
rapist was over forty years old, he was to be burned at the stake.13 The
regulation in the Duchy of Florence was similar: in 1542 Duke Cosimo I revised
the law against “the nefarious, detestable, and abominable vice of sodomy” and
not only increased the fines but also imposed physical punishments and even the
death penalty on repeat offenders.14 Once Siena had been ceded by King Philip
II of Spain to the Medici in 1557 and incorporated into the duchy of Tuscany,
the 1558 revision of the Florentine law on sexual violence also applied to the
city. This revised law removed the fines and imposed only physical punishments
for “those who will use force and violence to women and men to satisfy their
sexual desire.”15 If the violence did not lead to an effusion of blood, the
culprit was to be sent to the galleys for a certain number of years to serve as
a chained rower; if, on the other hand, there had been an effusion of blood the
culprit was to be executed. The only exception allowed, and this only for
Florentine and Sienese citizens, was commuting the sentence to the galleys into
a jail term, but this only at the discretion of Duke Cosimo I. Such discretion
generally depended on the social rank, personal reputation, and family honor of
the culprit.The rape of women and young girls The new law was tested almost
immediately. “Since this case was of such manifest enormity, and the first
since the publication of Your Excellency’s last pronouncement against violence
on men and women”:16 so begins a letter by Orazio Camaiani (or Camaini),17 a
diligent official and Captain of Justice in the “New State” (Stato Nuovo) of
Siena, to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in the winter of 1559. Camaiani went on to
relate a case of attempted sexual violence against “a poor widow of Belforte”
who, on resisting her attacker, was hit by him so hard that she bled.18
Camaiani’s information came not from first-hand observation, but from letters
he had received from the vicar of Belforte (fol. 13r), a small mountain-top
hamlet about 45 km west of Siena. It included all the necessary negative
requirements—night, loneliness, violence. The “poor widow,” who is never named
in the letter,19 had been assaulted during the night in her own home by two men
who entered on purpose in order to rape her; she resisted the attack, screamed
loudly, and was wounded in the head and face. Her attackers ran away without
succeeding in their intent. The widow did, however, recognize one of her
attackers, “a certain Terenzio Usinini, Sienese” (fol. 13r) and reported him.
The Captain of Justice thus knew for whom to look. The information was sent to
Duke Cosimo I, but what has survived is scattered and incomplete. It does,
however, point to the many cases of violence in a territory that was still
sufferingfrom the aftermath of the raids and devastations brought about by the
recent Florentine conquest of Siena (1552–59) and the republic’s difficult
process of submission to its new Florentine lord. We know very little about
Terenzio Usinini. There is no record of his having been baptized in Siena,20 so
we can assume that he was born and baptized in the countryside. He also does
not appear among the very few Usinini who held secondary appointments in
Sienese offices.21 His family pedigree or that fact that the family belonged to
one of the major political groups in Siena, the Monte of the Riformatori, were
of no help to him—in referring to Terenzio, the Captain of Justice noted that
“a worst name against a person cannot be heard in the entire town.”22 In fact,
Terenzio did not have a good reputation—after hearing that he had been accused
of attempted rape, other women in town went to the Captain of Justice to report
that he had raped them, too, or had attempted to do so. Terenzio managed to
escape arrest on this occasion, but his accomplice, a priest, was not as
fortunate—he was captured thanks to a peasant who tricked him with the help of
a woman who was priest’s former lover. The incomplete records do not tell us
what happened to either Terenzio or the priest. We can, however, determine that
Terenzio seems to have been a violent highborn individual who behaved as if he
were above the law and thought he could force his sexual desires upon
subordinate women. This may, in fact, be to a certain extent true because
Terenzio seems to have managed somehow to escape justice. While highborn locals
might have been able to get away with sexual violence and escape justice, the
sexual misbehavior of state officials, who were to uphold the legal system, was
more problematic, especially when such officials used their power to abuse
women and girls. Already in 1378, Pietro Averani from Asti, a district judge
was dismissed because he had used the power of his office (sub pretextu offitii
) to rape a young virgin girl living in Siena.23 In a case from 1554, a
community in the countryside asked the government in Siena to “immediately”
send another commissioner to replace the current one whose violence against
some local women was such that it was about to cause serious disorders. One
“young, respectable, and good” local woman even went to Siena herself and, in
tears, described to the magistrates how the said commissioner had come into her
house at night on the excuse of seeing how the soldiers had been billeted and
had started to lay his hands on her, at which point she had begun to scream and
he stopped.24 Though problematic, the sexual misbehavior of this representative
of the legal system seems to have elicited little more than a request for
removal from the post or relocation, and no actual physical punishment meted
out on the guilty party. We do not know whether this was the limit of what
plaintiffs could expect. In a different case, blasphemy was added to the charge
of attempted violence. This rendered the accusation much more dangerous because
blasphemy was considered an “open crime,” that is, clear and public. Angela
reported that Bastiano, the servant of the Bargello (that is, of the chief of
police), “on many occasions requested her honor from her.”25 After beating her
several times because sherefused, he entered her house while her husband was
away and tried to rape her, at which point she started screaming. After
threatening her, “he pointed the dagger at her throat saying ‘whore of God, if
you scream I will slaughter you,’” but she continued to scream and so he left.
The examples given so far point to a somewhat spontaneous, even impulsive
attempt on the part of the men to engage in sex with an unwilling woman. There
are also cases of carefully planned attempts. Agnoletto the Corsican, for
example, not knowing how other to seduce a young woman, did so by impersonating
a priest; “because he did not know how else to rape a young girl, he took the clothes
the archpriest wore during Lent and, dressed like him, started confessing her
in church.” This particular record continues by pointing out that Agnoletto
“raped many women and did other impudent things.”26 We have further examples of
premeditated rape. A notary reports that Pompeo di Giovanni from Monticello, a
45-year-old man, married and with two daughters, had engaged in “robberies,
rapes and, in general, all other sorts of abuses done and committed” including
“raping, together with other men, Iacoma the daughter of Filippo, his
relative,” and of “having prided himself for having entered through the roof
into Antonia di Censio’s house only to have sex with her and perhaps he did so,
and because there was no point in screaming she, for the sake of her honor,
kept quiet about it.” The notary continues his report with the comment that he
“will remain silent on what Pompeo did to certain poor young women who were walking
by” and then concludes by recording that Pompeo was eventually found guilty of
a long list of robberies and sentenced to the gallows.27 After the Council of
Trent (1545–63), a new detail enters into notarial descriptions of sexual
violence: some defendants now tried to justify themselves by explaining that
they had been tempted by the devil. In 1571, Sandro was accused of raping
five-year-old Santina in a wheat field and causing her to bleed from her
vagina.28 In his defense, Sandro told the Captain of Justice that when he went
in the field to “shout at some children doing some damage,” Santina and
Elisabetta came by. Sandro was then tempted by the devil to sit down and grab
the said Santina and put her on his lap, and having pulled out his tail [i.e.
penis] through the opening of his trousers, he inserted the second finger of
his right hand into Santina’s nature [i.e., vagina] and, having seen that it
could enter easily, took out his finger and started pointing his tail towards
her nature and, in so doing, he could have hurt her and she shouted one or two
times. Hearing the little girl scream, her uncle Domenico rushed to help her
and found her crying and “totally wrecked and bloody.” He hit Sandro with a bow
he had in his hands and moved him away from the girl. Sandro later confessed
that since he could not put his member inside Santina’s nature, he was about to
finish [i.e. ejaculate] between her thighs or in some other way as best hecould
because the devil grabbed him by the hair and he [Sandro] could not stop
himself, but the said Domenico stopped him. Sandro’s deposition claims that
when he was raping the girl he was not his own self, but was under the control
of the devil to the point that he was not physically able to do otherwise until
an external force, Domenico, interrupted him and stopped the devil’s control.
Referring directly to the 1558 law mentioned above, the Captain of Justice
pointed out that, in cases of violence with effusion of blood, the accused must
incur the death penalty. Perhaps to elicit a more merciful sentence, the
Captain of Justice described Sandro as “a young man between 25 and 30 years
old, a bachelor, and more a fool than a scoundrel.” The plea was
successful—Sandro was spared his life and received the lighter sentence of “two
or three years in the galleys.”A matter of honor, but whose honor? In a letter
of March 1524 to the government in Siena, Bartolomeo di Camillo, at that time
podestà (chief magistrate) of Sarteano, reported a disturbing case of rape: A
certain local man, Agnolo di Ipolito, entered into the house of a certain
Giovanni Baptista Tucci, a citizen of Siena, and found a daughter whose name is
Iuditta, who is around fourteen-years-old and not yet married, and violently
took her and because she did not consent, he started hitting her and eventually
he raped her by force so that he broke her nature. 29 Podestà Petrucci then
went on to say that: It seemed to me that, since I am in this town, for the
honor of your Excellencies first and for my own honor secondly, I had to bring
this shameful case to your attention so that it will not go unpunished.
Petrucci explained how he sent soldiers to Agnolo’s house to arrest him, but
the accused was defended by one of his brothers and other relatives, as well as
by the town’s priors. Because the victim’s father, Giovanni Baptista Tucci, was
a Sienese citizen, Sienese statutes applied and overrode Sarteano’s local
customs and statute (capitoli ). Petrucci thus assumed that he had the
authority, as podestà of Sarteano, to deal with the case, so “In a friendly
way, I let the Priori know that I did not want to bypass their local customs,
but I wanted [to uphold] my honor.” The situation quickly deteriorated and one
of Agnolo’s relatives fired “two rif le shots together with offensive words”
against the podestà. Another relative, Petrucci reports, “told me, answering
back, that if I would have gone to his house, he would have punched not only
me, but Christ himself.”Two days later, Petrucci reported that news of the rape
had reached one of the subordinate judges in his podestarial team, and that
this judge, together with some soldiers, went once again at Agnolo’s house to
arrest him. Agnolo’s uncle, Ser Giovanni di Gabriello, threatened them, saying
that if the judge tried to get in, he would throw bricks or stones at him. In
his report to Siena, Petrucci underlines the fact that “Your Excellencies know
that these actions are done against you, that in this place I am your delegate,
and that in order to preserve your honor I am ready to give my life.” Two days
after this, Cardinal Giovanni Piccolomini, archbishop of Siena, wrote from Rome
to the Sienese Concistoro (the lords and main officers) in support of Ser
Giovanni; perhaps as a way to show that Ser Giovanni enjoyed important connections
and patronage, or perhaps as an attempt to limit more severe outcomes. “Because
they had some other enmities [in town]” cardinal Piccolomini informed the
Concistoro, Ser Giovanni di Gabriello and his relatives did not recognize, in
the darkness of the night, the podestà ’s soldiers and so they defended
themselves. He added that Ser Giovanni “in a good-natured and simple way used
some inappropriate words” without realizing that he was speaking to the podestà
and his soldiers. Cardinal Piccolomini continued that he was certain that the
lords of Siena would recognize “the good faith of this country town and in
particular of the family and household of said Ser Giovanni who have always
been good servants of our city” and suggested that the lords “might show all
possible leniency.” A month later, podestà Petrucci happily wrote: Magnificent,
excellent and powerful lords [. . .] in order to carry out what your
Excellencies have ordered [. . .] I sent for Giovan Baptista Tucci,
his wife, and his daughter on the matter of what Agnolo di Ipolito had done,
and about the marriage that has to be contracted between them.30 Clearly, the
legal solution reached in this case of rape was for the rapist to marry his
victim. The records do not indicate what Iuditta, the victim, might have
thought of such a solution, or even what she felt about the entire case. There
is no trace of her in the reports or the letters. What is ever-present,
instead, is the matter of honor—the honor of Siena, of its magistrates, and
their delegate, of the town of Sarteano and its priors and local statutes; of
Agnolo’s family; of Tucci’s family; and of Iuditta’s own self, which would now
be restored through marriage with her assailant. In all of this, the discourse
is male while the female voice of Iuditta is completely absent.The rape of
young boys Rocco from Campiglia confessed under torture that, while he was at
home eating, a certain Curtio, a little boy around eight years old, entered his
house and asked him for something to eat; the said Rocco grabbed him and laid
him over a table and, having lifted his clothes, put his tail [penis] between
the boy’s butt cheeks with the intention of knowing him carnally.The boy’s
screams stopped Rocco from proceeding any further in the attempted rape. Under
questioning, Rocco admitted that “he did put [his penis] between the boy’s
thighs but then finished the job with his hands.”31 In light of the accusation
and confession, the Captain of Justice in 1571 asked not only that the usual
fine for such sodomitical activities to be levied on Rocco, but also that he be
given jail time on account of “the young age of the boy.” The request for jail
time may point to the Captain of Justice’s understanding of the aggravating
factor in the case (the boy’s tender age) and, perhaps, to his personal
feelings about it, but the bureaucratic language of the report does not allow
us to delve further into the case nor to understand more fully how Rocco
himself might have justified his aggression of Curtio. It does, however, point to
the risks and dangers that came with child poverty (Curtio entered the house to
ask for food) and the opportunistic behavior of men in the grip of sexual
impulses. The charges levelled a few years earlier in 1567 against Giovanni, a
25-yearold man from Sinalunga, “strong and well-shaped,” were many and
varied.32 The records tell that that he was “in jail, indicted for having
carnally known a she-ass and also for having used the nefarious sin [sic] vice
of sodomy.” He was also accused of having sodomized Salvatore, a boy of “around
four or five years of age and of having broken his ass [sic] sex.” Salvatore
was not the only boy Giovanni had attempted to sodomize; he had done the same
to “another little boy [also named Giovanni] of the same age [as Salvatore] or
a little more”, but this boy managed to run away crying. Under “rather rigorous
torture,” Giovanni explained that he had found a she-ass along the way, moved
her off the public road and into a scrub where, he felt the need to mount her
and so, approaching her from the back, he put his member into her nature, but
because she did not stop moving and grazing, after having kept it there for a
little while, he pulled it out and climaxed as he did so. Giovanni also
confessed to having taken little Salvatore to a vineyard where, having lifted
his clothes, he directed his natural member into the boy’s ass [sic] sex, but
because the boy was small he could not insert it more than two fingers, and
because this was hurting the little boy, the boy started to struggle and scream
so Giovanni let him go and climaxed outside, and he did not notice that he had
broken the boy’s sex or caused an effusion of blood. An aunt of the little boy
declared, instead, that when little Salvatore came home “the blood was running
down his thighs and his ass [sic] sex was chapped.” Giovanni justified himself
saying that when they were in a barn he told the child “if you come here, I
will fuck you” and then added that “it is not true that he wanted to sodomize
him.” The records conclude that “in line with the statutesof this city, it does
not look as if Giovanni is subject to capital punishment,” even though blood
had been spilled, “but we could condemn him to the galleys, with the approval”
of the Governor. Aside from the various crimes listed in this deposition
(bestiality, sodomy, child abuse, physical violence causing bleeding), there is
an interesting idiosyncrasy in the records. The notary seems to have had second
thoughts about some of the words he was using and seems to have felt compelled
to attenuate the language; he did so by striking out some words and
substituting them with more neutral, though still very precise, terms. As a
result, “ass” became “sex” and “sin” became “vice.” While the first correction
suggests an attempt to use terminology that is less vulgar or vernacular in
favor of a more technical term, the second suggests the presence of a moral
consideration whereby the Christian concept of “sin” is replaced by the more
secular concept of “vice.” All the previous cases deal with sexual violence in
the countryside or smaller towns in the region. The only case of sexual
violence I have found in the city of Siena itself involved a young apprentice
working in a slaughterhouse in the district of Fontebranda.33 Ascanio accused
the butcher Lando, an associate of his employer Orlando, of having sodomized
him in the slaughterhouse and having beaten him for resisting. Ascanio
explained that it happened “in the workshop when we were going to stretch the
tallow in the workshop dais” (fol. 169v). When Ascanio turned down Lando’s
sexual request, Lando “took me by the arms, tore the lace off my leggings and
lowered them. Then he lowered my head, came into me from behind, and did his
wicked things [ poltronerie] to me, and once he had done them, he punched me
twice in the back.” Ascanio told the court that he informed his employer
Orlando, who in turn informed the shop boys working with Lando as well as other
people. Ascanio’s accusation was, however, undermined by his own admission that
he had already, on several occasions, been the passive partner in same-sex
intercourse with soldiers in Montalcino and with a soldier in Siena in the
service of Cornelio Bentivoglio (fol. 170v). In other words, Ascanio had
previously been sexually active with other men. Perhaps for this reason Lando
did not suspect at first that he had been arrested for having sodomized
Ascanio, but thought, instead, that he had been arrested for having beaten him
(fol. 171r). Questioned on the details of what happened in the slaughterhouse,
Lando reported that perhaps Ascanio had misinterpreted his joking words “what
do you think, come here I want to fuck you.” This led the judge to interrogate
Ascanio once again, this time with his hands tied. The youth once again
declared that “Lando started beating me and wanted to force me and he bent me
over and sodomized me” (fol. 172r), but this time Ascanio added that he did not
resent his having been beaten. Ascanio was then questioned a third time, this
time in front of Lando, who maintained his defensive line saying: “I told him
jokingly ‘come here, I want to fuck you’ because he did not want to come.”
Interrogated again, Lando confirmed “I ordered him to bring the tallow and to
stretch it up, but I did not do anything with him nor with anyone else” (fol.
172v). Ascanio, too, continued to affirm his own version of events pointingout
that this happened not only at Lando’s slaughterhouse, but once also at
Fontebranda (where Ascanio refused to go along with the attempted sodomy). When
Lando kept saying that the accusation was levelled at him because of the
beating he had given Ascanio, the latter asked the judge call other witnesses
saying, “let the shop boys come here and they will tell you what I told you”
(fol. 173r). In the end, Ascanio’s situation became quite complicated as he
paradoxically changed from being the accuser to being the accused. He was
jailed (allegedly on charges of sodomy), but on 25 December, in celebration of
the Nativity, he was pardoned and released “by decree of the lords” (fol.
173r).34 Several factors worked against Ascanio. His position as an apprentice
was perhaps too weak to sustain the charges he levelled against a master
butcher such as Lando, or to raise doubts about the truth of Lando’s
deposition. In a situation such as this, the court seems to have given credence
to the more senior and more socially respectable individual. Similarly, the
fact that Ascanio’s employer failed to support him in his case must have raised
suspicions. Lastly, Ascanio’s admission of having previously engaged in
same-sex intercourse with soldiers both in Siena and in Montalcino worked
against him. Although Ascanio had the courage to denounce a superior for a
sexual crime that was not uncommon, his social status and his previous sexual
encounters with men not only placed his testimony in doubt, but actually served
to find him guilty and put him in jail.The clergy and violence After Siena fell
to Florentine forces in 1555 the Sienese government and part of the Sienese
population moved to Montalcino, a small town about 40 km due south of Siena, in
a last attempt to resist the conquest and preserve the centuriesold republic.
Among the volumes of deliberations that have survived from the “Republic of
Siena retired in Montalcino” (Repubblica di Siena ritirata in Montalcino) there
is the denunciation deposited by Mona Antilia di Andrea, a woman living in
Castelnuovo dell’Abate, in which she asks for justice for her eight-yearold son
who, she reports, has been “damaged” ( guasto) by the French friar Carlo who
worked at the ospedale (hospital or hospice) attached to the Olivetan abbey of
Sant’Antimo, in the plains just below Castelnuovo.35 The Sienese authorities
summoned the friar to appear in court within three days to defend himself
against the accusation that “he had had sodomitical intercourse with the said
young boy and had broken his ass” (“di havere fatto culifragio”). Because the
friar was French, the court decided to inform the French Marshal Blaise de
Lasseran-Massencome, seigneur de Monluc, who had commanded the French troops
during the defense of Siena and had then moved to Montalcino with the Sienese
government and exiles. A week later, Monluc was informed that the friar had
been arrested in Piancastagnaio where the podestà was told to keep the
Frenchman in jail and under close surveillance until further notice. About a
month later, the friar was transferred to the Franciscan convent in
Montalcinowhere the friars were advised of his alleged crime, told to guard him
well, and await further orders. At this point, the documents fall silent and we
do not know what further ensued with Friar Carlo. We are thus left with no
information on what he might have said in his defense, what further evidence
the mother and the boy might have brought into consideration against
him, or what the final verdict might have been. What we do have, however,
is the record of a mother asking for justice against a foreign clergyman who
was the subject of, and possibly defended by, a powerful foreign military
figure in the region, this during a difficult moment in a war that had
devastated the countryside and brought about the near-total collapse of the
government and the republic. Civic and moral regulations were still in effect,
but the silence of the incomplete records and the transfer of the accused friar
to another convent, rather than to a city jail, seem to imply that such
regulations had not been strictly applied and that the friar probably escaped
justice. The Sienese government, whether in exile or not, was not the only
jurisdiction to deal with sexual violence by the clergy. Ecclesiastical courts
also dealt with sexual crimes, as we can see from the records in the fonds of
Cause criminali housed at the Archiepiscopal Archive in Siena.36 The collection
includes the precepts, that is the summons to appear in court, and some of the
trial records, but once again many of the files are incomplete. In fact, in the
majority of documents and final sentences issued by the archbishop’s vicar are
missing, so this case can only be known in its general outlines.Menica and the
priest Ser Mauro Criti One case for which we do have a complete set of
documents deals with the charges levelled against the priest Ser Mauro Criti,
rector of Campriano di Murlo, a hamlet 17 km south of Siena.37 According to the
charges brought forth by the victim’s father, the priest used an excuse to
enter the accuser’s house and, finding the man’s twelve- or thirteen-year-old
daughter Menica alone at home, tried to sweet-talk her by asking her if she
wanted him to buy her a pair of shoes. Aware of the priest’s intentions, Menica
responded with “I want God to give you a misfortune.” Ser Mauro “then reached
out for her neck and kissed her and tried to do something else, but she
yelled.” Menica’s shouts were heard by Laura Pasquinetti, a nine-year-old girl
who arrived just in time to see the priest leave. He pretended to throw some
snow against the window, and said to Menica: “Be quiet, you little beast, I’ll
buy you a pair of shoes.” Menica’s father asked that the priest be justly
punished, having damaged both his and his daughter’s honor, even though he had
to admit that “he could not prove the fact, except as he had told it, because
when it happened there was no one else at home.” Although the evidence came
from two under-age girls, Menica and Laura, the court was nonetheless obliged
to pursue the case. A note signed by FilippoAndreoli, secretary of the Governor
of Siena, Federico Barbolano di Montauto, laid out the guidelines the vicar was
to follow: The very reverend vicar of the most reverend lord archbishop of
Siena will make sure that in the states of His Highness [Duke Cosimo I de’
Medici] crimes committed by priests will not go unpunished and he will not fail
to ensure that both public honesty and private interest are upheld. With this
note, Andreoli was referring to the 1558 Florentine law on sexual violence and
Cosimo’s determination that it be applied evenly and universally. The trial,
which lasted almost a year, gathered testimonies not only from the two girls
who had been ocular witnesses, but also from many other people, and brought to
light the fact that the priest was no saint. At first, the interrogation of Ser
Mauro revolved around what he did that day. His responses claimed that his conduct
had not been socially improper—he said that when he called at the house and
realized that no adult was present he simply went away (fol. 4v). He stubbornly
denied having thrown snow at the window, but admitted to having thrown snow
elsewhere that day, as confirmed by other witnesses. Brought in for questioning
once again, this time with Menica in the room, Ser Mauro reacted with surprise
and fear at seeing the girl (fol. 13r), who accused him without fear (fol.
13v). From the examination of other witnesses, the vicar learned that Ser Mauro
had also been physically and sexually violent with Caterina, a young girl about
fourteen years old, unmarried, who had been brought up by a certain Bernardino.
According to testimony, Ser Mauro had “misled and kidnaped Caterina
[. . .] brought her to his house, where he kept her for several
weeks, raping her and using her contrary to the law [contra forma iuris]” (fol.
23v). He also sought to take advantage of Hieronima, the servant of a priest
who had previously been stationed in Campriano. Ser Mauro asked her to wash his
clothes in exchange for his giving lessons to one of her sons and then added
that he would “give her more affection than the other priest”, and this
contrary to the law [contra forma iuris] (fol. 23v). Other witnesses reported
that the priest was a confirmed card player and always had with him a deck of
cards “that he says is a present from a beautiful girl” (fol. 30v). Ser Mauro
denied everything, even under torture, but was found guilty nonetheless and fined
100 lire, removed from his church in Campriano, and confined in Siena for two
years.Filippo and the presbyter Ser Cristofano Another case heard by the
bishop’s court in Grosseto deals with a mother who brought charges against a
priest who had raped her son. Monna Caterina, a thirty-year-old widow living in
Campagnatico, in the outskirts of Grosseto, reported that the presbyter Ser
Cristofano “has raped my little son Filippo.”38 The narrative she provides
illustrates a mother’s care and a young victim’s shame. “For the past year I
have sent my Filippo to his [Ser Cristofano’s] school andone evening when he
came back one I noticed he was unhappy and very sad.” Caterina asked what was
going on, but Filippo refused to answer. Later that evening, when she was
“undressing him to put him in bed, I saw his shirt very bloody and I asked him
what blood was this.” Filippo confessed that on that day, the priest had called
him in his bedroom and had given him a book and he had approached him and while
he pretended to teach him, he did that horrible thing on the back, and because
the little boy yelled, he hit him few times. Ser Cristofano threatened the boy
not to reveal anything to me nor to someone else and so, “looking carefully at
the boy, I saw that he had hurt him and had broken his ass and so I decided he
would not attend school anymore.” In her testimony, Caterina also reported that
she heard that Ser Cristofano had raped “Monna Lena, a widow at that time” and
that rumor went around the entire countryside that “he torn her behind.” But
what troubled Caterina more was that she and Ser Cristofano were cousins39
—presumably, she did not understand the reason behind his “bad behavior”
against his twelve-year-old nephew Filippo. When the bishop’s vicar
interrogated young Filippo, the story matched closely with what his mother had
reported. Both accounts pointed to a familiar closeness and confidence that the
presbyter had showered on Filippo in order to sodomize him. Filippo recounted:
I know Ser Cristofano of Ventura, the priest in Campagnatico and my kin, and I
attended his school for a year or perhaps more and one evening, after the other
pupils had left, I remained there to serve him at dinner and after he had dined
he stood up and he went to sit on a chair in his bedroom and he called me.
After I made the bed, we went back and he sat again on the same chair. Then he
gave me an illustrated book and he put me between his legs: he untied my pants
and lifted up my shirt and put his thing into my ass and caused me pain. I
started to scream and asked him to let me go, but he was holding me and he was
thrashing and kept telling me “be quiet, be quiet” and he closed my mouth so I
could not scream and he put his thing into my ass and then he let me go. I went
home and, along the way, I could not walk because he hurt me in the ass and I
was bleeding and I went to bed and my mother saw my shirt and I think she
believed it was scabies because at that time I had it, and then I told her: and
she did not want me to go to school again and I did not go anymore. In response
to a direct question, Filippo answered, “I never saw nor do I know whether Ser
Cristofano did something like this to any other student.”40 Family relation was
the justification Ser Cristofano used to keep Filippo back, have him serve
dinner, and make the bed. Once there, he used the “illustrated book” to entice
the boy enough to sodomize him, counting on the fact that Caterina, as a widow,
did not have a husband to defend the family or take action against the presbyter,
whose social and cultural position in town served, in part, to protect
him.Reading the document with modern eyes, we note Caterina’s maternal
sensitivity: she immediately realized that Filippo was unhappy and hiding
something. Her understanding of her son and her emotional connection with him
were strong and deep. She also had aspirations for her son, enough to send him
to be educated by a learned relative who might open doors in life for the boy.
In spite of this, Caterina was not about to accept her cousin’s violence
against her son and reacted quickly and with determination: “I did not want him
to go to his school anymore” she told the vicar’s notary, and then, perhaps to
temper her rage, added “I consider him [Ser Cristofano] wicked man [tristo]41 because he raped my
little boy Filippo.” Although Filippo was about twelve years old at the time,
Caterina referred to him as a citto (little boy), using a typically vague term
for a child that could be adapted to the legal necessities of the moment—in her
eyes, Filippo was an innocent child and not a possibly compliant youth. In
fact, the records do point to Filippo’s physical weakness and to his inability
to deal forcefully enough with the situation to avoid the rape—caught by surprise,
he reacted strongly and screamed, but to no avail because the priest’s adult
strength, his shutting Filippo’s mouth to prevent the boy from screaming, and
his repeated command to the boy to “be quiet” while he raped him all
contributed to overpower and subdue Filippo. The consequences of the priest’s
violence were not only physical—lacerations, bleeding, pain—but also
psychological—the boy’s depression and silence on his return home. While in
cases of anal rape in Venice, the authorities, already in the fifteenth
century, sought the help of surgeons and barbers to examine and report on the
lesions and physical damage done to the victim’s body,42 this was not the case
in Siena. There is no trace of such provisions in the surviving statutes of the
Sienese barber surgeons’ guild.43 The only reference I have found to an
obligation to report on wounded persons is a decree of February 1556 (reissued
in 1563) signed Governor Ferdinando Barbolani di Montauto, which refers to
wounds in a general way, and not to wounds specifically caused by sexual
violence or sodomy.44 In a case of some years later, a certain Arcangelo
charged the chaplain Ser Andrea with having sodomized his eight-year-old son
Sabbatino, who had been a boarding student in the chaplain’s school, and with
having threatened him (Arcangelo) with a weapon.45 Arcangelo reported that “one
night, while sleeping in bed with Sabbatino, Ser Andrea sodomized him forcibly
and against Sabbatino’s will, so that he broke his ass and then abandoned him.”
As he was being raped, the young boy screamed and was heard by a neighbor. The
physical damage done to Sabbatino was such that he could not walk. Archangelo
heard of this from a local miller who presumably heard the news through the
small talk of the neighbors, and went to the chaplain’s house to get his son
and take him home. A few days later, Arcangelo went to pick Sabbatino’s things,
but the chaplain refused to return them. In front of other people, the chaplain
threatened Arcangelo with a hatchet while “another man who is in his house took
an harquebus.” Ser Andrea’s violent behavior was not limited to
Sabbatino:Arcangelo reported that “he has sodomized four more little boys,”
among them two of the miller’s sons.Conclusion The case studies presented in
this essay point to a much larger corpus of documents dealing with legal cases
against perpetrators of crimes of sexual violence. A first observation we might
draw from the evidence presented is that, ten years after the publication and
implementation of the 1558 Florentine law against sexual violence, cases were
still being handled with leniency towards the accused—at least in Sienese
territory. In spite of mounting evidence that included precise and detailed
information from the victims, supporting evidence from eye-witnesses and other
people, and in spite of the use of torture (in a few cases) to extract further
information or confirm previously given information, alleged culprits seem
generally to have received lenient sentences that spared their life. What is also
striking is that all defendants denied the allegations raised against them,
even under torture. In their defense, the accused used standard diversion
tactics in order to have the case dismissed or the penalty reduced. This
included suggesting that the children’s allegations were reliable because of
their young age, or the fact that the children may have been prompted by others
to say things that were not true, or that they had been instructed on what to
say in order to build a case against the accused. Was this sexual violence
against minors “normal” at the time? To modern eyes, the cases and evidence
presented here may seem extreme and even unbelievable, and some contemporaries
probably felt the same way. Yet, as Ottavia Niccoli reminds us, we must not imagine
a constant in “human nature” that might allow us to apply our criteria, our
sensibility, our perceptions to people who lived five or six hundred years ago,
except in very general terms. The mental frame of our ancestors was, in fact,
and at least under some aspects, very different from ours.46 We can observe
that those mothers, fathers, and relatives who sought justice for their
victimized children did so without fear of the court, or public opinion, or the
bureaucratic lengths of time the process would entail. We can also note how
local communities were not sympathetic towards people in positions of authority
who behaved in improper ways towards the young people they were supposed to
educate, defend, and protect. The Sienese evidence suggest that these cases,
unlike those in Florence or Venice, were not about voluntary choices.47 These
were not cases of same-sex consensual sodomy or prostitution for profit. These
were violent acts perpetrated by men in power over young people who could not
defend themselves. As Patricia Labalme aptly said, “although there is herein
much to pity and much toprotest, this is a story without a moral.”48 The
evidence from the Sienese records points to the same conclusion.Notes 1 Di
Simplicio, “La criminalità.” For the later period, Di Simplicio, Peccato
penitenza perdono. 2 For the case of violent behavior in Bologna see Niccoli,
Il seme della violenza. 3 Archivio di Stato di Siena (hereafter ASSi), Guida
Inventario, 105, 119–23. 4 Ibid., 105. 5 Cantini, Legislazione Toscana, vol.
IV, 120. 6 ASSi, Guida Inventario, 121. 7 Cantini, Legislazione Toscana, vol.
IV, 120. 8 ASSi, Guida Inventario, 123. 9 Cantini, Legislazione Toscana, vol.
IV, 117. 10 For social aspects, see Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. For
statistical aspects, see Zorzi, “The Judicial System.” 11 Ascheri, ed.,
L’ultimo statuto, III. 76 “De poena adulterii, stupri et raptus,” 315. 12
Brackett, Criminal Justice, 111. 13 Ascheri, ed., L’ultimo statuto, III. 79 “De
poena sogdomitarum,” 316. 14 Cantini, Legislazione Toscana, Archivio di Stato
di Firenze (hereafter ASFi), Mediceo del Principato (hereafter MdP) 1869, fol.
13r (February 16, 1559). 17 Giansante, “Camaiani Onofrio.” 18 ASFi, MdP 1869,
fol. 27r. 19 It may be possible that she is “domina Francisca relicta quondam
Michelagnoli Iacobi de Belforte” with whom Terenzio had disagreements for some
quantities of wheat, ASSi, Curia del Placito 750, not foliated (November 4,
1555). 20 He does not appear in ASSi, Ms A 33, fol. 305r (battezzati), a
compilation of baptismal records from church registers in the Baptistery and
civic records in the office of the Biccherna. 21 ASSi, Ms A 39, fol. 203r
(riseduti). 22 ASFi, MdP 1869, fol. 21bisr. 23 ASSi, Notarile ante cosimiano
99, not foliated. Pietro was also legum doctor. 24 ASSi, Concistoro 2453 ad
datam (April 18, 1554). 25 ASSi, Capitano di giustizia 645, fols. 17r–19r
(August 1570). 26 ASSi, Repubblica di Siena ritirata in Montalcino 63, passim
(1557). 27 ASSi, Biccherna 1127, fol. 24v (1544); ASSi, Capitano di giustizia
645, fol. 94r–v (July 1571). 28 ASSi, Governatore 436, fol. 86r–v (June 28,
1571). 29 ASSi, Concistoro 2081, not foliated (March 20–24 1524). 30 ASSi,
Concistoro 2080, not foliated (April 26, 1524). 31 ASSi, Capitano di giustizia
645, fol. 78r–v (May 29, 1571). 32 ASSi, Capitano di giustizia 611, fols.
138v–139r (April 8, 1567). 33 ASSi, Capitano di giustizia 150, fols. 169v–173r
(November 2, 1555). 34 It was common custom to free some prisoners during the
most important religious celebrations. 35 ASSi, Repubblica di Siena ritirata in
Montalcino 5, not numbered Archivio Arcivescovile di Siena (hereafter AASi),
L’Archivio Arcivescovile di Siena, ed. G. Catoni and S. Fineschi (Rome: 1970).
37 AASi, Cause criminali 5509, insert 3 (January 23–December 6, 1569). 38 AASi,
Cause criminali 5502, insert 4 (May 5–September 1, 1552). 39 “To me he is a
cousin brother” (“a me è fratello consobrino”), that is, a cousin born to a
sister of Caterina’s mother.40 “For a similar case, see Marcello, “Società
maschile e sodomia.” 41 The Treccani Italian vocabulary defines as tristo a
person who has a bad attitude. 42 In 1467 the Council of Ten issued a law that
obliged doctors to report “anyone treated for damages resulting from anal
intercourse”; see Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, 117. 43 ASSi, Arti 37
(1593–1776). 44 ASSi, Statuti di Siena 64, fol. 72r. 45 AASi, Cause criminali
5504, insert 4 (February 19–March 5, 1559). 46 “Non dobbiamo immaginare una
costanza della ‘natura umana’ che ci consenta di applicare i nostri criteri, la
nostra sensibilità, la nostra attitudine percettiva a chi è vissuto cinque o
seicento annifa, se non in termini generalissimi. L’attrezzatura mentale di
quei nostri antenati era infatti, almeno sotto alcuni aspetti, molto differente
dalla nostra.” Niccoli, Vedere, vii. 47 For Florence, see Rocke, “Il fanciullo”
and Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. For Venice and the Veneto see Ruggiero, The
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McCarthy and Nicholas TerpstraEarly seventeenth-century Bologna was unique for
its relatively tolerant legislation on female prostitution. Rome, Florence, and
Venice required meretrici (prostitutes) and donne inhoneste (dishonest women)
to inhabit designated areas and streets. Romans settled on the large area of Campo
Marzio for their residence, Venetians ordered women to reside in the old
medieval civic brothel known as the Castelletto near the city’s commercial
center, the Rialto, and Florentines designated a few streets located in the
poorest areas of each city quarter.1 Segregation was motivated by concerns
about morality as well as the more pragmatic issues of civic disorder, noise,
an policing. Containment protected
sacred spaces and pious inhabitants from the immorality and disruption of
prostitutes and their clients and made it easier for authorities to locate and
arrest violators, thereby increasing order as well as the fees and fines
collected.2 By contrast, Bologna permitted registered prostitutes to live
across the city, and the records of its prostitution magistracy demonstrates
that they did. The extant annual registers from 1583 to 1630 provide a rare
opportunity to map where hundreds of registered prostitutes lived in the city,
and to trace individual women’s movements. Only about half lived on streets
with ten or more prostitutes, and very few dwelt on streets with twenty or
more. Consequently, most Bolognese could count prostitutes and dishonest women
as near neighbors, and for many laboring-poor, prostitution and prostitutes per
se were not a serious problem.3 Regulation and enforcement in Bologna show that
secular and religious civic authorities and the general populace approached
prostitution primarily as an issue of economics and public order, and only
secondarily as an issue of morality and public decorum. Due to the city’s
economic reliance on university students, civic authorities had long regulated
prostitution as a commercial issue and prostitutes as fee- and fine-paying
workers governed by a civic magistracy known as the Ufficio delle Bollette
(Office of Receipts). Established in 1376, theBollette registered “Foreigners,
Jews, and Whores” (Forestiere, Hebrei, et Meretrici ). After having tried civic
brothels and sumptuary regulations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
and residential zones in 1514 and 1525, Bolognese civic authorities of the
later sixteenth century bucked prevailing trends with comparatively relaxed
legislation that underscored the connections between prostitutes, Jews, and
foreigners as coherent communities living and working in the local body social
while remaining legally outside the body politic.4 The Bollette’s officials and
functionaries negotiated between legislation, their own interests, and the
needs of individual prostitutes when enforcing regulation. The hundreds of
women who registered annually as prostitutes were integrated into local
communities through residence and through familial, work, and affective
relationships, and had greater opportunities for agency than broader cultural,
religious, and social ideals would lead us to expect. There were bumps on the
road to this more relaxed regime. In the late 1560s, the Tridentine reforming
Bishop Gabriele Paleotti attempted to separate prostitutes and other dishonest
women from most of Bolognese society through residential confinement. Citing
the desire “to restrain their wickedness and uncontrolled freedoms of life” and
to stop them from polluting others with their “filth,” Paleotti and the papal
legate published three decrees that ordered all prostitutes, courtesans, and
female procurers to live in a handful of specific city streets. Yet Paleotti
was overstepping his jurisdiction. His ambitious reforms failed within eighteen
months, and by 1571 the civic government had regained exclusive control over
regulation.5 It returned to the more tolerant strategy employed before the
bishop’s intervention: all prostitutes and dishonest women were required to
register and purchase moderately priced licenses from the Bollette, but they
were neither required to wear distinguishing signs nor to live in assigned
streets or areas. They were free to live throughout the city. Scholars of
Roman, Venetian, Milanese, and Florentine prostitution have tracked the
contrasts between strict legislation and lax prosecution. Prostitutes regularly
lived outside of designated streets and areas, sometimes thanks to exemptions
sold by the magistrates.6 Yet these cities kept their stricter legal regimes on
the books. What was distinct about a city that largely abandoned that regime?
This essay examines the residential and social integration of prostitutes in
Bologna’s neighborhoods. It first maps their distribution across the city in
order to examine how far residential “freedom” extended in practice. While
about half of registered prostitutes clustered on sixteen specific streets, the
other half lived on eighty-five other streets with ten or fewer other
prostitutes. It then reviews registrants’ sometimes complex and contested
relationships with family, clients, lovers, friends, and neighbors using evidence
recorded in the annual registers and testimonies given to the Bollette’s
officials. Most were integrated into local networks through the familial,
affective, and working relationships they had with other local men and women,
and they gave and received support and companionship. Finally, it examines late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century proclamations forbidding prostitutes
from residing in specific city streets. Thesedecrees ref lect the civic
government’s pragmatism: they were issued in response to the specific
complaints of powerful convents, churches, and schools located in areas with
large prostitute populations. Trial records, cultural sources, and recent
scholarship on gossip and visibility shows that most neighbors were aware of
what these women did and that they were not troubled by it. What they did find
troubling were the displays of wealth by individual women, the noise and
disorder that some brought to their neighborhoods, and instances where
neighbors lost control over their communities. The Bollette provided a vehicle
for handling these complaints without criminalizing the prostitutes. Taken
together, the residential and legal evidence demonstrates that prostitutes
lived in most workingpoor neighborhoods of early modern Bologna and that they
were largely tolerated as a fact of life.The geography of early modern
Bolognese prostitution The majority of registered prostitutes lived in the area
between the second and third sets of city walls (see Figure 4.1), the “inner
suburbs” where the urban poor typically clustered in Italian cities.7 Only a
handful of prostitutes lived near the city center, usually on short alleys
hidden behind larger publicFIGURE 4.1Agostino Carracci, Bononia docet mater
studiorum, 1581.56buildings that had been licensed for prostitution in earlier
centuries.8 The civic brothel noted in the 1462 Bollette regulations had been
immediately south-west of the Piazza Maggiore and civic basilica of San
Petronio, and some prostitutes worked by particular gates and markets, but from
the sixteenth century Bolognese meretrici moved to houses across the low-rent
inner suburbs.9 Table 4.1 charts the number and percentage of registrants
who lived in each quarter in 1584, 1604, and 1624. The quarters differed in
size and population as Figure 4.1 shows, and the larger quarters of Porta
Procola and Porta Piera housed more prostitutes. Few lived by the north-western
city wall in Porta Stiera, which appear on Agostino Carracci’s 1581 map
(reproduced here) as dominated by fields.10 The sharp rise and fall in the
number of women registering demonstrate the inconsistencies of early modern
bureaucracy, with total numbers increasing by 327 from 1584 and 1604 (from 284
to 611) and then plummeting by 466 between 1604 and 1624 (from 611 to 165). Lucia
Ferrante has argued that in 1604 the Bollette was operating with unusual
efficiency, and perhaps even over-zealously.11 The f luctuations tell us more
about where the Bollette concentrated its work than about where all the
prostitutes and dishonest women actually lived. Charting residence by quarter
demonstrates that prostitutes spread themselves fairly evenly throughout the
outskirts of the city, and across each quarter. In 1604, registrants lived on
at least 102 streets, yet only eight streets had twenty or more women, and only
eight were home to ten to nineteen women (see Table 4.2). A few streets
housed larger numbers, like Borgo Nuovo di San Felice, in the western quarter
of Stiera by the city wall, and Campo di Bovi, located by the eastern city wall
in the quarter of Porta Piera.12 Women also clustered in the ghetto after the
Jews were expelled from the Papal States for a final time in 1592.TABLE 4.1
Residence of registered prostitutes in Bologna’s quarters1584Porta Piera Porta
Procola Porta Ravennate Porta Stiera Total16041624Number of resident
prostitutesPercent of total registrantsNumber of resident prostitutesPercent of
total registrantsNumber of resident prostitutesPercent of total registrants. This
table includes only those women with identifiable addresses. In 1584, this was
88% of all registrants (250 of 284 total registrants), in 1604 it was 91.8%
(561 of 611), and in 1624 it was 92.7% (153 of 165). Sources: Campione delle
Meretrici 1584, 1604, 1624.The sex trade in early modern Bologna 57 TABLE 4.2
Streets with ten or more resident prostitutes in 1604, by quarterQuarter of
Porta PieraQuarter of Porta ProcolaQuarter of Porta StieraCampo di Bovi:
36Senzanome: 36Jewish Ghetto: 21Frassinago: 21Borgo Nuovo di Fondazza: 29 San
Felice: 47 San Felice by the Broccaindosso: 10 gate: 13 Avesella: 10Borgo di S.
Giacomo: 20 Borgo di Santa Caterina di Saragozza: 21 Torleone: 18 Borgo degli
Arienti: 14 Borgo di San Marino: 17 Bràina di stra San Donato: 13 Gattamarza:
13Quarter of Porta RavennateSource: Campione delle Meretrici 1604.This was an
ironic reversal of the situation in Florence, where the ghetto was deliberately
located within the old brothel precinct in 1571.13 In 1604, twentyone women
lived in this area. Most streets in Bologna’s inner suburbs numbered only a few
prostitutes. In 1604, 84 percent (86 of 102) of the streets on which they
registered housed nine or fewer prostitutes, and these women accounted for
almost half of all registrants that year (44 percent). Further, 66 percent (68
of the 102 streets) housed five or fewer. Consequently, many of these women
lived on streets that were not dominated by prostitutes. A typical example of
this is the south-western corner of the city (see Figure 4.2). In 1604, three
of the area’s streets were heavily populated by prostitutes: Senzanome housed
36, Frassinago housed 21, and Borgo di Santa Caterina di Saragozza housed
twenty-one. However, the majority of the neighborhood’s streets had five or
fewer resident prostitutes and dishonest women: five women lived on Altaseda,
four on Nosadella, and three on Capramozza. The surrounding streets of Bocca di
lupo, Belvedere di Saragozza, Borgo Riccio, and Malpertuso had two or fewer. On
these streets prostitutes mixed with day-laborers, artisans, and merchants. They
rented rooms from pork butchers and shoemakers, lived in inns, and resided next
to potters.14 These were their immediate neighbors, separated only by the
porous boundaries of walls, stairways, doorways, and windows where they had
frequent day-to-day interactions.15 Like other working-poor women, they were
not confined to the streets that they lived on, but could and did move through
the surrounding area buying food, engaging in chores, finding work, visiting
friends, and going to the Bollette to buy their licenses.16 As Elizabeth S.
Cohen writes, prostitutes were both “seen and known” in their
neighborhoods.FIGURE 4.2Agostino Carracci, Bononia docet mater studiorum,
1581.Networks, neighborhoods, and communities The Bollette’s records reveal
prostitutes’ affective social and familial circles. Some women were registered
as living in their mother’s, sister’s, and (more rarely) cousin’s homes, while
other women’s female kin, housemates, lovers, and servants bought their
licenses. Notaries did not consistently record such details, making
quantitative analysis difficult.17 While men regularly appear in the registers
paying for licenses, the specifics of their relationships with the women were
almost never recorded. The Bollette’s records, particularly testimonies in
cases of debt against clients and long-term partners, provide rich information
aboutThe sex trade in early modern Bologna 59women’s familial, social, and work
relationships. However, the tribunal devoted more effort to investigating
unregistered women suspected of prostitution, than to the hundreds of women who
had bought licenses. The Bolognese evidence can be placed in the context of
evidence from other northern Italian cities demonstrating how prostitutes were
surrounded by family, housemates, and allies. In early seventeenth century
Venice, three-quarters of 213 prostitutes noted in a census lived with other
people. Most headed their own households, but some were boarders or lived with
their mothers. The majority of those who headed households sheltered dependent
female kin, children, and a variety of unmarried women, including servants and
other prostitutes. A few heads of households (6 percent) lived with men, who
were either their intimates or boarders.18 Roman parish censuses from 1600 to
1621 show similar cohabitation patterns: 47 percent of prostitutes lived with
at least one family member, mostly children but also siblings, nieces and
nephews, and widowed mothers.19 Everyone within the household economy
benefitted from the income and goods earned by these women. Bologna’s registers
give examples of sisters as registered prostitutes, like Dorotea di Savi,
called “Saltamingroppa” (literally “Jump on my behind”) and her sister
Benedetta, who lived together with their servant Gentile on Broccaindosso.20
Similarly, Margareta and Francesca Trevisana, both nicknamed “La Solfanella”
(“The Matchstick”), lived together on Borgo di Santa Caterina di Saragozza for
eight years. While Francesca registered annually from 1598 to 1605, Margareta
did so only in 1602, 1604, and 1605.21 Before registering, Margareta likely
enjoyed the income that her sister earned through prostitution and may have
assisted in preparing for and entertaining clients. The Bollette suspected that
she had, and so launched an investigation against her when she became pregnant
in 1601.22 Mothers and daughters also lived and worked together, like Lucia di
Spoloni and her daughter Francesca, who lived on San Mamolo by the old civic
brothel area, and Anna Spisana and her mother Lucia, who lived together on
Borgo degli Arienti.23 In 1604, Domenica di Loli bought licenses for her
daughters Francesca and Margareta, and all three lived just south of the church
and monastery of San Domenico on Borgo degli Arienti. Francesca had lived on
the street since at least 1600, and while she was no longer registering in
1609, her sister still was. Margareta continued to live on Borgo degli Arienti
until 1614, perhaps with her mother and sister.24 Prostitutes often lived
together in rented rooms, small apartments, and inns. Residential clustering
was not uncommon for unmarried women, who shared the costs of running a
household through lace making, street-peddling, prostitution, and laundering.25
The largest could count as brothels, though there were relatively few of them.
In 1583, twenty-one dishonest women lived in the house of Gradello on Bologna’s
heavily populated Borgo Nuovo di San Felice, by the eastern wall. Yet while
registrations climbed in the 1580s, the group at Gradello’s shrank to fourteen
women in 1584, and eleven in 1588.26 Moreover no other large houses appeared
through this period. In 1604, the street with mostregistrations was Borgo Nuovo
di San Felice, with forty-seven women, and the largest single group was
thirteen who gathered in the house of Lucrezia Basilia, while the rest had five
or fewer.27 On the second and third most populated streets, Campo di Bovi and
Senzanome, no house had more than six registered prostitutes living in it.28
These larger clusters were often inns, where prostitutes benefitted from the
presence of other women and the protection of innkeepers. Inns popular with
prostitutes included those of Matteo the innkeeper (“osto”) on Frassinago and
of Angelo Senso on Pratello. Seven registered women lived at Matteo’s inn in
1589, and ten lived in Angelo’s inn in 1597.29 Few women stayed at inns for
more than a year and most registered without surnames, but instead with
reference to a town, city, or region, like Flaminia from Ancona (“Anconitana”),
Francesca from Fano (“da Fano”), and Ludovica from Modena (“Modenesa”) who
lived at Matteo’s place in 1598. These could have been recent migrants or women
identifying by parents’ origins or using pseudonyms. The inns and brothels
helped them build social networks as they secured places of their own. Yet, it
was more common for women to live with one or two other prostitutes in rented
rooms and small apartments. In 1597, Lucia Colieva lived with Elisabetta di
Negri on Borgo di San Martino, and the following year she joined another
registered prostitute, Vittoria Fiorentina, on Senzanome.30 Similarly, in 1601
Isabella Rosetti, Giulia Bignardina, and Cassandra di Campi all lived together
in Isabella’s home on Frassinago. A year later Giulia had died and Cassandra
was no longer registered.31 For just under ten years, Madonna Ginevra Caretta,
who was unregistered, managed a small apartment where six to eight registered
prostitutes lived.32 Unlike Bologna’s inns and taverns, Ginevra’s household was
mobile, moving across town and back again over the years it operated. In 1588
it was located on Saragozza, in the south-western corner of the city, and the
next year it moved to San Colombano in the northwest quarter of Stiera. At
least one woman, Lena Fiorentina, followed Ginevra to the new street, where she
remained for almost a decade before moving to Paglia.33 A few of the
prostitutes lived with Ginevra for years, like Pelegrina di Tarozzi, who stayed
for four years, and Chiara Mantuana, for three.34 Domenica Cavedagna,
registered for thirteen years (1597–1609), ran a house on Centotrecento and
then on Bràina di stra San Donato.35 Seven other prostitutes lived with her in
1604, and a year later three had left but six new women had moved in. A few
stayed with her for four or five years.36 The Bollette’s registers explain why
some of the women moved out of the homes run by women like Ginevra Caretta and
Domenica Cavedagna. Some entered service (either domestic, sexual, or both)
while others moved to different streets or left Bologna entirely to try their
luck elsewhere.37 While living with other prostitutes could bring economic,
professional, and even personal security, it could also bring personal rifts or
increased attention from the police (sbirri ), who saw these homes as easy
targets for making arrests. Men interacted with registered prostitutes as
occasional clients, long-term amici, absentee husbands, jealous lovers, and as
acquaintances, if not friends.Single women, whether unmarried or widowed, were
financially and socially vulnerable, subject to sexual slander, to charges of
magic and sorcery, and to general suspicion by neighbors and authorities
alike.38 Relationships with men afforded them a degree of protection from the
financial and social marginalization they experienced because of their gender,
economic status, and work, and so women turned to them not just for income and
companionship but also for a measure of protection. The civic government had
always prohibited married women from prostituting themselves, since by doing so
they committed adultery. The 1462 statutes ordered whipping and expulsion for
the women, and fines of 100 lire for officials who looked the other way.39
Women living with husbands could not register with the Bollette, though
abandoned wives sometimes could. Francesca di Galianti claimed in 1604 that her
husband Bartolomeo di Grandi went to war three or four years previously,
leaving her with a three-year-old daughter to feed. She had since given birth
to a daughter with a cloth worker Giovanni, with whom she had been living for
about a year “to make the expenses.”40 For the Bollette, the question of
whether abandoned women like Francesca could and should register was a
practical one since women who registered were women who paid fees. These women
appealed to the sympathy of Bollette officials by claiming that they were
married but had not seen their husbands in many years, leaving unanswered the
question of whether their husbands were alive or dead. This ambiguity about the
ultimate fate of their husbands would have freed them from charges of adultery
at the archbishop’s tribunal (if the husband was alive) while at the same time
freeing them from registration with the Bollette (if he were dead). Francesca
did not state whether she thought her husband was dead or alive, and ultimately
a kinsmen Vincenzo Dainesi swore that he would ensure she left her “wicked
life” (“mala vita”) and take her into his home to live with him and his wife.41
The officials were satisfied with this, and so Francesca remained unfined and
unregistered. In 1586, Vice Legate Domenico Toschi authorized police to seize
“all married women who do not live with their husbands” caught at night in bed
with their lovers (amatiis).42 Archbishop Gabriele Paleotti believed such women
were clearly committing adultery, and Pope Sixtus V’s bull Ad compascendum
(1586) ordered that any married person whose spouse was alive and had sex with
another person—even if they had a separation from an ecclesiastical court
—should be sentenced to death.43 Toschi’s decree was reconfirmed ten years
later by the new vice legate, Annibale Rucellai, and a third time in 1614.44 If
a woman returned to her husband, she was to be immediately deregistered and
could not be allowed to practice prostitution. If she continued, she was no
longer under the Bollette’s jurisdiction, but rather that of the archbishop.
Stable relationships with men, referred to in Bologna as amici, “lovers,” or as
amici fermi, “firm friends,” offered a measure of economic security for
prostitutes by providing money, clothing, and food in varying amounts depending
on the men’s own status.45 When Arsilia Zanetti sued Andrea di Pasulini, notary
of thearchbishop’s tribunal, for compensation for their three-year sexual
relationship (“amicitia carnale”), she noted he had given her three pairs of
shoes, a pair of low-heeled dress slippers, and a few coins (a ducatone, half a
scudo, and a piastra, a Spanish coin).46 Buying the woman’s licenses could also
be part of the arrangement, as Pasulini had also done for Arsilia.47 Even
though Bologna’s monthly rate of five soldi, and annual rate of three lire, was
extraordinarily low—only onefifth of what Florentine prostitutes paid—this was
another expense that women did not have to worry about and suggested commitment
on the part of the men.48 Lovers and friends helped women in their interactions
with the law. The cavalier Aloisio di Rossi had a three-year sexual
relationship with Pantaselia Donina, alias di Salani, and when her landlord
complained to the Bollette that she had not paid the rent, di Rossi acted as
her procurator and ultimately paid the landlord.49 Other prostitutes maintained
relationships with local, low-level arresting officers (sbirri); Elizabeth S.
Cohen has uncovered many relationships between prostitutes and such men, noting
that “the two disparaged professions often struck up alliances in which the
women traded sex, companionship, and information for protection and money.”50
Such partnerships were not unusual in Bologna. In May 1583, the sbirro Pompilio
registered Francesca Fiorentina as his “woman” (“femina”) and got her a
six-month license for free.51 In 1624 three women registered as living in the
“casa” of the Bollette’s esecutore, Pietro Benazzi, on Borgo di San Martino.52
Pietro registered Caterina Furlana on January 11, 1624 and paid for her
one-month license. She was subsequently de-registered because “she went to stay
in order to serve Pietro Benazzi.” When Caterina di Rossi moved out of her
place on Borgo degli Arienti and into Pietro’s house, she paid for one month
and never again.53 Though these Bollette functionaries could not keep these
women’s names out of the registers, they could keep them from paying for
licenses, even when they were most likely still living by prostitution, and may
have protected them from harassment by other court officials. Male friends
could also be rallied for support, particularly by women who had lived in one
street or area for a substantial period of time, building reputations and
financial and social ties with their neighbors. When Margareta Trevisana “The
Matchstick” (Solfanella) was investigated by the Bollette in 1601, she had been
living on Borgo di Santa Caterina di Strada Maggiore with her sister for at
least eight years. She confessed that three years earlier she had given birth to
the child of Messer Antonio Simio, a married man.54 The Bollette had
investigated her then, allowing her to remain unregistered on the promise that
she would reform her life and go to live with an honorable woman. In 1601 she
was pregnant with the child of another man and was living with her sister
Francesca, a registered prostitute.55 Margareta produced statements signed by
two male neighbors who described her as a good woman (“donna de bene”) the
whole time they had known her, while her parish curate confirmed that she had
confessed and taken communion the previous Easter.56 On further questioning by
the Bollette, the priest claimed that he had known Margareta for about ten or
twelve years, having first met herwhen he lived in the same house as she and
her sister. He claimed not to know what kind of life Margareta led, but
admitted that she appeared pregnant, and was, as far as he knew, not married.
The priest’s testimony cleared her of charges of adultery, but could not save
her from registration, a three-lire fine, and probation.57 In May 1602,
Margareta produced statements about her “honest life and reputation” provided
by two different neighbors and another curate at Santa Caterina di Saragozza,
and her name was removed from the register.58 Margareta lived on the same
street for ten or twelve years, had relationships with neighbors and
housemates, had a sister with whom she lived, and was able to rally four male
neighbors and two parish priests to support her. She and others moved amongst
family, friends, long-term lovers, and occasional clients, building
relationships on reciprocal, if uneven, bonds of financial, emotional, and
legal support and protection. They were not just physically a part of Bologna’s
working-poor neighborhoods, but also socially and affectively integrated into
their communities.Bad neighbors While Bolognese civic law tolerated
prostitution and permitted prostitutes to reside throughout the city, public
disorder was always a concern. Decrees published by the Bolognese legate, at
the request of convents, churches, confraternities, and schools, frequently
lamented the dishonest words and daily and nightly reveling by prostitutes and
other disreputable people.59 Men socialized in prostitutes’ homes, eating,
making music, and talking.60 While some parties remained relatively quiet,
others filled the neighborhood with winefueled singing, laughing, and the
sounds of dancing and of fights over games of chance. The noise was intrusive,
disruptive, and alarming: blasphemous words, violent acts, and sexual slander
carried through windows, over walls, and into streets, squares, and other
residences. Broadsheets illustrating prostitutes’ lifecycles usually included
knife fights by men who discovered that “their” woman had another lover.61
Barking dogs, brawling men, and screaming women heard through f limsy walls and
open windows added to the noise of crowded squares, laneways, and streets.62
Men also fought in doorways and on streets in full sight and hearing of
neighbors. To reduce these disturbances, Papal Legate Bendedetto Giustiniani
forbade prostitutes from throwing parties ( festini ) or “making merry” (trebbi
) in the homes of honest people, or even from eating or drinking in taverns and
inns. Other decrees forbade games of chance and betting, like dice and cards.63
Lawmakers recognized that it was less the prostitutes than the men with them
who were the problem. In 1602 prostitutes were forbidden from travelling
through the city at night with more than three men, under fine of 100 scudi for
the men and whipping for the women.64 Eight years later, Legate Giustiniani
forbade prostitutes from going through the city at night with any men, under
penalty of whipping for both the men and the prostitutes.65Enclosed communities
of male and female religious frequently complained about the noise of
prostitution. Bolognese authorities attempted general exclusionary zones around
convents in the 1560s without success and so moved to proclamations expelling
prostitutes and other disreputable people from specific streets; this was
similar to Florence, where the streets designated for prostitution were de
facto exclusionary zones around most convents.66 Between 1571 and 1630, at
least fifty proclamations cleared twenty-five distinct streets in Bologna,
about one-quarter of all the streets inhabited by prostitutes in 1604. Most
proclamations concerned eight specific convents on the city’s outskirts, though
a few male enclosures were also protected.67 All either had elite connections
or were newly built, and most were near streets heavily populated by
prostitutes. In 1603 Vice Legate Marsilio Landriani forbade all prostitutes,
procurers, and other dishonest women from living on a cluster of streets
bordering the Poor Clares’ house of Corpus Domini, established in 1456 by S.
Caterina de’ Vigri, and the Dominican convent of Sant’Agnese (est. 1223), one
of the city’s richest and most prestigious convents with over 100 nuns.68
Landriani’s proclamation stated that the nuns were greatly disturbed and
scandalized by the daily and nightly reveling of prostitutes, procurers, and
other disreputable people, the “dishonest” words that they spoke, and the
wicked examples they posed.69 Prostitutes had just over a month to move out,
and those found there after the deadline would be publicly whipped, while their
landlords would be fined fifty gold scudi and lose their outstanding rents.70
Yet few prostitutes were actually registered on these streets.71 While
registrations generally dropped dramatically in the 1610s and 1620s, these streets
declined the most, with only two prostitutes remaining by 1614.72 In 1622, the
expulsion was repeated almost verbatim with the addition of two neighboring
streets that housed a handful of prostitutes; none remained by 1624.73 Concerns
about pollution continued, particularly around shrines. The confraternal shrine
of the Madonna della Neve was built in 1479 to shelter a miraculous image of
the Virgin on the street Senzanome at the south-western corner of the city.74
Senzanome had twenty-three registered prostitutes in 1594, thirty-six in 1604,
and thirty-five in 1609. Yelling, singing, mocking, and jesting disturbed the
peace, interrupted the Mass and other divine offices, and forced young,
unmarried girls and respectable residents to hide in their houses. Confraternal
brothers repeatedly complained to the legate about the noise of Senzanome’s
prostitutes and other “people who have little fear of God and his most holy
mother.” 75 Between 1587 and 1621 four proclamations expelled dishonest people
and prostitutes from Senzanome and around Santa Maria della Neve.76 One of 1608
threatened women caught residing or lingering in the street with a fine of ten
scudi the first time, and expulsion the second time.77 Men could be fined ten
scudi the first time, and another ten scudi and three lashes the second time.
This proclamation even named three specific women, Giulia da Gesso, Doralice
Moroni, and Ludovica Giudi, “as well as every other meretrice.” 78 A year later
all three of these women were still living on Senzanome, with Doralice Moroni
registeredin the house of the priest Campanino and Giulia da Gesso in the house
of a priest of San Niccolo.79 Moreover, they shared the street with thirty-five
other registered prostitutes. Yet the prostitutes gradually did move away, and
in 1614 and 1624, only two women registered on Senzanome.80 The Legate’s 1621
decree ordered dishonorable people living on Senzanome to move to Frassinago,
to Borgo Novo, or to “another street appointed to similar people” where there
were no convents, churches, or oratories.81 Neighbors had direct, day-to-day
contact with prostitutes and knew details about their lives. Gossip—the sharing
of local and extra local information— typified neighborhoods and formed the
basis of community self-regulation.82 People constantly watched and listened to
their neighbors from the streets, in doorways, through windows, on balconies,
and through f limsy walls.83 Early modern prostitution was public and visible.
Michel de Montaigne remarked that prostitutes sat at their widows and leaned
out of them, while others observed that the women promenaded proudly through
the streets.84 In his Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo
(1616), Tommaso Garzoni described how prostitutes worked to catch men’s eyes
while sitting at their widows, gesturing and bantering with them.85 Some called
attention to themselves by wearing brightly colored gowns with ostentatious
decorations and jewels on their fingers and at their necks.86 Contemporary
Italian broadsheets depict women sitting at their widows and in their doorways
while older women act as go-betweens.87 Bollette testimonies show that
Bolognese knew a great deal about the prostitutes who were their neighbors.
Witnesses often claimed that they had seen women going through the streets or
into buildings and apartments with men. In 1601, Caterina Marema told that when
she lived in the same casa as Lucrezia Buonacasa, she frequently saw the tailor
Gian Domenico Sesto come to stay and sleep with her.88 Others saw more intimate
behavior, like Bartolomea, daughter of Antonio di Miani, who claimed that she
knew her neighbors Margareta and Cornelia were “meretrici” because she saw them
laughing, dancing, embracing, and kissing men. She also heard that they went to
register with the Bollette.89 Still others testified more simply that “everyone
in the neighborhood considers her to be a whore,” or, “everyone says that she
is his whore.” Finally, some men talked with each other about their sexual
relationships with women. Silvio, son of Rodrigo di Manedini, claimed that over
the previous three years his friend Tarquino, a sbirro, told him repeatedly
that he was “screwing” (chiavava) Lucrezia Buonacasa.90 In this case, Silvio
claimed also to have first-hand knowledge of their relationship: he said that
he had seen the two in bed together at Lucrezia’s house on via Paradiso and at
the watch house of the sbirri. In a close knit, intensely local world like
this, prostitutes and dishonest women would have been hard-pressed to keep their
relationships and work a secret. In pragmatic terms, some women may not have
wanted to keep their work a secret: gossip and visibility acted as
advertisement and could attract better clients. Local knowledge of women’s
attachments to men might also earn them a measure of respect, even if only
while the relationship continued, especially ifthe man was honored locally
because of his wealth or status. These relationships could bring a sort of
social protection. Whether or not women or their clients and lovers made
spectacles of themselves, prostitution was both seen and known. Most
working-poor people were not overly scandalized by the fact that their
neighbors lived by prostitution, or perhaps they had resigned themselves to
living amongst them. No evidence has come to light that working-poor women and
men made a concerted effort to drive prostitutes and dishonest women as a group
out of their neighborhoods. Most streets on which registered prostitutes lived
housed ten or fewer such women, and prostitutes may have been quieter and less
given to overt public display, since they did not have to compete with each
other for the attention of the men and youths who came in search of their
services. With fewer women there was less of the serenading, violence, and harassment
by rowdy students and drunken men that offended neighbors, and less attention
from patrolling officers looking to fill their purses with rewards for
arrests.91 Tessa Storey has argued that as long as Roman prostitutes maintained
local order and the appearance of respectability, neighbors did not see them as
an exceptional problem. A few written complaints requesting the eviction of
specific prostitutes from their streets identified only the most scandalous and
the loudest, on grounds that they posed bad examples by “touching men’s
shameful parts and doing other extremely dishonest acts” in the streets.92
Those who were well behaved—and these were actually listed by name—were welcome
to stay provided that they continued to behave. Working-poor neighbors who
found the women’s work immoral or offensive or their noise and disorder
overwhelming could move to one of the 100 or so other city streets that were
not heavily populated by prostitutes. Even in 1604, the year when the highest
number of prostitutes and dishonest women registered with the Bollette, only
sixteen streets had ten or more registrants living on them, and only eight had
more than twenty. At least half of all Bolognese prostitutes were more widely
dispersed through the city, and this may explain why we see no concerted
efforts to dispel them as a group. Beyond this, it became increasingly
difficult to successfully prosecute violations like adultery or the lack of
license. A 1586 order from the vice legate to the Bollette’s officials
suggested that small-scale rivalries were behind too many frivolous
denunciations. Henceforth, unless a woman was found in flagrante with a man,
the testimonies of two neighbors of good repute and the local parish priest
would be required in order to find her guilty.93Conclusion For many
working-poor Bolognese men and women, living amongst prostitutes was a fact of
life. Whether they respected these neighbors or not, they learned to live with
them. Prostitutes and dishonest women had their places in the local kinship,
social, and economic networks of their neighborhoodsand the larger city. This
is not to say that they were not mocked, or that those who treated them with
courtesy fully respected them. Yet while some prostitutes annoyed, overwhelmed,
and frightened some neighbors with their noise, scandal, and violence, they
were also the sisters, mothers, lovers, and friends of many others. Elizabeth
S. Cohen has argued that “[prostitute’s] presence corresponded to an intricate
engagement in the social networks of daily life. In practice, if not in theory,
the prostitutes occupied an ambiguous centrality.”94 Tessa Storey suggests that
restrictive legislation, especially residential confinement, elicited sympathy
from Romans, who were not overly concerned about the immorality of
prostitution.95 This was also true in Bologna, where prostitutes were far more
widely distributed across the entire city. Religious authorities like Gabriele
Paleotti found them immoral and disruptive, posing bad examples and needing to
be separated and marginalized. Yet civic authorities and most lay people appear
to have held more nuanced attitudes, engaging prostitutes in the body social
and using bureaucratic registration to mediate their place in the body politic.
The sources generated by the Ufficio delle Bollette in the later sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries reveal these women operating within networks of
sociability, work, and family. They demonstrate women who fit within their
communities, more uneasily at sometimes than others, and who both gave and
received the resources of support, companionship, and security that
characterized the community-centered world of early modern Italy.Notes 1 Cohen,
“Seen and Known,” 402. Hacke, Women, Sex, and Marriage, 179. Brackett, “The
Florentine Onestà,” 291–92 and 296. Terpstra, “Locating the Sex Trade,” 108–24.
2 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 290–91 and 295; Cohen, “Seen and Known,”
404– 05; Storey, Carnal Commerce, 70–94; Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 48–49. 3
For expanded analysis and archival documentation, see: McCarthy,
“Prostitution.” 4 Biblioteca Universitaria Bologna (hereafter BUB), ms. 373, n.
3C, 151v–152v. Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, 205–06, 329. McCarthy,
“Prostitution, Community, and Civic Regulation,” 40, 54–61. 5 Archivio di Stato
di Bologna (hereafter ASB), Boschi, b. 541, fol. 170v, “Bando sopra le
meretrici et riforma de gli altri bandi sopra a cio fatti” (January 31 and
February 1, 1568). For more on this episode and the gendered politics of social
welfare reform in sixteenthcentury Bologna: Terpstra, Cultures of Charity,
19–54, 206–07. For the comparatively loose regime in the Convertite: Monson,
Habitual Offenders. 6 Cohen, “Seen and Known,” 403 and 405–08; Ruggiero,
Binding Passions, 49; Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 292. Terpstra,
“Locating the Sex Trade,” 116-21. 7 Miller, Renaissance Bologna, 16–17.
Terpstra, “Sex and the Sacred.” 8 For example, Isotta Boninsegna and Giovanna
di Martini. In 1604 Polonia, daughter or widow of Domenico Galina of Modena
lived on Simia, while in 1614 Maria Roversi did, and in 1630 Domenica
Borgonzona lived there. ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549– 1796, Campione delle
Meretrici (hereafter C de M) 1584, [np] “I” and “G” sections; 1604, [np] “P”
section; 1614, 190; 1630, [np] “D” section. 9 This street was called variously
the “via stufa della Scimmia,” the “postribolo,” or “lupanare Nuovo,” as well
as the Corte dei Bulgari. Fanti, Le vie, vol. 2, 516–17. McCarthy,
“Prostitution,” 20–67.10 Biblioteca Comunale di Bologna (hereafter BCB), Gabinetto
disegni e stampe, “Raccolta piante e vedute della città di Bologna,” port. 1,
n. 14. mappe/14/library.html 11 Ferrante, “‘Pro mercede carnale,’”
48. 12 Borgo Nuovo di San Felice was one of the streets that Bishop Gabriele
Paleotti had ordered prostitutes to live in. ASB, Boschi, b. 541, fols.
170r–171v, “Bando sopra le meretrici” (January 31 and February 1, 1568). Zanti,
Nomi, 16. 13 Muzzarelli, “Ebrei a Bologna,” 862–70. 14 Francesca Ballerina
rented from Giacomo the pork butcher (lardarolo) on Frassinago. Giacoma di
Ferrari da Reggio, Ursina de Bertini, and Lucrezia di Grandi all lived in the
house of Giovanni Pietro the shoemaker (calzolario) on Senzanome. Lucia
Tagliarini lived on Frassinago in the inn of Zanino. Giovanna Querzola, alias
Stuarola, lived on Nosadella between the potter (pignataro) and the shoemaker
(calzolaro). C de M 1604, [np] “F”, “I”, “V”, “L”, “T”, and “G” sections,
respectively. 15 Cohen and Cohen, “Open and Shut,” especially 64 and 68–69. 16
Chojnacka, Working Women; Cohen, “To Pray.” 17 For instance, in 1604, 611 women
registered and only eleven mothers and four sisters were recorded as purchasing
licenses for their kin. McCarthy, “Prostitution,” 220–21. 18 Of the 213
prostitutes who appeared in the censuses, one-third had children. Chojnacka,
Working Women, 22–24. 19 Storey, Carnal Commerce, 128–29. On widowed mothers,
114. 20 Benedetta was listed as “sorella di Saltamingroppa.” C de M 1604, [np]
“B” and “D” sections. 21 C de M 1605, 175. For Francesca, see C de M 1598, 56; 1599,
49; 1600, 68; 1601, 60; 1602, 72; 1603, 72; 1604, [np] “F” section; 1605, 86.
For Margareta, see C de M 1602, 201; 1604, [np] “F” section; 1605, 175. In
1605, Margareta was deregistered when she began working as a wet nurse for the
Ercolani, a senatorial family. As the register reads: “Sta per balia del 40
Hercolani.” 22 C de M 1601, 140. ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796,
Inventionum 1601, [np] fol. 19v (June 28, 1601). 23 C de M 1584, [np] “L”
section. Both were registered under Lucia’s name. C de M 1624, [np] “A” and “L”
sections. 24 C de M 1600, 73; 1604, [np] “F” and “M” sections; 1609, 171; 1614,
172. Domenica was not registered. 25 Hufton, “Women without Men.” Chojnacka,
Working Women, 18–19. Cohen, “Seen and Known,” 406. 26 C de M 1584 and 1588. 27
Of those who registered, almost all gave their street and residence (44 of 47).
For names of co-habitants: McCarthy, “Prostitution, Community, and Civic
Regulation,” 224–25. 28 A total of twenty-seven (75 percent) of the thirty-six
women who lived on Campo di Bovi identified their homes: five lived in the
“casa” of Messer Filippo Scranaro, and the rest lived with two or fewer other
prostitutes. A total of thirty (87 percent) of the thirtyfive women who
registered on Senzanome identified their homes: six lived in the “casa” of
Giulia di Sarti, called l’Orba (the Blind), who was not registered, and four
lived in the “casa” of Giovanni Pietro the shoemaker. Otherwise, all the rest
lived with two or fewer other prostitutes. C de M 1604. 29 C de M 1589 and
1597. 30 C de M 1597, 61 and 86 respectively; C de M 1598, 95 and 142
respectively. 31 C de M 1601, 99, 78, and 176 respectively. 32 This was between
1588 and 1597. Ginevra registered once, in January 1588, when she paid for a
one-month license. C de M 1588, [np] “G” section. In 1588, six registered
prostitutes lived with her, in 1589 seven did, and in 1594 and 1597 eight did.
C de M 1588; 1589; 1594; 1597. 33 C d M 1589, [np] “L” section; 1594, [np] “L”
section. C de M 1599, 28. Ginevra was still there in 1601, when Margareta
Tinarolla lived in her home. See C de M 1601, 130.34 C de M 1594, [np] “P”
section; 1597, [np] “P” section. C de M 1597, [np] “C” section; C de M 1599,
28. 35 For her first registration, see C de M 1597, [np] “D” section. 36 Eg., Gentile
di Sarti, C de M 1601, 79; 1605, 100, and Domenica Fioresa, C de M 1604, [np]
“E” section; 1609, 66–67. 37 Lucia Fiorentina left Ginevra’s to serve in the
house of a local scholar (“Signor Dottore”). C de M 1589, [np] “L” section.
Diana di Sacchi Romana lived in Ginevra’s casa in January 1594, but moved twice
more that year, to Borgo Polese and then to Altaseda. C de M 1594, [np] “D”
section. C de M 1594, [np] “L” section, Lucia Fiorentina. It is unclear but
possible that this was the same Lucia who entered service in 1589. 38
Chojnacka, “Early Modern Venice,” especially 217 and 225. McCarthy,
“Prostitution,” 253–314. 39 See ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette e Presentazioni dei
Forestieri, Scritture Diverse, busta 1, “Statuti,” [np] fol. 8r. 40 ASB,
Ufficio delle Bollette 1549-1796, Filza 1604, [np] “Die 21 May 1604,” fol. 1r.
41 Vincenzo is described as Francesca’s “cognatus.” Ibid., fol. 1r–v. 42 This
permission was copied into the 1586 register and the 1462 illuminated statutes:
C de M 1586, [np] “Z” section (28 June 1586); ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette e
Presentazioni dei Forestieri, Statuti, sec. XV, codici miniati, ms. 64, 28. 43
For Paleotti’s reaction, see BUB, ms. 89, fasc. 2, Constitutiones conclilii
provincialis Bonon. 1586, fol. 95v, cited in Ferrante, “La sessualità,” 993. 44
ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Filza 1601, [np] “Decreto d[e]lle
bolette” (November 20, 1596); Filza 1614, [np] “Dalla letura delli statuti si
cava che le Donne di vita inhonesta si possono descrivere nel campione in 4 modi”
(undated). 45 John Florio defines “amico” as “a friend, also a lover.” Florio,
Queen Anna’s, 24. See also Cohen, “Camilla la Magra.” 46 The suit was brought
to the Bollette. ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Filza 1601, [np]
“Arsilia Zanetti” (November 12, 1601). For a detailed study of Bolognese
registered prostitutes who took clients to the Bollette’s tribunal for debt,
see Ferrante, “‘Pro mercede carnale.’” 47 Pasulini bought her two six-month
licenses in July 1598 and January 1601. Arsilia’s son, Giovanni Battista, paid
for the other months. C de M 1598, 48; 1599, 3; 1600, 4; 1601, 4. 48 Archivio
di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Onestà, ms 1, ff. 27r–31v. Terpstra, “Sex
and the Sacred,” 77. 49 Ludovico Pizzoli, the Bollette’s esecutore, claimed
that for three years Rossi had purchased her licenses because he was having a
continuous sexual relationship with her even while she was having sex with
other men: ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Filza 1606, “Cont[ra]
Pantaselia Donina[m] al[ia]s de Salanis” (August 19, 1605), fol. 1r. John
Florio defines “amicítia” as “amity, freindship [sic], good will.” Florio,
Queen Anna’s¸ 24. The Bollette’s 1602 register confirms that Rossi paid for her
licenses in person as well as giving money to Pizzoli to pay on his behalf. C
de M 1601, 160; 1602, 154; 1603, 170. ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796,
Filza 1601, “Molto Ill[ust]re et Ecc[ellen]te Sig[no] re” (May 14, 1601). 50
Cohen, “Balk Talk,” 101. 51 The record in the register does not say why it was given
for free, only that Pomilio “solvet nihil.” C de M 1583, [np] “F” section. 52
These were Angelica Bellini, Caterina Furlana, and Caterina di Rossi. C de M,
1624, [np] “A” and “C” sections. 53 Both in Ibid., [np] “C” section. 54 This
was according to the curate of her parish church. ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette
1549– 1796, Inventionum 1601, [np] fols. 20v–21v (June 20, 1601; July 2, 1601).
For her sister Francesca’s registrations: C de M 1598, 56; 1599, 49; 1600, 68;
1601, 60. 55 ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Inventionum 1601, [np] fol.
19v (June 28, 1601) and fol. 20r–v (June 30, 1601).56 ASB, Ufficio delle
Bollette 1549–1796, Filza 1601, [np] “Malg[are]ta Sulfanela” (June 27, 1601).
57 ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Inventionum 1601, [np] fols. 20v–21v
(July 2, 1601). 58 ASB, Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Filza 1603, [np] (26
June 1602). C de M 1602, 21. The Convertite confirmed this removal: ASB,
Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Filza 1603, [np] untitled (October 12, 1602).
59 See, for instance, BCB, Bandi Merlani, V, fol. 106r, untitled, begins “Non
essendo conveniente che presso li Monasteri j di Monache” (March 24, 1603).
McCarthy, “Prostitution,” 131–97 60 Cohen, “‘Courtesans,’” 202. 61 “Vita et
fine miserabile delle meretrici” (“Life and Miserable End of Prostitutes”), ca.
1600, in Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, 275. Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, “La
vita infelice della meretrice compartita ne dodeci mesi dell’anno lunario che
non falla dato in luce da Veridico astrologo” (1692), Museo della Città di
Bologna, 2470 (re 1/425). 62 Cohen, “Honor and Gender,” especially 600–01.
Terpstra, “Sex and the Sacred,” 71, 79–80. 63 ASB, Assunteria di Sanità, Bandi
(XVI–1792), Bandi Bolognesi sopra la peste, 45, “Bandi Generali del Ill[ustrissimo]
et Reverendiss[i]mo Monsignor Fabio Mirto Arcivescovo di Nazarette Governatore
di Bologna,” (February 17, 18, and 19, 1575), fol. 2v; BCB, Bandi Merlani, V,
fol. 64r, “Bando Sopr’al gioco, & Biscazze, alli balli nell’Hosterie, &
che le Donne meretrici non vadano vestite da huomo” (December 9, 1602). 64
Ibid. 65 Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (hereafter Fisher), B-11 04425, “Bando
generale dell’Illustrissimo, & Reverendissimo Sig. Benedetto Card.
Giustiniano Legato di Bologna” (June 23 and 24, 1610), “Delle Meretrici. Ca
XXVIII,” 60–61. 66 In 1565, Governor Francesco de’Grassi set the exclusionary
zone at 30 pertiche (approximately 114 meters), while in 1566 Francesco Bossi
extended the zone to 50 pertiche (190 meters). See Martini, Manuale di metrologia,
92. ASB, Legato, Bandi speciali, vol. 3, fol. 16r (February 1, 1565); ASB,
Boschi, b. 541 (February 1 and 8, 1566), fol. 115r. Florence reduced its
exclusionary zone from 175 to 60 meters in this time (i.e., from 300 braccia to
100): ASF, Acquisti e Doni 291, “Onestà e Meretrici” (May 6, 1561). Terpstra,
“Sex and the Sacred,” 78–79. 67 These convents were San Bernardino, Santa
Caterina in Strada Maggiore, San Guglielmo, San Leonardo, San Ludovico, Santa
Cristina, San Bernardo, Corpus Domini, and Sant’Agnese. Proclamations also
protected the new monastery of San Giorgio, the Benedictine monastery of San
Procolo, the college of the Hungarians, the Jesuits and their school, the new
church of Santa Maria Mascarella, and the shrine of the Madonna della Neve.
McCarthy, “Prostitution,” 131–97. 68 Zarri, “I monasteri femminili,” 166, 177.
Johnson, Monastic Women, 235–37. Fini, Bologna sacra, 14. 69 BCB, Bandi
Merlani, V, fol. 106r, untitled, begins “Non essendo conveniente che presso li
Monasterij di Monache” (March 24, 1603). 70 One-third of each fine was to go to
the accuser, one-third to the city treasury, and onethird to the esecutore. 71
In 1601, one woman registered on Bocca di lupo, two on Capramozza, and four on
Belvedere di Saragozza. In 1604, one registered on Bocca di lupo, three on
Capramozza, and one on Belvedere di Saragozza. C de M 1601 and 1604. One of the
women who lived on Belvedere in 1601 continued to do so in 1604, while another
had moved three blocks west to Senzanome, and a third had moved across town to
Campo di Bovi by the north-eastern wall. These were Vittoria Pellizani, Gentile
di Parigi, and Angela Amadesi, called “La Zoppina.” For Vittoria: C de M 1601,
204 and 1604, [np] “V” section. For Gentile: C de M 1601, 74 and 1604, [np] “G”
section. For Angela: C de M 1601, 136 and 1604, [np] “A” section. 72 These were
Camilla di Fiorentini, who lived in the house of Caterina the widow, and
Cecilia Baliera. C de M 1614, 288 and 39 respectively.73 See BCB, Bandi
Merlani, XI, fol. 28r, untitled, begins “Non essendo conveniente, che appresso
li Monasterij di Monache” (January 18, 1622). In 1624, four women lived on
Altaseta and none on Mussolina. 74 Guidicini, Cose notabili, vol. III, 179–80
and volume III, 346–50. 75 The proclamation clearly states that the order was
made at the insistence of the “Huomini della Madonna dalla Neve, Confraternità
di essa, e persone honeste di detta strada.” BCB, Bandi Merlani, X, fol. 128r
(August 20, 1621). 76 These were published in 1587, 1602, 1608, and 1621. BCB,
Bandi Merlani, I, fol. 449r, untitled, begins “Devieto di affitare a persone
disoneste nella contrada di S. Maria della Neve” (April 26, 1587); ASB, Legato,
Bandi speciali, vol. 15, fol. 198r, untitled, begins “Essendo la Contrada di
Santa Maria dalla Neve sempre stata Contrada quieta” (January 31, 1602); ASB,
Legato, Bandi speciali, vol. 17, fol. 225r, untitled, begins “Havendo
l’Illustriss[im]e Reverendiss[ime] Sig[nor] Car[dinal] di Bologna pien notitia”
(June 6, 1608); BCB, Bandi Merlani, X, fol. 128r, “Bando Contra le Meretrici,
& Persone inhoneste” (August 20, 1621). 77 “non possa, ne possano, ne
debbano sotto qual si vogli pretesto, a quesito colore fermarsi, o star ferme
per detta strada, sotto il portico, suso il lor’uscio, o d’altri, o suso l’uscio
dell’ Hostarie.” ASB, Legato, Bandi speciali, vol. 17, fol. 225r (June 6,
1608). 78 “comanda espressamente all GIULIA da Gesso, all DORALICE Moroni, alla
LUDOVICA Guidi, & ad ogn’altra MERETRICE [sic].” ASB, Legato, Bandi
speciali, vol. 17, fol. 225r (June 6, 1608). 79 C de M 1609, 73, 121, and 151,
respectively. 80 These were Agata Martelli, alias Bagni, from Castel San Pietro
and Lena di Stefani who lived in the casa of Messer Domenico Bonhuomo. C de M
1614, 19 and 1624, [np] “L” section. 81 BCB, Bandi Merlani, X, fol. 128r,
“Bando Contra le Meretrici, & Persone inhoneste” (August 20, 1621). Though
Savelli did not specify which “Borgo Nuovo” they should move to, in all
likelihood he meant Borgo Nuovo di stra Maggiore, which had no convents or
churches on it. 82 Cohen and Cohen, “Open and Shut,” 67–68. 83 Cowan, “Gossip,”
314–16; Cohen and Cohen, “Open and Shut,” 68–69. 84 Cohen, “‘Courtesans,’”
204–05; Cohen, “Seen and Known,” 396–97. In a later article Cohen argues that
“[t]hough typically noisier and more abrasive than feminine ideals would
dictate, much of prostitutes’ street behavior was not radically distinct;
rather it fell toward one end on a spectrum of working class practices.” Cohen,
“To Pray,” 310. 85 Tommaso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni
del mondo, nuovamente ristampata & posta in luce, da Thomaso Garzoni da
Bagnacavallo (Venice: Appresso l’Herede di Gio. Battista Somasco, 1593), 598.
Available online from the Università degli Studi di Torino OPAL Libri Antichi
internet archive GIII446MiscellaneaOpal,
cited in Cohen, “Seen and Known,” 397, n. 18. 86 Ibid., especially 396–97 and
399; Storey, Carnal Commerce, 172–75. 87 “Mirror of the Harlot’s Fate,” ca.
1657, reproduced on 278–79 in Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip: Volume 1 and
Storey Carnal Commerce, 37. Vita del lascivo (“The Life of the Rake”), ca.
1660s, Venice, reproduced on 39–44 of Storey, Carnal Commerce. 88 ASB, Ufficio
delle Bollette 1549–1796, Inventionum 1601, [np] January 22, 1601. 89 Ibid.,
[np] July 23, 1601. 90 Ibid., [np] January 22, 1601. John Florio defines
“chiavare” as “to locke with a key. Also to transome, but now a daies abusively
used for Fottere.” He defines “fottere” as “to jape, to flucke, to sard, to
swive,” and “fottente” as “fucking, swiving, sarding.” Florio, Queen Anna’s, 97
and 194, respectively. 91 On the attraction of lawmen to streets known for
prostitution, gambling, and drinking: Cohen, “To Pray,” 303; Storey, Carnal
Commerce, 99–100. 92 The complainants referred to themselves as honorati and
gentilhuomini, curiali principali, and artegiani buoni e da bene. Storey,
Carnal Commerce, 91, n. 103. She dates the two letters from 1601 and 1624.93
For the vice legate’s order, as transcribed into the 1586 register: C de M
1586, [np], untitled, begins “Ill[ustrissim]us et R[everendissi]mus D[ominus]
Bononorum Vicelegatus in eius Camera” (June 28, 1586). 94 Cohen, “Seen and
Known,” 409. 95 Storey, Carnal Commerce, 1–2.Bibliography Archival sources
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Boschi, b. 541 Legato, Bandi speciali, vol. 3, 15, and 17 Ufficio delle
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1605, 1609, 1614, 1624, and 1630 Ufficio delle Bollette 1549–1796, Filze 1601,
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XI. Gabinetto disegni e stampe, “Raccolta piante e vedute della città di
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patria per le province di Romagna. Adulteresses in Catholic Reformation Rome
Elizabeth S. CohenAdultery was no simple sexual lapse. Intricately bound to the
fundamental institution of marriage, it threatened honor, family, and
livelihood. Traditionally, this grave offense merited harsh punishments like
stoning, although by the sixteenth century these had much softened. A sin, a
crime, and a breach of contract, in early modern Italy it could be prosecuted
under several kinds of law. Beyond canon law’s jeopardy for both spouses, under
Roman law enshrining patria potestas, adultery was overwhelmingly a wife’s
transgression, to which, furthermore, she was presumed to have consented.1 So,
a vengefully passionate husband or kinsmen who killed a wife found f lagrantly
abed with a lover could claim immunity from prosecution for murder.2 The
adulteress herself figured ambiguously as a theme in Italian paintings, prints,
and stories. Nevertheless, neither law nor broader cultural norms ref lected
adultery’s complexities as social experience on the ground. To juxtapose
prescriptive and lived understandings and to test the crime’s notoriety, we
turn to judicial records. For contrast with our culturally framed expectations
and to glimpse the everyday worlds of most early modern people, this essay
reconstructs four stories from adultery prosecutions in the Roman Governor’s
court circa 1600. The particular crimes of these non-elite women and men
involved companionship and sex, but little else was directly at stake. My
accounts seek to represent both social dynamics and a vernacular culture of
sexuality accessible alike to the educated and the illiterate. I highlight a
cluster of adulteresses who cultivated not primarily instrumental, but rather
personal, alliances outside marriage. The lovers’ choices transgressed and had
consequences both at home and in the public courts. Nevertheless, their
misconduct was not radically out of step with an everyday culture of sexuality
that endured even in Catholic Reformation Rome. Adultery had a lengthy history
as a cultural, legal, and behavioral problem. From the twelfth century, an
ambivalent medieval literature on humanlove—from Andreas Cappelanus to
Gottfried von Strassburg—suggested that passion and marriage did not mix.
Despite the Renaissance emergence of more positive takes on sex, the notion
persisted that intense eroticism was seldom the business of husbands and
wives.3 The church still taught that marriage was the only licit setting for
sex, while discouraging the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. The
iconography of love on domestic objects linked to betrothals and weddings
promoted family policy as much as private spousal gratification.4 Although
married people may not have behaved as they were told, they have left few words
about sex. If conjugal relations did often tend to routine, adultery could be
easily imagined by contemporaries, and by scholars since, as an agreeable
alternative. Popular histories have repeatedly featured swaggering Renaissance
noblemen, including prelates, who dallied sensuously with mistresses and
fathered bastards. Their female partners, who ranged from servants to
gentlewomen, were often married, and so adulteresses.5 A wife’s adultery posed
problems for both her spousal household and her natal family, but sometimes
brought them benefits as well. Under ancient Roman law still frequently cited
in the Renaissance, uncertainty about paternity and corruption of the lineage
was one major cost.6 Adultery also rattled the public honor of a patriarchal
family that could not control its assets, including the chastity and fertility
of its women. These concerns appear as conventional rhetoric, but it is far
from clear how much they actually drove Renaissance husbands’ retribution.
Certainly, charges of adultery were invoked to instigate violence against an
inconvenient kinswoman and to cover other, less high-minded goals. On the other
hand, where doctrines of sexual exclusivity could bend in practice,
adulteresses might reap rewards rather than punishments for their liaisons,
especially with powerful men. For example, Giulia Farnese, wife of the Roman baron
Orsino Orsini and the mistress of Pope Alexander VI in the 1490s, arranged a
cardinal’s hat for her brother, Alessandro, the future Pope Paul III.7 Even
bastards could be absorbed and their mothers supported. In the 1460s Lucrezia
Landriani, married conveniently to a Milanese courtier, bore four illegitimate
children to the young Galeazzo Maria Sforza before he became Duke of Milan and
took a bride. Bearing their father’s name and raised in his court, Lucrezia’s
brood included Caterina Sforza, the future indomitable Countess of Forlí.8 The
husbands of these high-f lying adulteresses managed their role, its perks and
its costs, more and less deftly. In Florence, the husband of Bianca Cappello,
the mistress and later wife of Grand Duke Francesco I, retaliated by
intemperate womanizing of his own, and died at the hands of his paramour’s
kinsmen.9 Husbands did not take adultery lightly, but there might be multiple
stakes and more than just one bloody end. The dark emotions of
adultery—jealousy and anger—struck men and women alike. Legends of aristocratic
adulteresses killed in flagrante delictu by vengeful husbands arouse pity,
horror, and titillation in later readers. Although the threat and the rhetoric
surely circulated, documented historical examples are few.10 More modest women,
too, had reason to fear even unmerited spousal violence.For example, in a
miracle attested in 1522, the Madonna della Quercia of Viterbo saved a woman
mortally assaulted by a suspicious husband, egged on by his mother.11 More peaceably,
a Quattrocento necromantic recipe promised that to make a wife “persevere in
honest alliance with her husband.”12 Moreover, although adulterers were rarely
prosecuted, women deeply resented their husbands’ philandering. In the 1550s a
pious Bolognese gentlewoman, Ginevra Gozzadini, asked her spiritual director if
she owed the marital debt to her errant husband. Though reluctant to release
his disciple from godly duties, Don Leone Bartolini allowed her to decline if
her husband refused to forgo his “public adultery and also grazing on his wife
like a pig and not a Christian.”13 Renaissance Italian visual and literary
culture depicted four roles in adultery’s drama: the wife; the husband or
cuckold; the lover; and the chorus of the public. Though shadowed by misogyny,
views of women were mixed. Ancient and medieval texts widely posited female
propensities to falling in love and to undisciplined and mercenary carnality.
Beauty, coupled with fickle mind, made women at once temptresses and easy prey
to seducers. These risky frailties in turn justified tightly constraining
rules. In parallel, novelle, poetry, madrigals, and commedia dell’arte evoked
both woe and delight with representations of love and romantic adventure.
Magic, too, offered women and men ways to attract and bind a lover.14
Mainstream cultural norms often lumped non-conforming women together as sexual
transgressors. Yet prestige and class, singled out some for celebration. Thus,
as whores, prostitutes stood for the obverse of female virtue, but courtesans,
especially those dubbed counterintuitively “honest,” earned renown among elite
men for their manners and cultural finesse. Even Saint Mary Magdalene appeared
in paintings as the brightly dressed, or undressed, playgirl who was the foil
to her model penitent. The adulteress partook of this generic bad girl, at once
attractive and corrupt, but her jeopardy under law invited ambivalence. For
example, many early modern artists represented the Gospel story of the woman
“taken in adultery.”15 Sixteenth-century Italian paintings usually depicted a
beautiful, young woman, thrust by the Pharisees’ heavy legal hand to stand
alone before a crowd to be judged. Although conventional language suggested
that she was in some sense caught or trapped, she was still deemed to have
consented to dire offense. Viewers would hear Jesus first chide her
persecutors, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” and then tell
her to go and sin no more. All were sinners, not least the adulteress, but law
must not trump Christian mercy. Among the men’s roles, not the male adulterer
nor the wife’s lover, but rather the husbandly cuckold claimed a share of
cultural preoccupation. The aristocratic choice between familial vengeance or
instrumental accommodation often came down on the latter side. Instead of
destroying the adulteress, the cuckold had his reasons for complacency. In
visual imagery, art historians have shown betrayed husbands responding as much
with dismayed forbearance as with hot ire. Comparing paintings of Joseph, the
helpmate of the Virgin Mary, and Vulcan, the spouse of Venus, Francesca Alberti
explained how the aging husbands ofexceptional wives, though vulnerable to
mockery by artists and viewers, served divine ends.16 Louise Rice tracked
Italian depictions of the cuckold from a nasty late fifteenth-century
allegorical engraving through sixteenth-century literary parodies from Aretino
and Modio, and finally to Baccio del Bianco’s drawings. These last offered
whimsically ironic scenes that normalized both the cuckold and the
adulteress.17 Ambivalently allotting pleasure and agency to women and
complicating the revenge narrative, novelle offered socially more varied
cultural constructions of adultery. In the Decameron, Boccaccio exploited these
possibilities in more than twenty-five stories featuring adultery that
fancifully permuted its spousal roles.18 The married women of the novelle,
again almost always beautiful, pursued love and reaped their adulterous
pleasures with ambiguous culpability. At the expense of dull or aging husbands,
some wives schemed cleverly both to achieve their desires and to elude
discovery and punishment.19 Others, honest, virtuous, and alluring, had to be
tricked by would-be lovers into learning that sex outside marriage was more fun.20
Lucrezia in Machiavelli’s Mandragola found similar fortune. Although female
delight was only a means to an end in the Decameron’s elegantly ironic lessons,
a more literal reading of the stories at least gave a space to imagine wives’
extra-domestic enjoyment. Boccaccio’s cuckolded husbands reacted variously to
adultery’s challenges to honor and to its remedies in law. In Day 4, Story 9, a
gentlewoman let herself fall to her death after her vindictive husband fed her
the heart of her paramour. Explained the woman, since she had given her love
freely, she was the guilty one and not the lover. In a lighter vein, Day 3,
Story 2 parodied the narratives of murder in f lagrante and, less directly, of
Christ forgiving the adulteress. A king, discovering his wife and a groom
asleep together, cut the man’s hair to mark his guilt. When the lover woke, he
scotched his jeopardy by similarly tonsuring other servants. In the end, the
king, rejecting a petty vendetta that would broadcast his dishonor, announced
cryptically to his assembled entourage: “He that did it, do it no more, and may
you all go with God.”21 In Day 6, Story 7, a hapless husband, fearing penalty
if he killed his adulterous wife himself, hauled her before the public court,
where, by statute, she faced a sentence of death by fire. Unlike the Gospel’s
submissive adulteress, the respected Madonna Filippa staunchly defended herself
with two claims. First, as in the tragedy of Day 4, she did it for her “deep
and perfect” love for Lazzarino. Secondly, having gotten her husband to agree
that she had always satisfied his every bodily wish, she asked: “what am I to
do with the surplus? Throw it to the dogs? Is it not far better that I should
present it a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself, rather than allow
it to turn bad or go to waste?” The gathered populace of Prato greeted this
charming riposte with approving laughter and, at the judge’s suggestion,
altered the harsh statute to punish only adulteresses who did it for money.22
Christian rules as implemented through ecclesiastical courts also ref lected
more everyday cultural norms. Although by medieval canon law both spouses owed
the marital debt, in customary practice expectations differed for husbandand
wife. As historian Cecilia Cristellon shows, the church courts of preTridentine
Venice aimed less to police sex than to stabilize marriages and to minimize
scandal.23 Many proceedings, often brought by women, sought to formalize
separations or annulments of couples who had long since parted company. Adultery
by wife or husband was a charge to blacken character but was seldom advanced as
the source of a broken marriage.24 In fact, among the lower orders, adultery
was a common product of widespread, informal serial monogamy. Finding
themselves for various reasons without present spouses, people readily took up
new heterosexual partnerships. Although adulterous, such concubinage, sometimes
with a formal blessing that made it bigamy, was often marriage-like and, in the
absence of contrary evidence, usually accepted by the lay community. In the
face of these popular habits, fifteenth-century church courts worked to sharpen
the boundaries of marriage, and the Council of Trent’s legislation assimilated
concubinage more and more to prostitution.25 Even so, ecclesiastical judges
continued less to punish adulterous sex by itself than to seek better moral and
spiritual discipline around marriage as a whole. Let us turn now to Rome at the
end of the sixteenth century to gauge the moral climate and social textures in
which our everyday adulteries took place. For some decades Catholic reformers
had worked to burnish Rome’s reputation as a fitting capital for a resurgent
church. Issuing repeated regulations (bandi ) to suppress blasphemy and vice,
local authorities particularly targeted gambling and adultery.26 Yet these
official pronouncements better registered moralistic concern than they
energized a thorough cleansing of the civic body. Parallel rules sought to
constrain the practice of prostitution, although that trade and fornication by
the unmarried were transgressive but not criminal. The magistrates’ concerns
turned mostly on guarding sacred sites from taint and restraining violence and
disorder by prostitutes’ clients. Yet enforcement of decrees around illicit sex
remained sporadic. Pius V’s ghetto for prostitutes of the late 1560s at the
Ortaccio did not last long as either structure or policy. That moment was the
reformists’ exception rather than the trend. The early sixteenth-century
celebrity of Rome’s honest courtesans had certainly waned, but in 1580 the
gentleman traveler Montaigne was still keen to admire and visit their kind.27
More generally, the historian of crime Peter Blastenbrei concluded that, for
two decades immediately post-Trent, Rome was de facto quite accommodating of
heterosexual irregularities and sometimes attracted couples seeking to escape
sharper discipline elsewhere.28 All told, by 1600, reform in the papal city had
subdued the Renaissance culture of f leshly pleasures, but effective suppression
of non-marital sex was scarcely true on the ground. The labyrinth of Rome’s
institutions and, especially, the mobile demography of its residents
consistently subverted the religious and moral aspirations of its leadership.29
The city’s population swelled, from 35,000 in 1527, after the catastrophic Sack
by Hapsburg imperial troops, to around 100,000 in 1600.30 Few people were
native Romans. Visitors and migrants f lowed in—men and women, of all social
ranks from ambassadors and nobildonne to pilgrims, cattledrivers,and servants.
Many also left town. In a f luid residential geography, most people rented
their accommodations and often moved house. Although many households had a
nuclear core or its remnants, complete families were fewer than in many cities.31
Lodgers and informal clusters of housemates were common. People also changed
jobs frequently, and some worked in one part of the city but, regularly or
occasionally, ate and slept elsewhere. As a result, ordinary Romans had
repeatedly to renegotiate the personnel and terms of daily life. Furthermore,
Rome’s sharply skewed sex ratio yielded distinctive economic and marital
dynamics. The urban population counted, roughly, only 70 women for every 100
men. Celibate clerics were not the primary culprits. Many of the surplus men
came to the city to provide for the needs and comforts of a courtly society, by
serving in great households of prelates or secular lords or by supplying
goods.32 With males doing much of the domestic work and without a major textile
industry, the market for female labor in turn was weak. Of the many men, some
married in Rome to help establish themselves, but others had wives elsewhere,
or were young and not ready to settle down.33 Although some, nubile, women
found husbands readily, many others were left to improvise when fathers died or
spouses left town for shorter or longer absences. Typically, they struggled to
live piecemeal from laundry, spinning, and sewing. As in Venice, concubinage
was common. Prostitution, too, though never as rampant as some hysterical
reformers claimed, was another, potentally better paid recourse. Often
informally and intermittently, younger, more presentable or gregarious women
offered mixes of sexual, social, and domestic services to a shifting contingent
of unpartnered men, and to some husbands as well. As a concubine or prostitute,
a married woman faced legal jeopardy for adultery. When a husband did not, as
obligated, support his wife, she had to find alternatives. Sometimes, he had
wasted the dowry. Often, he had been long away, having intentionally or not
abandoned his wife. A woman, in turn, unknowing if her spouse had died, often
proceeded as if he had and set up new partnerships. In the absence of contrary
information, neighbors tended to presume legitimacy for couples who lived
appropriately, including taking the sacraments at church. Nevertheless, married
women living as prostitutes, concubines, or even bigamist wives were liable, if
denounced, to prosecution. The discipline and prosecution of adultery in early
modern Rome has left only erratic traces. No trial records survive from the
tribunal of the Vicario, who bore many of the city’s episcopal functions for
the pope. 34 As an offense of “mixti fori,” however, adultery sometimes came
before the criminal courts.35 Killing women for honor was rare, especially in
the city, and the ferocity of the ancient law had attenuated. Going to law,
though risking unwelcome publicity, became more common, even for noblemen.36 In
the 1580 edition of Rome’s Statuta, carnal and associated crimes occupied a
brief three pages and mostly specified due punishments.37 In practice, these
penalties were often negotiated down, so the statutory guidelines are
interesting mostly as a ref lection of judicial thinking and broader cultural
values. This section began with sodomy and a tersepronouncement of death by
burning. Next, a longer paragraph, De Adulterio e incestu, spoke first of
“adultery with incest,” before turning to “simple adultery.” For this last,
punishments were calibrated to the woman’s honesty and the man’s social rank.
For sex with an “honest” wife, a plebian man faced a hefty fine of 200 scudi
and three years of exile. A gentleman owed double the fine and the exile, and a
baron triple. Notably, this scale of penalties targeted the common circumstance
of high-status men making alliances with women of lower rank. On the other
hand, the chance that even a middling family would successfully haul a nobleman
into court was slim. Continuing, the statute declared that if the wife was poor
and “inhonesta, but not a public prostitute,” the penalties were halved.38
Reputation ( fama) in the neighborhood legally determined a woman’s
“honesty.”39 At the same time, where early modern criminal law recognized that
virgins might resist forcible def loration (stupro), wives were still held
complicit in adultery.40 Thus, every proven adulteress was, in principle, to be
sequestered for correction in a casa pia for errant wives (malmaritate), where
her husband or family paid her expenses. From the later sixteenth century,
adultery came before the Governor’s court by two routes. By legal tradition,
reiterated in the Statuta, sexual crimes involving respectable women received
public intervention only when brought by a kinsman with honor at stake.
Institutional justice, seeking to promote itself and to tame the violence of
self-help vendetta, encouraged this recourse with some success. Thus, husbands
initiated many of the Governor’s adultery trials, although typically with a
keen eye to retaining spousal property.41 On occasion, angry women prosecuted
their husbands for adultery.42 To note, the Governor’s criminal court in
general took seriously women’s complaints, even without male backing. Their
testimony as accused or witness, usually recorded under the same intimidating
circumstances as men’s, bore analogous weight. Especially for offenders from
the lower social ranks, adultery also came to the court’s attention by an
investigation ex offitio, on the state’s initiative. Usually, a secret report
by a mercenary spy or grouchy neighbor launched the case, followed by a police
raid.43 Such arrests were often handled by summary justice that imposed a fine
and issued an injunction against further misconduct.44 A few cases led to full
trials, and my stories here of “simple adultery” are among them.45 Although
these examples were not formally typical, they involved ordinary people getting
into relatively routine kinds of trouble. Bodies and honor were at stake, but
neither money nor property were central for either husbands or wives. All the
women had engaged actually or potentially in sex with men of their own choosing
outside the bonds of marriage. From the tales of these willing adulteresses who
ended up in court, we can learn about a range of possibilities for extramarital
adventures and about the narratives and discourses that explained them and
hoped to extenuate culpability. These women, though several years married, were
often young. In other Governor’s court trials around f lawed marriages the
wives typically complained of mistreatment to justify their straying. In none
of these four stories, however, did that rhetoric appear. The husbands, when
theysuspected or learned what was afoot, were angry, but the trials were not
about ending a marriage. The lovers, themselves unmarried, were among the many
unattached men in Rome, and met the adulteresses through family and local
connections. Also telling are the ways that neighbors and colleagues took part,
both in the trysts and in their discovery and discipline. In my first two
adultery stories, unhappy husbands tried, more and less cannily, to corral
their wandering wives. For both, events transpired close to home. In the first
case, the spouses spoke of Tridentine teachings to repair a troubled marriage.
The pastoral discipline had failed to work, however, and the next time the
irate husband resorted to self-help, seriously beating his incorrigible wife.
The domestic violence brought the problem to public notice. In the second
story, the husband confronted his wife with her misconduct reported by
neighbors. When she faced down his efforts at proper spousal correction and
still continued to roam, the husband turned for help to the ecclesiastical and
public authorities. They, in time, intervened, but notably declined to rush
into a private matter without good cause. The first tale provocatively mixed
elements of Boccaccio with Catholic reform teaching to the laity. A very short
trial from May 1593 recounted adultery trouble that exploded within the cramped
premises of a fruit and vegetable seller in central Rome.46 After the
beleaguered husband, Hieronimo, had resorted to self-help, the resulting
domestic violence led an unnamed informant to alert the police. In this
instance, probably because the wife, Caterina, lay injured, instead of
collecting testimony at the prison, the notary first hurried to the respectable
shopkeeper’s premises to interview both spouses. Husband and wife testified
immediately in the heat of events and again, later, in jail. The would-be
lover, the shop assistant Leonardo, nimbly decamped before the law arrived. As
was common for many city dwellers, Hieronimo Ursini from Milan kept shop on the
street f loor and lived upstairs with his wife, Caterina, but evidently had no
children. Two garzoni (shop assistants) slept in an adjacent room. The
fruitseller had good reason to suspect his young wife. By his account,
Caterina, whom he spied often f lirting in the window “with this one and that
one,” had repeatedly tried his patience. Worse, he once had caught her at her
mother’s house, “almost in the act” of having sex with a tavern keeper.
Nevertheless, Hieronimo averred piously, “I forgave her, and she promised to do
no more wrong, and we confessed together to the parish priest and took communion,
and I took her back and led her home, pardoning everything and keeping her
always as well as possible” (ff. 1125r–v). Portraying himself as a pious and
forgiving husband, Hieronimo sought to meliorate the court’s view of his later,
less irenic, behavior. The testimony, which likely was approximately true,
shows us a man of modest status deftly invoking good Catholic teaching.
Caterina in turn confessed, “Truly, I did wrong (torto) to do what I did to my
husband, because I once fell into error (errore) at my mother’s house, where I
had sex with Giovanni Angelo the tavern keeper, and even so, my husband forgave
me and took meback into the house” (ff. 1128r–v). Here she acknowledged not
only Hieronimo’s forbearance, but also her own inclinations to illicit
pleasure. Hieronimo’s jealousy thus primed, on a May morning he climbed early
out of the bed that he shared with his f lirtatious wife. According to his
testimony, he intended to go to a garden on the edge of the city to cut
artichokes for the shop. He tried to rouse his two garzoni who were sleeping in
another room. One got up, but Leonardo, also from Milan, claimed to be sick and
would not rise. Suspecting the lay-a-bed of setting a “trap,” Hieronimo sent
the other assistant out to collect the produce, but he himself slipped into the
shop and hid behind a barrel. After a while, Leonardo entered the shop,
“sighing,” according to the hidden Hieronimo, “an amorous sigh.” A few minutes
later, Caterina appeared, asking where her husband was. “Gone to cut
artichokes,” replied Leonardo. Immediately, said Hieronimo, Caterina began to
adjust the garzone’s ruff ( fare le lattughe), and quickly the two became
playful and kissed each other. The husband, seeing that “Leonardo wanted to
lift her skirts and do his thing ( fare il fatto suo),” burst out of hiding
shouting, “Oh traitor, oh traitor, you do this to me!” Seeing his master thus
enraged, Leonardo, expediently, slipped out the shop door and disappeared from
the story. Caterina retreated hastily up the stairs, and Hieronimo surged
after, beating her with a broomhandle, a domestic weapon of choice for women as
well as men, with his fists, and with his belt. So incensed was he that he
pinned her down with his knees on her belly and then on her shoulders, while hauling
on her braids, so that he left her “as if dead,” swollen, bloody, and with
bruises “blacker that your Lordship’s hat”. Hieronimo volunteered all these
details, and one suspects that he may have shocked even himself with his
ferocity. Caterina’s tale of the putative adultery and its sorry aftermath
provides another perspective. Not surprisingly, she presented herself as
aggrieved and “mistreated.” Nevertheless, she reported a similar account
leading to the f lirtatious exchange with Leonardo. Her husband, having left
early without a word, she rose two hours later. Going into the next room,
Caterina rousted Leonardo to get up and open the shop, while she swept. When
she went down for a basket to hold the sweepings, she found Leonardo, wrestling
with a pair of sleeves. He asked for help in attaching them, and the two began
laughing as they struggled with the laces. Just then, Hieronimo sprang out and
began to assault his wife. Confirming Hieronimo’s confessed details and adding
blows with the head of a hatchet, Caterina claimed that he wanted to kill her.
But, “please God,” he had not (f. 1125v). Later, pressured by the court at a
second interrogation, the wife admitted to some greater provocation of her
husband. In this version, as she came into the shop, Leonardo asked that she
help lace his sleeves and moaned about not feeling well. She joked that he was
not going to die, and they began to play so that, as in Hieronimo’s account,
the garzone had kissed her “lustfully (lusuriosamente)” on the cheek and she
responded in kind (f. 1128r–v). Though more theatrical than some tales, this
domestic drama had several points in common with other neighborhood adulteries.
First, illicit relationssprouted very close to home. These were the
settings—through work and domestic propinquity—in which wives were likely to
meet other men. Perhaps surprisingly to us, these were also the spaces in which
adultery—its initiations and often its consummations—took place. People
understood the risks and costs of getting caught; at the same time, privacy,
such as we imagine it, was simply not a reality for most people. While married,
Caterina had practiced serious f lirtations first in her mother’s house and
then in her husband’s, with one of their live-in employees. Even if no real sex
had transpired with Leonardo, Caterina saw the wrongful pattern of her conduct.
She evidently enjoyed the play and appreciation of her guilty encounters, but
she gave little sign of personal feelings for her lovers. In contrast, there
does seem to have been some commitment, however f lawed on both sides, between
the spouses. While we may doubt that Caterina changed her ways, she did express
a sense of responsibility and a belief that she should make peace with her
husband. The brevity of the trial suggests that the magistrate was content to
dispatch the matter quietly. Both spouses had to answer for their
transgressions— Caterina’s sexual misconduct and Hieronimo’s excessive
correction.47 The second story of adultery is the only one of the four where
the husband himself brought his private troubles to the authorities.48 For more
than six months, Bartolomeo from Genoa, alerted by friends, investigated
suspicions and then sought to correct his errant wife, Isabetta from Rome. He
had tried several times in previous months to enlist the help of the Vicario’s
ecclesiastical tribunal, but in vain. Recently, however, he had procured a
warrant, probably from the Governor’s court (ff. 832r–v, 834r). So, a police
patrol met Bartolomeo outside the building where the lovers had been seen and
at his direction made arrests that led to the trial.49 Events took place in a
shared neighborhood and within a community of workers, several of whom
testified. In this slightly larger, but still face-to-face social terrain,
friends and neighbors, notably men this time, had a crucial role in managing
their comrade’s disarray. On Saturday, October 22, 1604, right after the
arrests, Bartolomeo, coachman to a Monsignor Dandini, complained formally
against his wife and Francesco Cappelli from Florence (ff. 831r–v). Bartolomeo
had married Isabetta six years earlier; although native Roman women were few,
they often married men from outside who sought to establish themselves in the
capital. It was a second marriage for Isabetta, who had a grown stepson and a
son who lived together in another neighborhood (f. 840v). Bartolomeo lived with
Isabetta and their young son near San Pantaleone in the city center. The
accused lover, a twelve-year resident of Rome who served as coachman to another
churchman, the Archbishop of Monreale, worked from a stable nearby.
Bartolomeo’s complaint charged Isabetta with spending “unusually much ( piu
dell’ordinario)” time with Francesco. According to reports from several men,
including a third coachman, while Bartolomeo lay on his sick bed, Isabetta came
and went late in the evening from the stables where Francesco worked. Once
healthy again, Bartolomeo berated his wife for her visits and threatened her
with arrest and public whipping (f. 831r). She, however, denied all charges and
challenged her husband to do his worst(f. 831v). Nevertheless, Bartolomeo
asked his friends to spy on her movements (ff. 833v–834r). One morning
Bartolomeo’s nephew brought word that Isabetta had been spotted a few streets
away going with Francesco into the Palazzo de Picchi. Bartolomeo sent a
messenger to alert the city police. When they arrived, Bartolomeo told them to
arrest Francesco, then descending the stairs. The husband entered the building,
collected Isabetta, and sent her, too, off to jail (f. 831v). Note that the
Governor’s police were willing to act, but left it to the respectable husband
to hand over his wife. After the arrests, neighbors and colleagues testified to
having seen Francesco and Isabetta often together over many months and hearing
talk in the piazza of their being lovers. One man observed her three or four
times in the last month taking advantage of walking her son to school to stop
to talk with Francesco in the courtyard of the Massimi family palace (f. 837v).
Another neighbor, Alfonso, intervened directly. Because, he said, Isabetta was
his commare, his spiritual kinswoman, he had invited her a month earlier to his
house. There, with his own wife present, Alfonso told the wayward Isabetta of
the rumors that she was in love (inamorata) with Francesco and having sex with
him. Alfonso urged to her to smarten up (stesse in cervello) and amend her
ways, because her husband knew and had a warrant to send her to jail, and
because it dishonored Alfonso himself, who had helped marry her so respectably
(ff. 834r–v). In their early testimonies, the lovers took different tacks. The
unattached Francesco downplayed the whole business. He acknowledged, as did
Isabetta, that they had known each other in the neighborhood for three or four
years. Yet Francesco dismissed her presence in his room or any adulterous
reasons for it, “I cannot know the heart of that woman or why she came up” (f.
835v). Isabetta, pressed hard through several interrogations, tried
ineffectually to parry the court’s questions. She garbed herself conventionally
as a dutiful housewife who minded her own business and seldom went out: “I have
to keep working if I want to live” (f. 841r). Accordingly, she implausibly
denied knowing local geography; then, insisting that she had never set foot in
the stables, she fudged the meanings of being “inside” a place (f. 839r). She
invoked her own good name, though in an elaborately conditional mode: “What do
you imagine, your Lordship, if I had gone out while my husband was sick, that
would have been a fine honor from me” (f. 839v). Blaming her neighbors for
their spiteful testimony, she invoked the chronic enmities of local life: “what
fine witnesses are these? this is how they repay the courtesies and good will
that I have used with them” (f. 843r). Later, however, she backtracked on some
of these claims with a pathetic tale of going out at night to fetch some greens
to feed the ailing Bartolomeo. Passing by the stable’s open door, she said,
Francesco had called out to her, “‘how is your husband?’ I, in tears, answered
that the doctor offered little hope, and then Francesco responded, ‘look, if
you need anything, be it money or anything else, just ask’” (ff. 843r–v). Spun
this way, the errant wife’s visit to the stable got folded into a stirring
picture of her desperate efforts to help her husband and of the fellow
coachman’s sympathetic offer of aid.Near the end of the trial, the accused
lovers, confronted with repeated testimony to their private meetings at the
stable and in the palazzo, were pushed to address the presumption that they met
for sex. As a judge said in another trial, “solus con sola, one does not
presume they are saying the paternoster.”50 When pressed, Francesco exclaimed,
“Your Lordship, I will take 100,000 oaths that I had no carnal doings with
Isabetta!” He continued, “I can show your Lordship that only with great
difficulty can I go with women, and when I do, it is rarely and to my great
injury (danno), because four ribs got cut by a Turkish scimitar when I served as
a soldier on the galleys of the Grand Duke” of Tuscany (f. 849v). Here we have
detail so baroque that we may have to believe it. Francesco aimed to suggest,
with timeless logic, that his encounters with Isabetta were not, actually, sex.
Whatever it was, however, he feared culpability and had tried, with various
moves, to def lect it. Interestingly, Isabetta’s final remarks also denied a
sexual relationship by alluding to Francesco’s behavior. In her words, “if he
were as proper (netto) with other women as he is with me, he would never have
had sex with any woman.” Then, reaffirming her veracity, she concluded with a
shift to a rhetoric of intention and sin, “If I had done wrong (errore) and if
Francesco had sex with me, I would say so freely and ask for forgiveness, but
because I did not do it, I cannot say I did” (ff. 850v–851r). Much more was at
stake for Isabetta than for her lover. Knowing well that, in sneaking around
while her husband was ill, she had erred in the eyes of her peers, she did not
counter Bartolomeo’s charges with complaints of mistreatment. Yet she stood on
her word that she could not confess a lie. There the trial record ended with
the usual legal instruction that both accused parties be released into the
jail’s public rooms (ad largam) with three days to prepare a defense.
Accumulated circumstantial evidence, rather than catching lovers in the sexual
act, was sufficient for neighbors and, in turn, their publica vox et fama
attesting to the offense had weight in court. Nevertheless, perhaps fearing
retaliation, people appear not to have turned each other in too quickly. Once
an adulterous coupling became common, local knowledge, a friend or associate
might assay an informal warning to wife, husband, or lover. Consensus likely
deemed these matters family business, better handled privately and with minimal
scandal. In this case, Bernardino not only chose official help, but had to
persist to get it. In two other stories private adultery and its public
prosecution unfolded in different circumstances. Here the adulteresses took
advantage of wider urban terrains when pursuing their romantic yearnings. The
husbands, although present in the city, were not principal players in bringing
the cases to court. Neighbors, on the other hand, took active part,
facilitating the alliances or tolerating them for some time, until a moment
arrived when someone alerted the authorities. These times, when the police
raided an illicit rendezvous, they acted ex offitio, on the newer legal premise
that the court could intervene directly, without a kinsman’s request, to ensure
order among the city’s lower-status residents. In a third episode of simple
adultery, prosecuted in January 1605, the husband, Giovanni Domenico, was in
fact the last to know. The short trial consists of apolice report and
testimonies from several neighborhood witnesses.51 Neither wife nor lover spoke
on record, but procedural annotations at the document’s end register their
choice not to challenge any of the witnesses. Most likely, the adulterers accepted
a summary decision that ordered them to pay fines and agree formally not to
consort any more. Giovanni Domenico di Mattei from Lombardy and his wife,
Madalena, lived on the Tiber Island with their two young children and an orphan
boy whom they kept “for the love of God” (f. 145v). Husband and wife shared a
business selling doughnuts from their home (f. 143r). Giovanni Domenico also
commuted daily across the city to Piazza Capranica to work as an assistant to a
doughnut-maker (ciambellaro) (f. 145r). The job required his being away
overnight, but every morning he returned to his family quarters, evidently
bringing pastries to sell. One Wednesday morning, Giovanni Domenico came home
to find that Madalena had been arrested, along with Pietro Gallo from Parma, a
twenty-five-year-old barber’s garzone who lived two doors down the street (ff.
144r, 145v). According to the official report, a neighbor’s denunciation had
informed the authorities that “every night after four hours (10 p.m.) Pietro
habitually goes to sleep with Madalena” (f. 143r). Receiving word again last
night that the barber was there, the police raided the house late on a chilly
January evening. With professional savvy, the lieutenant posted men to watch
the exits before knocking on Madalena’s door, which she opened after a few
minutes’ delay. While a search inside found no man, a loud noise overhead
alerted the police to visit the roof, but in vain. They did soon discover the
barber in his nightshirt in his own bed, where he protested that he had been
checking the premises above on behalf of his absent landlord. Unconvinced, the
police led the two lovers off to jail (ff. 143v–145r). When Giovanni Domenico
came home to the unpleasant surprise of his wife’s arrest, he learned that
Pietro the barber, carrying a sword (a further offense), had been in the house
at night with Madalena. The cuckolded husband went immediately to make a formal
complaint and to demand, according to the protocol, the severest punishments
for Pietro, Madalena, and anyone with a part in “leading him to her” (ff.
145r–v). The young orphan, Giovanni Santi, nicknamed Scimiotto (Little Monkey),
also testified then under his master’s auspices. The boy explained that, during
the four months that he had lived in the household, Madalena had many times
sent him to invite the barber to eat, and that, when Giovanni Domenico was
away, Pietro stayed to sleep. He shared the bed with Madalena and the two
children, while the young witness slept on the f loor in the same room. The
lover usually entered through the door, but sometimes through a window
belonging to a laundress (ff. 146r–v). During her husband’s nightly absences
and in plain view of the neighbors, Madalena had carried on adulterously with,
like the other women, a young, unmarried man who lived nearby. The affair
(amicizia) had been going on for as much as two years, according to gossip in
the local wineshop (f. 148v). A hatmaker who lived in the house between the two
lovers had for six months heardlocal “murmuring” that Pietro was having sex
(negotiava) with Madalena. In passing back and forth, the neighbor had many
times seen the barber in her house, their “talking and laughing together
publicly . . . sometimes in the morning, sometimes after eating,
sometimes toward evening” (f. 147r). Often, said the hatmaker, other men also
hung out convivially at the shop, eating doughnuts, or, in season, roasted
chestnuts (f. 148v). Giovanni Domenico must have been around sometimes when
such sociability, presumably good for business, took place. Yet, about a month
before the arrests, the hatmaker saw fit one day in his shop to warn the young
barber: “the people of Trastevere say you’re having sex with the
doughnut-maker’s wife; if you don’t straighten up, you’ll go to jail.” When
Pietro denied it, the hatmaker replied that it was not his business, but that
the barber had better mind his (f. 147r). Cesare the tavern keeper had also
challenged Pietro. Several weeks ago, Cesare had gone to Madalena’s to borrow
matches and found her eating with the barber and another man. Seeing the tavern
keeper, Pietro had slipped away to hide. Later that day, Madalena’s small son
came to Cesare’s house to get a light. Jokingly, he asked the boy: “who was
sleeping with your mother last night?” (f. 148r). Later still, Pietro stormed
into the tavern and began to threaten the host, saying that he should take care
of his own house and not speak of others, or that he would get his head stove
in. Cesare, figuring out how his words had passed from the child to his mother
and to Pietro, protested that he had only spoken in jest (f. 148r). Although
propinquity and opportunity during Giovanni Domenico’s regular absences clearly
favored the liaison, we must guess at what drew these two lovers together. The
unmarried barber could readily have found sex and even a quasi-domestic
companionship elsewhere among the city’s prostitutes. The illicit pair seemed
to enjoy each other’s company, alone together and also in groups. In Rome where
many men were on their own, taking meals in others’ houses, sometimes in return
for a contribution in food or money, was not unusual. Pietro’s sleeping over,
especially when he lived so close by, was less acceptable. Interestingly,
though, no one called Madalena a whore or said that she was in it for money.
This suggests that there was something companionable about the connection, and
that may have colored local reactions, at least initially. Some shift of
neighborhood opinion in recent weeks, however, had led the hatmaker to confront
Pietro and the tavern keeper to make his tactless joke to Madalena’s son. How,
then, did the cuckolded husband not suspect? Seemingly, none of the neighbors
said anything to him. At least, when he came home to discover the arrests, he
hastily adopted a posture of righteous ignorance and mustered shreds of
domestic mastery by adding his complaint to the magistrate’s file.
Nevertheless, given local practices, the marriage probably muddled on. The
fourth case shows a different pattern of adulterous assignation.52 The lovers had
been acquainted through family connections for several years. The older married
woman, infatuated with a younger man, a cloth dealer, organized their sexual
trysts. Completely absent from the trial, the cuckolded husband figured only as
an angry specter in his wife’s mind. Here again, a neighbor’s
denunciationlaunched the official investigation. Testimonies from the two
lovers and from several women neighbors arrested with them confirmed and
extended the police report. On Saturday, March 23, 1602, in mid-afternoon, a
police patrol raided a modest upstairs room in the Vicolo Lancelotti near the
Tiber river. According to their lieutenant, an unnamed local informant reported
that a married woman had been meeting a lover there on Saturdays for some
months (ff. 1219r–v). The lodging belonged to Filippa from Romagna, a weaver
and the wife of Hieronimo Morini, though evidently alone in Rome (f. 1220r).
Two other women on their own, including Filippa’s commare Marcella, also shared
the staircase. On Saturday, hearing men barge into the building, the weaver was
able to warn the lovers, so that the police arrived to find the pair, both
fully clothed, the man sitting on the bed and the woman standing beside him.
But when the man rose, lifting his cloak from the bed, the lieutenant spotted a
“shape” ( forma) betraying the couple’s activity (f. 1219r). The woman, Livia,
was known to all present as the wife of Pietropaolo Panicarolo, a carpenter
from Milan (f. 1224v). Confronted by the police, she threw herself tearfully on
her knees and begged not to be taken to prison, because “this is the time” that
her husband would kill her. The man, Marino Marcutio from Gubbio, took an
officer aside, saying “I am a merchant” and offering money or whatever he
wanted in order to let them go, the woman in particular (ff. 1219r–v). But the
righteous policeman refused the bribe, bound the pair, and sent them to jail.
The adultery’s backstory emerged from the interrogations. Livia testified that
she had been married for twenty-six years, although she likely included a brief
first marriage contracted when she was very young (ff. 1225r–v). That husband
had died before she was old enough to go live with him, and probably she had
been wed soon again to Pietropaolo. In any case, in 1602 Livia must have been
at least thirty-five and maybe older. She lived with her husband, but, like
Caterina and Hieronimo in the first story, they had no children. Besides
Livia’s fear of Pietropaolo’s violence should he discover the adultery, we know
nothing of their relationship. As in the third case, the geography in this one
spread out across the center of the city. Livia lived currently not far from
the Trevi Fountain and was accustomed to moving good distances around the city
on her own (f. 1221v). Marino, a younger man, kept shop across town on a corner
where the street of the Chiavari met the Piazza Giudea (f. 1220v). Livia had
come to know Marino eight years before in her own home, where she nursed his
seriously ill cousin, who later died (ff. 1227r, 1229r). Marino had also shared
recreation and games with her husband, Pietropaolo, and the merchant’s parents
had more recently lodged in the carpenter’s quarters during the Holy Year of
1600 (f. 1229r). Through these domestic encounters, Livia had fallen in love
with Marino and had long strategized to meet him discreetly for sex. Livia had
known Filippa for two years, during which time the weaver, who worked on a loom
in her room, had made three cloths for the more aff luent carpenter’s wife (f.
1221r). Filippa had visitedLivia’s house to collect yarn for the loom and to
deliver finished cloth, and Livia had called in the Vicolo Lancelotti, although
it was a good way from her home. So, bumping into Filippa at various spots
around town, Livia importuned her repeatedly for the use of her room to meet
Marino (f. 1221v). Though reluctant, Filippa eventually gave in to the woman
who gave her work. At risk of being charged as a go-between, the weaver said
she had refused any compensation, but Livia said that she had given Filippa
five giulii for the two recent assignations (f. 1227v). In Livia’s own
words, she had loved and been in love (inamorata) with Marino for years, and
her infatuation had propelled her to arrange a series of private encounters
“not having opportunity to enjoy him ( goderlo) in my house out of respect for
my husband” (f. 1225r). Livia and Marino both acknowledged having met privately
a number of times at Filippa’s room, and twice in the last week that was the
focus of the investigation. On the Monday before the arrests, the pair had had
a rendezvous at Filippa’s house. Duly chaperoned by a nephew, who left
immediately, Livia arrived first after the midday meal and joined the weaver in
her room. Marino appeared about a half hour later, bringing some collars for
starching as a standard cover story for his presence. After chatting brief ly,
Filippa withdrew and left the pair alone. Sometimes, the door was open during
the couple’s visits, but on this, as on another, occasion they had been locked
inside for about an hour (f. 1221r). When later the policeman asked Filippa
what the couple had been doing, she replied, “you know very well that when a
man and a woman are together, it is not licit to see what they are doing” (f.
1219v). Although all the women witnesses echoed the sentiment that Livia was in
love, it was not clear whether, when the couple next met on Saturday, they had
sex. Livia was angry with Marino, because she thought that he was chasing
another woman, and they had had words. She also insisted with dubious piety,
“on Saturday I don’t commit sin, not even with my husband (il sabbato non fo il
peccato, ne anco con mio marito)” (ff.1221r, 1225r). Although during the
arrests Marino had tried to protect Livia, under interrogation his story aimed
first to exonerate himself. He acknowledged that he had met Livia once before
Christmas, twice before Carnival, and another two times during Lent, but, he
insisted, only to talk. Making the implausible claim that he only sought the
carpenter’s wife’s help in order to secure a “simple benefice” for his brother
who was a student, he denied sex altogether (f. 1229v). Describing their
emotional bond, he notably cast the feelings in terms of Livia’s warmth toward
him, “she is a friend to me and loving because she has helped me (mi e amica et
amorevole perche mi ha fatto de servitii ),” referring to her nursing his
mother and cousin (ff. 1231v–1232r).53 To dislodge the lovers’ conf licting
testimony and to convict Marino, the court proceeded to torture the adulteress in
front of the merchant (f. 1234r–v). Using the lighter instruments of the
sibille that compressed the hands, this formal act of judicial stagecraft
intended, as in Artemisia Gentileschi’s case, to authorize the claims of the
sexually compromised woman.54 The tactic failed, nonetheless, to elicit a
change in Marino’s testimony that denied any sex, or touch, or kisses,or even
hearing that Livia was in love with him (f. 1236v). The judge probably did not
believe Marino, but legally his respectability and his adamancy held good
weight. Livia’s unknown fate, on the other hand, would have lain in part with
her invisible husband. If less dramatic than high culture’s renderings of
adultery, adorned by the heft of law, familiar biblical tropes, and colorful
narrative in paint and words, these everyday stories of wives seeking illicit
moments of love and fun have their own art and pathos. For example, there is
the coachman Francesco’s alleged sexual impairment due to a Turkish scimitar
injury. Or the hardworking doughnut guy cuckolded by the young barber. Or
Filippa the poor weaver, who got into trouble because her friend and employer
Livia wore down her resistance to playing hostess to a sexual rendezvous.
Paradoxically perhaps, the criminal court’s address to transgression here tells
us more about what really happened, and what happened to most people some of
the time than the great dramas of high art. Despite reformers’ efforts to
discipline marriage and sex, a customary culture that tolerated various forms
of heterosexual error persisted in Rome long after Trent. In these four cases,
only one husband sought the court’s help. In the others, neighborhood
informants alerted the authorities to a public disorder, but only after an
adulterous liaison had been known in their midst for some time. While the
Governor’s court prosecuted lovers as well as errant wives, the women usually
had more to lose, but also perhaps to gain. Even if unwise, some married women
broke the rules and went looking for love. What they found was usually close to
home so that their adventures took place under the eyes of a local community.
These neighbors knew often well before the law got involved and responded in
diverse ways. Adultery posed a social problem that demanded a solution, sooner
or later. Although the law had its own ambitions, in these sorts of everyday
misdeeds justice did not intervene with a devastating external discipline.Notes
1 Cristellon, “Public Display,” 182–85, summarizes Italian legal and customary
views of adultery. 2 Clarus, Opera omnia, 51b. 3 Besides essays in
Matthews-Grieco, ed., Erotic Cultures, see Bayer, ed., Art and Love, including
essays by Musacchio (29–41) and Grantham Turner (178–84). 4 Ajmer-Wollheim,
“‘The Spirit is Ready’” 5 McClure, Parlour Games, 36–38. 6 Esposito, “Donna e
fama,” 97–98, states this standard view. 7 Cussen, “Matters of Honour,” 61–67.
8 Lev, The Tigress of Forlì, 3–20. 9 Musacchio, “Adultery, Cuckoldry,” 11–34;
on Piero’s death 17–18. 10 On wife-killing by nobleman Carlo Gesualdo in
Naples, 1590, see Ober, “Murders, Madrigals”; on Vittoria Savelli in the Roman
hinterland, 1563, see Cohen, Love and Death, 15–42. Killings of noble wives not
caught in flagrante delictu often had motives linked to claims on property or
power rather jealous rage. 11 Esposito, “Donne e fama,” 47 48 49Elizabeth S. CohenGal, Boudet, and
Moulinier-Brogi, eds., Vedrai mirabilia, 241. Kaborycha, ed., A Corresponding
Renaissance, 172 + n. 19. Gal, Boudet, and Moulinier-Brogi, Vedrai mirabilia,
251. Examples include: Titian (1510); Rocco Marconi (1525); Palma il Vecchio
(1525–28); Lorenzo Lotto (1528); Tintoretto (1545–48); Alessandro Allori
(1577). Alberti, “‘Divine Cuckolds.’” Rice, “The Cuckoldries.” Boccaccio,
Decameron. For example, Day 3, Story 3; Day 7, Story 2. For example, Day 3,
Story 2; Day 4, Story 2. Ibid., 241–46. My translation of the quote. Ibid.,
500–01. Cristellon, Marriage, the Church, 14–19, 159–90. For French parallels,
see Mazo Karras, Unmarriages, 165–208. Ferraro, Marriage Wars also includes
cases in secular courts, where issues of property, often pursued by husbands,
have greater visibility; yet women brought many more suits than men, 29–30. In
the complaints, adultery was generally subordinate to other concerns, 71.
Cristellon, “Public Display,” 175–76, 180–85, Scaduto, ed. Registi dei bandi,
vol. 1 (anni 1234–1605), passim. Storey, Carnal Commerce, 108-14, 242–43.
Blastenbrei, Kriminalität im Rom, 274–75. Cohen and Cohen, “Justice and Crime.”
Sonnino, “Population,” 50–70. Da Molin, Famiglia, 93–95. Sonnino, “Population,”
62–64. See also, Nussdorfer, “Masculine Hierarchies.” Da Molin, Famiglia, 243.
The unexplained disappearance of Vicariato tribunal records precludes Roman
comparisons with Venice. Marchisello, “‘Alieni,’” 133–83. See also in the same
volume, Esposito, “Adulterio.” Blastenbrei, Kriminalität im Rom, 273, n. 160.
Statuta almae urbis Romae, 108–09, for what follows. Forcibly abducting
prostitutes was a crime. Ibid., 109. Esposito, “Donna e fama,” 89–90.
Marchisello, “Alieni,” 137, 166–68; Esposito, “Adulterio,” 26–27.
Alternatively, the legal narrative for the charge of sviamento, leading astray,
shifted more blame onto the lover. For example, Archivio di Stato di Roma,
Governatore, Tribunale criminale (hereafter ASR GTC), Processi, xvi secolo,
busta 256 (1592), ff. 540r–62; see also, Blastenbrei, Kriminalität im Rom, 272,
275. For example, ASR GTC, Processi, xvii secolo, busta 25, ff. 17r–26v;
(1603); busta 91, ff. 1153r–1159r (1610). In parallel, the Statuta almae urbis
Romae, 110, declared that men keeping concubines were liable for fines of 50
scudi. Counts based on small numbers of surviving records do not reflect
behaviour or even patterns of prosecution. Nevertheless, it may be useful to
note that this type of “simple adulteries” represent about a quarter of the
adultery prosecutions between 1590 and 1610. ASR GTC, Processi, xvi secolo,
busta 270, ff. 1124r–1128v. References to specific folios appear in parentheses
in text. The trial record ended with the usual note that those charged had three
days to prepare their formal defense. I have found no record of a judgment, but
it is likely that the couple were fined. ASR GTC, Processi, xvii secolo, busta
37, ff. 830r–851r. The charge preteso adulterio (appearance of adultery)
carried a lesser burden of proof.Adulteresses in Catholic Reformation Rome50 51
52 53ASR GTC, Processi, xvii secolo, busta 36, f. 63v. ASR GTC, Processi, xvii
secolo, busta 44, ff. 142r–149r. ASR GTC, Processi, xvii secolo, busta 17, ff.
1218r–1238r. The range of colloquial meanings for “amica” and “amorevole” was
broad. Here Marino used these words to indicate friendship and affiliation,
rather than romantic or sexual alliance. 54 Cohen, “Trials of Artemisia
Gentileschi,” Archival sources Archivio di Stato di Roma, Governatore,
Tribunale Criminale Processi, xvi secolo, busta 256 (1592) Processi, xvi
secolo, busta 270 (1593) Processi, xvii secolo, busta 17 (1602) Processi, xvii
secolo, busta 25 (1603) Processi, xvii secolo, busta 36 (1604) Processi, xvii
secolo, busta 37 (1604) Processi, xvii secolo, busta 44 (1605) Processi, xvii
secolo, busta 91 (1610)Published sources Ajmer-Wollheim, Marta. “‘The Spirit is
Ready, But the Flesh is Tired’: Erotic Objects and Marriage in Early Modern
Italy.” In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy. Edited by Sara
Matthews-Grieco, 145–51. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Alberti, Francesca “‘Divine
Cuckolds’: Joseph and Vulcan in Renaissance Art and Literature.” In Cuckoldry,
Impotence and Adultery. Edited by Sara Matthews-Grieco, 149–82. Farnham: Ashgate,
2014. Bayer, Andrea, ed. Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008. Blastenbrei, Peter. Kriminalität im Rom, 1560–1585.
Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1995. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. Translated
by G.H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Clarus, Julius. Opera omnia
sive pratica civilis atque criminalis. Vol. 5. Venice: 1614. Cohen, Elizabeth
S. “Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History.” Sixteenth Century
Journal and Thomas V. Cohen. “Justice and Crime.” In Companion to Early Modern
Rome. Edited by Pamela Jones, Simon Ditchfield, and Barbara Wisch. Leiden:
Brill, 2018 Cohen, Thomas V. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004. Cristellon, Cecilia. Marriage, the Church,
and Its Judges in Renaissance Venice, 1420–1545. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017. Originally published as La carità e l’eros. Bologna: Il Mulino, Public
Display of Affection: The Making of Marriage in the Venetian Courts before the
Council of Trent” In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy. Edited by Sara
Matthews-Grieco, 173–97. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Cussen, Bryan. “Matters of
Honour: Pope Paul III and Church Reform (1534–49).” Ph.D. diss., Monash
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Seicento. Bari: Cacucci Editore, 2000. Esposito, Anna. “Adulterio, concubinato,
bigamia: testimonianze dalla normativa statutaria dello Stato ponteficio
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“Donna e fama tra normativa statuaria e realtà sociale.” In Fama e Publica Vox
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L’Adulterio come delitto carnale in Prospero Farinacci.” In Trasgressioni:
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Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni, 133–83. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Matthews-Grieco,
Sara, ed. Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Mazo
Karras, Ruth. Unmarriages: Women, Men and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages.
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Amsterdam University Press, 1997. Statuta almae urbis Romae. Rome: 1580.
Storey, Tessa. Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.PART IISense and sensuality in sex and gender.
The case of the early seventeenth-century “lesbian nun” Benedetta Carlini
Patricia SimonsOn November 5, 1623, two Capuchin friars sent by a papal nuncio
finished their investigation regarding whether abbess Benedetta Carlini was a
valid mystic. An earlier, local study drawn up for Pescia’s provost in 1619 had
been amenable to her claims. In July 1620, she became the first abbess of the
newly enclosed convent, a prestigious appointment that suggests belief in her
story. Yet Benedetta’s authority within the nunnery was not universally
accepted and she lost the support of the civic establishment, leading to the
new investigation by more distanced authorities. They decided that she had been
deceived by the devil because, according to evidence from disaffected nuns,
signs such as her stigmata were faked. New evidence also included the testimony
of the abbess’ assistant, Bartolomea Crivelli (often called Mea), who
unexpectedly told the men, in explicit detail, about sexual relations between
the two women. Most scholars were similarly surprised when Judith Brown
published the supposedly “unique” case in 1986, in Immodest Acts: The Life of a
Lesbian Nun.1 Responses were varied, the lengthiest being Rudolph Bell’s
evaluation in 1987, which argued that the nuncio was already determined to
silence Benedetta and that her subsequent lengthy imprisonment in the convent
was imposed by the nuns rather than external authorities, a claim refuted by
Brown.2 The details of the internal, civic, and ecclesiastical power plays
cannot be definitively known, but the sexual dynamics are clear. Over thirty
years later, it is time to reconsider this case, neither adhering to a
modernist notion of strict sexual identity nor relegating Benedetta and Mea to
the margins. In keeping with Konrad Eisenbichler’s ability to draw out erotic
implications from literary and archival evidence, this essay respects the
reality of the women’s intimacy and examines textual and visual materials in
order to situate them in their spiritual and sensual context. This case offers
specific details and terminology for what might be called corporeal
spirituality, the unequivocal coexistence of amorous language, sexual deeds,
pious rhetoric, and religious faith.3Since Benedetta’s visions entailed
visitations from Christ, whom she married in a public ceremony, and messages
from angels such as Splenditello, in whose voice she often spoke, Brown claimed
the two nuns were engaged in a heterosexualized affair: The only sexual
relations she seemed to recognize were those between men and women. Her male
identity consequently allowed her to have sexual and emotional relations that
she could not conceive between women. . . . In this double role of
male and of angel, Benedetta absolved herself from sin and accepted her society’s
sexual definitions of gender.4 Brown’s judgment associates male sex with
masculine gender, and in turn a presumed dichotomy between the two women is
seamlessly laminated onto their sex acts. However, this does not accord with
either the women’s physical actions, or with possibilities engendered by the
sensual spirituality of premodern Catholicism. The souls and f lesh of nuns
were not as neatly divided as a later, secular view imagines. Despite the
Foucauldian point that discourses of repression can generate the very thing
they seek to silence, the presumption of religious “purity” and feminized
innocence has hardly disappeared. Benedetta’s case remains nearly ignored in
studies of European religion or is cited brief ly with no new interpretation.5
It is seen as an aberration on two counts: she was a nun with a sex
life—considered an oxymoron—and her sexual activity was with another
woman—thought to be impossible in her time and setting. Documented cases of
nuns having sex with clergy or secular men, as well as anti-clerical, fictional
stories about such conjunctions, are taken as ordinary, natural, feminine acts
by women who were supposedly frustrated in an entirely earthly way.6 But
Benedetta, it seems, must be a “unique” case, even “bizarre,” who assumed a male
guise and cannot be assimilated into religious history.7 My point here is to
remove her from the interdependent frameworks of deviance and heterosexuality,
and to reintegrate her into a religious context. Benedetta literally acted out
what was usually a world of visual and imaginary culture. Here I try to
reconstruct a premodern nun’s agency and the imagination of religious women,
who were not necessarily repressed victims with no recoverable history of any
import. Nunneries were loci of social and economic power, particular
inhabitants inf luenced secular women and male authority figures ranging from
fathers to confessors, and some women like Benedetta negotiated rich emotive
lives for themselves. We tend to think of nuns as women restricted by
institutional confines and discourses that denied them their bodies, but
Benedetta’s story urges us to examine the materiality of passion, of art, and
of past lives. Only the report of the Capuchins told of Benedetta’s sexual
transgressions— f lirting with two male priests as well as “immodest acts” with
a woman—and only at the end of its account.8 The inquiry concluded that her
visions andecstasies were “demonic illusions.”9 Along with her disturbingly
erotic behavior, the inquirers were concerned by their discovery that apparent
signs of her special favor, the stigmata, nuptial ring, and a bleeding
crucifix, were all forged. The friars integrated Carlini’s sexual behavior with
her spiritual behavior—all were sinful and diabolically inspired. In an
important sense, we need to take this contemporary contextualization seriously,
understanding that Benedetta’s visions were not utterly divided from her
corporeal acts. The aspiring mystic, then in her early thirties, had been
having regular sex with Mea for at least two years. Neither investigation was
sparked byrumors of sexual sin, nor is it clear how central that particular
misconduct was to her lifelong imprisonment within the convent.10 Benedetta’s
story most resembles cases of what Anne Jacobson Schutte has called “failed
saints,” or what Inquisitors termed “pretended holiness” (affetata santità).11
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century penance for a nun’s sexual sin ranged from
expulsion or permanent incarceration in the convent to just two years of
penance there.12 No witnesses or other evidence confirmed Mea’s testimony and
if she had not made a voluntary confession, no one could have uncovered the
information. The demoted abbess Carlini herself renounced her past and never
acknowledged Mea’s claims. The unusually visible sexual aspects may not be
unique. Recalling her secular life of the 1670s, and her enjoyment of men
courting her, St. Veronica Giuliani later emphatically interrupted one of her
autobiographies. A sentence written in capital letters alluded to imprecise
errors, implicitly sexual: “I bore great tribulation for the sins I committed
with those spinsters and I did not know how to confess them.”13 Cloistered
women may have enjoyed undocumented but thoroughly physical relationships in
secluded spaces. From at least the twelfth to the seventeenth century,
incidents of same-sex eroticism within female convents are recorded. Around
1660, nuns at Auxonne accused their mother superior of bewitching them, of
wearing a dildo, of kissing, and penetrating them with fingers.14 Sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century women in Italian religious refuges for convertite
(ex-prostitutes) and malmaritate (abused wives) became friends and in some
cases nearly half the inhabitants formed couples sharing rooms, where
“officials discovered women who were sexually involved with other women.”15
Close living and supportive conditions also obtained in non- or semi-cloistered
communities of pious laywomen. Bell’s critique of Brown usefully corrected
various errors, while nevertheless making new mistakes. His chief point was
that the male investigators “had no lack of imagination or conceptual framework
for describing love between two women” and that it was the nuns rather than the
Church officials who condemned Benedetta to life-long imprisonment.16
Certainly, she seems to have been a demanding, imperious abbess who could not
cope with the dissension her rule engendered, perhaps in part due to newly
instigated clausura. Brown’s label of “lesbian,” despite her careful
acknowledgment that it was anachronistic, provoked much criticism. One reviewer
of the book, using yet more historically inappropriate terms, insisted that
“Carlini is heterosexual or, more properly,bisexual in both her inclinations
and conduct.”17 Disagreements over labels and details should not distract from
the fundamental fact that physical, sexual contact took place between two nuns.
Too often, a series of dichotomies misinform discussions of sexual practices. A
binary between the mind and the body, the soul and its vessel, is often mapped
onto other seemingly concomitant divides, not only between masculine and
feminine but also the celestial and the mundane. The presumption is that
religious ideologies constantly repress bodily desires and only secular,
putatively modern, frameworks are capable of acknowledging material passion. In
a similar vein, a contrast is regularly drawn between “real sex” (whatever that
is) and “Romantic Friendships” amongst women. Both the abbess’s visions and her
sexual deeds were informed by conventions shaping the lives of all nuns as
brides of Christ at a time when dualism was not naturalized. Discussing the
exegetical tradition regarding the biblical Song of Songs as an allegory about
the soul’s union with the divine, E. Ann Matter noted that the text was “the
epithalamium of a spiritual union which ultimately takes place between God and
the resurrected Christian—both body and soul.”18 Benedetta’s mysticism links
her to a tradition of female spirituality “that made the body itself a vehicle
of transcendence. . . . Corporeal images were the stuff with which
nuns described their experiences.”19 Heterosexualization of the story is too
simplistic, too ignorant of complex issues related to gender dynamics as well
as intersex and transgender bodies. What Brown calls Benedetta’s “double role
of male and of angel” and “her male identity” was not a consistent performance
of masculinity. Speaking on occasion as an angel named Splenditello or as
Christ, the nun was a medium for the divine rather than for her “self ” in a
modern sense of individual identity, and none of her contemporaries, including
Mea, considered her male. During sex, neither seventeenth-century woman
believed the other was transformed into a man, and their sex did not
necessitate resort to “instruments” or dildos, devices that so obsessed
confessors. For two or more years, “at least three times a week,” when the
women shared a cell as mistress and servant, they had sex, in the day as well
as at night or in the early morning.20 Although Mea sought to protect herself
by claiming she was always forced, and a degree of intimidation or overbearing
insistence may well have been involved, she implicitly admitted pleasure.
“Embracing her,” the abbess “would put her under herself and kissing her as if
she were a man, she would speak words of love to her. And she would stir on top
of her so much that both of them corrupted themselves.” The women did much more
than engage in what Brown and Bell describe, using the dismissive misnomer, as
“mutual masturbation.”21 They touched each other until orgasm, in vigorous and
multiple ways, including actions that were not possible for a single person,
and had no need of a phallus. Rubbing or “stirring” their genitals together to
the point of “corruption,” they also manually penetrated each other and
actively used their mouths. Presenting herself as more passive, Mea recounted
how even during the day the abbess grabbed her handand putting it under
herself, she would have her put her finger into her genitals, and holding it there
she stirred herself so much that she corrupted herself. And she would kiss her
and also by force would put her own hand under her companion and her finger
into her genitals and corrupted her.22 A slightly later expansion of the
account accentuated Benedetta’s inventive pursuit of pleasure, saying that “to
feel greater sensuality [she] stripped naked as a newborn babe,” and “as many
as twenty times by force she had wanted to kiss [Mea’s] genitals.”23 The
document, although stressing the younger woman’s reluctance, also showed a
comprehension of how satisfying the actions could be: “Benedetta, in order to
have greater pleasure, put her face between the other’s breasts and kissed
them, and wanted always to be thus on her.” During the day in her study, while
teaching her companion to read and write, the abbess again enjoyed sensual
contact, having Mea “sit down in front of her” or “be near her on her knees
. . . kissing her and putting her hands on her breasts.” Despite the
reticence Mea tried to convey in her statement, it was clear her lover sought
mutual delight. When manually arousing Mea, Benedetta “wanted her companion to
do the same to her, and while she was doing this she would kiss her.” The older
woman was presented as active and insistent. If Mea tried to refuse, the abbess
went to the cot “and, climbing on top, sinned with her by force,” or she would
arouse herself (“with her own hands she would corrupt herself ”). Hence, in a
phrase recorded only a few times in Mea’s testimony, the younger woman conceptualized
her vigorous, forceful lover in standard terms, saying “she would force her
into the bed and kissing her as if she were a man she would stir on top of
her.” Mea probably had no sexual experience with men, so her comparison was not
based on a Freudian model of the phallus or anatomical knowledge of a penis,
but on a sense of gendered roles whereby the man took a physically dominant
position. Benedetta and Mea enacted substantive, varied sex, in a range of
modes, positions, times, and locations. Benedetta’s case spurs us to ask
questions about the management of nunneries. How did seemingly “innocent” and
“repressed” women learn about sexual details and inventively contravene
prohibitions? A stock opposition between knowledgeable yet repressive male authorities,
and ignorant nuns without any agency, cannot satisfactorily apply. Some
inhabitants of nunneries shared a degree of sexual experience and innuendo with
their companions. Dedicated to God after her mother survived difficult labor in
1590, Benedetta was a nine-year-old villager when she entered the religious
life.24 Most other entrants (and boarders) were similarly prepubescent or in
their early teens, but some were older, sexually experienced women, such as
widows or former prostitutes. Heterogeneity was increased by the presence of
converse, servants and lay sisters who entered at slightly older ages, did not
profess, and sometimes frequented the outside world, although the growth of
post-Tridentine enclosure made this less likely from the late sixteenth century
onward. The popular and much reprinted Colloquies (1529) by Augustinian friar
Erasmus suggested that nunneries were filled with “morewho copy Sappho’s
behavior (mores) than share her talent,” and that “All the veiled aren’t
virgins, believe me.”25 Through whatever means, cloistered women could have
clear ideas about how to attain sexual pleasure. An anonymous nun, literate in
Latin, wrote a love poem to another religious woman in the twelfth century,
noting that “when I recall how you caressed / So joyously, my little breast / I
want to die.”26 Confessors and canonists educated women in their obsessive
sense of sexual sin. Due to the urging of questioners, or to a sense of guilt
that welcomed the relief of voluntary confession, Venetian Inquisitors heard in
the 1660s about how the “failed saint” Antonia Pesenti fought in the nighttime
against diabolic temptations to masturbate.27 St. Catherine of Siena (1347–80)
was tormented by sexual visions.28 Such a woman, who strenuously resisted
association with secular men outside her family ever since she was a girl and
refused to place herself on the marriage market, nevertheless had some
comprehension of the conventions of sexual sin. Secular inspirations included
farmyard sights, carnival songs, and oral jokes. Sermons, or the queries of a
confessor, further embedded a degree of simple knowledge, horrifying yet
fascinating. Nuns were governed by regulations suspicious of erotic activity in
all-female environments, such as the provision since the early thirteenth
century of night-lights to deter illicit entries into cells, regular checks on
sleeping arrangements, supervision of female as well as male visitors, and
careful control of the grille and other points of contact with the wider world.
Yet those very rules made everyone aware of the possibility of contravention.
Many penitentials and texts of canon law voiced a concern about nuns erotically
touching or using “instruments” with each other, possibilities paradoxically
furthered through inquiries in the confessional.29 Visual culture, including
widely circulated prints and paintings of the damned, was another means whereby
nuns were incorporated into a communal imagination regarding both sin and
sensual piety. Explicit condemnations of same-sex activities led occasionally
to illustrations in religious texts or on the walls of convents.30 Sensitive
contact was also represented. Mutual tenderness and awe between the embracing
Mary and Elizabeth at the Visitation, liturgically celebrated in the musical
crescendo of the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) sung every day at Vespers, was
powerfully pictured by artists such as Domenico Ghirlandaio, Jacopo Pontormo,
and Parmigianino ( Figure 6.1).31 Saints’ lives contained legends like
Catherine of Siena suckling at Mary’s breast or St. Catherine of Genoa tenderly
kissing a dying woman on the mouth.32 A woman’s understanding of sex and
sensuality might have been based more on discursive than experiential
practices, but it could seem all the more real in its visionary presence. The
chief focus of my study is legitimized, mystical eroticism in convents, leading
to Benedetta’s mistaken, kinetic literalization of spiritual metaphors. Her
pious and sexual performances intertwined on at least three levels of efficacy.
Instrumentally, her access to the divine persuaded the younger, initially
illiterate Mea to be a witness to the visionary experiences and to become a sex
partner.Parmigianino, Visitation, pen and wash. Galleria Nazionale, Palazzo
della Pilotta, Parma.FIGURE 6.1De Agostini Picture Library/A.
DeGregorio/Bridgeman Images.Whether the ambitious nun was a self-aware
manipulator throughout, or convinced by her own delusions, is neither knowable
nor particularly pertinent. For some time Mea and the other nuns, the confessor,
local officials, and the townspeople were all caught up in a visionary scenario
they wanted to believe. At Benedetta’s funeral in 1661, the populace had to be
kept away from a body they stillthought capable of miracles.33 The
investigators eventually judged Benedetta a “poor creature” deceived by the
devil, and she agreed that everything was “done without her consent or her
will.”34 That defense of unconscious possession was already evident during the
days of her acceptance by the community, but it shifted from being divine favor
and spiritual rapture to becoming demonic deception. On the psychological
level, the two women were provided with an effective way to cope with guilt.
Until Mea “confessed with very great shame” about their sex, the angel Splenditello
convinced her the women were not sinning. 35 Initially hesitating, in the
presence of a host of saints led by Catherine of Siena, to obey Christ’s
command to disrobe so he could place a new heart in her body, Benedetta was
reassured by Jesus, who said “where I am, there is no shame.”36 The Capuchin
investigators thought her putative ecstasy “partook more of the lascivious than
of the divine” but the earlier inquiry, and the convent’s inhabitants like Mea,
had not taken it amiss. After all, Saints Catherine of Siena, Catherine de’
Ricci (1522–90), and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1607) received hearts from
Christ, and numerous images in printed or painted form continued to disseminate
this aspect of female sanctity’s typology.37 Secular poetry and pictures also
represented the gifting of manly hearts as a token of a courtly love that
metaphorically elevated carnal desire into an idealized realm, without losing
sight of erotic thrill.38 Nuns were increasingly devoted to Christ’s wounded
heart, and imagined their own hearts as inner loci to be entered by their
heavenly groom. The crucial difference was that Benedetta’s imagination was so
inventive, and her belief system so literal, that representation of her
participation in this mystic ritual included physical—“lascivious”—details.
Thirdly, on the affective level, Benedetta’s mysticism heightened her sense of
desire, not only for union with the divine, but for sex aided by angels.
Equally, it could be said that her yearnings exacerbated her mysticism. Recourse
to mystical fantasy endowed her passion with a structure and rhetoric. Rather
than sublimation through piety, Benedetta’s case history indicates an
intensifying of acts spiritual and sexual. Much of her complex psyche is summed
up by the striking act of benediction she performed after sex: as Splenditello,
“he made the sign of the cross all over his companion’s body after having
committed many immodest acts with her.”39 Priest, angel, nun, lover, guilty and
grateful, powerful and placatory, Benedetta moved her hand over a body she
rendered simultaneously sacral and sensual. Alongside a renewed disciplinary
zeal regulating cloistered life, CounterReformation culture witnessed a
heightening of the emotive register of piety. In doing so, the Catholic Church
accentuated a venerable, central heritage that used human bodies to imagine
spiritual passions. So, in the Mystic Nativity of 1500–01 (National Gallery,
London), Botticelli’s angels reenact the ritual of the kiss of peace, a regular
liturgical moment, but potential eroticization is indicated by its conjunction
with a nuptial kiss and by the exclusion of sinners from the ritual.40
Primarily same-sex pairs kiss and embrace in Giovanni di Paolo’s
midfifteenth-century panels representing eternal paradise ( Figure 6.2).41
Angels andFIGURE 6.2 Giovanni di Paolo, Paradise, 1445, tempera and gold on
canvas, transferred from wood, 44.5 × 38.4 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Open access.souls of the blessed greet each other, and the blissful unions
are all manifested as moments of physical intimacy. Men in religious costume
embrace, two secular women tenderly touch, near them two Dominican nuns entwine
in one unit, and angels enfold men into the sweet realm of grace. Some female
mystics were blessed with a miracle of lactation.42 Catherine of Siena’s
experiences especially inf luenced Benedetta because her mother was devoted to
Catherine and the convent was under her aegis as its patron saint.43 That role
model’s mouth drained pus from a woman’s breast and the abnegation was rewarded
by what her confessor termed an “indescribable and unfathomableliquid” f lowing
from Christ’s side.44 Both scenes featured in one of the prints comprising a
well-disseminated series illustrating Catherine’s life, designed by Francesco
Vanni and first issued in 1597, then reissued in 1608 ( Figure 6.3).45 Her
confessor Raymond of Capua presented Christ as Catherine’s sensual lover:
“putting His right hand on her virginal neck and drawing her towards the wound
in His own side, He whispered to her, ‘Drink, daughter, the liquid from my
side, and it will fill your soul with such sweetness that its wonderful effects
will be felt even by the body.’” Raymond brief ly noted that an earlier
confessor had written about how “the glorious Mother of God herself fills her
[i.e. Catherine] with ineffable sweetness with milk from her most holy
breast.”46 Nurtured at the breasts of Christ and Mary, and moaning that “I want
the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ” in church before his body f luid miraculously
satisfied her so that “she thought she must die of love,” Catherine’s inf
luential model of sanctity encouraged women such as her follower Benedetta
Carlini to believe in sensate relief of their spiritual desires.47FIGURE 6.3
Francesco Vanni, St. Catherine of Siena orally draining pus from an ill woman
and being rewarded with liquid from Christ’s wound, 1597, engraving, 25.7 ×
28.9 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Open access.Benedetta’s maleness supposedly
derived from her role-playing as Jesus or an angel, yet neither Christ nor
angels were unequivocally male. In a fundamental sense, of course, Christ was
masculine, the son of God endowed with visible, male genitals to prove the
infant’s assumption of Incarnational humanity.48 His adult manifestation was also
primarily masculine and patriarchal. Imitative adoration of their heavenly
spouse could lead to mortification and even stigmatization, but nuns were not
masculinized through such actions and they did not automatically become lovers
of men. Stigmatized like Christ or speaking at times as though Christ was
delivering a message,Benedetta was not Jesus, but his bride and servant.
Cloistered women were privileged followers of Mary’s role as sponsa, the
heavenly bride reenacting the Song of Songs and enjoying sensual relations with
an adult, loving Christ. But when a German cleric regretfully noted that “it
properly is the prerogative of his [i.e. Christ’s] brides” alone to enjoy
sensual union with a celestial bridegroom, he nevertheless vicariously enjoyed a
homoerotic fantasy by instructing nuns to kiss Christ “for my sake.”49 As
scholars have shown, in many ways the metaphorical body of Christ was
“feminine” or homoerotic or, rather, polymorphous in its sensual charge.50 Nuns
imagined themselves as suckled infants, nurtured adults, mothers, spouses,
female friends, all sharing an affinity as “sisters and daughters in Jesus
Christ,” as Catherine de’ Ricci addressed a group of nuns in October 1571 after
the death of “your dearest mother,” their abbess.51 While Christ was their
child and groom, and Mary their exemplar, nuns were also enfolded in a female
genealogy of succession and a feminine household of multiple sisters, daughters
and mothers. Fellow nuns tenderly support Catherine of Siena when she is so affected
as to faint after receiving the stigmata, painted by Sodoma in the mid-1520s
for the Sienese chapel dedicated to her within the Dominican headquarters of
her cult (Figure 6.4).52 Catherine is shown with exemplary female acolytes
whose intimate, gentle regard for her swooning body suggests a bodily care and
unselfconsciousness that requires no masculine intervention. Nuns took on more
than one persona in this labile community of affection. After Benedetta married
Christ in a special ceremony on May 26, 1619, a brief investigation did not
distrust her mysticism, and on July 28, 1620 her religious sisters elected her
abbess, head of the new Congregation of the Mother of God.53 As such, “mother”
abbess Benedetta embraced her “daughter” and fellow “sister” Mea. Brown conf
lates being male with taking on an angelic guise, but Benedetta took on no such
“double role of male and of angel.” When using the voice of an angel, she was
not adapting a role assigned to unambiguously male figures. Since theologians
such as Aquinas believed angels might assume f lesh but had no natural bodies
or functions, the ethereal creatures were officially asexual. Names, pronouns,
and visual representations implied a degree of masculinity about God’s
messengers, but often of a childlike or pubescent and androgynous kind. At the
very moment when Gabriel carried the message transmitting the Logos into the
body of the Virgin Mary, that archangel was often depicted as especially
androgynous. It was probably to a frescoed Gabriel that the orphan,Sodoma,
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, Scenes from the Life of Saint Catherine of Siena: The
swooning of the saint, 1526, fresco. Siena, S. Domenico. Scala/Art Resource,
NY.FIGURE 6.4The “lesbian nun” Benedetta Carlinilater Beata, Vanna of Orvieto
pointed on a church wall when she said “this angel is my mother.”54
Splenditello and Benedetta’s other angels empowered rather than masculinized
her. Splenditello and company were celestial, barely gendered embodiments of
winged eros or desire, rather than of a particular lover. Mea’s account moved
directly from details of their sex to the statement that the mystic “always
appeared to be in a trance (ecstasi ) . . . Her angel, Splenditello,
did these things, appearing as a beautiful youth (bellisimo giovane) of fifteen
years.”55 The attractive adolescent was endowed with the kind of homoerotic
potential celebrated in contemporary paintings such as Caravaggio’s The
Stigmatization of St. Francis produced in the first decade of the seventeenth
century (Figure 6.5).56 Like the contemporaneous Splenditello, the seraphic
spirit of celestial love who gently supports Francis is a creature ostensibly
male but fundamentally symbolic of an eroticism which does not insist on
singular identifications of gender or sex. The saint swoons in the arms of a
lover whose pictorial form embodies the ineffable and polymorphous. Francis’s
pious identification with the supreme exemplar Christ is physically and
metaphorically consummated as he receives the stigmata in a mystical experience
necessarily represented in erotic terms. A little more than twenty years after
Mea’s confession, Gianlorenzo Bernini began work on a three-dimensional
figuration of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (Figure 6.6). With caressing gaze,
divine light, a conventional arrow of Love, andFIGURE 6.5 Caravaggio, Saint
Francis receiving the stigmata, ca. 1595–96, oil on canvas, 94 × 130 cm.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.Photo credit: Nimatallah/Art Resource,
NY.FIGURE 6.6Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, marble, 1645–52. Rome, S.
Maria dellaVittoria. Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.delicate gestures,
Bernini’s embodiment of celestial spirit visits upon Teresa an experience of
divine transport. A childlike member of the ranks of the cherubim gently strips
Teresa of her worldly garments, lifting the robe so that blissful fire will
sear her soul with what she called “a point of fire. This he plunged into my
heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails.”57 As Teresa
described her rapture in the early 1560s, “this is not a physical, but a
spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable
share.” Corporeal sensation was certainly perceived by an anonymous critic who,
around 1670, accused Bernini of having “dragged that most pure Virgin not only
into the Third Heaven, but into the dirt, to make a Venus not only prostrate
but prostituted.”58 Contemporaries, in other words, were quite aware of the
fine line between sensuality and spirituality, a boundary crossed not only by
Benedetta but by the renowned artist Bernini. Benedetta’s staging of such
favors as her stigmatization and her nuptials with Christ were eroticized
events akin to those depicted by artists. She involved an entire community of
nuns and a local populace in earthly manifestations of the divine, just as
Caravaggio did in oil paint, Bernini in marble, or preachers with words.
Miracles were understood to be physically manifest, and visions subtly brought
the divine into the corporeal realm. The late thirteenth-century mystic Gertrude
of Helfta wondered why God “had instructed her with so corporeal a vision.” Her
question was rhetorical, as any acceptable mystic knew: spiritual and invisible
things can only be explained to the human intellect by means of similitudes of
things perceived by the mind. And that is why no one ought to despise what is
revealed by means of bodily things, but ought to study anything that would make
the mind worthy of tasting the sweetness of spiritual delights by means of the
likeness of bodily things (corporalium rerum).59 As the seamstress and “failed
saint” Angela Mellini knew about her visions in the 1690s, “one never sees
things with the eyes of the body, but everything is seen intellectually.”60 On
the other hand, this reassuring statement was delivered to an Inquisitor,
whereas a note written by her halting hand understood that emotional passion
had very real effects. Thinking of such things as the pains she suffered in her
heart, in imitation of Christ’s passion, she observed that “love makes me
experience the truth of sufferings through the senses, now it beats, now it
purges, now it hurts and now all sorts of torments are felt.” In order to truly
convey the exactitude and reality of her sensate love, in September 1697 she
sketched a diagram of her wounded heart, complete with lance, nails, hammer,
cross, and crown of thorns. That drawing was produced for her confessor, a man
she desired so much that she felt “great heat in all the parts of my body and
particularly of movements in my genitals.”61 Like a courtier offering a heart
to the beloved, and like the related love-imagery for the soul’s yearning after
the divine, Angela availed herself of religious rhetoric and resorted to
physical signs when lovingChrist and wooing her priest. Similarly, on Caravaggio’s
canvas and in Bernini’s chapel, light is divine and natural, the ecstasy
spiritual and embodied. So, too, Benedetta’s sensate and emotive life was a
continuous blend of illusion and reality, spirit, and similitude. Echoing her
model, Catherine of Siena, Benedetta experienced visions, stigmatization, the
exchange of hearts, and a marriage with Christ. Catherine’s reception into
heaven after her death, disseminated in Francesco Vanni’s engravings and
various paintings, entailed a tender, intercessory greeting by Mary.62
Catherine’s charitable nursing brought her mouth into contact with one dying
woman’s breast (Figure 6.3), and on another occasion she transformed an ill
woman into her spouse.63 “Full of burning charity,” Catherine rushed to the
hospital to tend a bereft woman, “embraced her, and offered to help her and
look after her for as long as she liked.” She motivated herself by “looking
upon this leper woman, in fact, as her Heavenly Bridegroom.” Benedetta took the
actions of her exemplar further, embracing another woman in a relationship
where each was a spouse, each a bride. At some level, she perhaps believed the
words God spoke to Catherine, that “In my eyes there is neither male nor
female.”64 To have an impact, mysticism had to present a degree of spectacle,
and thus cross into the physical realm. The special favors bestowed on some
mystics were invisible, but then other signs had to appear, especially as the
Church grew more cautious about legitimizing local cults, feminine excesses,
fakery, and piety which might turn out to be diabolical in origin. Lucia
Broccadelli’s stigmata arrived during Lent in 1496 but only becoming visible at
Easter, after Catherine of Siena’s supplication in heaven persuaded Christ
“that the stigmata should be visible and palpable in me.”65 For several years,
the Dominican visionary was highly favored by the lord of Ferrara, Ercole
d’Este, and officials, including the Pope’s physician, examined her wounds to
their satisfaction. But the fortunes of this “living saint” suffered a reversal
when her ducal patron died in 1505. The sisters, chafing under her strict rule,
were able to mount a counter-offensive because the stigmata had disappeared.
Lucia was imprisoned for fraud within the convent for nearly forty years, until
she died in 1544. A potential mystic impressing only a relatively small town
and without a powerful supporter, Carlini also encountered a backlash from her
fellow religious and was investigated in an even more stringent climate. Once
the Counter-Reformation took hold, especially after the Council of Trent
(1545–63), there was an increase in cases of women ultimately judged “failed
saints” or diabolically possessed. Concomitantly, the number of female
canonizations decreased, with a suspicion of women deemed credulous and
excessive further abetted by Urban VIII’s more strict procedures for
canonization.66 Two hundred years earlier, Catherine of Siena’s confessor,
Raymond of Capua, later Master General of the Dominican Order, was persuaded of
the veracity of her mystical experiences, despite the invisibility of her
marriage ring and stigmata, by “watching the movements of her body when she was
in ecstasy.”67 Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi begged Christ that her mystical ring
andThe “lesbian nun” Benedetta Carlini113stigmata be invisible, but the impulse
for humility was neatly balanced by kinetic and audible theatre similar to
Catherine’s. Her very wish not to be singled out became itself part of the
record collected by her community. In May 1619, Benedetta staged an elaborate
wedding witnessed by the secular elite of Pescia. The first inquiry into her
holiness began the very next day. But her renewal of the ring (with saffron)
and stigmata (with a large pin) only emerged in the course of the later
investigation.68 Judged fraudulent by Bell, Benedetta may nevertheless have
been acting in good faith, marking her body artificially only when doubts grew,
trying to persuade the sceptics by secondary, external signs that she truly
believed were there on her soul.69 When a Capuchin nun, the blessed Maria
Maddalena Martinengo (1687–1737), piously took a needle to her own body, it was
not counted diabolical. She embroidered the instruments of the Passion “with
the needle threaded with silk . . . into her own f lesh, nice and
big, as chalice-covers are embroidered, nor without bleeding.” 70 To retain her
status and stem the tide of opposition in an increasingly fractious convent,
Benedetta may have inscribed her body without thinking that the act was
forgery. Self-mutilation recurs in the lives of mystics, including Angela of
Foligno’s searing of her genitals, Margaret of Cortona’s desire to cut her
face, and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi’s gouging of her f lesh.71 Benedetta’s
piercing, documented by a hostile witness who came forth only after the convent
turned against their imperious abbess, may have been motivated in part by a
genuine element of imitatio Christi. Rather than judge her by later standards
of verisimilitude and honesty, it would be more appropriate to understand her
actions, and subsequent downfall, as a naïve, over-literal, and undisguised
performance of spiritual conventions that found no meaningful political support
amongst higher authorities or in a discordant convent. Like other aspirants to
mysticism, Benedetta displayed her celestial vision through mime, “motioning
with her hands as if she were taking” souls out of purgatory, for instance, but
her choreography went so far as to publicly process in a prearranged mystic
marriage, and to act out her erotic drive with Mea.72 Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi
also kinetically staged her exceptionality. She mimed her wedding with Christ,
or in pantomime indicated to the novices under her care that she was being
stigmatized. Her charges reported that “she held her hands open, staring at a
figure of Jesus that she had on top of her bedstead; she looked like St.
Catherine of Siena. So, we thought that at that point Jesus gave her his holy
stigmata.” 73 Eroticizing a dormitory, looking at one image and mimicking
another, Maria Maddalena involved her young female audience in a highly visual
fantasy that drew on widely familiar iconography of female mysticism. Those
visualizations were further instilled through skills of internalized sight.
Trained, like all Catholics, in contemplative techniques merging the inner and
outer eye, Maria Maddalena and her faithful novices witnessed the material
reality of a vision. Meditative practices imagined narratives set in
contemporary settings, with familiar faces, placing a premium on immediacy and
recognition that was also highly valued in visual culture. Visions were
regularly made tangible,when nuns cared for and dressed dolls of the Christ
Child, acted out the stigmatization, wrote and performed religious plays, or,
in Catherine of Bologna’s case, painted and drew images inspired by her
raptures.74 To make fantasy real, to don the mantle of holy figures, was
orthodox rather than perverse. Benedetta’s concrete sexualization of her
religious scenario was not unique. In the early sixteenth century, a Spanish
canon lawyer had justified his inordinate lust for some nuns in Rome by arguing
that since, as a cleric “he was the bridegroom of the Church and the nuns were
brides of the Church,” they could have “carnal relations without sin.” 75
Imprisoned until he renounced these beliefs, the educated man had muddled
certain doctrines, but his conf lation of spiritual allegory and physical
desire was present in the writings of many a mystic and it was visualized in
numerous visions or works of art. By making her desires earthly as well as
divine, Benedetta misunderstood conventions, but she did not invent outside a
context. While she cannot be posited as a mainstream example of premodern
religiosity, there was a logic to Benedetta’s actions that does not rely on a reading
of her as a skeptical, manipulative fraud. Angelic disguise transformed the
mystic aspirant Benedetta into a forceful seductress, whose tenderness and
ecstatic passion was not rigidly fixed along differently sexed lines. Mea
reported: This Splenditello called her his beloved; . . . [and said]
I assure you that there is no sin in it; and while we did these things he said
many times: give yourself to me with all your heart and soul and then let me do
as I wish.76 Like the facilitating angel in the mystic encounters represented
by Caravaggio and Bernini, Benedetta’s guardian angel was imagined as a
beautiful, curlyhaired youth dressed in gold and white.77 The young angel was
an instrument of persuasion, the abbess a figure of command and intimidation.
Splenditello’s power derived from a patriarchal hierarchy in heaven, but he
sounded like a youth rather than a god. His counterpart in Caravaggio’s
painting does not heterosexualize that encounter; and in Bernini’s ensemble the
young angel eroticizes a spiritual ecstasy that cannot be crudely reduced to
phallic penetration by an adult man. Nor does Splenditello’s presence amidst
the couplings of Benedetta and Mea reduce them to a differently sexed twosome.
There was a third, disembodied protagonist in each of these raptures. The
divine was elemental light in Caravaggio’s painting and Bernini’s sculpture. In
Benedetta’s visions, as in her sex with Mea, the divine was literally
articulated, through voice. Christ or Splenditello was a pivot in a
triangulation of desire in which one of the results was frequent, very real sex
between two women.78 The interpretation of Benedetta’s acts within the
framework of a heterosexualized bride of Christ points to the need to
reconsider in quite what ways Jesus was a spouse. Three kinds of marital
imagery informed the regulation of female religious: liturgical, allegorical,
and mystical. While all nuns were incorporated liturgically and could picture
their souls as allegorical spouses of the heavenlybridegroom, only mystics experienced
additional nuptials. In 1619, Benedetta’s mystic marriage was an overt,
preplanned, public festival, as was her first marriage to Christ in 1599 at the
age of nine, taking the veil, ring, and crown at a ceremony celebrated by a
bishop, though occasionally the celebrant was an abbess.79 In a drawing by an
anonymous German nun around 1500, enthroned Virgin Mary/Ecclesia replaces the
priest (Figure 6.7).80 Strikingly, the figure of Christ, particularly as an
adult, is absent from many such images. When he does appear, as in an
illuminated manuscript of the rule of St. Benedict produced for Venetian nuns,
he can bestow the nuptial crown on two Brides at once.81 Describing the ritual
as one involving “the giving of a woman to a man” and using the term “heavenly
husband” mistakenly suggests a scenario akin to a modern, secular, nuclear
family.82 Analogy should not be confused with actuality. The acculturation
entailed complex, multiple interchanges, evident in the drawing (Figure 6.7).
Its scroll carries the inscription “Take this boy and take care of [i.e.
suckle] me (nutri michi). I will give you your reward.”83 Like a priest
offering the veil, ring, and crown, and then the eucharist, the Virgin begins
to speak, licensing the earthly virgin to embrace the baby. But the infant
takes over, urging the young nun to suckle him and promising her eternal
reward. Her spouse is an infant, not a dominant patriarch, nor an earthly
“husband.” Christ was a communal groom, and a commonly nurtured babe. He was
more visible, and more often adult, in images of the allegorical and mystical
levels of marriage.84 Mystic marriages of saints show the adult, or often
infant, Christ as the pivotal locus of mediation, yet the rhetoric and ritual
of marriage also visually and symbolically bonds two or more female characters Anonymous
German nun, Consecration of Virgins, ca. 1500.Photo credit: Jeffrey Hamburger.
Used with permissionwho are devoted to God’s son. Catherine of Siena imitated
St. Catherine of Alexandria’s mystic marriage with Christ, and thereafter the
subject of union became popular.85 Female saints, especially the earlier
Catherine, are usually depicted in the act of espousal to an infant Christ
offered by his mother Mary, just as the German nun remembered (Figure 6.7).
Thereby, two holy women engineer a mystical union over the body of a small
child. To say that Christ becomes “the object of exalted maternal instincts
rather than sublimated sexual desire,” however, is to assume that a nurturing
woman’s affection has no component of passion, and that all female desire must
be focused on a male object.86 The child-groom can be shown as a young,
unknowing instrument guided by his mother, as in a painting by Correggio, where
the interplay of hands is particularly sensitive.87 Courtly decorum amongst
adults becomes in Correggio’s visualization an intimate, gentle affair in which
the child is too young to grant seigneurial permission. Held close so that his
body is subsumed in his mother’s, at other times he is a virtual extension of
her body, helping to connect through compositional line and symbolic gesture a
succession of two or more female figures. His small arms and shoulder stand in
for Mary’s left arm in a later painting by Ludovico Carracci, so that his torso
becomes especially symbolic of a presence that almost need not be there.88
Guercino’s painting of 1620 depicts a gentle touch between the two women, and
tender glances link the three characters, but Christ is relegated to the
opposite side.89 Visual management of nuns’ fantasies could imagine them in
very physical, explicit actions. A cycle on the Song of Songs painted in the
mid-fourteenth century on the walls of a nun’s gallery at Chelmno in eastern
Prussia imagined Sponsa eagerly pulling her spouse into her bedchamber.90 It
literalizes the Canticle: “I will seize you and lead you / into the house of my
mother” (8:2). Such pictures made manifest an emotive intensity that the
all-female audience knew they were meant to share with other women.91 In
Northern Europe, the instructional habit of elaborating the amorous interchange
between Christ and the soul produced a sequential narrative version illustrated
in comic-strip fashion, Christus und die minnende Seele (Christ and the loving
soul), written in German in the late fourteenth century, later disseminated in
printed sheets and books.92 The divine lover embraced the soul, wooed her with
music, and crowned her in a ritual reminiscent of a wedding ceremony. She
obeyed Christ’s command to divest herself of worldly garments when he said “If
you wish to serve me, you must be stripped bare.” It is unlikely that Italian
nuns like Benedetta knew this particular text or its imagery, but the practice
of encouraging a religious woman’s fantasy through narrative, whether in
sermons, sung words, wall paintings, prints, books, or paintings, fostered a
widespread, eroticized imagination. The soul’s rapturous reach toward its
divine lover from a supine position on a bed, as represented in the Rothschild
Canticles, was echoed in Bernini’s marble display of Ludovica Albertoni arching
up from a bed where the disarranged sheets are even more telling a sign of the
soul’s ecstasy.93 Within this ideological structure, BenedettaCarlini could
imagine herself as a privileged soul experiencing ecstatic union with the
actual body of Mea. On one of the three occasions when she addressed Mea in
Christ’s voice, “he said he wanted her to be his bride, and he was content that
she give him her hand; and she did this thinking it was Jesus.”94 Even if the abbess
was a manipulative faker, as a crude and cynical reading might have it, Mea
believed the illusion, according to her self-protective testimony. If neither
woman was skeptical at the time of the conversation, then the words and gesture
performed a tangible, if unconventional, enactment of bridal mysticism. Christ
was manifest in a human—and female—body rather than only present to the mind’s
eye, yet the two believers went on with the corporeal pantomime. If one or both
of the earthly players did think that Christ was not speaking, then at least
one of them heard a marriage proposal being offered by one woman to another yet
did not rebuff or denounce it at the time. Benedetta utilized the traditional
metaphors and scenarios of erotic mysticism, but at certain moments she took
the logic beyond doctrinal limits. She only assumed Jesus’ voice during three
conversations with Mea.95 Twice she spoke “before doing these dishonest
things,” first when Jesus took Mea’s hand and suggested marriage. The second
time was in the choir, “holding [Mea’s] hands together and telling her that he
forgave her all her sins.” “The third time it was after [Mea] was disturbed by
these goings on,” and was reassured that there was no sinfulness, and that
Benedetta “while doing these things had no awareness of them.” All three
occasions offered comfort and framed sex, occurring either before or after
their “immodest acts,” but Benedetta did not present herself as a sexually
active Christ. However much bridal mysticism structured Benedetta’s actions,
she never took on the persona of Christ during sex with Mea, instead acting
through an angel when she used any guise at all. Perhaps she is best described
as a mystic playwright, someone who wrote scripts during visionary or ecstatic
experiences but who acted out rather than wrote down the dramas, for an
audience that included not only Mea but also on occasion the other nuns and the
local populace. Plays by nuns were performed by inmates who cross-dressed for
the male roles.96 In 1553 Caterina de’ Ricci played the part of twelve-year-old
Jesus speaking, with “signs of particular love,” lines from the Song of Songs
to a fellow nun who was acting as St. Agnese.97 Taking multiple roles, such as
Christ or angels with a variety of dialects and ages, as well as sponsa and
anima, Benedetta was a consummate performer whose voice and appearance fitted
the occasion.98 The mutual gestures of Benedetta and Mea literally followed the
Song of Songs: “My beloved put forth his hand through the hole / and my belly trembled
at his touch / I rose to open to my beloved / my hands dripped myrrh /
. . . / I opened the bolt of the door to my love” (5:4–6). Mea’s
account of how Benedetta “put her face between the other’s breasts and kissed
them, and wanted always to be thus on her” recalls the Canticle’s enjoyment
too. In the adaptation of the biblical Song in the Rothschild manuscript
compiled for a nun, Sponsus delightsin breasts: “between my breasts he will
abide . . . Behold my beloved speaketh to me: How beautiful are thy
breasts, thy breasts are more beautiful than wine.”99 The phrase “sister my
bride (soror mea sponsa)” was particularly apt. It occurs four times in the
Song (4:9, 10, 12; 5:1), along with “open to me, my sister my friend” (sor mea
amica mea) (5:2). Imitating the soul’s statement in Christus und die minnende
Seele that “I must go completely naked,” Benedetta “stripped naked as a newborn
babe.” Each recalled the Song’s bride: “I have taken off my garment” (5:3). The
sequential narrative of the romance between Christ and the soul also had the
womanly soul say “I cannot read a book unless you are my master” and “I will
tell no-one, love, what I have heard from you,” each lines Mea could have
uttered to her abbess.100 Benedetta spoke another line, taking on the voice of
Christ to offer the symbolic emblem of mystical marriage: “Since you delight
me, love, I set a crown upon you.” She lay on top of Mea, “kissing her as if
she were a man [and] she would stir on top of her so much that both of them
corrupted themselves,” an arrangement, and finale, which bears comparison with
the miraculous levitation experienced by the Capuchin nun Maria Domitilla in
Pavia at the very same time, 1622. She recorded that Christ united his most
blessed head to my unworthy one, his most holy face to mine, his most holy
breast (petto) to mine, his most holy hands to mine, and his most holy feet to
mine, and thus all united to me so very tightly, he took me with him onto the
cross . . . I felt myself totally af lame with the most sweet love of
this most sweet Lord.101 Benedetta’s models, such as the sponsa, the anima, and
Catherine of Siena, were feminine, metaphorical, or legendary, and her mistake
in dogma was to take the symbolic literally. Benedetta acted as though the
material was the spiritual: stripping for Christ or Mea like an obedient and
pleasured soul in the Northern sequential romance; kissing a woman or suckling
at a breast as did certain female mystics or saints; engaging in mutual, manual
penetration of an orifice in line with the Song of Songs; proposing and
performing marriage as though she could take both roles in a mystical drama.
Her sex partner, Mea, was always a female figure, assigned a feminine part.
Benedetta enjoyed repeated sex with a woman, not because that was the only body
available to her, but because their religious beliefs were not predicated upon
some exclusionary, modern notion of heterosexual identity. Through the
vicissitudes of confession and documentary survival, we happen to know that in
the early 1620s two under-educated women in a provincial Tuscan convent took
religiously legitimized and visualized passion to a literal level. Brides of
Christ, nurtured on the notion that their cells were bedchambers for nuptial
union with a shared, metaphorical spouse, became in those very spaces lovers on
an earthly plane. In seventeenth-century Pescia a patriarchal logic led to an
alternative rite of passion. This does not mean that the women’s sexual arousal
was incidentalor insignificant, but that their sensual and spiritual
inspirations were neither entirely insincere nor irreligious. Benedetta Carlini
was a nun, abbess, articulate angel, feminized soul, female mystic, and woman’s
lover.Notes 1 Brown, Immodest Acts, 4; Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,” with
“virtually unique” on 487, Brown’s response, 503–09, and Bell’s reply, 510–11.
I am grateful to Professor Bell for sharing his microfilms of the documents.
The Italian of two missing frames, his figs. 1 and 2, was partly published in
the Italian edition of Brown’s book, Atti impuri, esp. 184– 86. I will endeavor
to place digital copies of the documents in the Deep Blue repository of the
University of Michigan. Ideas here were first explored in a talk at the
University of Michigan (January 2000). I am grateful for everyone’s attention
in numerous audiences since then, but for conversations I especially thank
Louise Marshall and Vanessa Lyon. 2 Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,” 501–2,
Brown’s response, Immodest Acts, 507. 3 Partner, “Did Mystics Have Sex?”
296–311; Salih, “When is a Bosom,” 14–32. 4 Brown, Immodest Acts, 127. 5 An
exception is Matter, “Discourses of Desire,” 119–31. 6 Documented cases include
Brucker, ed., The Society of Renaissance Florence, 206–12; Chambers and Pullan,
with Fletcher, eds., Venice. A Documentary History, 204–05, 208. 7 Matter,
“Discourses of Desire”, 122–23: “the nature of Benedetta Carlini’s sexual
encounters with her sister nun is so bizarre as to defy our modern categories
of ‘sexual identity.’” 8 Brown, Immodest Acts, 161–64. 9 Ibid., 110–14, 160–64;
Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,” 491. 10 Carlini’s imprisonment “in penitence”
ended when she died in August 1661: ibid., 132. Upon Mea’s death in September
1660, the recorder referred to Benedetta’s fraud rather than sexual deeds: when
Benedetta “was engaged in those deceits” Mea “was her companion and was always
with her.” But Mea was not imprisoned: ibid., 135. 11 Jacobson Schutte, “Per
Speculum in Enigmate, 187, 195 n. 11. For another case see Ciammitti, “One
Saint Less.” 12 Brown, Immodest Acts, 7–8, 136; Rosa, “The Nun,” 221; Velasco,
Lesbians in Early Modern Spain, 92. 13 Bell, Holy Anorexia, 70. 14 Barstow,
Witchcraze, 72, and further cases, 139–41. Others include Velasco, Lesbians in
Early Modern Spain, 113–24. 15 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, 92–93,
208–09 n. 65. 16 Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,” 498. 17 Cervigni, “Immodest
Acts,” 286. 18 Matter, The Voice of My Beloved, 142. 19 Hamburger, The
Rothschild Canticles, 4. 20 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from Brown,
Immodest Acts, 117–18, 120– 22, 162–64 passim (with emphases added). 21 Brown,
Immodest Acts, 120; Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,” 486, 495, 497, 499. 22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 498 (“le ha voluto baciare le parti pudente”); Brown, Immodest Acts,
120. 24 Ibid., 21–22, 27–28. 25 Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 39:
Colloquies, 290. 26 Coote, ed., The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, 118–21
for this and another example. 27 Schutte, “Per Speculum in Enigmate,” 192. 28
Raymond of Capua, Life of St Catherine of Siena, 91–93. 29 Payer, Sex and the
Penitentials, 43, 61, 99, 102, 138–39, 149–50, 172 n. 136.30 For a female
couple sinning sexually in a Bible Moralisée of c. 1220, see Camille, The
Medieval Art of Love, 138–39, fig. 125. For the 1468 fresco of the Inferno situated
in an upper room of the convent founded by St. Francesca Romana, with a couple
of indeterminate sex, but probably male, lying side by side on the lowest (and
most easily seen) register, see Bartolomei Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana,
Pl. 27. 31 Ghirlandaio’s panel is in the Louvre, Pontormo’s remains in
Carmignano. 32 See n. 43 below; Jorgensen, “‘Love Conquers All,’” 102–03. 33
Brown, Immodest Acts Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,” 502. 34 Brown, Immodest
Acts, 108, 129, 130. 35 Ibid., 163–64. 36 Ibid., 63, 158, with subsequent
quotations from 107, 117, 164. 37 Raymond of Capua, Life of St Catherine,
165–67; Kaftal, St Catherine in Tuscan Painting, 72–77; Bianchi and Giunta,
Iconografia di Santa Caterina da Siena, 112–14 and passim; Maggi, Uttering the
Word, 176 n. 15; Vandenbroeck, et al., Le Jardin clos de l’ame, nos. 147, 169;
Brown, Immodest Acts, 63–64. 38 Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 111–19, and
passim, including figs. 19, 55, 80. 39 Brown, Immodest Acts, 163. 40 Payer, Sex
and the Penitentials, 105; McNeill and Gamer, eds., Medieval Handbooks of
Penance, 81, 152. When Ercole d’Este married Renée of France in Paris in June
1528, at the Pax they kissed each other: Gardner, The King of Court Poets, 194.
41 The quotation is from Rosa, “Nun,” 222. A detail of embracing Dominican
women from the panel in Siena’s Pinacoteca appears on the cover of Brown’s
book. 42 Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 101, 126, 131–32, 157, 165–80,
270–73, and passim. 43 Brown, Immodest Acts, 26, 41. 44 Raymond of Capua, Life
of St Catherine, 141, 147–48 (hereafter quoted from 148). 45 Marciari and
Boorsch, Francesco Vanni, 118–27. 46 Raymond of Capua, Life of St Catherine,
179. 47 Ibid., 170–71. 48 Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ. 49 Hamburger, The
Visual and the Visionary, 390. 50 Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother; Rambuss,
Closet Devotions. 51 St. Catherine de’ Ricci, Selected Letters, 39 (no. 47).
Subsequent quotations come from Letters 19, 46. 52 For the frescoes by Sodoma
and an earlier one by Andrea Vanni in the same church see Riedl and Seidel, Die
Kirchen von Siena, II, pt. 2, pls. VII, 596, 627–28 (and pl. 276 for Rutilio
Manetti’s canvas of 1630). 53 Brown, Immodest Acts, 41. 54 Frugoni, “Female
Mystics, Visions, and Iconography,” 139. 55 Brown, Immodest Acts, 163, a
translation here adjusted according to the cropped photograph of the passage in
Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,” 501 (fig. 2), because Brown conflates the
information on Splenditello and on another angel Radicello (a fanciullo) aged
eight or nine. The common misperception is thus that Splenditello was a boy. 56
Gregori, “Caravaggio Today,” no. 68. 57 Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint
Teresa of Ávila, 210 (ch. 29). 58 Bauer, ed., Bernini in Perspective, 53. 59
Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 165–66; Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary,
147. 60 Ciammitti, “One Saint Less,” 149. 61 Ibid., 150–52, fig. 3. 62 Bianchi
and Giunta, Iconografia, nos. 43, 438, p. 126. 63 Raymond of Capua, Life of St
Catherine, 131, 133. 64 Ibid., 108–09. During her visionary union with God, the
medieval mystic Hadewijch noted that God “lost that manly beauty” so that he
dissolved and “then it was to me as if we were one without difference”: Bynum,
Holy Feast, 156. 65 Gardner, Dukes and Poets in Ferrara, 366–81, 401–05, 431-32,
464–67, 562.The “lesbian nun” Benedetta Carlini66 Weinstein and Bell, Saints
and Society, 141–42, 220–38; Bell, Holy Anorexia, 151, 170–71. Raymond of
Capua, Life of St Catherine, 100, 175–6. Brown, Immodest Acts, 160. Bell,
“Renaissance Sexuality,” 493. Rosa, “Nun,” 201–02. Bell, Holy Anorexia, with
other cases passim; Tibbetts Schulenburg, “The Heroics of Virginity,” 29–72.
Brown, Immodest Acts, 159. Maggi, Uttering the Word, 34 (my emphasis). On
Catherine of Bologna see Wood, Women, Art and Spirituality. Weyer, De praestiis
daemonum, 184–85. Brown, Immodest Acts, 163; Bell, “Renaissance Sexuality,”
fig. 2. Brown, Immodest Acts, 64–65, 122. On erotic triangulation, see the
classic study Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, esp. Ch. 1. Hamburger, Nuns as
Artists, 56–61, 240 nn. 125–26; Lowe, “Secular Brides and Convent Brides,” esp.
43; Vandenbroeck, et al., Le Jardin clos de l’ame, nos. 168, 172. Hamburger,
Nuns as Artists, Pl. 7. Lowe, “Secular Brides and Convent Brides,” fig. 3. The
phrases are in ibid., which often uses “heavenly husband” and has the other
phrase on 44. But at 56ff she points out how often Christ is absent from
images, although the essay’s point is to suggest parallels between the secular
and religious ceremonies. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 56–58. Vandenbroeck, et
al., Le Jardin clos de l’ame, nos. 148, 178 and fig. 106a; Hamburger,
Rothschild Canticles, 113–15. Raymond of Capua, Life of St Catherine, 99–101,
explicitly noting the antecedent with “another Catherine, a martyr and queen.”
Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 57, 239 n. 118. Ekserdjian, Correggio, 137–38.
Emiliani and Feigenbaum, Ludovico Carracci, no. 1. In Parmigianino’s red chalk
drawing of the subject for an altarpiece, c. 1523–24, the Child does not appear
at all: Franklin, The Art of Parmigianino, 104–06. Stone, Guercino, 84 n. 62.
Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 85–87, fig. 156 (and see fig. 159); Hamburger,
Visual and the Visionary, 409–10, fig. 8.5. Wood, Women, Art and Spirituality,
128ff, 252 n. 31, 253 n. 37. Gebauer, “Christus und Die Minnende Seele. Both
nuns and secular women were readers. Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 106–10,
155–62, f. 66r (Pl. 7); Perlove, Bernini and the Idealization. Bernini’s
motives included wanting to atone for his brother Luigi sodomizing a boy in St.
Peter’s (13–14). Brown, Immodest Acts, Weaver, “Spiritual Fun,” 177, 181–83.
Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 194–96. Splenditello spoke in
three dialects: Brown, Immodest Acts, 160. Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 82,
179, cf. Song of Songs Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, vol. 1, 23. Brown,
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Thomas V. CohenLet us take two tawdry events, male affronts to women, with
social history’s eye to assets, both cultural and material, and to the subtle
exchanges that bound men to men, women to women, and one gender to the other.
This is social history in nearly-literary mode, keen to read texts closely. We
have text of two kinds—first the words on paper provided by a small tangle of
criminal trials. If not the actual words spoken before and by the court or in
the streets, taverns, and brothels, still these records do come close. The
conventions and imperatives of the court itself, and the imperfect scribal hand
have, as always, refracted actual speech, but the Roman-legal habits of
verbatim transcription still offer material for close, thoughtful reading.
Second comes the fabric of the city itself, for our scoundrel and his allies
prowled and enjoyed their small corner of Rome, with its streets, squares, and
assorted monuments, an urban backdrop and firm anchorage for memories. The
urbanscape, so prominent both in what happened and in the telling, in itself
invites a reading no less close than the one we accord words on paper. So,
before turning to the deeds, note the spaces where they took place. We are in
Rome’s Rione Regola, or Arenula, a zone sometimes little changed from the 1550s
and 1560s of our stories. Nevertheless, the urbanism of first united Italy and
then the Duce made drastic alterations. In the later 1880s, the wide Via
Arenula ripped inwards from the Tiber, obliterating a web of streets and
squares, and demolishing the church and convent of Santa Anna, right under the
grand 1890 apartment where I once lived and wrote. The church survives only in
the names of Via Santa Anna, and of a pleasant trattoria whose menu depicts my
own abode. A second nineteenth-century destruction obliterated the ghetto,
replacing it with a grand synagogue and some lumpish buildings. And then, under
Mussolini, nostalgia for the Caesars erased the medieval fabric around the fish
market at Pescheria, reducing tight neighborhoods to sterile archeology.So, to
trace our scoundrel and his entourage, we must fall back on the old maps,
especially the splendidly accurate Nolli Plan of 1747, and read street plans,
the surviving urban fabric, and words in court, together. The Nolli plan shows
how, from 1555, once the ghetto gates went up, a street our witnesses call the
strada dritta became crucial for mobility, especially at night. It is hard today
to recapture that very ancient urban street, today the Via del Portico
d’Ottavia. Down by the old ghetto, it is now so wide that restaurants sprawl
into it to hawk carciofi alla giudia, and, on their Sabbath, Rome’s Jews gather
after services for a great chiacchiera —communal conversation. Further north,
Via Arenula and the unkempt park in Piazza Cairoli, and a vague piazza before
the baroque facade of San Carlo, have all smudged the profile of this street,
which, in the sixteenth century, was no less tight than straight. Moreover, it
was handy, skirting the ghetto to link the fishmongers’ square at Pescheria to
Piazza Giudia. It then passed the palace of the Santa Croce, Renaissance in
spirit but, like Palazzo Venezia, still half-medieval in shape, with an
ornamental square tower today lopped short. The Santa Croce, banished by Sixtus
IV, had lost their houses; readmitted, they threw up this palace, with its
elegant diamond-studding on the wall. As the Nolli map shows, heading
northwest, the street, at a bivio (a fork), slotted into Via Giubbonari, a
curving passage today still narrow. Joseph Connors, in his “Baroque Urbanism,”
discusses the extremely ancient streets of this part of Rome, pointing out how
they wander eastwards from the bridge from Hadrian’s Tomb, now Castel
Sant’Angelo, forking as they go.1 The Renaissance papacy used these roads
often, as a way to San Giovanni in Laterano and across Rome, and palaces of the
early Renaissance clustered along them. For our nocturnal misdeeds, the wide
network mattered little, but the local Strada Dritta bore much social traffic.
Our louche central character straddled lines—moral, social, sexual, and
religious. A liminal man, he was and is hard to place, and his actions,
crossing boundaries ethical and social, remind us not to put Rome and Romans
into boxes. His name reveals his hybrid nature—Ludovico Santa Croce. At first
glance, nothing strange there, but, as genealogies show, the civic noble Santa
Croce, descending, they believe, from Publius Valerius Publicola, anti-Tarquin
and one of Rome’s first consuls, in the sixteenth century named their children
almost exclusively from Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus: not a Ludovico in sight.
Moreover, law courts called him “the son of the late Giovanni Antonio de Franchi”
so, if he was a Santa Croce, the noble house somehow adopted him.2 A friend,
aware of this f limsy identity, says of him, “The said Messer Ludovico si fa
romano de casa de Santa Croce et per romano il tengo.”3 Close reading: the
friend does not call him a Santa Croce: just “si fa”—“he claims to be”; the
friend readily affirms his Roman identity but, as to family, balks. But
Ludovico, clearly, grew up some at the family’s palace. A friend recalls: “I
have known him for more than twelve years in Rome and I knew him when he was a
lad [ putto] here at the Santa Croce [qui alli Santa Croce].”4 Magrino, the
witness, a very recent Jewish convert (Feast of the Annunciation, 1556),
testifies not at the prison as is usual, but at home, asIn bed with Ludovico
Santa Croce 127he is sick, and with his “here at the Santa Croce” shows how,
now fatto christiano, he has moved a mere block or so beyond the ghetto gate at
Piazza Giudia to lodgings near the Santa Croce palace. Ludovico is sufficiently
Santa Croce that, back in Carnevale of 1557, a noble Santa Croce helped bail
him out of prison.5 But he is no signore; his cronies call him messer instead.
This title f lags both his status and its ambiguity. In 1557, at his first
trial here, Santa Croce is “about twenty-six, as he asserts.”6 If so, then
either his friend Magrino knew him longer than twelve years or, back then, age
fourteen, he had become a fairly lanky putto. He was born in 1531 or so. By
1565, at the second trial, he would be thirty-four. No sign of a marriage. His loves,
we will see, were all casual, among the whores. No sign, either, of a craft,
trade, or civic office. He probably still lived at the palace as, for sex, he
took his hireling women to the bathhouse (stufa) or bunked down with them at
friends’ and seldom, if ever, took them home. So how did he pass the days? He
hung out at the Pescheria, the fish market at one end of the Strada Dritta. And
the company he kept: fishmongers, Jews, and recent converts. Plus prostitutes.
He ate, drank, caroused, and got into abundant trouble. In 1565 the court asks
for his criminal record: I have been in prison three or four times, here in Tor
di Nona and in Corte Savelli. I don’t remember why. And his lordship asked him
that he at least tell for what crimes and excesses he was investigated and
tried. He answered: I cannot remember things that are fifteen or sixteen years
old, but I know well that I have not been under investigation either for
homicides or for ugly things [cose brutte]. It is true that I remember that I was
in jail in Corte Savelli for having had a brawl with another gentilhomo, and
for it I paid ten scudi to Messer Pietro Bello.7 Here, Ludovico is as evasive
as his memory is fuzzy; cose brutte indeed came up in court. The court asks
after a jailbreak.8 The fight was probably in Carnevale, 1557, when Pietro
Bello was a judge on staff.9 In June, 1563, Ludovico was wounded in a brawl
where he, a reluctant fighter, stabbed a spice-trader in the chest.10 In a
trial of another unruly gentleman, the court asks the suspect’s serving woman
if her master ever wanted to kill our Ludovico. “I don’t know,” she says, “but
know that the said Ludovico was wounded once and that [my master] Pietro de
Fabii rejoiced.”11 So Ludovico is a man on many margins. A self-proclaimed gentilhomo,
he haunts the edge of his foster-family, in a neighborhood strung between Jews
and Christians, and his socializing crosses boundaries of station, ethnicity,
family, community, and moral action. So let’s join him for the evening. We
begin not along the Strada Dritta, but atop Piazza Navona, by Torre Sanguigna
and the Pace church, with two Christians, doublet-makers both. It was before
Christmas, 1556.12 Antonio Scapuccio and Mario di Simone came offwork at the
Ave Maria sunset bell. Mario, aged twenty, lived across town, by Santissimi
Apostoli. With Antonio he went back three years, from their work.13 As for
Ludovico, Antonio had known him since childhood: “at the time I and he were
lads, we had a close friendship.”14 Antonio, via Ludovico, knew that Fabritio,
another convert, kept a house where friends gathered. “Antonio brought me to
the house of Fabritio, Jew-made-Christian, who sells ironware.”15 When the
doublet-makers arrived, Ludovico was there, with Magrino, and one Giulio
Matuccio, and the host, Fabritio.16 So began their evening. “We all decided, in
agreement, to go find a Signora called Vienna Venetiana, friend of the
aforesaid Giulio Matuccio.”17 Mario adds: And when we were at Vienna’s
house—she lived at Torre Sanguigna— Antonio Scapuccio knocked on the door, and
the mother, if I remember, said that she had hurt her arm and could not keep us
company, and that we should let her off.18 Torre Sanguigna was far from
Ludovico’s haunts. “We left and went to a pie-shop, also near Torre Sanguigna,
and got ourselves a pasticcio. And I don’t remember which of us paid for it.”19
Magrino, a convert, adds that the pie contained a shoulder of pork.20 Ludovico
stepped in, announcing as they walked: let’s fetch my whore!21 So entered
Betta, a cortigiana grande, says Mario, meaning not a top-rank prostitute, but,
as Magrino says disparagingly, a big tall woman—“una donna grande longaccia.”22
Betta lived near the stufa of Felice, near the Cavaglieri family palace, two
blocks north of the strada dritta.23 As the five trailed after him, Ludovico
vaunted his sex with her: And Ludovico said it again, while he was going with
us for that woman, and he was heading to knock on her door . . . that
last night he had slept with this woman, and he said that she had a fine ass
and that it gripped firmly.24 At Betta’s lodgings, the men remained outside.
Ludovico called or knocked and the prostitute came down, and, oddly, if she
really had slept with him the night before, in error she embraced the wrong
man, as if Ludovico, though a gentilhuomo, was hard to tell from the company he
kept.25 “And we asked her if she wanted to come to dinner with us, showing her
the pasticcio, and she said yes, and came away. And going down the street
Messer Ludovico and she went arm in arm.”26 The passage illustrates handsomely
some workings of Roman prostitution. Note how complex were the exchanges
between these women and their customers. Roman prostitution was seldom simple
sex for plain cash. Like many transactions in the economia barocca, it had wide
bandwidth and complex linkages forward, backward, and across society.27 Betta
here accepted a promise of food and entertainment, and furnished public
gestures of affection, a gift to Ludovico, who could f launt her to posse and
to street.In bed with Ludovico Santa Croce 129The party, with Betta making
seven, retired to Ludovico’s hang-out, the inn at Pescheria, called after its
owner Domenidio.28 It was some hour after nightfall.29 “All of us, in company,
went to dinner at the aforesaid inn, and we brought with us a pasticcio, and we
ate.”30 To this osteria, patrons readily brought food. After dinner, the whole
group went to spend the night at Fabritio’s dwelling, near Ludovico’s own
house, where Ludovico, other times that winter, sometimes brought women: “in
the time that he was made Christian . . . he lent me the room.”31 On
the way, the men say, Ludovico again boasted of anal sex with Betta.32 The room
had but a single bed; Fabritio, leaving the bed to his gentleman guest,
hospitably withdrew to a little attic, a solarello —“no great thing”—and
slept.33 Magrino “gave the command to fetch from home a mattress, which we
threw on the f loor.”34 Ludovico and Betta undressed at once and slipped under
the covers.35 There was a bed curtain. It would have had many colors, and it
was mine [Magrino’s]. And to a question he answered: It was not spread around
the bed but gathered to one side.36 Ludovico, in his account, avers that the
curtain was draped around the bed. 37 While Magrino settled somehow on a chair,
clothed, to spend the night, the two doublet-makers and Giulio huddled on the
mattress. Ludovico, meanwhile, lay snugly in one convert’s bed and another
convert’s hangings, in a convert’s house. “Before the light was put out we were
all joking and chatting, and Messer Ludovico told us please to put out the
light.”38 And then, as men settled for the night, Ludovico thrust his arm out
from the covers, making a letter “O” with his index and middle finger.39 Lest
he shame Betta he said nothing, Antonio avers, but Mario claims he boasted
loudly.40 Mirth erupted. Everybody laughed at that and said to one another, “He
has fucked her in the ass. Fire! Fire!”41 The stake, of course. And slim regard
for Betta! What is going on here? The social psychology of this scene is
tangled. We have three Christian artisans, two ex-Jews on the f luid boundary
of the ghetto, and one semi-gentleman half outside his noble family, a troop
cemented, perhaps, by Ludovico’s leadership, occasional largess, and arrant
breach of sexual and moral rules. All six men share in Betta’s humiliation.
Ludovico parades his transgression and the risks he runs and, laughing, the
cronies applaud and, vicariously, thrill to his vulnerability. Collusion
cements this solidarity. Ludovico and Betta were the first to fall asleep.42
Much later, say the others, invited by Ludovico to join them in the bed,
Magrino left the chair, climbing in still clothed, and fell asleep.43And then
awoke, jostled by the bounce of sex. I could feel it when he was screwing her,
and she had her bottom towards Ludovico and she was turned with her face toward
me. And it was one time that I felt it, and I did not see him stick it in
because it was no affair of mine. I know well that he was screwing her, and he
was shoving her towards me, so that it made me wake up.44 Magrino is
remembering events before Christmas, almost nine months earlier. The trial took
place in August, 1557, first at the Inquisition, at the Ripetta. Halfway
through, interrogations moved to the prisons of the Governor of Rome. That is
why this record survives. Precisely two years later, when Paul IV died, Rome’s
most tumultuous Vacant See broke out. Mobs attacked the Inquisition’s Ripetta
offices, burning the papers, and ransacked the house of the tribunal’s notary.45
Later, Napoleon’s supporters would destroy the Inquisition’s later trials, so a
transcript such as this is rare indeed. Both at Ripetta and later, this trial
has a Holy Office feel; the magistrates treated the courtroom as a
confessional, sparing neither shame nor feelings with their swift, intrusive
questions. Why did the matter slip to the criminal court? The crime in
question, though moral and involving converts, revealed no taint of heresy.
Prostitution in mixed company was no crime and the court was after anal
intercourse. He was asked if on that night he the witness heard the said Betta
moaning and crying out, because the said Messer Ludovico was having intercourse
and fucking her [ futuebat] from the back. He answered: “I could hear it when
she was screwed the first time by Messer Ludovico. She was crying out [si
lamentava]. But one can cry out for several things.” And to a question of me
the notary he said: “She can cry out the way women do.” And I the notary asked,
“And how do women do?” He said, “They can cry out because it pleases them and
they can cry out because it hurts them too. But, one time, as I said, I felt it
when he screwed her.”46 When the Inquisition hauled her in, Betta did her all
to prove it wasn’t so. Her testimony about what went on in bed surely did her
little good, as, on point after point, she lied elsewhere about her history
with Ludovico, shown as far skimpier than others alleged. Her testimony, earthy
and vehement, catches well a prostitute’s voice in court. He never did it to me
in that place. It is true that Messer Ludovico told me to turn around, that he
wanted to do it cunt-backwards [a potta retro], and I told him, “You want to
trick me. You want to stick it in contrary-wise.” And he said no, that he
wanted to do it cunt-backwards, and so I turned around and he did it to me
cunt-backwards. I know where he went in, and if he was fooled, I was not
fooled.47In bed with Ludovico Santa Croce 131Betta appears twice in the record.
The first time, to cover for the weakness of her case, she regales the judge
with promises to live in virtue. If I had consented to the other way, it would
seem to me that God would not keep me on earth. And if I have done wrong in one
way, I don’t want to do wrong in the other. And if I get out of this I want to
go to Santa Maria di Loreto, and then to my home to do good works, and I want
to go this September. And if he wants to say that he did it to me from behind
against Nature, he is lying through his throat, and he is tricked, and, me, I
am not tricked, because I protect myself from this the way I do from fire.48
The next morning, Betta, Ludovico, and most of the posse stayed. (Mario,
sleeping clothed, had slipped off early to his shop.)49 At breakfast, the
boasts went on: She never heard a word when Messer Ludovico told us that he had
twice screwed Betta in the ass, but he said it at length to us. He was asked if
the said Betta was at the table eating with them, how could Ludovico have said
those words, since they could be heard by Betta. He answered: I will tell you.
We were kidding Ludovico . . . and when he said it at the table she
had not yet sat down.50 As current events show sadly, Renaissance Italy was
hardly the only place where, for some admirers, the swaggering abuse of women
gives callous men allure. Jump eight years ahead. It was 1565, not 1557, and
Ludovico was now some thirty-four years old. Still unmarried, still at loose
ends, he haunted the same tight quarter, up to little good. He had a new
entourage; none of the same men turn up. At the center, as ever, sat that
osteria of Domenidio, in Pesheria. His cronies were, this time, two or three
fishmongers and one Cesare Vallati, son of the civic noble family that owned a
palace on the square, facing its ghetto gate. The Vallati house still stands,
pared back to its medieval core, which now bears sad plaques about Roman Jewish
deaths at Nazi hands. Cesare was gentleman enough to hold, they said, a civic
office.51 On Friday, November 23, the friends stirred up dinner at the inn.
Meo, fishmonger, says: Ludovico Santa Croce came to me, as I was in Pescheria.
It may have been a half-hour after dark, and he asked me if we wanted to go to
dinner together at the osteria of Domenidio. I said yes and so I picked up some
fish, and along with Grillo and Ludovico we went to the osteria of Domenidio,
and while we were setting up to eat Cesare arrived and said, “I want to eat
with you,” and so he too sat at the table and we were four in all.52Meo reports
that, when he left his fish-bench, he brought sardines, while Grillo fetched
clams.53 In the midst of dinner, “a Jew”—nobody names him, ever— joined the
group; no sign he ate with them.54 After dinner, except Grillo, all left
together. “Let’s go to the house of my whore,” said Ludovico. “We said, ‘let’s
go!’ and Cesare said, ‘I want to join you.’”55 The court asks later, did Cesare
and Ludovico go with sword in hand?56 Probably. The men took the strada dritta,
the ghetto to their left, the Santa Croce tower to the right, over to Il
Crocefisso, behind or under where the big church of San Carlo later stood.57
Ludovico’s woman of the month was Olimpia, who, it turned out, was off with an
amico, a regular of hers, who, she says, felt ill, so she headed homeward with
a Lorenzo stufarolo in tow.58 But when Ludovico and his cronies arrived, only
the house’s mistress, Lucretia, was yet home. Olimpia calls Lucretia the house
padrona; in court, Ludovico will call her a whore, whom he has known for years,
presumably hooking up with tenant after tenant.59 At Olimpia’s front door, the
four men, masking voices and pretending to speak Spanish, shouted, “Open up the
door!” Lucretia: “They banged six or seven times, for I was not of a mind to
open, ever.”60 At last I went to the window and told them that I did not want
to open for them under any circumstances, and told them to change their talk
because no way could I not recognize them. I knew them just fine, but, with my
tenant not home, and because, I knew, they wanted nothing of me, I had no
intention of opening for them. Instead, I said, I would throw water on their
heads if they did not get away from the door.61 The four men loped east to Via
dei Chiavari, still in Lucretia’s sight.62 There they encountered a second
Lucretia. Wife of wealthy Cyntho Perusco, and mother of two children, she was
returning with a servant—but with no light, lest she be seen and
recognized—from a call on her procurator.63 Two men armed with swords and
daggers, with their swords under their arms and the daggers in hand unsheathed,
came at us and at once they stopped me and one of them put his hand to my neck,
feeling my neck, thinking that perhaps I had some chain necklace or string of
gems.64 And I said to them, “I am a poor woman. What do you want of me?” And I
was screaming, “Thieves thieves!” When they heard that, they let go of me.65
Giovanni Maria, the servant, thought he recognized one of the four assailants:
“Ah Meo, why are you doing this to us?”66 Meo at once hid his face behind his
cape.67 Giovanni Maria’s assailants, Meo and the Jew, grabbed him. “They were
holding on to me and they told me to keep silent, and they held the naked
daggers to my neck.”68 The assailants released their quarry, only brief ly.
Lucretia will tell the Governor: “When we had walked three or four paces, the
same men,In bed with Ludovico Santa Croce 133with some others, made a circle
around me and some of them grabbed me from one side and some from the other,
putting their daggers to my throat.”69 Giovanni Maria tells the Governor: “they
began punch me and shove me and they threw me to the ground.” 70 Adds Lucretia:
And they took from him a pouch. In it were ten giulios, between testoni coins
and giulio coins, and a gold ring that was mine, with a Jesus on the top, and
on the bottom, there is a “claw of the great beast” [a fabled stone with
curative powers], which was also in that pouch, and they took from it also the
belt and a handkerchief. The ring contains 18 giulii of gold.71 Giovanni Maria
adds that the pouch had been tied to his waist and that Lucretia had removed her
ring to wash her hands.72 One of the band of four, almost certainly Cesare
Vallati, as Ludovico was by now no youngster, may have had second thoughts:
When this [theft] was done one of those youngsters took me by the hand and told
me, “Come here. I promise you as a gentleman that I will not hurt you.” And he
asked me, who was that woman. And I told him that she was not for them, and
that they should let her go, and that she was the wife of Messer Cynthio
Perusco.73 Ludovico had other ideas. One of the two underlings, probably not
the Jew but Meo, asked him “Messer, what are we to do?” “Carry her off, carry
her off!” 74 And they tried with all their might to lead me to a house, for
they took me by force and they dragged me . . . But I cried out,
“Thieves! Thieves! Is this how you assassinate people in the street!” And I
told them that I had nothing on me and that they should come to my house, that
was near there.75 The assailants hauled Lucretia into an alley.76 Lucretia was
convinced that they wanted to drag her to a stufa, a bath house of the sort
Ludovico haunted. As they pulled her, Lucretia fell in the mud, losing her
pianelle, her clogs. “She told them that her clogs had fallen off, and they
told her to keep walking, and they were making her walk up that alley, leading
her, as there were three or four around her.” 77 And then, providentially, down
the alley came two men, in front a servant with a torch, and, behind him, his
master, Agostino Palloni, a man of substance whose house stood close to the Santa
Croce palace.78 And when the light arrived, I recognized the gentleman, and I
begged him for the love of God to help me. And while I was saying those words,
one of those young men, who had dragged me, as he thought that the light was
not coming from that side and that he would not be seen—Messer Agostino
recognized one of those young men, who is called Cesare Romano.And at that
Messer Agostino said, “Ah Cesare, what are you doing [che fai]. What is this!
Do you see that you [tu] are doing wrong?79 Turning towards Agostino, says
Giovanni Maria, Lucretia tripped on an iron grate and once more fell and then,
as supplicant, grasped his cape: “Ah, Messer Agostino, don’t abandon me
. . .!”80 Agostino, Lucretia, and Cesare then stood together, a threesome.
First off, Cesare, to catch his social balance, tried to place Lucretia as a
Roman matron. Then Agostino did the same. Giovanni Maria tells the Governor:
The man whom Agostino had called Cesare asked Madonna Lucretia if she knew
Cyntho Perusco. She said, “Yes, I know him, and I have two children with him,
and he is my husband.” And Messer Agostino asked Madonna Lucretia if she knew
Messer Francesco Calvi, and she said yes, and if he came to her house with her
she would show him her daughter.81 Gentleman to gentleman! Cesare Vallati, in
night’s shadow, had strayed well outside his class’s code of conduct, and
Agostino’s torch jolted him back from the abyss. He switched codes as nimbly as
he could. Then Messer Agostino turned to Cesare and told him, “Cesare, son, you
have done wrong.” And then Cesare told Messer Agostino to leave, and said that
he would have Madonna Lucretia escorted by a servant of his.82 No such thing
happened, of course. After questions to Lucretia about how she came to be out
after dark, Agostino, with his torch and serving man, conveyed them both back
home.83 At her window, the other Lucretia, the madam, had seen and heard the
fracas. Outraged, woman to woman, she strove to allay the trouble. I heard a
woman who was starting to scream, and when I looked toward where I heard that
cry, I looked and saw a woman with a man, and she was screaming, “What do you
want with me, brothers, pull the door rope for me, pull the door rope for me!”
and when I heard those words, I feared it might be some neighbor, and I knocked
on the window of Diana and told her, “Listen to your sister who is screaming,”
and she answered, “My sister is here at home.”84 While Cesare and Agostino
parleyed, the other three miscreants probably crept away, and soon, all four
were back at Olimpia’s door. This time they had luck, as Olimpia turned up,
with Lorenzo her bathhouse worker, and his lute. “I came back home and I found
Ludovico Santa Croce there at my door, along with Meo the fishmonger and with
two others whom I did not know, but there was aIn bed with Ludovico Santa Croce
135Jew.”85 Lucretia opened for Olimpia and, willy-nilly, in came all the
others, with Ludovico, as usual, in the lead.86 Note Lucretia’s version: At
that moment, my tenant called Olimpia arrived, along with an amico called
Lorenzo the bathhouse worker, who played the lute, and I had to pull the rope,
and then there came in, along with my tenant, Ludovico Santa Croce, Meo, Cesare
Vallati, and a Jew.87 We learn from Olimpia several things. For one, the Jew
was a stranger, known only, presumably, by his obligatory Jew’s cap. For
another, Cesare Vallati had rejoined the crew. And, for a third, while she knew
Meo, Vallati, a stranger to her if not to the madam, was less central to
Ludovico’s habitual posse. Neither he nor the Jew had been part of the dinner’s
start; though locals, they were hangers-on. When the men entered, Lucretia, the
madam, upbraided them. “And when they were up the stairs, I said to them, ‘Oh
this is a fine state of affairs! Poor women cannot go in the street.’ And they
told me that they weren’t the ones who did it.”88 Lorenzo, with the lute, would
prove Ludovico’s undoing. The men all stayed a while in Olimpia’s room,
listening to him play. And then Ludovico led Olimpia off to the Santa Anna stufa
to spend the night. The other three escorted him down the block, then went
their separate ways.89 We catch a bit of the denouement via Barbara, Meo’s
ex-puttana, who, she tells the court, had after three years broken with him
because he owed her big money on borrowed goods. Barbara had moved to Monte
Savelli, just a block down-river from Pescheria.90 I went to bed without dinner
because I felt ill, and while I was in bed with Annibale the fish-monger I
heard passing in the street Cesare Vallati with other people whom I did not
see, and he said, “Your faithful servant, Signora Barbara, my heart!” I made no
answer.91 Annibale and Barbara went back, she says, three years; she swam as
easily among the fishmongers as a mackerel in the sea. But Cesare Vallati,
clearly, slipped through these same waters; in the intimate spaces of the city,
these men and women moved up and down class lines. Annibale, when asked, would
tell Madonna Lucretia what he knew about the crime. Small world!92 The very
next day, Madonna Lucretia sent her servant to scout the local bathhouses.
Lorenzo, the fellow with the lute, a paesano, led Giovanni Maria to Ludovico
and Meo, who would be arrested on Monday, together.93 At Olimpia’s, the four
men, said Lorenzo, had been “in a terrible mood and all of them distressed.”94
Agostino Palloni, meanwhile, refused to help Lucretia—“he sent word to me
through Cynthio that it wasn’t a gentleman’s role to accuse anybody, and that
was it was enough that I had suffered no harm.”95 Citing class solidarityhe
covered for Cesare Vallati, who either f led or ducked prosecution. The Jew,
luckily nameless, got away. We have neither a sentence nor knowledge what our
four villains did with the rest of their lives. Our story of status slippage
and hasty re-calibration, coarse male solidarity, callous abuse of women, and
female resilience models a careful reading of words, places, and actions, with
an eye to the density of webs and the fine-grained texture of lives in time and
space, to lay out the ref lexes with which Romans navigated their city.
Ludovico, uneasily perched on several margins, could build coalitions, trading
his noble connections, hospitality, slovenly rapaciousness, and access to paid
female sex and company for male support and applause. To Cesare he offered a
pathway down, to the others perhaps a step upwards. These male solidarities in
a moral grey zone show the porosity of Rome’s social boundaries and its alliances’
often easy give.Notes 1 Connors, “Alliance and Enmity,” 208–09. 2 Archivio di
Stato di Roma, Governatore, Tribunale Criminale, Processi (16o secolo), busta
38, case 23, folio 568r: “Ludovicus de S. Cruce filius q. Io. Ant. d.
Franchis.” Henceforth, I give busta and folio only. 3 38.23, 559v: Antonio
Scapuccio, August 15, 1557, to a notary at the Holy Office. 4 38.23, 573r,
Magrino, August 26, 1557, at home sick, to a notary. 5 38.23, 579v: Ludovico
cites Valerio Santa Croce and noble Mario Mellino. For Magrino’s conversion at
the Annunciation in 1555: 38.23, 573r, Magrino. 6 38.23, 568r. 7 Busta 103,
909r: Ludovico Santa Croce: “. . . costione con un altro gentil’homo
. . .” 8 103, 909v: “fregit carceres et unde exivit.” 9 38.23, 572v:
“questo carnevale [1557] . . . messer Ludovico uscii di pregione in
Corte Savella.” 10 Investigazioni 80, 181v–183v, for 23–24, from June, 1563. 11
38.19, 461v: “. . . se ne reallegrava.” 12 38.23, 577v: Betta:
“. . . avanti natale.” 13 38.23, 562v-563r: for age and employment;
for the friendship and the workplace: 38.23, 562v–563r. 14 38.23, 559v:
“eravamo regazi havevamo amicitia intrinseca insieme.” 15 38.23, 562v: Mario:
“Fabritio giudio fatto Cristiano che venne li ferri.” 16 We know little about
Giulio, never interrogated. Ludovico seems to place him among the converts:
38.23, 570r–v: “Vi pratica in questa casa Julio Mattuzzo, Fabritio doi o tre
altri giudei facti christiani . . . de continuo li se ce vengono
giudei et d’ogni sorte de generatione.” But no other witness calls Giulio a
convert. 17 38.23, 563r–v: Mario. 18 38.23, 563v: Mario: “. . . lei o
la madre . . . disse che era ferita in uno braccio et che non posseva
abadarci et che lavessemo per scusata.” 19 Ibid.: Mario: “. . . a un
pasticciero pur presso Torre Sanguigna et pigliassemo un pasticcio
. . .” 20 38.23, 574r: “comprassemo una spalla de porco.” 21 38.23,
564r: Mario: “. . . disse per la strada che voleva pigliar detta
cortigiana.” 22 38.23, 573v. 23 38.23, 563v: Mario: “apresso la stufa de Felice
presso li Cavalieri.” 24 28.23, 561r: Antonio Scapuccio: “. . . ando
con noi per dicta donna et voleva bussare la porta . . . che haveva
bravo culo et teneva bene.”In bed with Ludovico Santa Croce 13725 38.23, 574:
Magrino, for Ludovico’s call: “Messer Ludovico chiamandola . . .”;
38.23, 564r: Mario: “credendosi di abracciar messer Ludovico abraccio un altro
in loco suo in cambio.” 26 38.23, 564r: Mario: “Mostrandoli il pasticcio et per
la strada messer Ludovico et liei andavano abracciati insieme.” 27 Ago,
Economia barocca. 28 38.23, 560r: Antonio Scapuccio: “l’ostaria de Domenidio in
Piscaria.” 38.23, 574r: for the name’s origin. 29 38.23, 564r: Mario, for the
time. 30 38.23, 560r: Antonio di Scapuccio: “tutti de compagnia . . .
portassimo . . . un pasticcio . . .” 31 38.23, 568v:
Ludovico Santa Croce: “. . . Fabritio giudio facto christiano apresso
. . . [a] casa mia nel tempo che e facto christiano et lui me
impresto la stantia”; 38. 560r: Antonio Scapuccio: “presso la casa de Santa
Croce.” 32 28.23, 561r: Antonio Scapuccio for the boast: “et di poi che
andassemo a magnar a l’ostaria . . .” 33 38.23, 574v: Magrino: “un
solaretto di sopra quale era poca de cosa”; 38.23, 572r: Fabritio: “dormivo io
sopra una solarello.” 34 38.23, 560r: Antonio Scapuccio: “. . . un
matarazo quale lo buttassemo in terra.” 35 38.23, 574v: Magrino: “. . .
spogliati si misero sotto li panni.” 36 38.23, 574v–575r: Magrino: “un
paviglione che saria de piu colori quale era il mio . . . radunato da
una banda.” 37 38.23, 569r. Ludovico claims to have closed the curtain:
“mettevo il paviglione atorno.” 38 38.23, 564v: Mario: “et avanti che la lume
fosse svitata stavamo a burlare et ciancinare . . . che di
gratia volessemo svitar la lume.” 39 38.23, 561v: Antonio Scapuccio:
“. . . facendo un zeno con il deto grosso et con il deto indice
facendo uno O designando che lui haveva chiavato nel culo dicta donna”; 38.23,
564v: Mario: “Dicendo forte con noi altri Nel proprio facendo con il detto
grosso et con il indice il tondo.” 40 38.23, 561v: Antonio Scapuccio: “lui non
diceva chiaramente per rispecto de dicta donna che non volea svergognarla”;
Loudly: Mario: “Dicendo forte.” 41 Ibid.: Antonio Scapuccio: “. . .
la chiavata in culo foco foco.” 42 38.23, 574v: Magrino: “forno primi messer
Ludovico et la donna.” 43 38.23, 574r: Magrino, for sleeping clothed: “et io
ancora dormi . . . vestito”; for much later: 38.23, 560r: Scapuccio:
“Giovanni Maria . . . dipoi a un gran pezo . . . se ando a
corigare nel medemmo lecto.” 44 38.23, 575r: Magrino: “io ho inteso quando lui
la chiavava et lei teneva le natiche verso Ludovico et lei voltata con il viso
verso di me et io una volta il sentia et io non lho visto metter dentro perche
io non ce ho tenuto le mane. So bene che la chiavava et lui sbatteva detta [no
noun] verso di me che mi fe svigliato.” 45 Hunt, The Vacant See, 183–84. 46
38.23, 575v: notary and Magrino: “. . . langere et lamentare eo quia
. . . ipsam retro negotiabat et futuebat. Respondit io sentivo che le
quando fu chiava[ta] la prima volta da messer Ludovico si lamentava. Ma si
posseva lamentare de piu cose . . . Si posseva lamentare come fanno
le donne . . . Se posono lamentare che li sappia bono et si
posono lamentare che se li faccia male ancora. Ma io una volta come o detto o
sentito che l’habia chiavata.” 47 38.23, 577v: Betta, August 23, 1557: “lui mai
ha fato in tal loco e e ben vero che messer Ludovico mi disse che mi voltassi
che me lo voleva far a potta retro et io li disse tu me voi gabare tu me voi
mettere al contrario et lui disse de no che il voleva fare a potta retro et
cossi io mi voltai et mi fece a potta retro. Io so dove intro. Si lui se e
gabbato non me sonno gabbata io.” 48 38.25, 567r: Betta, August 21, 1557:
“. . . mi parrebbe che dio non mi tenesse sopra la terra et se ho
fatto male per una via, non voglio far male per laltra, et si io ne esco voglio
andare a Santa Maria de Loreto et poi a casa mia a far bene . . . et
se si gabba lui non mi gabbo io, perche me ne guardaro come dal fuoco.”49
38.23, 565r: Mario. 50 38.23, 576r–v: “Lei non intese mai parole .
. . Noi davamo la baia a Ludovico . . . quando lui il diceva
a tavola lei non se ce era messa ancora.” 51 103, 911r: Ludovico: “me pare che
sia cancelliero de conservatori.” 52 103, 906v: Meo: “. . . voleamo
andare a cena al’hostaria de domenedio insieme . . . et cosi righai
certo piscio et . . . andammo alhosteria . . . et mentre
voleamo cenare arrivo li Cesare . . . lui se messe a tavola et
cenammo tutti quatro insieme.” 53 103, 907r: Meo: “portai certe sarde
. . . et Grillo porto certe telline.” 54 103, 907v: Meo: “un’hebreo
. . . venne . . . mentre che magnammo.” 55 103, 907r–v:
Meo: “voliamo andar a casa della mia puttana et noi dicemmo andamo et Cesare
ancora disse io ve voglio fare compagnia.” 56 103, 911v. 57 The present Via del
Monte della Farina was then Via del Crocefisso, named for church, San Biagio
del Crocefisso (or del Annulo), demolished circa 1617 to expand San Carlo:
Lombardi, Roma, 222; Delli, Le Strade, 339; Gnoli, Topografia, 91; Adinolfi,
Roma, 171. Olimpia probably lived towards San Biagio. 58 103, 913r: Olimpia:
“da uno amico mio quella sera . . . tornai a casa et trovai Ludovico
Santa Croce li alla mia porta”; 913v for the name Lorenzo. 59 103, 918r:
Ludovico: “sono parecchi anni.” 60 103, 917r: Lucretia the madam: “parlando
spagnolo et contrafacendo il parlare loro solito . . . apri qua la
sporta che batterno sette o otto volte ch’io non li volsi mai aprire.” 61
Ibid.: “. . . non li volevo aprire . . . dovessero
mutare parlare perche non potessi di non cognoscerli, . . . ma per
non ci esser’ la mia pigionante in casa et sapendo che non voleano niente da me
io non li volsi aprire anzi . . . haverci buttato del acqua in testa
se non si fussero levati dalla porta.” 62 Ibid.: “correre verso li Chiavari.”
63 103, 889r: Lucretia the wife: “retornandome . . . senza lume et con
una cannuccia in mano per non esser vista ne conosciuta.” One Cynthio Perusco
lodged by the Minerva: Bullettino della Commissione archeologica comunale di
Roma 29, 15. One puzzle: on October 7, 1567, a Cinzio Perusci by San Marcello,
not the Minerva, buried a wife named not Lucretia but Ortensia. de Dominicis,
Notizie biografiche, 275; And, at court, (103, 899r) Lucretia appears as
“Lucretia q. Petri”—no father’s family name, no husband’s name. Is Lucretia a
femina, a semi-wife? 64 Ibid., r–v: Lucretia: “Doi armati . . . me si
ferno incontro et subbito me fermorno et un di loro me misse la mano al collo
tastandomi il collo pensando forsi ch’io havessi qualche collana o vezza.” 65
Ibid., v: “. . . io son poveretta che volete da me strillando ai
ladri ai ladri . . . me lasciorno”; the servant confirms this and
notes that other men were also holding Lucretia: 103, 902r. 66 103, 902r: 25:
“. . . perche questo a noi.” 67 Ibid.: “se misse la cappa inanti il
viso et pero non posso saper’ ne poddi veder’ se l’era quel Meo.” 68 Ibid.:
“. . . pugnali nudi presso alla gola.” Why daggers? The gentlemen,
with their swords, held Lucretia. 69 Ibid.: Lucretia: “. . . un
cerchio intorno et chi mi pigliava da un canto et chi dal altro mettendomi li
pugnali alla gola.” Giovanni Maria: Ibid., 902r: “ci fermamo per paura.” 70
Ibid.: Giovanni Maria: “. . . dar de i pugni et d’urtoni et mi
buttorno in terra.” 71 103, 900r: Lucretia: “. . . con un yesu di
sopra et di sotto c’e l’ongia della gran bestia . . . ancho la cintura
et un fazzoletto: che l’anello ci e 18 giulii d’oro.” This “yesu” may have been
a monogram. Giovanni Maria confirms almost all these goods. 72 103, 902r–v:
Giovanni Maria: “una scarsella che io portava cinta. . . . a tenere
lavandosi la mano . . . messo in la scarsella.” 73 103, 902v:
Lucretia: “. . . vi prometto da gentilhuomo de non ti far dispiacer
. . . che non era per loro . . . che era moglie di Messer
Cynthio Perusco.” Cesare had yet to hurt the servant.In bed with Ludovico Santa
Croce 13974 Ibid,: Giovanni Maria: “messer che volemo fare . . .
menavola via menavola via.” See also Lucretia: 103, 899v: “menala su menala su
strascinala.” Why do we say Meo and not the Jew? Note Meo’s ongoing
relationship with Ludovico, their habit of joint action, plus that prompt
“Messer.” 75 103, 899v: Lucretia: “. . . con molta instanza di
menarmi in una casa che . . . per forza . . . me
strascinavano . . . a i ladri a i ladri a questo modo si assassina
alla strada, . . . che venessero in casa mia . . .” Why
this invitation? Probably demonstrate her station, not to proffer loot. 76 103,
199v: Lucretia: “per andare al arco delli catinari.” The present Via dei
Falegnami then was Via dei Catinari: Gnoli, Toponomia, 69. This Arco was
demolished for San Carlo ai Catinari: Gnoli, Toponomia, 11. 77 103, 903r:
Giovanni Maria: “. . . gl’era cascate le pianella . . .
diceano che caminasse . . . la faceano camminar . . . tre o
quattro attorno.” See also Lucretia: 103, 899v: “cascai in terra in un fangho
et lasciai li pianelle.” 78 For Agostino Pallone’s house, see Cohen and Cohen,
Words and Deeds, 136. For the two men: 103, 903r: Giovanni Maria: “arrivò quel
che portava la torcia accesa et . . . mr Agostino Palone
. . . per il medesimo vicolo.” In 1577, Agostino would be buried in
Santa Maria in Publicolis, the Santa Croce family church: de Dominicis, Notizie
biografiche, 267. 79 103, 899v–900r: Lucretia: “. . . cognobbi detto
messer . . . per l’amor de dio che me aiutasse . . .
pensandosi che il lume non venesse da quella banda et de non esser visto detto
mr Augistino cognobbe . . . Cesari romano, al quale disse Mr.
Augustino ah Cesari che fai, che cosa e questa[!] . . .” 80 103,
903r: Giovannia Maria: “casco con una gamba in una ferrata et . . .
se attacò alla cappa di Messer Augistino . . . Mr Augustino di
grazia. non me abbandonate per l’amor de Dio.” 81 103, 903r–v: Giovanni Maria:
“. . . se conosceva Cyntho Perusco, et lei disse si che lo cognosce
et ho doi figli con lui et e mio marito et . . . se la conosceva
messer Francesco Calvi et lei disse de si . . . se li andava in casa
con lei che li mostraria la figlia.” 82 103, 903v: Giovanni Maria:
“. . . Cesari figlio tu hai fatto male . . . che andasse
via che farria accompagnare Madonna Lucretia da un suo servitore.” 83 Ibid.;
Lucretia: “m’accompagno con la torcia.” 84 103, 917r–v: Lucretia the madam:
“. . . guardai et viddi una donna con un’homo che cridava: che diceva
che volete da me fratelli che volete da me fratelli et diceva tiratimi la corda
tiratimi la corda . . . dubitando io che non fusse qualche vicina, io
bussai alla fenestra della Diana . . . senti quella tua sorella che
crida . . .” “Tiratimi la corda” here refers to Lucretia’s door-rope:
“open up for me!” with a dative. 85 103, 913r: Olimpia: “. . . trovai
Ludovico Santa Croce li alla mia porta assieme con Meo pescivendolo et con doi
altri . . . ci era un’hebreo.” 86 Ibid.: Olimpia: “. . .
Ludovico fu il primo”; 103, 918: Ludovico Santa Croce: “il primo io d’intrare
in casa.” 87 103, 917r: Lucretia the madam: “. . . Olimpia insieme
con un’ suo amico che si chiama Lorenzo stufarolo, quale sonava di liuto. Et me
bisogno tirar’ la corda et alhora intro . . . Ludovico Santa [Croce]
Meo Cesar Vallati et un hebreo.” 88 103, 917v: Lucretia the madam: “. . .
o bella cosa, le povere donne non ponno andare per la strada et loro dissero
che non erano stato.” 89 103, 913v: Olimpia, “Meo et l’altri ci accompagnorno
sino alla stufa et poi se ne andorno con dio”; 914v: Meo: “insieme alla stufa
et poi io me ne tornai a casa mia e Cesare e l’hebreo andorno a fare i fatti
suoi.” 90 103, 922r: Barbara claims Meo has been her amico for three years;
103, 904r: Barbara: “e un mese ch’io l’ho lassato perche non mi piace piu
l’amicitia sua et perche ha dieci scudi delli mei in mano.” Monte Savelli is
today’s Teatro di Marcello, now stripped bare by archeology. 91 103, 922r:
Barbara: “me ne andai a letto senza cena perche io me sentivo male et mentre
ch’io stavo a letto con Annibale pescivendolo sentei passare per la strada
Cesare 92 93 94 95Vallata con altre genti . . . et disse servitor’
Signora Barbera cor mio ch’io non li resposi altrimente” 103, 914r: Giovanni
Maria: “madonna Lucretia domando a . . . pescivendolo predetto per
che causa fussi preso questo messer Ludovico et . . . rispose che
fu preso perche haveva preso una donna nella strada.” 103, 905v: Meo, on
Tuesday: “io fui preso hiermatina in Ponte ch’io non so perche causa assieme
con Messer Ludovico Santa Croce.” 103, 901r: Lucretia the wife: “et che stavano
molto di mala voglia et tutti afflitti.” 103, 900v: Lucretia: “lui mi mando a
dir per il detto Cynthio che non era offitio da gentilhomo di accusar nesuno e
che mi bastava che io non havessi ricevuto mal nesuno.”Bibliography Archival
sources Archivio di Stato di Roma, Governatore, Tribunale Criminale Processi
(16° secolo), busta 38, case 19 Processi (16° secolo), busta 38, case 23
Processi (16° secolo), busta 38, case 25 Processi (16° secolo), busta
103Publisd sources Adinolfi, Pasquale. Roma nell’età di mezzo, rione Campo
Marzo, rione S. Eustachio. Florence: Le Lettere – LICOSA, 1983. Ago, Renata.
Economia barocca: mercato e istituzioni nella Roma barocca. Rome: Donzelli,
1998. Bullettino della Commissione archeologica comunale di Roma 29 Cohen,
Thomas V. and Elizabeth S. Cohen. Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1993. Connors, Joseph. “Alliance and Enmity in
Baroque Urbanism.” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 25 (1989):
207–94. de Dominicis, Claudio. Notizie biografiche a Roma nel 1531–1582,
desunte dagli atti parrocchiali. Rome: Academia Moroniana, n.d. Delli, Sergio.
Le Strade di Roma. Rome: Newton Compton, 1975. Gnoli, Umberto. Topografia e
toponomastica di Roma medioevale e moderna. Rome: Edizioni dell’Arquata, 1984.
Hunt, John M. The Vacant See in Early Modern Rome: A Social History of the
Papal Interregnum. Leiden: Brill, In two unrelated sixteenth-century texts, a
Renaissance prince was described as vulnerable to assassination because of a f
lawed fashion judgment. In his Historia patria (published 1503), the courtier
Bernardino Corio recounted that just before Galeazzo Sforza left his castle on
December 26, 1476, he put on and then took off his corazina because he felt
that the chest armor made him look “too fat.”1 The lack of armored protection was
crucial as Galeazzo was famously stabbed to death during mass later that day.
In his analysis of the event, Timothy McCall provocatively suggests that
Galeazzo’s fatally bad judgment was determined by fashion; Galeazzo, according
to McCall, was inf luenced by the growing pressure to conform to cultural
expectations of a slim masculine figure.2 Sixty years later, a Florentine
prince was murdered by stabbing, and similar to the description of Galeazzo
Sforza, a chronicler of the episode points to clothing’s role in the affair.
Benedetto Varchi’s Storia fiorentina (incomplete at his death in 1565) recounts
that just before Duke Alessandro de’ Medici left his bedchamber on the night of
his murder in 1537, he contemplated whether he should wear his gloves “da guerra”
(for war) or his perfumed gloves “da fare all’amore” (for making love).3
According to the story, Alessandro chose the love-gloves as they better matched
his sablelined cape and were suited to his planned sexual escapade. He
apparently chose unwisely. Elizabeth Currie argues that Varchi added this
presumably invented anecdote about gloves in order to communicate—through
sartorial metaphors—the gap between Duke Alessandro’s expected dutiful behavior
and his actual irresponsible conduct.4 To Currie’s analysis, I add that the
glove anecdote also participates in what had become a literary pattern of
associating men’s clothing with physical weakness. If, in the first episode,
the author indicates how a soft doublet made Galeazzo defenseless to the knife
blade, in the second, the writer implies that the outcome of Alessandro’s
evening might have been different had the princechosen his gloves “da guerra.”
The two historiographical accounts of Galeazzo’s and Alessandro’s murders
underscore not only the high stakes of men’s clothing choices but the
relationship between literary representations of dress and elements of
masculinity. Varchi, like so many writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth
century, chose to articulate men’s dress as integral components in representations
of violence, war preparedness, moral virtue, and sexuality. Clothing was thus
fundamental to Renaissance discourses of masculinity. While masculine
subjectivity as performed through dress has been the focus of several excellent
studies by fashion and art historians, what has gone somewhat unexplored is how
clothing functioned in such discourses of masculinity.5 Was, for example,
clothing presented as a symptom of men’s loss of masculine virtue or did
writers claim that clothing had a more active role in the imperilment of men?
Did so-called effeminate clothing cause men to weaken, or was it merely a
byproduct of a so-called anima effeminato? This essay will address these
questions by looking at the interconnection of male dress, effeminacy, and militarism
in Baldassare Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (Book of the Courtier). I have
chosen to concentrate on Castiglione’s Courtier because of its prominent place
in the history of dress and fashion as well as its role in the history of
masculinity.6 The Courtier presents male dress as a high-stakes enterprise; a
misstep in clothing not only had grave consequences for a man’s reputation, it
was also a question of life or death. Like the gloves of Alessandro de’ Medici
and the cuirass of Galeazzo Sforza, a man’s clothing choice could lead to glory
or personal injury, and it could also result in (at least in Castiglione’s
assessment) large-scale military defeat.Arms in the Courtier Very early in the
book, Ludovico da Canossa declares arms to be the primary profession of the
courtier [1.17].7 Yet, the privileged status of arms is not a settled question,
and it is destabilized during a debate of arms vs. letters.8 The debate is
framed by the same Ludovico, who asserts that the French only respect arms and
abhor letters. Ludovico extols the value of letters by describing several
successful military generals who trotted off to battle with copies of the Iliad
or other literature at their side. His examples of successful and literary
generals are offered as proof that the French were erroneous in their belief
that literature damaged a man’s ability to fight: “Ma questo dire a voi è
superf luo, ché ben so io che tutti conoscete quanto s’ingannano i Francesi
pensando che le lettre nuocciano all’arme” (1.43, p. 92) (But there is no need
to tell you this, for I am sure you all know how mistaken the French are in
thinking that letters are detrimental to arms) (1.43, p. 51).9 Ludovico’s
accusation of the misguided French could as well have been leveled against
Italian contemporaries of Castiglione, since none other than Niccolò
Machiavelli himself was proclaiming that letters were injurious to arms in both
his Art of War as well as his Florentine Histories.10Contrary to the view of
the French (and Machiavelli), Ludovico proposes that letters are beneficial to
arms; letters bring glory, and glory inspires courage in warfare: “Sapete che
delle cose grandi ed arrischiate nella guerra il vero stimulo è la
gloria. . . . E che la vera gloria sia quella che si commenda al
sacro tesauro delle lettre” (1.43, p.92) (The true stimulus to great and daring
deeds in war is glory. . . . And it is true glory that is entrusted
to the sacred treasury of letters) (1.43, p. 51).11 When Ludovico notes that
literature, like the Iliad, could have a positive effect on soldiers, he shifts
the debate that began with the hierarchy of arms and letters to the correlative
and causative relationship between arms and letters.12 For Ludovico, arms and
letters are “concatenate” (conjoined) (1.46). Ludovico’s assessment of the
positive effects of letters on arms is troubled by the fact that France, at
least since 1494, had proven itself to be militarily superior to Italy. He
hedges his argument in a prebuttal, acknowledging that others might cite recent
French military success as evidence against his claim: “Non vorrei già che
qualche avversario mi adducesse gli effetti contrari per rifiutar la mia
opinione, allegandomi gli Italiani col lor saper lettere aver mostrato poco
valor nell’arme” (1.43, p. 93) (I should not want some objector to cite me
instances to the contrary in order to refute my opinion, alleging that for all
their knowledge of letters the Italians have shown little worth in arms) (1.43,
p. 51). To this objection, Ludovico states that the defeat of literate Italians
by illiterate French is the fault of only a few men: “la colpa d’alcuni pochi
aver dato, oltre al grave danno, perpetuo biasimo a tutti gli altri” (1.43, p.
93) (the fault of a few men has brought not only serious harm but eternal blame
upon all the rest) (1.43, p. 52). The debate of arms and letters in the
Courtier raises two key points for my analysis on dress and militarism. The
first is that there is an anxiety among the speakers that the actions of a “few
men” can bring shame on all men.13 The book’s project of social control depends
in great part on this anxiety. Indeed, the belief that massive military defeat
was caused by a few deviant men gives urgency to the entire masculine
normativizing process (i.e., the ideal courtier). The second point, related to
the first, is that men’s ability to win wars could be affected (positively or
negatively) by what are presumably unrelated aspects of a courtier’s masculine
identity. Throughout the Courtier, not only letters but music, dance, and of
course dress are all placed in a context of their relationship to warfare.14
When, for example, one speaker condemns music as effeminate, another will
anxiously argue that music stirs soldiers to combat, and thus it is rightfully
masculine (I.47). The book delineates the court and the battlefield as discrete
yet interrelated spaces. The courtier-soldier is expected to shuttle between
the two while performing hegemonic masculinity in both.15 The challenge is that
certain practices of masculinity were viewed as causing a negative effect in
one or the other space. The battlefield, in particular, is shown as vulnerable
to the presence of courtly practices. Analogously, the court’s refined spaces
were shown as incompatible with certain military behaviors.16 Nonetheless, the
court often measured itself against a functionality in war (e.g., music was
useful in war) just as men in court adopted martial aesthetics (e.g., court
dress was an adaptation of the military tunic).17 There thus arises a tension
within the Courtier between the masculinity of courtly practices and the
masculinity of warfare, and this tension is routinely expressed as a fear that
practices at court are deleterious to combat. The speakers never clearly
articulate how dress, letters, and music might endanger war tactics and
strategies, but they do repeatedly imply that refined behavior threatens
masculinity. The reader is then left to leap the epistemological gap that
assumes such a claim to be true. The cumulative effect of this rhetorical
technique is that a fear of effeminacy underlies the entire project to produce
an ideal courtier, and this fear is often articulated in terms of dress and
aesthetics.18Aesthetics and masculinity before Castiglione The association of
men’s dress and aesthetics with effeminacy has a literary tradition that
stretches at least back to Classical antiquity. Craig Williams’ groundbreaking
text, Roman Homosexuality, provides scores of ancient examples of writers
reproaching men’s aesthetics. In Roman texts, clothing, perfumes, and grooming
habits were frequent subjects of scorn. According to Williams, men’s aesthetics
were invoked as part of accusations of effeminacy in what was consistently a
reproach of men’s loss of dominion and self-mastery.19 More recently, Kelly Olson’s
Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity has provided a systematic look at
dress in ancient Rome, and she usefully pinpoints specific elements of dress,
perfumes, and grooming to show how the Roman man “walked a fine line” between
expected grooming and dressing practice and what was considered effeminate.20
As we move into the Middle Ages and Renaissance, writers adopted these
Classical condemnations of men’s dress and added their own brand of Christian
morality. Renaissance legal codes and prescriptive literature justified the
regulation of male dress under the auspices of protecting state expenditures,
preventing deviant sexuality, or ensuring the salvation of the soul.21 For
example, Francesco Pontano (f l. 1424–41), a professor in republican Siena, attacked
male hair styling, cosmetics, and ornate garments as a civic and Christian
moral problem.22 In his treatise Dello integro e perfetto stato delle donzelle
(On the whole and perfect state of girls), a work written primarily about
women’s vanities, the author states that “vain and superf luous ornament”
should be disdained by all males “who want to be called real men.”23 Certain
men, he states, do not care if they are esteemed as masculine, and thus they
spend extraordinary amounts of time on hair and skin care.24 He complains that
men multiply the effect of their grooming habits by fussing over dress as well:
“Ma i maschi moltiplicano questo errore or co’ lisciamenti or con continui
increspamenti di falde, e arrondolamenti de’ cappucci a diadema, e infiniti
altri loro frenetichi e babionerie” (But men multiply this error, sometimes
using cosmetics and at other times with their continual ruff ling of crinoline
and swirls of hoods in the shape of a tiara, as well as their infinite other
frenzies and buffooneries) (Pontano 22). For Pontano, so-called luxurious dress
muddied the gender binary as well as presented a peril to Christian morality
since, as he states, vanities and ornament debased men, who were “made to be
equal to the angels” to a status “below pigs.”25 Dress imperiled the body and
the very soul of men. Effeminate dress, he states, showed disrespect for God.
The crowd of ornate men “non crede che Dio sia, e che non sia alcuno altro
iudice che quegli del podestà ovver del capitano” (does not believe that God
exists, and that there is no other judge than the podestà or commander)
(Pontano 22). Pontano made so-called effeminate dress a moral and theological
issue. Similarly, other writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
voiced concern about the morality of dress with respect to sexuality and class
status. The chronicler Giovanni Villani (c. 1280–1348) worried that men’s
fashion could create dangerous alliances with foreign powers and blur class
differences, and San Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) complained that young
men’s short tunics and tight hose were too erotic.26 Ironically, those same
tight hose were reevaluated in the sixteenth century as evidentiary proof that
the male youths of the past were uncorrupted.27 There has as yet been no systematic
study of the condemnations of men’s dress in early modern Italy, but such a
study would aid our understanding of possible thematic shifts. Not only did the
targets of these condemnations vary (e.g., short tunics, tight hosiery), so too
did the rhetoric used to vilify certain dress undergo changes. There seems to
be one significant moment in the history of dress and masculinity at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, when condemnations of so-called effeminate
male dress shifted from threats of Christian imperilment to failed militancy.28
The anxiety over dress and militarism had real-world implications such as the
standardized military uniform, just as it may have also inspired some
unexpected rhetoric, such as the praise of an unkempt look.29 Most importantly,
it made the abstract notions of dependency and autonomy visible; men’s clothing
carried the meanings of military victory or loss. Castiglione’s Courtier has a
distinct place within the normativization process of the militaristic masculine
body as it is an early—possibly the earliest— example of sixteenth-century
rhetoric of effeminacy, dress, and military defeat. Castiglione began writing
his text during the chaotic years between the invasion of France in 1494 and
the Sack of Rome in 1527. In this period of instability, he chose to point to
certain courtly behaviors, including dress, in relation to the military losses
that were still potentially viewed as reversible. The Courtier blames the
subjugation of the Italian people on certain refined masculine behaviors that
were otherwise unrelated to militarism, but so, too, it suggests that the
salvation of Italy lay in the hands of this same class of men, men who often
marked their class by the very dress that undermined their masculinity. There are
two moments in which Castiglione suggests that men’s clothing played a role in
military loss. I will analyze these passages along with other textual examples
of men’s aesthetics and dress to demonstrate that Castiglione is in effect not
only making pronouncements about dress but, more importantly, is establishing a
practice whereby men can redeem their masculinity through speaking about the
effeminizing power of aesthetics. The spoken condemnation of courtly dress
purportedly critiques gender and class structures, but like the dress itself,
this very speech is what marks the speaker as belonging to the properly
masculine elite.30Male aesthetics and dress in the Courtier Book One:
sprezzatura and gender nonconformity In Book One, the primary speaker, Count Ludovico
da Canossa, says that the ideal courtier should have a manly yet graceful face.
What is to be avoided, he exclaims with disgust, are certain male grooming
habits: [your face] has something manly about it, and yet is full of
grace. . . . I would have our Courtier’s face be such, not so soft
and feminine as many attempt to have who not only curl their hair and pluck
their eyebrows, but preen themselves in all those ways that the most wanton and
dissolute women in the world adopt; and in walking, in posture, and in every
act, appear so tender and languid that their limbs seems to be on the verge of
falling apart; and utter their words so limply that it seems they are about to
expire on the spot; and the more they find themselves in the company of men of
rank, the more they make a show of such manners. These, since nature did not
make them women as they clearly wish to appear and be, should be treated not as
good women, but as public harlots, and driven not only from the courts of great
lords but from the society of all noble men. (1.19, p. 27) Certo quella grazia
del volto, senza mentire, dir si po esser in voi . . . tien del
virile, e pur è grazioso . . . . di tal sorte voglio io che sia lo
aspetto del nostro cortegiano, non così molle e femminile come si sforzano
d’aver molti, che non solamente si crepano i capegli e spelano le ciglia, ma si
strisciano con tutti que’ modi che si facciano le più lascive e disoneste
femine del mondo; e pare che nello andare, nello stare ed in ogni altro lor
atto siano tanto teneri e languidi, che le membra siano per staccarsi loro
l’uno dall’altro; e pronunziano quelle parole così aff litte, che in quel punto
par che lo spirito loro finisca; e quanto più si trovano con omini di grado,
tanto più usano tai termini. Questi, poiché la natura, come essi mostrano
desiderare di parere ed essere, non gli ha fatti femine, dovrebbono non come
bone femine esser estimati, ma, come publiche meretrici, non solamente delle
corti de’ gran signori, ma del consorzio degli omini nobili esser cacciati.
(1.19, pp. 49–50) For Ludovico, the so-called effeminate courtiers are not by
nature “molle” (soft) or “ femminile” (feminine), but they work very hard (si
sforzano) to make themselvesappear to be so. Moreover, he links aesthetics to
acts of despised behavior, particularly obsequious dependency. This condemned
behavior occurs when, as Ludovico explains, men affect their appearance and
speech around other men of rank. We can situate these despised men within the
context of Ludovico’s own theory of sprezzatura. Coining a new term, Ludovico
describes sprezzatura as the art of “ciò che si fa e dice venir fatto senza
fatica e quasi senza pensarvi” (1.26, p. 60) (making whatever is done or said
appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it) (1.26, p.
32).31 In the case of the men who plucked their eyebrows, curled their hair,
and augmented certain behaviors around men of rank, they have failed at this
art. Rather than concealing a performance, as sprezzatura demands, these men drew
attention to the act of ingratiating themselves to men of authority. Their
failed performance of sprezzatura thus resulted in the loss of reputation and
power, a point also made by Ludovico in his definition of the new term:
Accordingly, we may affirm that to be true art which does not appear to be art;
nor to anything must we give greater care than to conceal art, for if it is
discovered, it quite destroys our credit and brings us into small esteem.
(I.26, p. 32) Però si po dir quella esser vera arte che non pare esser arte; né
più in altro si ha da poner studio, che nel nasconderla: perché se è scoperta,
leva in tutto il credito e fa l’omo poco estimato. (1.26, p. 60) Successful
sprezzatura, on the other hand, offered the courtier an ability to perform a “compelling”
version of himself that masked a very different, perhaps less putatively
masculine identity.32 This “manly masquerade,” however, risked pointing to both
a fantastic masculine ideal as well as to the absence of that ideal.33 Dress
and aesthetics, or more precisely, the discussions of dress and aesthetics in
the Courtier, form a paradox in the logic of sprezzatura. When the speakers
complain of the “effeminate” dress or grooming habits of men, they imply that
some idealized masculine version of these men existed before the offending
grooming or dressing occurred.34 However, this anchoring of essentialist
manhood is dismissed in the Courtier. Instead, the speakers reaffirm that since
very few men are born with the qualities of the ideal courtier, the ideal (read
masculine) courtier manipulates his body, behaviors, and dress. If the ideal
courtier is therefore a man who must alter his person in order to be masculine,
then the ideal masculine pre-altered courtier—much like the idealized Urbino
court itself—is a pastoral fantasy.35 The men who alter their hair and posture
when among men of rank, in effect, draw attention to this absence of essential
masculinity in all but the rarest courtiers. These men fail at a sprezzatura of
masculinity not because they ornament themselves, but because they have exposed
the necessity of ornamenting themselves. It is so great an infraction that
Ludovico angrily condemns these men to be punished not as women but as “public
harlots.” Of course, the reference to prostitution is significant for it
foreshadows an episode (discussed below) in Book Four where Ottaviano explains
that all courtiers must use their bodies, speech, and behavior to gain princely
favors. The irony is that the principal difference between the despicable
groomed courtier with plucked eyebrows and the masculine courtier with less
apparently plucked eyebrows is solely aesthetic; both sell themselves for
favors. The offending behavior of the groomed courtier is therefore that he has
failed to conceal this economy.Book Two: foreign dress and foreign occupation
Given the gravity of the punishment that Ludovico doles out to certain
courtiers, it is apparent that a mistake in styling and grooming could pose a
serious threat to masculinity. Thus, choosing proper male dress also caused
anxiety for the upwardly mobile courtier. In Book Two, Giuliano de’ Medici
expresses his personal difficulty regarding the variety of dress available to
men, and he asks for assistance “to know how to choose the best out of this confusion”
(2.26). Federico Fregoso responds to this question by stating that men should
dress according to the “custom of the majority.” Fregoso then states that the
majority of Italians wore the styles of various foreign cultures and that these
foreign fashions signaled which cultures would dominate Italian men.36 But I do
not know by what fate it happens that Italy does not have, as she used to have,
a manner of dress recognized to be Italian: for, although the introduction of
these new fashions makes the former ones seem very crude, still the older ones
were perhaps a sign of freedom, even as the new ones have proved to be augury
of servitude . . . Just so our having changed our Italian dress for
that of foreigners strikes me as meaning that all those for whose dress we have
exchanged our own are going to conquer us: which has proved to be all too true,
for by now there is no nation that has not made us its prey. (2.26, pp. 88–89)
Ma io non so per qual fato intervenga che la Italia non abbia, come soleva avere,
abito che sia conosciuto per italiano; che, benché lo aver posto in usanza
questi novi faccia parer quelli primi goffissimi, pur quelli forse erano segno
di libertà, come questi son stati augurio di servitù . . . cosí
l’aver noi mutato gli abiti italiani nei stranieri parmi che significasse,
tutti quelli, negli abiti de’ quali i nostri erano trasformati, dever venire a
subiugarci; il che è stato troppo più che vero, ché ormai non resta nazione che
di noi non abbia fatto preda. (2.26, p. 158)Fregoso’s fashion advice poses a
host of problems regarding identity and autonomy. By suggesting that men
“follow the majority,” he undermines agency, sovereignty, and control, themes
often repeated as central to masculinity by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
authors. Manliness is the ability to look like others, to disappear in the
crowd; but it is also ironically defined as following the crowd’s errors. For,
as Fregoso states, the majority of Italians have made a grave error and adopted
foreign dress, which leads to invasion and occupation.37 If fitting in is a
masculine virtue, it could even mean implicating oneself in Italy’s political
and military losses. Fregoso’s concern about foreign dress is a Classical trope
that has considerable fortune in the Renaissance, where French and later
Imperial invasions were not infrequently associated with foreign fashions. 38
The epistemological link of fashion and invasion was so imbedded in the culture
that even one hundred years after Castiglione wrote his Courtier, the Spanish
priest Basilio Ponce de Leon suggested that God castigated Italy with invasion
in 1494 precisely because Italian men wore French fashions.39 Within the
Courtier itself, foreign fashion does not incur God’s wrath, but rather, it
beckons other nations to “venire a subiugarci” (come and subjugate us). Such a
logic—where large scores of men were responsible for invasion because of their
fashion choice—stands in contrast to Ludovico’s claim in Book One when he
claimed that the collapse of Italy was caused by a “few men.” Book Two thus
broadens the guilty parties of Italy’s subjugation from a “few men” to a
“majority” of (upper class) men, who, like Castiglione himself, were bedecked
in the latest Spanish and French trends.Books One and Two: fashion theory and
agency The first two books are differentiated also by the way they discuss
men’s aesthetics. In Book One, for example, there is no association between
aesthetics and military loss. Ludovico did not state that plucked eyebrows and
curled hair brought about military defeat. Rather, his complaint was limited to
gender nonconformity. On the other hand, Book Two draws a direct line between
aesthetics (foreign dress) and military failure. This shift from Book One to
Book Two might be explained by the general ideological difference that
distinguishes the two books. Virginia Cox has convincingly argued that Book One
proclaims that a courtier’s virtue ensures him success, while in the more
cynical Book Two, success at court is depicted as at the whim of the prince.40 In
particular, military bravery is praised only when it can be observed by others,
particularly by the prince. To risk one’s life when no one is watching would be
a waste of one’s personal resources. Virtue, therefore, is whatever the
courtier makes seen in the eyes of others. In the context of Book Two, where
the courtiers participate in an economy that trades in appearance of virtue
rather than intrinsic virtue, clothing takes a central role in masculine
identity construction. It thus follows that Fregoso attempts to draw a direct
relationship between appearance and essence. He statesthat one must be
attentive to what type of man he wishes to be taken for, and then act and dress
accordingly, “aggiungendovi ancor che debba fra se stesso deliberar ciò che vol
parere e de quella sorte che desidera esser estimato, della medesima vestirsi”
(2.27, p. 160) (I would only add further that he ought to consider what
appearance he wishes to have and what manner of man he wishes to be taken for,
and dress accordingly) (2.27, p. 90). Such action is necessitated by the belief
that external appearance (including mannerisms) communicates a person’s
identity: “tutto questo di fuori dà notizia spesso di quel dentro” (2.28, p.
161) (all these outward things often make manifest what is within) (1.28, p.
90). The body makes legible the soul, and this externalization of virtue and
morality is problematized by the fact that the courtier is taught to manipulate
the body according to his fashion. One speaker, Gasparo Pallavicino, pushes
back on the theory that dress determines personal character. He states that one
should not “judge the character of men by their dress rather than by their
words or deeds” (2.28, p. 90). To Gasparo’s comment, Fregoso responds that
although deeds and words are more important than dress, dress is “no small
index” (non è piccolo argomento) (2.28) of the man. Fregoso’s insistence that
dress is ref lective of the essence of man is, however, hard to reconcile with
the fact that one’s projected image, as Fregoso himself states, can be false:
“avvenga che talor possa esser falso” (2.28) (although it can sometimes be
false) (2.28, p. 90 translation altered to ref lect original). Despite
Fregoso’s suggestions otherwise, behavior, dress, and bodily adornment do not
convey an unproblematic version of the self. In the elegant fishbowl of the
court, courtiers manipulate dress with the hopes that others might be duped
into believing that it represents an intrinsic identity. Fregoso’s fashion
theory, though not cohesive, does communicate to other men that a fashion faux
pas imperils the courtier’s masculinity in two ways: it points to a perceived
essential effeminacy, or it demonstrates an inability to mask this
effeminacy.Book Four: Ottaviano’s paradox The last mention of dress in the
Courtier is in Book Four, and it famously gives elegance of dress a virtuous
purpose. In Book Four, Federico Fregoso’s brother, Ottaviano, declares that
dress, manners, and pleasantries permit the courtier access to the prince so
that he can provide the ruler with wise counsel. According to Ottaviano, the
courtier must fashion himself with this mask of the “perfect courtier” so that
he can lead the prince away from the ills of vice through deception,
“ingannandolo con inganno salutifero” (beguiling him with salutary deception)
(4.10, p. 213). Ottaviano’s interjection has received much scholarly attention
in part because it exposes the fashioning of the perfect courtier as a
performance of deceit.41 Berger, in particular, has noted how this deceit can
have an effect on the integrity of the courtier: The byproduct of the
courtier’s performance is that the achievement of sprezzatura may require him
to deny or disparage his nature. In order tointernalize the model and enhance
himself by art, he may have to evacuate – repress or disown – whatever he finds
within himself that doesn’t fit the model. (20) If sprezzatura requires the
courtier to deny or disparage his own nature, then there is an implicit notion
that the courtier also risks destabilizing his identity, including his
masculine identity.42 This is no more apparent than when we consider how a
courtier’s agency is compromised by the act of sprezzatura, an act of
self-fashioning that is dependent on the will of others. Ottaviano addresses
this very process head on. He states that elegance of dress, along with
singing, dancing, and general enjoyment, change a man and make him effeminate.
Relevant here, this effeminacy has consequences not only on a courtier’s
identity but also on state security: I should say that many of those
accomplishments that have been attributed to our Courtier (such as dancing,
merrymaking, singing, and playing) were frivolities and vanities and, in a man
of any rank, deserving of blame rather than of praise; these elegances of dress,
devices, mottoes, and other such things as pertain to women and love (although
many will think the contrary), often serve to merely make spirits effeminate,
to corrupt youth, and to lead to a dissolute life; whence it comes about that
the Italian name is reduced to opprobrium, and there are but few who dare, I
will not say to die, but even to risk any danger. (4.4, p. 210) anzi direi che
molte di quelle condicioni che se gli sono attribuite, come il danzar,
festeggiar, cantar e giocare, fossero leggerezze e vanità, ed in un omo di
grado più tosto degne di biasimo che di laude; perché queste attillature,
imprese, motti ed altre tai cose che appartengono ad intertenimenti di donne e
d’amori, ancora che forse a molti altri paia il contrario, spesso non fanno
altro che effeminar gli animi, corrumper la gioventù e ridurla a vita
lascivissima; onde nascono poi questi effetti che ’l nome italiano è ridutto in
obbrobrio, né si ritrovano se non pochi che osino non dirò morire, ma pur
entrare in uno pericolo. (4.4, pp. 367–68) Ottaviano’s claim marks a critical
shift from the other cited passages. It is the only time in the Courtier where
clothing (along with other courtly behaviors) is described as rendering men
effeminate. In Book One, distasteful grooming habits are practiced by those men
who “wish” that they were women, and in Book Two, foreign dress beckons
military defeat. In Book Four, clothing causes effeminacy, and the effeminized
man loses wars. The passage is not only a significant moment in the Courtier,
it is an important moment in the history ofeffeminacy. To my knowledge, it is
one of the earliest Renaissance texts that figures clothing and other behaviors
as the agents that cause effeminacy leading eventually to military defeat.43
Ottaviano’s brief interjection on clothing would have provided the attentive
listener with (again) some troubling fashion advice. The passage forms what I
call Ottaviano’s paradox: on the one hand, Ottaviano affirms that elegant dress
may be necessary to ingratiate the prince and engender virtue, while on the
other, he warns that dress has deleterious effects, effeminizing the courtier’s
soul and bringing shame to him and Italy. If the courtier performs his
requisite duties (which include ingratiating the prince with dress, dancing,
music, etc.), he cannot escape losing his own masculinity. It is unclear how
the reader is to navigate this paradox. Castiglione may have been genuinely
concerned with the possible effeminizing effects of dress, or there may have
been some irony in placing these words in the mouth of Ottaviano.44 Ottaviano
had, in fact, been derided for his unusual dress in the earlier version of the
book known as the seconda redazione (written 1520–21).45 Moreover, Castiglione
was himself quite the fashionista. His letters tell us that he was deeply
concerned with his own dress, both at court and during military operations.
Many of his letters to his mother refer to his need for appropriate clothing,
and on some occasions, he refers to this clothing as necessary for exercises
carried out in a context of war.46 The fact that Castiglione has left us
extensive writing on dress from the period raises hermeneutical questions about
Ottaviano’s statement that courtly dress and activities “make spirits
effeminate and corrupt youth” and eventually lead to the shame of Italy. Surely
the author was not suggesting that winning wars merely a matter of changing
clothing. I propose that Castiglione was less interested in changing the
garments and grooming habits of Italians than he was in investigating how the
rhetoric about aesthetics functioned in defining identity and motivating social
groups. His book explores how courtly practices, including dress, determined
the boundaries of an elite ruling class, but so too does it explain how the
language used to discuss these practices could shift the values added to such
practices. Thus, Ottaviano’s paradox—where the courtier is virtuous if he
ingratiates the prince but loses his virtue of masculinity by doing so—is in
effect a masterful demonstration of sprezzatura. When Ottaviano utters his
words, he not only explains how courtliness denigrates a man for a virtuous
cause, he also reveals how a courtier can assume an intentional and masculine
participation in this virtuous cause. He derides the very courtly practices
that he himself performs and then engenders them with virtue.47 By showing that
a courtier sacrifices his masculinity on the altar of state security, Ottaviano
offers a reclamation of masculinity for any courtier. The trick is, however,
that the courtier must be willing to decry the very practices that make him a
courtier in order to claim this masculinity. Ottaviano states, in effect, “I
criticize the grooming of men as effeminizing, but I will also perform these
acts for the larger good of pleasing the prince.”By way of a conclusion, we
will turn to this same moment in the second manuscript edition, or seconda
redazione.48 Here Ottaviano’s passage appears in Book Three (the final book of
the manuscript). It is spoken by Gasparo and, most importantly, the condemned
effeminate activities are not routine courtly behavior, but belong to young
courtiers in love: Do you not believe that the young would be doing a much more
praiseworthy thing if they were to concentrate on arms to defend the patria,
their own honor, and the dignity of Italy, rather than to go around with their
hair all coiffed, perfumed, and strolling through the neighborhoods with their
eyes glued to the windows above without considering anything in the world except
their own priorities? And what purpose do these devices and mottoes and
elegances of dress serve other than vanity and frivolity? And what is the point
of dancing at balls and masquerades as well as games and music (and other such
things that you praise so much)? What do these things offer other than to give
birth to the effeminizing of men’s spirits as well as corrupting and reducing
youth to a delicious and lascivious life? Whence, as Signor Ottaviano so well
says, it comes about that the effect of all this is that the Italian name is
reduced to opprobrium, and one cannot find a man who dares, I will not say die,
but even to risk any danger. And all of this is the cause of women.
(Translation mine) Non credete voi che li giovani facessero opera più laudevole,
se attendessero all’arme per difender le patrie e l’onor loro e la dignità de
Italia, che andar con le zazare ben pettinate, profumati, passeggiando tutto dì
per le contrade, con gli occhi alle finestre senza pensare cosa alcuna di
quelle che più gl’importano? e queste imprese e motti et attillature insomma a
che servano altro che a vanità e leggiereze? e danzare e ballare e mascare e
giuochi e musiche e tai cose, fatte con tanta diligenzia e che voi tanto
laudate, infine che partoriscono altro che effeminare gli animi, corrompere la
gioventù e ridurla a vita deliziosa e lascivissma? Onde, come ben talor dice el
signor Ottaviano, ne nascono poi questi effetti che il nome italiano è ridutto
in obrobrio, né si truova uomo che osi non dirò morire, ma purentrare in un
pericolo. E di tutto questo sono causa le donne. The manuscript passage, like
that of the final 1528 version of the Courtier quoted earlier, tells us that
men’s dancing, games, music, and elegance of dress are dangerous to Italian
sovereignty. However, there are important differences between these two textual
examples. In the seconda redazione, dressing and music, etc. are presented as
the vices specific to young lovers. This characterization of lovers fits
clearly within Gasparo’s stated distaste for any action that involves the
courtship of women. Additionally, Gasparo explains the relationship between
warfare andeffeminate behaviors in simple terms of time allocation; men should
choose to spend time fighting to “defend their homelands,” but instead they
focus on love. Thus, when he states that dancing, masquerades, and games
effeminize men’s spirits, it follows that this causal effect is at least in
part due to the fact that men are busied with these activities and not
fighting. When the author adapted the passage for the final version, he changed
not the effeminizing practices but the cast of the shameful men, and he removed
the phrase that explains that these practices simply took up too much of the
courtiers’ time. In Courtier Book Four, the list of mottoes, devices, dancing,
and dress are not described as what courtiers do to woo women, but rather, they
are general courtly practices. Indeed, Ottaviano mentions the previous
evenings’ discussions and takes aims at these activities and practices that are
described by Ludovico and Fregoso in Books One and Two.49 These courtly
practices were not performed to attract only the attention of women, but also
(and primarily) of men; in particular, these practices attracted the attention
of other courtiers and, most importantly, the prince. What Ottaviano offers his
peers is the chance to reclaim a masculinity of purpose, even while operating
in a gender paradox where dress and acts necessarily effeminized the men who
pursued this purpose. Ottaviano reclaimed courtly masculinity by denigrating
the necessary courtly practices and dress that enabled the courtier to pursue
virtue. His accusatory rhetoric allows the disempowered male to assert
masculinity even in the performance of dependency. Castiglione’s book enacted
the same performance as Ottaviano’s utterance; the book as a whole takes aim at
dress as effeminizing while explaining that such dress typified the ideal,
masculine, and virtuous courtier. These accusations of the practices of men
also served the larger function of the Courtier’s normativizing project, where
the “few men” who were responsible for the shame of Italy might be refashioned
into warrior heroes. The nagging question is just how aesthetics figured into
this degradation of Italy. It is doubtful that Castiglione (or any other
Renaissance writer) would suggest that changing one’s ruff les and sleeves
would be the key to defeating the French or the Habsburg empire, but why, then,
we should ask, did writers frame military defeat in terms of silks and ruff
les? It would seem that we still have much to learn about how aesthetics and
militarism functioned in the Renaissance projects of social control.Notes 1
Corio, Storia di Milano, 2: 1398–99: “il duca se misse una corazina, quale cavò
dicendo parebbe troppo grosso, puoi se vestì una veste di raso cremesino
fodrata di sibelline e cinto con uno cordono di seta morella la biretta.” 2
McCall, “Brilliant Bodies,” 472. 3 Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, Vol. 3, Book 15,
186. 4 Currie, Fashion, Introduction. 5 See, for example, Simons,
“Homosociality and Erotics,” Currie, Fashion, Biow, On the Importance, and
Eisenbichler, “Bronzino’s Portrait.” 6 Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, 3. On
masculinity and dress in the Courtier see Quondam, Tutti i colori and Currie,
Fashion.7 All Italian quotes of the Cortegiano are from the Garzanti edition.
All English quotes are from the Javitch edition (2002) of the Singleton
translation. 8 Najemy, “Arms and Letters.” The hierarchy of arms is challenged
by Ludovico himself, who states that letters are the “true and principal”
adornment of the courtier. Moreover, Bembo argues that arms are actually the
adornment of letters; see ibid., 211. 9 Castiglione’s references to France
change from manuscript to print edition. In one of the earliest manuscript
editions of the book, he calls those who do not appreciate letters, barbari.
Pugliese, “The French Factor.” 10 For a discussion of Machiavelli’s position on
arms and letters see Najemy, “Arms and Letters,” 207–08. For a later discussion
on the danger of letters to arms see Stefano Guazzo’s “Del paragone dell’arme
et delle lettere” in which an interlocutor suggests that some people fear that
letters “si snervassero gli huomini Martiali,” Stefano Guazzo, Dialoghi
piacevoli (Piacenza: Pietro Tini, 1587), 167. 11 See Albury, Castiglione’s
Allegory, 65. 12 Ludovico is here discussing the influence of literature on war
rather than the study of combat manuals. On Urbino’s master at arms, Piero
Monte, who published the “first significant combat manual ever to be printed,”
see Anglo, The Martial Arts, 133. 13 My reading on this passage differs from
Najemy’s, which argues that Ottaviano, in Book Four, implicates the courtiers
as the few bad men, responsible for Italy’s decline. 14 In Book One, Gasparo states
that music and other “vanities” “effeminar gli animi” of men. Quondam’s
published edition of Manuscript (L) Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana,
Ashburnhamiano 409 shows that Castiglione originally phrased his concerns
differently, without using the word “effeminize”: “e cosi fatte illecebre
enervare gli animi.” Quondam, Il libro del Cortegiano. 15 On hegemonic
masculinity, see Connell, Masculinities, 77. 16 Although warfare is typically
shown to be endangered by courtly behaviors, there are some moments in which
the court is shown to be negatively affected by the presence of warriors; see
Book I.17. 17 Newton, Fashion, 1–5; Blanc, “From Battlefield to Court.” 18 On
effeminacy in the Courtier see Milligan, “The Politics of Effeminacy.” On
effeminacy in the study of pre-modern texts, see Halperin, “How to Do.” 19
Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 125–58. 20 Olson, Masculinity and Dress; see
chapter four in particular. 21 See Blanc, “From Battlefield to Court” for a
discussion about several fourteenth-century chronicles that blame a sudden
change in dress for battles and plague. See also Muzzarelli, Breve storia;
Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market; Sebregondi, “Clothes and Teenagers”;
Muzzarelli, Guardaroba Medievale. 22 Francesco Pontano, along with his brother Ludovico
Pontano, was a professor at the university of Siena. On Francesco Pontano see
Marletta, “L’umanista Francesco Pontano.” 23 “Il quale tanto più è vituperoso
in loro in quanto debbono in tutto essere rimoti da ogni vano e superfluo
ornamento, s’eglino debbono e vogliono esser detti veri maschi.” Pontano,
“Dello integro e perfetto stato,” 22. All translations are mine unless
otherwise noted. 24 “Li quali non minor tempo e industria mettono raschiamenti
di coteche e scialbamenti di gote e di collo e de’ vari pelatogi e
scorticatogi, e di bionde e d’acque sublimate e stillate, che si facciano le
femine.” Ibid. 25 “Talché oggidì l’uomo che fu fatto presso che pari agli
angeli ’e di sotto a’ porci e a qualunque altro sporco e vile animale.” Ibid.
On dress and gender confusion in early modern England see the essays by Epstein
and Straub, Body Guards. 26 See Sebregondi, “Clothes and Teenagers,” which
shows how preachers such as San Bernardino da Siena complained about the erotic
elements of tight hose and short doublets. Ibid., 31 cites Sermon 37 of
Prediche di San Bernardino vol. 3. 27 Sebregondi, “Clothes and Teenagers,” 36.
28 Not all writers condemned male dress. Leonardo Fiorivanti states that the
only way to make this “miserable world” better is to dress well and eat well,
and that young men dress extravagantly and then change their dress when they
reach the age to marry and have children. Fiorivanti, Dello specchio, Book I,
chapter 9, 27. On the other hand, Anton Francesco Doni (1513–74) and Scipione
Ammirato (1531–1601) both criticize military failings while discussing men’s
dress and aesthetics. In language that is contrary to modern notions of
military discipline, writers such as Pio De Rossi (1581–1667) suggested that
the most courageous warriors were slovenly, dirty, and untidy. De Rossi,
Convito morale, 42. On Rossi see Biondi, “Il Convito.” This mechanism functions
similarly to the “hypocritical rhetoric of self-censorship” identified by Carla
Freccero in that an utterance pretends to do one thing while performing a
different function. Freccero, “Politics and Aesthetics,” 271. On scholarly
interpretations of sprezzatura see Javitch; Rebhorn, Courtly Performances; and
Berger Jr., The Absence of Grace. On the “more compelling figure” see Rebhorn,
Courtly Performances, 38; on the virility of sprezzatura see Berger, Absence of
Grace, 11. I borrow the term “manly masquerade” from Finucci, The Manly
Masquerade. How Renaissance writers characterized the pre-dressed (naked) man
as masculine or effeminate is discussed by Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, ch. 3.
According to Berger, Castiglione casts an idyllic, unreal version of Urbino.
Berger describes how Castiglione discloses to the reader his process of casting
Urbino as unreal in a “metapastoral” gesture Berger, Absence of Grace, 119–78.
On this passage see Quondam, Questo povero cortegiano and Milligan, “The
Politics of Effeminacy.” See Currie, Fashion; Paulicelli, Writing Fashion. On
Classical examples see Williams, Roman Homosexuality. Castiglione himself cites
an ancient anecdote of Darius III, King of Persia (336–330 b.c.), told by Q.
Curtius Rufus, Historiorum Alexandri Magni III, 6. For Renaissance examples see
Lando, Brieve essortatione, which states that the Syrians have dominated the
Italians through their perfumes, and Lampugagni claims that Italians follow
French fashions like monkeys, Della carrozza da nolo. Lampugnani also complains
of women who seek to “dis-Italianize” themselves by adopting foreign fashions.
De Leon, Discorsi novi, published in Spanish in 1605. “E, quando in Italia
cominciarono a vestirsi all’usanza di Francia, molti ciò mirando con prudenza
temerono, che i Francesi havessero a mal trattargli; e non s’ingannò l’anima
loro, come fra pochi giorni mostrò il successo. Di modo che la natione, che
lascia la sua foggia di vestito antica, e naturale per imitare quella de’ Regni
stranieri, ben può temere, che Dio non la castighi con guerre, persecutione,
rubamenti, e mali trattamenti che le faranno fatti da coloro, i cui habiti ella
va imitando,” 628. Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue, 54. On Ottaviano’s
interjection see Rebhorn, Courtly Performances, Albury, Castiglione’s Allegory,
and Quondam, Questo povero cortegiano. Berger does not characterize courtliness
as weak or effeminizing; he instead states that the successful performance of
sprezzatura demonstrates a certain virile mastery. Berger, Absence of Grace,
1–12. In his “Education of Boys” Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini suggests that
clothing can make boys soft and effeminate. He particularly warns against
feathers and silk. Piccolomini, “The Education of Boys,” 71. Basilio Ponce de
Leon, Discorsi (Italian Translation 1614) suggests that clothing makes spirits
effeminate and soft “Legislatori antichi giudicarono così (e la isperienza lo
insegna) che non tanta delicatezza di vestiti si assottigliano gli animi, e di
virile, e forti divengono bassi effeminate e molli,” 626. Some assert that
Ottaviano’s response might be due to his “republican” leanings. This seems to
be overstated given that Ottaviano was the nephew of Guidobaldo de Montefeltro,
spent much of his childhood at the Urbino court, and was himself a prince of
Sant’Agata Feltria. In response to how a courtier should dress, Federico
responds “Voi lasciate una sorte de abiti che se usa, e pur non si contengano
tra alcuni di questi che voi avete ricordati, e sono quegli del signor
Ottaviano.” Castiglione, Seconda redazione, II.26, 110.46 See, for example,
letters 29 and 30. Castiglione, Le lettere, Ottaviano’s censoring of courtly
dress follows Carla Freccero’s analysis of “’hypocritical’ rhetoric of
self-censorship,” in that it is as much about establishing identity groups as
it is about a sincere rebuke of argument. Freccero, “Politics and Aesthetics,”
271. 48 For a useful review of the manuscript revisions to the text, see
Pugliese, Castiglione’s “The Book of the Courtier”, 15–24. 49 “Estimo io
adunque che ’l cortegiano perfetto di quel modo che descritto l’hanno il conte
Ludovico e messer Federico, possa esser veramente bona cosa e degna di laude; non
però simplicemente né per sé, ma per rispetto del fine al quale po essere
indirizzato” (4.4) Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Nicola Longo,
367.Bibliography Albury, W.R. Castiglione’s Allegory: Veiled Policy in the ‘The
Book of the Courtier’. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Anglo, Sydney. The Martial Arts
of Renaissance Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Berger Jr.,
Harry. The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance
Courtesy Books. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Biondi, Albano.
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‘Cortegiano’:2 – un modello europeo. Edited by Adriano Prosperi, 93–112. Rome:
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Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Blanc, Odile. “From Battlefield to
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Koslin and Janet E. Snyder, 157–72. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Castiglione, Baldassar. The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation. An
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novi sopra tutti li evangelij della quaresima. Translated by Ottavio Cerruto.
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materie militari. Venice: Gueriglij, 1639. Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Bronzino’s
Portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere.” Renaissance and
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Kristina Straub, eds. Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Ambiguity. New
York: Routledge, 1991.Finucci, Valeria. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity,
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universale. Venice: Sessa, 1583. Freccero, Carla. “Politics and Aesthetics in
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Costabissara: Colla, 2007. Rebhorn, Wayne. Courtly Performances: Masking and
Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Detroit: Wayne State
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Men Wore in FifteenthCentury Florence.” In The Premodern Teenager: Youth in
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Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, How the sausage and carne battled for gastronomic and social prestige in
Renaissance literature and culture Laura GiannettiIn Girolamo Parabosco’s
comedy La fantesca (published in 1556) the sexual activities of a maid, the
young cross-dressed Pandolfo who impregnated his young lover Giacinta, were humorously
referred to with a culinary metaphor, that of inserting meat in the oven:
People, the female servant has become a male in two houses at once as you have
seen. And she has shown that she is a better cook than a housekeeper, because
she knew better how to put the meat (carne) in the oven than make beds or sweep
the house. (V, c. 94)1 The Italian word carne with its multiple meanings of
meat, f lesh, and the masculine sexual organ commonly served as a tool for
clever word play in Italian literature from the Decameron to the Canti
carnascialeschi and enjoyed a renaissance of its own in sixteenth-century comic
prose, poetry, letters, and everyday language.2 The early modern dietary corpus
reinforced the religious association between eating meat, gluttony, and lust.
All nutritious food, in particular meat, created more blood than needed by the
body; therefore the surplus translated into an extra production of sperm, which
in turn fueled the sex drive.3 A traditional view of the link between gluttony
and lust holds that biblical accounts of the Fall considered gluttony the
opening door to lust, although the Garden of Eden’s transgression consisted in
eating the forbidden fruit, a fig or an apple according to different versions,
and not eating immoderately. Many medieval theologians and then Pope Gregory
the Great, a medieval doctor of the Church, defined gluttony mainly as a desire
to stimulate the palate with delicacies, while also exceeding what was
considered necessary for basic nourishment and health.4 But then he drew a more
precise connection between the two sins and differentorgans of the body: “when
the first (stomach) fills up excessively, inevitably, the other are also
excited to sin.”5 Gluttony excites the senses and therefore can carry the sinner
to sins of the f lesh. In Dante’s Inferno, and following Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics, incontinence (of desire) was the link between gluttony and
lust. Paolo and Francesca in Canto V are among the “peccator carnali, / che la
ragion sommettono al talento” [Inf. 5.38–39]). Although for Dante gluttony was
a sin worse than lust, the common vision at his time was that eating
immoderately and lusting were both sins of carne, the f lesh.6 If early
theologians’ readings discussed gluttony without referring to a particular
food, it was meat that later became the preferred target of moralists and came
to be associated with ideas of lasciviousness and lust. Traditionally, animals
such as the boar, pig, wolf, and/or ape in late medieval and early Renaissance
visual and prescriptive sources represented luxuria7 and gluttony, as
inextricably and negatively bonded together.8 Sixteenth-century prints,
paintings, broadsheets, and emblem books kept those associations alive in
society and culture even as the associations between those animals and gluttony
or voracity often surpassed their association with luxuria.9 Sins of the f lesh
were often symbolized as sins of carne in the sense of meat.10 But before
delving into the imaginative perceptions and symbolism attributed to meat-eating
it is advisable to recall brief ly what the lived practice and experience of
consuming meat in medieval and Renaissance Italy involved. Symbol of power and
violence, masculinity and aggressive sexuality, luxury and abundance, meat was
often associated with the aristocracy and its lifestyle.11 As Massimo Montanari
and Alberto Capatti have shown, in the Middle Ages the noble table first saw a
triumph of big game gained through hunting but later the preference was
directed more toward smaller game such as pheasants, quails, and/or farmed
animals, like geese and capons. The new court nobility of the twelfth century
no longer identified with the warriors’ taste for big, bloody game.12 Gross and
nutritious meat was now left to peasants, usually in the form of pork. City
dwellers also enjoyed the meat of the pig in the form of sausages but strove to
differentiate themselves from the rural inhabitants by buying and eating veal,
beef, and small birds. Although Fernand Braudel famously called “carnivore” the
period in Europe between 1350 and 1550,13 Italians of the period had other food
resources and could not, and often did not care to eat meat every day.
Nonetheless, eating meat, and especially good meat, remained an indicator of
social elevation and offered the promise of good health. The preference of the
new court nobility for small birds and farmed animals received the approval of
contemporary doctors, who exalted birds as a source of exceptional nutritional
value, with the caveat that it was best suited to an aristocratic diet.14 It
was not just the symbolic and nutritional value that was considered important;
in dietetic tracts partridges and quails excelled also for their delicate taste
and their lightness. But not all agreed. Vatican librarian and gastronome
Platina (1421–81) was more open to the pleasures of eating a much wider range
of meats, demonstrating more catholic tastes. His De Honesta Voluptate et
Valetudine(first Italian edition 1487) is full of numerous recipes that
included poultry, organ meats, fowl, pork, and sausages. Still much like many
doctors, cooks, and courts stewards, he agreed that meat in general was a food
healthier than others and had an elevated nutritional value.15 The reputation
of meat as a primary source of nourishment and good health continued in the
sixteenth century, and was particularly strong among surgeons, medical
practitioners, and professors of “secrets.” A Spanish “surgeon and empirical
doctor”16 who lived in Rome, Giovan Battista Zapata (ca. 1520–86), claimed that
all meat products sustained good health, as long as they were roasted with a
rosemary oil and a mixture of other herbs and spices, and were accompanied by
good wine.17 Zefiriele Tommaso Bovio (1521–1609)—a Veronese nobleman and lawyer
who later became a medical practitioner—wrote a treatise at the end of the
sixteenth century against the “medici rationali ” who wanted to impose a strict
meatless diet on sick people. He claimed that doctors knew that eating good
meat and drinking wine had the power to restore health but kept the secret to
themselves for fear of losing fees from patients who recovered from illness and
stayed healthy eating meat.18 The nutritional value of meat was thought to rest
on the idea that meat could transform into the substance, the very carne, of
the human body. The steward Domenico Romoli affirmed in his cooking manual that
those who invented the eating of meat did it both for taste but especially for
health reasons: they knew that “more than any other food, it is meat (carne)
that makes f lesh (carne).”19 In his view eating meat meant literally giving
nutriment to human f lesh.20 Renouncing meat, however, was a crucial
requirement for early Christian hermits and monks. It represented unequivocally
the mortification of the f lesh and contempt for the body, although numerous
sources show that meat-eating in many monasteries was fairly normal. In
general, the suspicion of meat running through Christian texts in the period
appeared to be based on an association of the eating of meat with fears of the
f lesh and sexual incontinence. San Bernardino’s preaching in the fifteenth
century aggressively linked meat consumption with unruly sexuality and was
particularly severe on policing widows and youths’ eating practices. He
represented the extreme side of a widespread religious censure of culinary
pleasures and the sense of taste, emphasizing the presumed dangers of uniting
desire for meat and unruly sexuality.21 Outside of the monastic world,
religious proscriptions on food dictated that for periods of fasting, such as
Lent, abstinence from animal f lesh, meat, poultry, and eggs, was mandatory to
mortify the body and its appetites. And Lent was not just the forty days that
followed Carnival; every Friday and many vigils during the year were Lenten
days when meat was proscribed as well.22 How much weight did this religious
censure or the ideology of the ascetic abstention from eating meat actually
have? Apparently not much in everyday life or culture. The desire for meat,
originally condemned as gluttony and a carnal practice that took one away from
the life of the spirit, was often identified in theliterary imagination with
positive expressions of sexual desire. The longstanding Christian prohibition
against eating meat associated gluttony and illicit sexuality, and the Galenic
dietary theory reinforced this, claiming that the body of the meat eater would
have a surplus of blood and thus an increased sex drive. Literary sources
valorized the gastronomic desirability and sexual powers promised by eating
meat. Slowly but surely the sexual/alimentary play on carne as food and f lesh,
positively portrayed in imaginative literature and culture of the sixteenth
century, battled successfully against earlier moralistic discourses insisting
on restraint of the body and its instincts.23 The emerging cultural war of the
period opposed a disciplining view of the body and posited the increasing
importance of pleasure and taste in both life and literature, with the
enjoyment of meat, carne and f lesh, at their very center.Appetite for meat in
literature Returning to the courtly taste for birds in the Renaissance, the
link between eating birds and the lustful consequences that followed was
visible in literary texts, fresco cycles, and dietary discourses, albeit with
different meanings. While Dantesque Inferno punishment scenes in late medieval
Italian dietary treatises and church fresco cycles dwelt on the negative
consequences of eating birds or eating too much meat, literary texts presented
a competing discourse. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, novelle collections such
as those by Niccolò Sacchetti (ca. 1332–1400), Giovanni Sercambi (1348–1424),
Anton Francesco Grazzini (1503– 84), and Niccolò Bandello (1485–1561), and many
satirical and licentious poems, all exploited the phallic meat metaphor to
elicit laughter as well as sexually allusive word-play.24 Boccaccio made clear
in his Conclusione to the Decameron that the obscene language he had used came
from everyday usage and included words from the culinary world: It is not more
shameful that I have written words that men and women spell out continuously
such as hole, peg, mortar, pestle, sausage, and mortadello. Dico che più non si
dee a me esser disdetto d’averle scritte che generalmente si disdica agli
uomini e alle donne di dir tutto dì foro e caviglia e mortaio e pestello e
salsiccia e mortadello. Many contemporary tales depict adulterous lovers or
lovers-to-be enjoying meals with game, fowl, and poultry in preparation for the
carnal pleasures to come. The “carne” metaphor to designate the male member had
a notable literary tradition. Giovanni Sercambi’s Novelliere (written ca.
1390–1402) presents many instances of the metaphorical/sexual use of the word
carne, in some cases distinguishing between “raw” and “cooked” meat to indicate
the male sexual organ and actual meat.25 In the novella “Frate Puccio e Madonna
Alisandra,” Pseudo-Sermini26 plays on the double meanings of food and sex and
the pleasureof tasting the meat and its f lavor.27 The metaphor of “fresh meat”
to indicate the male sexual organ continued unabated in the sixteenth century
as seen in a laughing novella by the Sienese Pietro Fortini (ca. 1500–ca. 1562)
where a lusty friar offers a pound of “carne fresca” for free to a young woman
with the excuse that religion does not let him enjoy meat that day. The novella
naturally ends with the friar being beaten by the woman’s husband and with the
laughter of the brigata listening to the story.28 The offer of an attractive
bird for a meal often opened the way to a carnal relationship. In one
sixteenth-century novella by Grazzini, the priest Agostino, enamored of his
parishioner Bartolomea, decided to entice her with the offer of a large and
plump duck. Bartolomea, who was a woman of “easy taste” (buona cucina), let him
inside her house and made love to him with the hope of gaining the duck. But
the early return of her husband allowed the priest to escape with his duck,
leaving her literally empty handed. Agostino bragged cleverly that she would
never find another duck, or another member, so large and plump. But, as often
happens in Italian novelle, women were cleverer than their lovers. Bartolomea
was no exception; when Agostino came back with a duck and two capons to make
peace and love again, she got her revenge. With the help of her husband she
beat him and sent him away barely able to walk, keeping the birds to enjoy with
her husband.29 In this novella, birds carried out their multiple roles: they
were an enticing and valued meat, able to stimulate the senses at many levels
but also able to transform gluttony and lust into laughter and pleasure. In
sixteenth-century comedies, birds such as partridges and pheasants could serve
as domestic aphrodisiacs, for both old men and young. In Donato Giannotti’s
comedy Il vecchio amoroso (written ca. 1533–36), old Teodoro, in love with the
young female slave his son has brought home from Sicily, organizes a banquet
where the food includes delicacies like fat capons, birds (starne), and
pigeons, served with wine and sweets, in order to prepare him for the rigors of
lovemaking.30 The meat of birds was believed to arouse lust because it was seen
as hot and moist; for this reason Messer Nicomaco, in the comedy Clizia, plans
to eat a half bloody pigeon before his night of love with the young Clizia.
Perhaps because of this popular belief, or perhaps because it was the most
prized and elegant type of meat, Pietro Aretino, in one of his letters from
Venice in 1547, invites the painter Titian to a dinner at his house with a
famous courtesan, Angela Zaffetta, promising that the main dish to be served
would be roasted pheasants.31 Adulterous lovers with their lascivious dinners
were the protagonists of a great number of plays and novella. Some specific
language used in sixteenthcentury poetry, dialogues, and comedies also
suggested that the desire for meat was closely connected to the practice of
sodomy.32 A type of meat that was used euphemistically to signify sodomy,
either with men or women, was the young male goat or “capretto.” Pietro Aretino
in his Ragionamento (1534) used the masculine gender and the diminutive form of
“capretto” to indicate the act of sodomy with a nun, in obvious contrast with
the word “capra,” the adult goat used to refer to vaginal sex. In describing a
moment at an orgy in a convent, Aretino exploited the culinary metaphor of meat
to its fullest: Tired, at the first morsel of the goat he asked for the young
goat . . . I tell [you] that as soon as he got it, he stuck inside
the meat knife and madly enjoyed seeing it in and out . . . stucco al
primo boccone della capra, dimandò il capretto [. . .] dico che
ottenuto il capretto, e fittoci dentro il coltello proprio da cotal carne,
godea come un pazzo del vederlo entrare e uscire. (Emphasis mine) 33 Matteo
Bandello similarly narrates a tale about Niccolò Porcellio, humanist, poet, and
historian at the court of Francesco Sforza in Milan, and well known for his
notorious passion for young boys. Bandello expresses Porcellio’s desire with
the culinary euphemism: he loved “la carne del capretto molto più che altro
cibo” (he always preferred the meat of the young male goat much more than any
other food). In his final confession, he justified his vice as the most natural
thing in the world because it corresponded to his natural taste, and it was a
“buon boccone”: Oh, oh, Reverend Father, you did not know how to interrogate
me. Playing with young boys is for me more natural than eating or drinking to a
man . . . go away as you do not know what a good morsel is . . .
oh, oh padre reverend, voi non mi sapeste interrogare. Il trastullarmi con i
fanciulli a me è più naturale che non è il mangiar a il ber a l’uomo
. . . andate andate che voi non sapete che cosa sia un buon
boccone.34 Porcellio insisted that his sexual behavior—the preference for young
male goat meat—was as natural as it was natural to eat and drink for humans.
His narrator Bandello explained first that Porcellio was forced to marry by the
Duke in order to soften the opinion people had of him as someone who always preferred
“the meat of young goat.”35 The food metaphor, so widely employed in the
novella, was indeed perfect to address his sexual desire as a manifestation of
taste, which can vary according to different people. Contemporary literature of
the Land of Cockaigne included fantastic maps of Cuccagna [Cockaigne in Italy]
where meat, in all of its incarnations, for rich and for poor, was center
stage, while the theatrical Battaglia fra Quaresima e Carnevale regularly ended
with the victory of Carnival and meat eating.36 The carne of the lascivious
goat and luxurious hot birds were generally enjoyed by the rich. Yet it was the
meat of the more humble pig, in the form of sausages that became dominant in
sixteenth-century literature as a food easily conducive to sexual play,
gastronomical delights, and a festive world.The triumph of the sausage The
Allegory of Autumn by Niccolò Frangipane, a follower of Titian, is a remarkable
painting displaying a lascivious satyr who sticks one finger into a split melon
and with his other hand grabs a sausage on top of a table full of other autumn
produce. In the cultural imaginary and in the common understanding of the
period, that sausage in hand proclaimed with a perverse smile that it was known
as a type of meat that promised and was well suited for indulgence, alimentary
and sexual.37 The metaphorical use of the term “salsiccia” was not new. Many
tales in Sercambi’s Novelliere, fifteenth-century carnival songs, and humorous
and popular print allegories of Carnival used the same metaphor associating the
consumption of meat/sausages with the pleasures of the senses, especially
sexual pleasures. In one novella by Sercambi, a libidinous widow living with
her brother, who had not arranged for her to marry again, realizes that there is
a similarity between the sausages her brother brought home and the instrument
with which her dead husband had made her happy. She decides to satisfy “the
need she had of a man” using those sausages as an instrument of pleasure and
consumes them little by little until discovered by her brother. 38 A popular
sixteenth-century print studied by Sara Matthews-Grieco shows an old
lower-class woman selling a sausage during Carnival, just before the time of
Lent, when both meat and sexual intercourse will have to be forgotten. While
Sercambi’s humorous novella does not attack the widow, who is described as
young and naturally deprived of sexual pleasure, the prints and grotesque
portraits studied by Matthews-Grieco, more often cruelly satirize old
lower-class women desirous of sausages. 39 Pork occupied a particular cultural
space in the realm of meat of the time. Far from high-class birds, or
middle-class poultry and veal, the pork sausage was the food of the poor, the
peasant, or at best, the uneducated.40 Sausages, particularly pork sausages,
were a food appealing to taste but otherwise problematic as gross, humid, full
of fat, and unsuited to a delicate stomach—or so claimed several early modern
doctors and apothecaries. Humoral physiology dictated that the f lesh of a hot
and humid animal would be beneficial only to a person with a cold temperament
who needed to adjust his/her complexion: people with predominantly moist/hot
humors should therefore avoid pork.41 Practice was, however, more complex. Some
doctors associated with the Galenic revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries promoted the meat of pig as nutritious and easy to digest, although
more suited to physical workers. In fact, for all the undesirable
characteristics noted, the idea that pork was nourishing and healthful enjoyed
wide circulation in dietaries and medical treatises. From there, it was added
as a significant qualifier to the traditionally unfavorable descriptions of
pigs, and ultimately found its way into comic and burlesque literature, where
it merged with the well-established carnivalesque passion for fat meat and
gastronomical excess. The Galenic revival maintained descriptionsof pork as
gross and humid, but gave more positive press by affirming that it was a
nutritious meat. Indeed, despite these warring visions, the sausage and pork
continued to win their battles in both literature and life.42 Even with their
negative medical and social reputation, sausages had had their partisans in the
gastronomical world for at least two centuries. Platina provided a general and
expected warning against the meat of pork at the beginning of Book VI (“you
will find pork not healthful whatever way you cook it”) but then offered three
recipes for sausages, all derived from maestro Martino: pork liver sausages,
blood sausages, and the range of sausages known as the Lucanica.43 Platina was
more interested in showing how to cook and smoke the meat of pork than in
talking about social suitability. He included an elaborate recipe for roast
piglet stuffed with a mixture of herbs, garlic, cheese, and ground pepper,
beaten eggs, slowly cooked over a grill. At the end of this tempting recipe, he
added the usual medical advice: “The roast piglet is of poor and little
nourishment, digests slowly, and harms the stomach, head, eyes, and liver.”44
While the roast piglet was ostensibly not a fare suitable for higher classes,
Platina’s detailed recipe and the ingredients used meant that the medical
proscriptions against pork were losing ground to the culinary practices of
courts and an emerging gastronomical culture. In a similar way, Marsilio
Ficino, who considered pork a meat more suitable to laborers who already had
pig-like physical features, admitted that dressing pork with expensive and
luxurious spices could transform it into a valuable food.45 Significantly, in
this vein, a testimony by Cristofaro da Messisbugo (late
fifteenth-century–1548), steward at the court of the Este in Ferrara, showed
how dressing up pork and sausages elevated such meat above its common status as
a food prescribed for rustic people. Messisbugo’s cookbook, Banchetti,
composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generale (published in 1549), exalted
the famous “salama da sugo,” still today a renowned Ferrarese specialty. In his
recipe he explained how the less noble parts of pork were mixed together with
expensive spices such as cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon to create a dish that the
Este family appreciated. Apparently, the salama was served especially at
wedding banquets because of the reputed aphrodisiacal quality of its spicy
sauce.46 Sex, pleasure, and taste were clearly winning battles for the
once-humble sausage. The salsiccia, fresh or cured, also took center stage
among a group of bawdy poems on fruit, vegetables, and other humble foods,
authored by three of the most representative poets writing in the bernesque
style, Anton Francesco Grazzini, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543), and Mattio
Franzesi (ca. 1500–ca. 1555). Firenzuola composed a canzone, and Grazzini and
Franzesi capitoli, praising pork sausage for its alimentary and sexual
properties, and demonstrating its social primacy over “superior” foods such as
pheasants and capons. And, as if in a philosophical debate, these poems
regularly elicited long, scholarly, and often obscene prose comments. The
erotic allusions of their verses were clearly associated with the consumption
of meat during Carnival, suggesting both the literal consumption of carne as
meat and of carne as f lesh of a more sexual variety.47 As we have alreadyseen,
pig meat had a mixed reputation because it was considered dangerous on one hand
and nutritious on the other. Imaginative literature built upon medical and
gastronomical culture to produce a more complex vision that allowed
considerable room for ambiguity and ambivalence. Pork never entirely lost its
reputation for promoting debased gluttony and pig-like manners, but it also
gained a more positive reputation as a pleasurable food suitable for both
peasants and upper classes to enjoy, as these poems demonstrate.48 The “Canzone
del Firenzuola in lode della salsiccia,” written between 1534 and 1538 by the
Florentine poet and dramatist,49 boasts of the primacy of his writing on the
sausage and plays on the double erotic sense: “Since no fanciful poet / has
dared yet / to fill his gorge with the sausage” (“poi ch’alcun capriccioso /
anchor non è stato oso / de la salsiccia empirsi mai la gola”).50 He concludes with
an invocation to the canzone itself to go and tell the poets’ friends in
Florence the secrets of this most perfect food.51 Probably written in Rome
while he was a member of the academy known as the Virtuosi52 and followed by an
ironic prose commentary signed by a mysterious Grappa,53 the poem recognizes
its affiliation with the bernesque poets. Yet it humorously affirms that they
deserved an herb crown on their head because they lauded the oven, figs, and
“boiled chestnuts” but not the sausage, “the most perfect food.”54 Firenzuola
presented the pork sausage produced in Bologna as a food worthy of poets but
good also for rich priests and lords, learned men, and beautiful women. He
argued that it had a better reputation than the highest priced meat of the
time, veal. The poem blended sexual innuendos and gastronomical discussion in
its overtly simple description of how to make the sausage. And following the
bernesque tradition, it mocked doctors’ recommendations about when to eat
certain foods and reassured readers that the sausage “is good roasted and
boiled, for lunch or for dinner, before or after the meal”; all these prepositions
suggested different parts of the body and different types of sexual
intercourse.55 Firenzuola then adds what he labels a “beautiful secret”: never
use the sausage during the hot months of summer but wait until August has
passed. According to Aristotelian physiology, men who are already by nature hot
and dry are less potent in the summer when the excessive heat of the season
takes away their sexual force.56 Nonetheless, he argues that even old men who
have lost their heat can be young again thanks to the mighty sausage.57
Finally, and appropriately, for his reportedly polymorphous tastes, Firenzuola
concluded that one could make sausages with “every type of meat,” referring to
all possible sexual practices.58 The sausage’s morphology, then, links it to
the male member and to its features that could be seen both as gastronomic and
sexual: Sausages were ordered from above / to amuse those who were born into
the world / with that grease that often drips from them; and when they are
cooked and swelled / you can serve them in the round dish, although a few today
want them with the split bread. Fur le salsiccia ab aeterno ordinate / per
trastullar chi ne veniva al mondo / con quell’unto che cola da lor spesso; et
quando elle son cotte e rigonfiate, le si mettono in tavola nel tondo. / Altri
son, che le vogliono nel pan fesso, / ma rari il fanno adesso; / che il tondo
inver riesce più pulito, / né come il pan, succia l’untume tutto.59 When a
sausage is cooked and ready to serve, Firenzuola advised, it would be best to
display it on the table “nel tondo” (the round dish and, metaphorically, the
bottom) although others preferred it served with the “pan fesso” (split bread
or, metaphorically again, a woman’s genitals). But there are few who prefer the
latter today, Firenzuola added. As a Florentine, he prefers the domestic
Florentine sausage, large and firm, red and natural, and encased in clean skin.
The metaphors roasted or boiled and the adjectives “tondo” and “ fesso” (round
and split/foolish), refer to sodomitical and heterosexual encounters, while
also alluding to different gastronomical appetites. The poem concludes in an
ecumenical and procreative tone, affirming that the creation of sausages was
intended to give pleasure and utility to everyone, but in the end the good
sausages would always be the reason why men and women were born into this
world.60 Firenzuola’s poem affirms that while the sausage is for everybody and
every taste, gustatory and sexual, when served “after” and roasted it is good
only for upper classes. Like other bernesque poets, he seems eager to assign a
higher social status to this “popular” (and economic) food. In fact, usually it
was roasted fowl and roasted meat that was theoretically reserved for upper
classes. Since he is suggesting sodomy with the reference to roasted meat, that
sexual practice is seen as the nobler activity, although forbidden. Elevating a
lower-class food to a higher status was the perfect metaphor for speaking in
favor of sodomy and introducing social values along with the sexual. What
function did this type of poetic imagery serve in a period when sodomy was a
crime and even the depiction of non-sodomitical sexual acts in an artistic work
such as I Modi proved to be so controversial? It seems likely that images had
more power to move viewers than writings, but in an era of printing
reproduction, cheap copies of poetry, like the one produced in the Vignaiuoli
and Virtuosi circle, could circulate outside an intended audience of
intellectuals and fellow poets. It is therefore difficult to assess the impact
of these texts, but the humor and the metaphorical language dedicated to meat,
vegetables, and fruits may have helped allay the anxiety among authorities,
both religious and civic, about the diffusion and circulation of writings
exalting sodomy.61 The long Capitolo in lode della salsiccia by Anton Francesco
Grazzini, which is followed by an erudite and playful prose commentary by the
same author, extolled the sausage mainly from a gastronomical point of view,
humorously contrasting its attractions with moralizing medical lore, and
interweaving it once again with sexual innuendos.62 Presenting himself as a
knowledgeable gastronome, Grazzini also praised the primacy of the Florentine
sausage, superior to capons, partridges, and all the meat of birds, as well as
to highly prized fish such as lampreys and eels.63 After defining it as a meal
worthy of poets and emperors, and begging Greece and Rome to recognize the
superiority of the sausage made in Florence, Grazzini once again lauded its
colors and its appearance. In addition, much like the cookbooks of his day, he
listed its ingredients: well-ground lean meat and fat from the pig, salt and
pepper, cloves, cinnamon, oranges, and fennel, all stuffed in a case of animal
intestines.64 However, he clarified that his intent was not to explain how to
make it but to laud the sausage’s beauty, taste, and goodness. And citing the
process of stuffing, “imbudellar la carne,” Grazzini took the opportunity to
shift the poem from the culinary to the sexual. He saluted women who always
wanted to have their body full of sausages because they are good and
healthy—another battle won in the same sausage wars.65 The prose Comento sopra
il Capitolo della salsiccia di maestro Niccodemo dalla Pietra al Migliaio, also
authored by Grazzini, makes clear that although women love the sausage, the
double sense is again a reference to sodomy. The “buona carne,” well done, well
cut, and making a good show when displayed in the round dish, once again is a pretext
to laud the male bottom. Furthermore, the view of the tagliere wins over all
the other poetic images (including those taken from fragments of Petrarch’s
poems) such as eyes, hair, breasts, or feet of Beatrice and Laura.66 A long
section of the Comento on the gastronomical virtues of pork begins with a verse
from a sonnet by Petrarch dedicated to the name of Laura: “O d’ogni riverentia
et d’honor degna.” In this line he humorously shifts abruptly from Petrarch’s
words honoring his beloved Laura to the more mundane culinary and sexual
wonders of pork, the only meal worthy of poets and emperors.67 Even Petrarch’s
untouchable Laura takes her blows in the sausage wars. Throughout the long
prose comment on his own poem on the pork sausage, Grazzini attacked Petrarchan
poetry and current medical lore regarding sausages and pork’s meat. The playful
observations on the ability of the sausage to heal every illness—while
maintaining a sexual overtone—reads like a learned medical prescription listing
several herbs and substances used by apothecaries to prepare their confetti,
pills, and tonic drinks.68 Yet Grazzini also made the straightforward culinary
point that Florentine pork and lard, key ingredients in their sausages, were
exceptionally good for roasting and frying as well as the essential ingredient
for making the popular bread with lard called pan unto. The attraction to lard,
the white fat of pork, was echoed in a poem by the author and translator
Lodovico Dolce (1508–68), “Salva la verità, fra i decinove,”69 dedicated to a
gift of wild boar he had received from a friend. This wild pork is defined as
“a magnificent and regal gift” whose rich fatty f lavor “will make Abstinence
die of gluttony and Carnival lick his fingers.” 70 His enthusiasm for lard in
the poem leads to a dream where Dolce witnessed himself, in an Ovidian fashion,
metamorphosed into a succulent sausage, rich with fat dripping from the
extremities of his body.71 Dolce gave the transference theory of Renaissance
doctors a positive spin, since eating pork actually transformed him if not into
the animal itself, into its gastronomical essence and pleasure. Accordingly,
his poem exploited the common ideaof closeness and fratellanza between pigs and
humans in an iconic and paradoxical way that privileged the sausage.72 The
third poem on sausages was written by Mattio Franzesi who dedicated it to a
certain “Caino spenditore,” a friend presumably in charge of food provisioning
in Florence.73 Franzesi employs the language of gastronomy in an amusing pairing
with quotidian language referring to sodomy. The sausage is called “buon
boccon” (excellent morsel) and “boccon sì ghiotto and divino” when it is paired
again with the beloved specialty panunto, declared superior to two famous
upper-class foods, the impepato and marzipan.74 Franzesi, like Dolce, describes
the panunto or slices of bread with sausage inside as a divine and gluttonous
morsel, definitely superior to luxury foods like the beccafico, a fat and fresh
songbird.75 Moreover, the salsiccia does not cost much and can be used in many
different ways to sustain a meal: it can substitute for a salad (i.e., a
woman)76 and priests in particular use it often because they do not need to
cook it but can just warm it up between their hands. All the affirmations in
Franzesi’s poem can be read in a double sense, as gastronomical discussion or
as a metaphorical way of talking about the phallussausage and its pleasures. He
refers with technical precision to the gastronomical side of sausages, even
when metaphorically discussing sexual acts.77 The sausage is better than
prosciutto (both come from pork), when boiled (used with women), and is a good
meal for sauces and “guazzetti ” (sauces). Moreover, all the birds in the world
would be like truff les without pepper and confetti without sugar, if not
accompanied by sausages. A meal with sausages is a meal for taste and pleasure,
not a meal for nourishment. Franzesi then describes its shape, and how to make
a good-tasting, good-smelling sausage, using spices, herbs, and the unique
ingredient for Florentine sausages, fennel. The poem ends with a list comparing
the sausage in the panunto as equal to Florentine gastronomical specialties,
such as the ravigiuolo cheese with grape, cheese with pears, old wine with
stale bread, and others. Exalting a humble subject fitted well with the agenda
of the bernesque poetry that lauded simple foodstuffs and everyday objects. But
privileging sausages over songbirds was clearly not just a rhetorical ploy
because it implied a comparison between a food for rustic people and a luxury
food. Franzesi, like Grazzini before him, contributed in his poem to elevating
the social status of the pork sausage. It was not simply a food “da tinello,”
for poor courtiers used to eating the leftovers of their lord, but a meal
worthy of rich people and important prelates.78 In sum, poets, novellieri, and
dramatists from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries took full advantage
of the possibilities offered by the different meaning inherent in the word carne.
It allowed them to discuss virility, sexual potency, masculinity, and sodomy
under the guise of the gastronomical discourse. The sausage poems fit well with
the constant preoccupation and advice of medical and dietary literature of the
time on how to ensure sexual potency. The novelle discussed sexuality between
men and women, endorsing a decisively masculine and traditional view that
depicted women as lusty and desirous of raw carne,which is able to heal every
illness and satisfy every need. The poems on sausages confirm this hierarchical
vision of sexuality dominated by the mighty phallus. Yet they also endorse a
concept of diverse gastronomical taste, lesso and arrosto, nel tondo or nel
fesso, to offer a variety of views of sexuality that responded to every gusto.
These poems on sausages were written in the cultural circle of the Vignaiuoli
and Virtuosi academies, well known in the period for their substantial corpus
of poetry dedicated to the comparison of fruit and vegetables to sexual organs
and sexual acts. The not-so-covert sexual sense of most of those poems exalted
sodomy, in their praise of peaches or carrots, or sexuality with women in poems
on salads and figs. Poems on the mighty sausage covered all the bases of
sexuality, although with a preference, often openly stated, for male–male
sexuality. Intriguingly, the poetic and linguistic play on carne in the form of
sausage allowed lengthy descriptions of an Italian and Florentine gastronomic
specialty of the time, totally ignoring the negative vision of pigs as
gluttonous, dirty animals presented by dietary literature. Since gluttony was
the quintessential behavior represented by pigs, what better way to reclaim
pork in the sausage wars than to use it to symbolize gastronomical richness and
sexual variety? If sins of the f lesh were often symbolized as sins of carne in
medieval times, now in a perfect reversal the pleasures of the f lesh were
symbolized by the pleasures of eating meat in all of its variety, thanks in
part to these sausage wars. Thus, while a moral and disciplinary vision tried
to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises
of the sixteenth century, a counter-argument advanced playfully in literature
and bernesque poetry presented carne as a metaphor for the pleasures of the
senses.79 The conceptual pairing of gluttony and lust in medieval tradition
began to lose ground to a much more complex world of food, taste, and pleasure,
and the no longer quite so humble sausage led the way.Notes I would like to thank
Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstra for inviting me to contribute to this
volume in honor of Konrad Eisenbichler, a friend and scholar who always
supported my work and my career. The research and writing of this essay took
place when I was a fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the
University of Texas, Austin, in 2016–17. Some of the topics of this essay were
discussed at events at the University of Toronto in 2015 and University of
Melbourne in 2012. Belated thanks to Konrad Eisenbichler and Catherine Kovesi.
This essay is part of my forthcoming book Food Culture and the Literary
Imagination in Renaissance Italy. 1 Girolamo Parabosco, La fantesca, quoted in
Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 143. 2 The popularity and frequency of the word carne
to indicate the male sexual organ was matched in Renaissance literature and
culture by the use of bird terminology to indicate the virile member as well
as, less frequently, the female organ and sexual intercourse. Allen Grieco has
recently catalogued and analyzed the numerous references to birds in imagery
and literary sources and has studied birds and fowl as food to understand the
connection between eating birds and fowl, and sexuality. He has uncovered the
widely shared humoral perception of birds as a “hot” food which tended to
over-stimulateThe sausage wars the senses. In this way he was able to give a
deeper explanation of the theological link between gluttony and lust typical of
the period, pointing out the reason why, in common perception, the consumption
of luxurious and heating food, especially birds, stimulated the sexual
function. According to the taxonomy of the Great Chain of Being, birds belonged
to air and they were hot and humid: when eaten they would transfer their
properties to the body and stimulate carnal appetite. See Grieco, “From
Roosters to Cocks.” Albala, Eating Right, 144–47. Quellier, Gola, 15–16. Cited
in Grieco, “From Roosters to Cocks,” 123. Much later, gluttony was defined as
the consumption of luxury foods, particularly birds. On Dante’s
conceptualization of sins see Barolini, Dante, chapter 4. The Latin word
“luxuria” meant extravagant/excessive desire (for power, food, sex, money,
etc.) and in the Italian form “lussuria” became the word for lust in medieval
Italy. In Inferno “lussuriosi” sinners are those who had excessive love of
others, thus diminishing their love for God. Gluttony is a sin of incontinence
like lust. In medieval bestiary and other iconographic sources especially north
of the Alps gluttony is often represented as a fat man holding a piece of meat
and a glass in his hands and riding a swine or a wolf. Quellier, Gola, 15–23.
For medieval bestiaries see chapter one in Cohen, Animals. In Italy church
frescoes represented gluttons in Hell suffering the tantalic punishment. At the
end of the sixteenth century, in the first edition of Cesare Ripa Iconologia
(without images) Gluttony (Gola) is described as “donna a sedere sopra un porco
perché i porchi sono golosi . . .” and Gourmandize (Crapula) is
identified with a “donna brutta grassa . . .” Iconologia, 111
and 54. This helps to explain, for instance, why the famed preacher San
Bernardino da Siena in his Lenten sermons in fifteenth-century Florence
condemned the desire of Florentine young men for capons and partridges,
claiming they opened the doors to a life of sensual foods and sensual pleasure.
In particular, he linked gluttony to lust and sodomy. Bernardino da Siena, Le
prediche volgari, ed. Ciro Cannarozzi (Pistoia: Tip. A. Pacinotti, 1934), II:
45–46, quoted in Vitullo, “Taste and Temptation,” 106. Montanari, “Peasants,”
179. Montanari and Capatti, La cucina italiana, 76–77. Pheasants and partridges
represented the ideal components of a refined and tasty banquet, possible only
for people with means. Braudel, Capitalism, 129. “Danno ottimo nutrimento,
risvegliano l’appetito, massime a’ convalescenti e sono cordiali. Nuocono a gli
infermi, e massime à quei che hanno la febre e fanno venir tisichi i villani.”
Residing on a high position on the Great Chain of Being, they represented
powerful people and, accordingly, were sternly cautioned against for rustic
people, to whom, according to Pisanelli, they could be dangerous. Pisanelli,
“De beccafichi, Cap. xxvi” in Trattato de’ cibi, 33. Similarly, pheasants and
partridges are responsible for provoking asthma in rustic people (Cap. xxvii
and xxix). In his work, Bartolommeo Sacchi, known as Platina, paid much
attention to the idealistic principle of moderation derived from the Greek and
Roman world, along with his interest in the revival of Epicureanism. Platina,
On Right Pleasure. Eamon, Science, 163. Giovan Battista Zapata, Li maravigliosi
secreti di medecina, et chirurgia, nuovamente ritrovati per guarire ogni sorta
d’infirmità, raccolti dalla prattica dell’eccellente medico e chirurgico Giovan
Battista Zapata da Gioseppe Scientia chirurgico suo discepolo (Venice: Pietro
Deuchino, 1586; 1st ed. Rome, 1577), 37–41, quoted in Scully, “Unholy Feast,”
85. Eamon, Science, 188. Bovio, Flagello. He gives the example of a doctor whose
wife was sick and how he cured her with a diet of French soup, capon, and wine
but could not apply the same treatment to his other patients in fear of losing
business; see 45–46. “più facilmente di carne si faccia carne che di qualunque
altra sorte di cibo.” Romoli, La singolare dottrina; “Delle carni in generale,”
205r. Domenico Romoli (n.d.) previously Laura Giannettiworked as a cook with
the name of Panunto (oiled bread) and then became steward for Pope Julius III.
For poor people and peasants in particular, pork continued to be the meat of
choice; and although it had a negative reputation, in the case of people
occupied in heavy physical work, pork was reputed nourishing and healthful.
Florentine communal statutes of 1322 prohibited innkeepers from serving up
culinary delights because they could attract men and boys and incite them to
commit the unspeakable sin of sodomy. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 159. During
Cosimo the Elder’s regime Florentine Archbishop St. Antonino—in his confessor’s
manual—warned against sloth, excess food, and drink as causes of sodomy.
Toscan, Le Carnaval, vol. I: 190. See Giannetti Ruggiero, “The Forbidden
Fruit,” especially pages 31–33. Later in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the Church allowed consumption of eggs, butter, and cheese during
famines and epidemics. See Gentilcore, Food and Health. One of the most
important representatives of this tendency was the Venetian noble Alvise
Cornaro who wrote the extremely successful Trattato della vita sobria in 1558.
In general, moralists’ writers of the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance
continued to advise against eating food that would produce excessive heating of
the body. The dietetic literature, particularly the influential earlier author
Michele Savonarola and the later Baldassar Pisanelli, supported the restriction
of birds and fowl to particular categories of people held to be more capable of
controlling the passions they induced, such as the powerful and rich or those
needier of stimulation such as the sick and the ailing. Grieco, “From Roosters
to Cocks,” 115. See novella “De Novo Ludo” (Sercambi, Novelliere) available
online at www.classicitaliani. it/sercambi_novelle_08.htm where Ancroia enjoys
her time with the priest: “la donna, come vide Tomeo fuora uscito, preso un
fiasco del buon vino, una tovagliuola, alquanti pani e della carne cotta per
Tomeo, et al prete Frastaglia se n’andò e con lui si diè tutto il giorno
piacere, pascendosi di carne cruda e carne cotta per II bocche . . .”
Apostolo Zeno in the eighteenth century attributed the author name Gentile
Sermini to the two anonymous caudexes containing the novelle. Monica Marchi in
her critical edition of the novelle prefers to use Pseudo-Sermini instead of
the conventional name Gentile Sermini. See Marchi, “Introduzione,” in
Pseudo-Gentile Sermini, Novelle, 10–22. The novelle were written in the first
half of the fifteenth century. “[ . . . ] non altramente fece la
valente madonna Alisandra che, agustandole molto la carne e ‘l savore, per quello
dilettevole giardino, preso insieme d’acordo giornata . . .”
Pseudo-Gentile Sermini, Novelle, xi, 270. Fortini, Le giornate, I, xvi,
296–300. Grazzini (Il Lasca), Le Cene, I: vi, 80–94. Giannotti “Il vecchio
amoroso,” II: i, 40–41. On remedies for impotence, and early modern drama, see
Giannetti, “The Satyr.” “A Tiziano,” in Aretino, Lettere, 67–68. This section
is partially based on Giannetti Ruggiero, “The Forbidden Fruit,” 31–52. See
“Ragionamento Antonia e Nanna,” in Aretino, Sei giornate, 38. “The Roman Porcellio
Enjoys the Trick Played on the Friar in Confession,” in Bandello, Novelle, vi:
125. See the discussion of the tale in Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 181–82. Ibid.,
181. On the battles between Quaresima and Carnival see Ciappelli, Carnevale.
Albala, Eating Right, 168 and 181. The painting is now in the Museo Civico of
Udine. Sercambi, “De vidua libidinosa” in “Appendice,” Novelle inedite, 417–18.
Matthews-Grieco, “Satyr and Sausages.” Several novelle, from Boccaccio to
Sacchetti, related the closeness in everyday life of pigs and humans in rural
and urban areas and the importance of pork for sustenance, but also the
negative perception of pigs and filthy and gross animals. For instance, see
Sacchetti LXX, CII, CXLVI, CCXIV. For Boccaccio see “Calandrino e il porco.”
Already in the Middle Ages, from the perspective of the Great Chain of Being,
pork and the quadrupeds occupied a questionable position—they were not part of
Air like birdsThe sausage wars nor of the Earth but somewhere in between; and
pig in particular occupied one of the lowest position among all quadrupeds.
Grieco, “Alimentazione e classi sociali,” 378–79. Pigs were voracious animals
and, according to the Galenic doctor, eating their fattening meat would
transform a person in a pig, as a later image of Gola as a woman sitting on a
pork would make really explicit. For instance, in the second half of the
sixteenth century, Baldassar Pisanelli advised eating sausages and salami in
moderation, but recognized in them some positive characteristics such as reawakening
of appetite and helping to make drinking more pleasurable. Pisanelli, Trattato
de’ cibi, c. 13. Platina, On Right Pleasure, Book VI, 281. Ibid., 277. Ficino,
Three Books on Life, Book 2, 181. See the section “Sausages and Salami”
in Matthews-Grieco, “Satyr and Sausages.” Pietro Aretino in his comedy Il
Filosofo summarizes well this new ambivalence about pork when he had one of his
characters resolutely affirm: “refined sugary confections (the biancomangiari)
and quails do not stimulate taste as do steaks and sausages.” Pietro Aretino,
Il Filosofo, III, 15. See the text in Romai, Plaisance, and Pignatti, eds.,
Ludi esegetici, 313–15. Firenzuola is also author of the famous dialogue On the
Beauty of Women. vv. 12–14. “Canzon, vanne in Fiorenza a quei poeti,” v. 76 The
Virtuosi academy was the continuation of the Vignaiuoli academy, one of the
first “academies” of sixteenth-century Italy, an informal gathering of
intellectuals that met for dinner, witty conversations, music, and poetry in
the early 1530s. Around 1535 or slightly later, the Vignaiuoli renamed
themselves Academia della Virtù and/or Reame della Virtù and continued their
activities until ca. 1540. Meetings, often held at Carnival time, featured
improvised speeches and the recitation of poems, frequently accompanied by
music. The Vignaiuoli was one of the first academies in Italy to privilege the
usage of vernacular and became most famous for the poetic production of
so-called “learned erotica,” as well as for their anti-Petrarchan and anti-classicist
poetic stance. Grappa, now identified with Francesco Beccuti, comments on
Firenzuola’s poem. See Grappa, Il Comento. On Beccuti see Fiorini Galassi
“Cicalamenti.” The allusion here is to the poem Sopra il forno by Giovanni
della Casa, De’ Fichi by Francesco Maria Molza, and In lode delle castagne by
Andrea Lori. All three are poems dedicated to the female genitals. “Mangiasi la
salsiccia innanzi et drieto / a pranso, a cena, o vuo’ a lesso o vuo’ arrosto /
arrosto et dietro è più da grandi assai; / innanzi et lessa, a dirti un bel
segreto / non l’usar mai fin che non passa Agosto.” vv. 30–35. “Perchè in
estate gli uomini sono meno capaci di fare l’amore, le donne invece lo sono di
più [. . .]? Perché gli uomini sono più inclini a fare l’amore
d’inverno, le donne in estate? Forse perché gli uomini sono di natura più caldi
e secchi [. . .]?” Aristotele, Problemi, ed. Maria Fernanda Ferrini
(Milan: Bompiani, 2000), IV, 25–28, quoted in Pignatti, ed., Ludi Esegetici II,
200. “O vecchi benedetti! / questo è quel cibo che vi fa tornare giovani e
lieti, et spesso ancho al zinnare” vv. 58–60. “Fassi buona salsiccia d’ogni
carne: /dicon l’istorie che d’un bel torello/dedalo salsicciaio già fece farla
/e a mona Pasife diè a mangiarne? Molti oggidí la fan con l’asinello
. . .” vv. 46–50. vv. 61–65. “Basta che i salsiccioli/cotti nei
bigonciuoli, / donne, dove voi fate i sanguinacci, / son cagion che degli
uomini si facci.” vv. 72–75. On the cultural function of humor see
Matthews-Grieco, “Satyr and Sausages,” 37.62 For the text of the canzone, see
Grazzini, “In lode della salsiccia,” in Romei, Plaisance, and Pignatti, eds.,
Ludi esegetici, 227–30. For Grazzini “Comento di maestro Nicchodemo dalla
Pietra al Migliaio sopra il Capitolo della salsiccia del Lasca,” see ibid.,
231–309. There is no secure date regarding the writing of the Comento but it
should have been written around 1539–40. See Franco Pignatti, “Introduzione,”
in Romei, Plaisance, and Pignatti, eds., Ludi esegetici, 163. 63 Ibid., vv.
22–33. 64 Ibid., vv. 76–81. 65 Ibid., vv. 94–111. 66 “La bellezza del tagliere
non è come forse molti credono, e non consiste in l’esser bianco, non di buon
legno, non tondo, non ben fatto, ma si bene nell’essere pieno di buona carne
ben cotta e ben trinciata; . . . tolghinsi pur costoro i capelli di
fin oro, la fronte più del ciel serena, le stellanti ciglia . . .
come dire le Laure, le Beatrici, le Cintie e le Flore!” Grazzini, Comento di
Maestro, 240–41. 67 Sonetto n. 5 of Canzoniere on the name of Laura: “Quando io
movo i sospiri a chiamar voi” 68 “Perciò che quei traditori de’ medici la prima
cosa levono il porco e non vogliono a patto nessuno che n’habbia l’ammalato per
mantenergli bene il male addosso, sendo il porco e maggiormente la salsiccia,
habile e possente a guarir d’ogni malattia e più sana che la sena, più
necessaria che la cassia, più cordiale che il zucchero rosato, più ristorativa
che il manicristo, et insomma ha più virtù che la bettonica.” Grazzini, Comento
di Maestro, 280–81. The terzina commented is 103–05: “Io crederria d’ogni gran
mal guarire/ quando haver ne potessi un rocchio intero,/ancor ch’io fussi bello
e per morire.” 69 In Dolce, Capitoli. 70 “dono invero magnifico e reale,/da far
morir di gola l’astinenza/e leccarsi le dita a Carnevale.” Ibid., vv. 10–12. 71
“E chi m’avesse allora allora punto/aria veduto uscir liquor divino/del corpo,
ch’era pien di grasso e d’unto.” Ibid., vv. 43–45. 72 Some authors trying to
dignify pork, recycled Galen’s idea expressed in De alimentorum facultatibus where
he argued troublingly that pork was pleasurable because it was similar to
human’s flesh. For instance “Le carni del Porco fra tutte le altre carni dei
quadrupedi han vittorie in nutrire e dar più forza ai corpi perché cosi nel
gusto come nello odore par che habbiano una peculiar unione e fratellanza col
corpo umano si come da alcuni si è inteso che per non sapere hanno gustato la
carne dell’huomo” [For taste as well as for odor, it seems that the meat of
pork has a peculiar unity and likeness with the human body, as some reported,
who tasted human flesh while not knowing it] in Un breve e notabile trattato
del reggimento della sanità, ridotto dalla sostanza della medicina di Roberto
Groppetio 362–63 v. The little volume is attached to La singular dottrina. It
is not clear whether it was written by Panunto himself or not. For a similar
affirmation see also: Della natura et virtù de’ cibi, 68v. Not all agreed with
this troubling similarity but it was quite a common affirmation in many medical
treatises and in some literary works of the time. 73 In Romei, Plaisance, and
Pignatti, eds., Ludi esegetici, 316–18. 74 “Qui non è osso da buttare al cane,
/ e’l suo santo panunto è altra cosa/che lo impepato overo il mrzapane,” vv.
25–27. 75 “Dicon che la midolla del panunto,/incartocciata come un cialdoncino,
/ tal che di sopra e di sotto appaia l’unto, / è un boccon sì ghiotto e sì
divino, / che se lo provi ti parrà migliore/ch’un beccafico fresco e
grassellino,” vv. 38–42. It should be noted that even the luxury food, the
beccafico, had strong sexual overtones. 76 The cultural discourses that
surrounded salad in early modern Italy and Europe were complex and rich,
ranging from sexuality and manners, to taste, gastronomy, and class identity.
See Giannetti, “Renaissance Food-Fashioning.” org/uc/item/1n97s00d. 77 “è un boccon sì
ghiotto e sì divino, / che se lo provi ti parrà migliore/ch’un beccafico fresco
e grassellino,” vv. 40–43. Franzesi, “Capitolo sopra la salsiccia,” 316–18.78
“Questo non è già pasto da tinello/ma da ricchi signori e gran prelati / che
volentieri si pascon del budello.” Ibid., vv. 79–81. 79 On the disciplining
vision of the sixteenth century and a counter-discourse in dramatic literature
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Senses and Society 5, Visualizing sexuality in word and image10Homosexuality in
art, life, and history James M. SaslowFrom his mid-thirties, the
Lombard-Sienese painter Gianantonio Bazzi (1477– 1549) was publicly known as
“Il Sodoma.” This epithet translates as “Sodom,” the biblical city eponymous
with sexual transgressions that were then both a sin and a crime. Sodomy bracketed
multiple acts, but most commonly referred to love between men; so, his nickname
might be freely rendered as “Mr. Sodomite.” Our principal biographical source
is Giorgio Vasari, whose Vita of Bazzi (1568) recounts several revealing or
scandalous episodes. A few are exaggerated or false, skewed by Vasari’s disdain
for both homosexuality and Siena. However, his plausible explanation of how the
artist earned his sobriquet is not refuted by other evidence. Vasari describes
him as a gay and licentious man, keeping others entertained and amused with his
manner of living, which was far from creditable. . . . [S]ince he
always had about him boys and beardless youths, whom he loved more than was
decent, he acquired the by-name of Sodoma.1 While sources for private feelings
are scanty and often problematic for this period, and Sodoma left little
first-person testimony, this and other records suggest a prima facie case for
the artist’s erotic interest in other males. He is unique in Renaissance Italy
as the only artist whose homosexuality was frankly avowed and widely known. His
character and sexual interests offer a provocative case study of the
intersections between eros and creativity, and how that sensibility was
manifested in his imagery. His experiences further suggest that there were
overlapping audiences eager to receive and respond to that sensibility. Sodoma
exhibited other character traits also considered eccentric or insolent, and was
fond of capricious pranks; the monks at Monteoliveto Maggiore, his first large
commission, referred to him as “Il Mattaccio,” the “crazy fool.”2 Hewas an
impudent mocker of moral decorum: Vasari reports indignantly about the nickname
Sodoma that “in this name, far from taking umbrage or offence, he used to
glory, writing about it songs and verses in terza rima, and singing them to the
lute with no little facility.” He was also infamous for his f lamboyant
clothing and for keeping an entire menagerie in his home, including pet birds,
monkeys, squirrels, and race horses; Vasari called the house “Noah’s Ark.”3 He
entered his horses in public contests, and we can date his sobriquet back to a
series of races in Florence from 1513 to 1515. When his steed won, the heralds
asked what owner’s name to announce; Bazzi replied, “Sodoma, Sodoma,”
indicating that he was already known by that name and willing to be associated
with it. The incident also reveals the precarious social landscape that known
or suspected sodomites had to negotiate. Thumbing his nose at a mocking public
backfired: a group of outraged elders incited a mob attack, during which he
narrowly escaped being stoned to death.4 Anecdotes and documents
notwithstanding, historians have long tried, for widely differing reasons, to
chip away at the foundations of a historiographical tradition dating back to
Vasari himself. For it was Vasari, unwittingly anticipating modern queer
scholarship, who first understood Sodoma as having homosexual desires and
assumed some connection between his sexuality and his work.5 To the prudish chronicler,
that connection was negative: Vasari blamed Sodoma’s failure to achieve
greatness on his excesses of character, from laziness to carnality, scolding
that if he had worked harder, “he would not have been reduced to madness and
miserable want in old age at the end of his life, which was always eccentric
and beastly.”6 Value judgment aside, the assumption that artists’ personalities
and passions are intimately imbricated with their work runs throughout Vasari’s
biographies. Modern generations, beginning with the homophile Victorian
critic-historians John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater, acknowledged the
same connection with a positive valence, reading Sodoma’s androgynous figures
and distinctive iconography as revealing glimpses into the sensibilities of a
man aware of both his own desires and the gap separating that passion from
social norms. The path they laid down guided post-Stonewall gay studies through
the early 1980s.7 More recently, postmodern theoreticians, stressing the
ever-shifting social constructions of sexuality and identity, have countered
such attempts to posit any individual sexual identity or group homosexual
consciousness, however embryonic and sporadic, in that era. Their methodology,
inspired by scholars from Michel Foucault to Eve Sedgwick and David Halperin,
dismisses such formulations as anachronistic over-reading.8 The generational
shift in goals and methods, from “gay and lesbian studies” to “queer studies,”
instigated an ongoing debate. These theoretical polarities have implications
for the present study, which aims to excavate the embodied passions and
creative process of an individual who felt homosexual desire, and to
reconstruct, to whatever extent possible, an early moment in the gradual,
fitful emergence of self-aware homosexual sensibilities and
self-expression.Although I defer consideration of this theoretical controversy
until the essay’s end, my working hypothesis parallels the nuanced
historiography of Christopher Reed, who reminds us that, although readings of
Renaissance homosexuality as similar to modern conceptions were convincingly
challenged by Foucault’s insistence that [the modern] sexual typology was not
invented until the nineteenth century, [nevertheless] no idea is without roots,
and subsequent scholarship provided evidence that convinced even Foucault to
recognize stages in the eighteenth, the seventeenth, and even the sixteenth
century leading to the invention of homosexuality as a personality type.9 As a
personality, Sodoma was among the few early modern artists who visualized
homoerotic desire. This essay investigates that process along three intertwined
axes: life, work, and historiography. His biography provides a unique
microhistory of an early avowed homosexual and his culture’s understanding of
that inclination. His works gave visual expression to his erotic sensibility,
and contemporary patrons and spectators, from pederastic monks to libertine
aristocrats, were ready to receive it sympathetically. Finally, I conclude with
a more personal historiographical meditation on the controversy over whether
embryonic homosexual consciousness can be located in early modern culture.Early
religious works Arriving in Siena as a young man, Sodoma established relations
with the Chigi family and the Benedictine order, who commissioned numerous
works, mainly on sacred themes.10 Officially, since Christianity condemned all
non-procreative sex, theological narratives offered next to no scope for
“homo-representation”; but his religious pictures nonetheless provide material
for queer readings. If a subject contained any potential for imagining or
accentuating a homoerotic subtext, Sodoma exploited it more than any artist of
his time except Michelangelo (also a lover of men), seldom missing an
opportunity to foreground male beauty or intimacy in nude or suggestively clad
bodies. Many images celebrate the boyish, androgynous type that was the most
common object of adult male desire at the time, while a few idealize the more
heroic male adult body; he often derived both figure types from classical
sculptures with a homoerotic pedigree. And many members of the audience for his
imagery, both clerical and lay, were likely to appreciate this eroticized
beauty. The first example of the interlinked sensibilities of artist and spectators
is his fresco cycle for the abbey at Monteoliveto Maggiore, outside Siena
(1505–08), depicting the life of the order’s founder, St. Benedict.11 Payment
records confirm several Vasarian details about the artist, from his early
nickname, Mattaccio, to his use of apprentices ( garzoni ) and his fondness for
extravagant finery. Although the austere life of the founder of monasticism was
unpromising terrain,Sodoma found novel pretexts for inserting numerous visual
features—often rare or unique inventions—that would appeal to the homosexual or
bisexual gaze. Most striking in its novel and ironic departure from the
subject’s nominal moral is the illustration of Benedict seeking relief from a
female devil’s sexual temptation by stripping off his clothes and f linging
himself into spiny briar bushes12 (Figure 10.1). Unlike the few earlier
representations of this scene, Sodoma renders the vegetation soft and
unthreatening: rather than conveying mortification of the f lesh, he presents
in full frontal view a nude of heroic proportions, reclining comfortably in a
pose modeled on classical prototypes. The all’antica beauty of the body
displaces attention from the saint’s physical self-abnegation onto his
potential to arouse erotic desire—precisely what Benedict is trying to
suppress.13 The most personally revealing of the frescoes is the Miracle of the
Colander (Figure 10.2), in which the saint and his homespun miracle (repairing
a household sieve) are shunted to the left, leaving the central focus on the
figure of Sodoma himself, showing off his legendary wardrobe. His self-portrait
corroborates Vasari’s disdainful take on him as a fop, “caring for nothing so
earnestly as for dressing in pompous fashion, wearing doublets of brocade,
cloaks all adorned Sodoma, Abbey of Monteoliveto Maggiore, Saint Benedict Is
Tempted by a Female Devil, fresco, 1505–8.Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i
Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY.Gianantonio Bazzi, called “Il
Sodoma”Sodoma, Monteoliveto, Miracle of the Colander, fresco, 1505–8.Photo
credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource,
NY.with cloth of gold, the richest caps, necklaces, and other suchlike
fripperies only fit for clowns and charlatans.” Here, as elsewhere, Vasari
seems well informed about specific details of Sodoma’s life and work: his
comment is supported by the abbey account books, which describe a garment much
like the one Sodoma wears here, an embroidered gold cape listed among elaborate
items of apparel as a form of payment from the monks, who had received it from
a wealthy nobleman.14 The artist also surrounds himself with exotic animals,
just as Vasari noted he liked to do: birds and two pet badgers. Sodoma’s
sartorial tendencies and other biographical details connect him to a contemporaneous
homosexual demimonde in ways that Vasari himself was perhaps unaware of, but
which is well attested in social history of the period. His clothing, fondness
for androgynous youths, and writing of satirical poetry are all behaviors then
associated with sodomites as an identifiable group with its own recognizable
customs. Research by Michael Rocke, Guido Ruggiero, and others into the
prevalence of sodomy and the emergence of urban homosexual networks in early
modern Italy has revealed that they were so widespread they can scarcely be
called a “subculture.” As Rocke puts it, Bazzi’s brand of sexuality became “an
increasingly common feature of the public scene and the collective
mentality.”15 In Florence, a special sodomy court heard hundreds of casesannually
until 1502; a substantial percentage of males passed through at some time in
their lives.16 Hence “sodomy was . . . a common part of male
experience that had widespread social ramifications.” Rocke notes that “this
sexual practice was probably familiar at all levels of the social hierarchy”
and among a wide range of professions.17 Among those occupations are the
“beardless boys” whom Vasari blames for the artist’s nickname, probably his
apprentices and workshop assistants. Artists’ studios being all-male, “the
potential for homoerotic relations in such an environment was high,”18 and
intimate, sometimes sexual relations between assistants or models and their
masters are suggested by documents on artists from Donatello to Leonardo da
Vinci and Botticelli. Closer to Sodoma’s time, the bisexual sculptor Benvenuto
Cellini was taken to court by the mother of one apprentice for coercing him
sexually.19 This common social pattern gives Sodoma’s behavior wider
implications, since his actions were shared with countless other men. His
wardrobe is the clearest exemplar of those erotic implications. Helmut Puff has
documented the role of material culture in formulating and enacting sexual
subcultures, and how extravagant clothing was a marker of effeminacy and sexual
deviance. Exchange of rare and costly textiles or clothing could betoken
homosexual relationships, either as gifts for love or payment for services.20
By the mid-fifteenth century, San Bernardino da Siena’s sermons thundered
against boys’ receiving clothing and money for sex.21 Within the field of
costume studies, which asserts “the centrality of clothes as the material
establishers of identity itself,” clothing is understood as a set of
materialized symbols with social functions and meanings. As Jones and
Stallybrass have explored, clothes can either embody and reinforce submission
to normative social roles (uniforms) or, when deployed in violation of
sumptuary standards, mark the wearer as consciously rejecting those norms—as
Sodoma did by appropriating the dress of an aristocrat.22 Thus, portraying
himself in extravagant, coded finery was a subversive act of
self-identification with a marginalized minority: in Andrew Ladis’s phrase, “a
pose of arrant foppishness, as if the painter personified the very diabolical
temptations of the f lesh that he painted and lived, not excluding what was
commonly known as ‘the monastic vice’”23 —a revealing euphemism for sodomy. The
artist gives freest play to erotic signifiers in the scene of St. Benedict
welcoming two disciples, Saints Maurus and Placidus, amid the wealthy youths’
retinue and onlookers24 (Figure 10.3). While the disciples are modestly clothed
and posed, both the epicene youth on the center axis and the African groom at
right are shown da tergo, Italian for a rear view that spotlights the buttocks.
The central youth and his mirror image at far left are boyish androgynes,
embodying the predominant pattern of pederasty, in which mature men sought
stillfeminine adolescents for anal intercourse. Thus, some viewers, at least,
would have appreciated the erotic implications of the motif.25Gianantonio
Bazzi, called “Il Sodoma”Sodoma, Monteoliveto, St. Benedict welcomes Sts.
Maurus and Placidus, fresco, 1505–8.Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e
le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY.Reinforcing this erotic interpretation,
the two youthful onlookers at center and left also sport versions of Sodoma’s
own elaborate clothing, as does the groom to the right of center. They f launt
the styles associated with homosexual seduction: tight multicolored stockings,
long hair, and extravagant fringes, hats, and colors.26 Such clothing had long
been associated with sodomites; Alainof Lille’s De planctu naturae (ca. 1160)
lamented that these men “over-feminise themselves with womanish adornments.”27
San Bernardino da Siena inveighed against parents who let their sons wear short
doublets and “stockings with a little piece in front and one in back, so that
they show a lot of f lesh for the sodomites,” resulting in such an appealing
adolescent always “having the sodomite on his tail.”28 These suggestive details
may have been projections of Sodoma’s erotic mindset, but it is highly likely
that they resonated with some of the monks who were his primary audience.
Shifting our focus from the artist, we should also examine the mental world of
his viewers. Reception theory or spectator theory asks not what did the artist
put into the work, but, rather, what did the audience take out of it? What
interests, beliefs, or habits of seeing did his audience have, and how did that
subject-position influence their reading of his messages? As Adrian Randolph
observed regarding the reception of Donatello’s homoerotic bronze David, an
artwork can function as “a receptacle for the beholder’s imaginative concerns.”
His and other studies have explored how reception of religious art was
determined by the viewers’ gender, particularly in convents, where nuns often
specified subjects relevant to their experience; these insights can be extended
to male religious and to sexuality as well as gender.29 Sodoma’s audience here
was exclusively male clergy, proverbially stereotyped as sodomitical.30
Temptations were exacerbated by the enforced closeness of clerical living
arrangements: several scenes depicting Benedict and his monks highlight their
day-to-day intimacies both emotional and physical.31 To head off such dangers,
the rules of the order specified that no brother is permitted to enter the cell
of another without permission of the abbot or a prior; if this is permitted,
they may not remain together in the cell with the door closed. And no monk may
touch another in any way . . . A light was to burn all night in the
dormitory area and latrine, presumably to prevent secret trysts under cover of darkness.32
Such precautions were not entirely effective, as a few visual examples attest.
A near-contemporary satirical painted plate depicts a monk pointing to a
youth’s bare bottom; the caption explains, “I am a monk, I act like a rabbit”
(Figure 10.4)—then, as now, a symbol of tireless sexuality, particularly
homosexuality.33 A Flemish print depicts a 1559 event in Bruges in which three
monks were burned at the stake for “sodomitical godlessness.”34 These starkly
contrasting examples dramatize the contradictory culture within the religious
world: male–male sex was acknowledged, though officially taboo and sometimes
severely punished, yet often tolerated and even laughed about. Outside
monastery walls, free from Church proscriptions, Sodoma found more overt
opportunities to celebrate such love. Majolica plate, attributed to Master
C.I., ca. 1510–20. Musée national de la Renaissance, Écouen, France.Photo
credit: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.Secular subjects Sodoma illustrated
secular subjects for private patrons and domestic settings. His most
career-boosting painting depicted the Roman heroine Lucretia, whose suicide to
preserve family honor after she was raped symbolized the ideal of married
women’s honorable chastity; gifted to Pope Leo X, it earned the artist a papal
knighthood.35 When the opportunity arose, however, as with sacred images,
hepaid unusual attention to the homoerotic elements of myth and history, which
offered explicit exemplars of male devotion and passion. And the audience for
his best-known classical project, a fresco cycle for the papal banker Agostino
Chigi, was the sophisticated, libertine Roman society who were as likely to
share his sexual interests and habits of spectatorship as were the monks at
Monteoliveto.36 In 1516–17, Chigi commissioned Sodoma to decorate the bedroom
of his villa, now called the Farnesina. The wealthy financier’s love nest,
shared with his mistress Francesca Ordeaschi, offers a revealing microcosm of
the hedonistic, tolerant atmosphere of High Renaissance Rome, where even popes
had mistresses and bastards, and humanist classical culture provided
justification for libertine bisexuality all’antica.37 Numerous rooms were
painted with erotic myths both heterosexual and homosexual.38 Given Chigi’s
personality and interests, Sodoma was a sympathetic addition to his creative
team. Although Sodoma married in 1510, his nickname was public knowledge by
1513, when he registered as “Sodoma” in a list of racehorse owners, and two
years later had the heralds call that name. After describing our artist’s
clothes, manners, and mocking spirit, including the racing incident, Vasari
reports that “in [these] things Agostino, who liked the man’s humour, found the
greatest amusement in the world.” The appreciative patron requested episodes from
the life of Alexander the Great, historically implied as bisexual.39 The
principal scene recreates a lost Greek painting of Alexander’s marriage to
Roxana, known through an ancient ekphrasis—a classicizing tribute to Chigi and
his beloved40 (Figure 10.5). The emperor proffers a marriage crown to the
princess, while putti cavort in playful eroticism. To the right stand two
idealized men: nude Hymen, god of marriage, and torch-bearing Hephaestion,
Alexander’s intimate companion and, in some accounts, lover. Both figures are
based on a well-known Greek statue, the Apollo Belvedere, depicting the most
vigorously bisexual of the gods.41 While principally a heterosexual scene,
then, the picture’s sub-theme is nude male beauty and the passion Hephaestion
represents. Sodoma’s audience was predisposed to appreciate this story’s erotic
duality. Many patrons and viewers had bisexual or homosexual desires; an
anecdote in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (ca. 1514) reports that “Rome
has as many sodomites as the meadows have lambs.” The erotic tone among these
clerics, aristocrats, artists, and writers was light-hearted; while sodomy was
outlawed, enforcement was spotty and penalties light.42 Eyewitness testimony
for “queer visuality” at the Farnesina comes from raunchy bisexual author
Pietro Aretino, who spent time there while Sodoma was painting. Aretino
recorded an ancient statue of a satyr chasing a boy, an explicit complement to
the loftier male love in Sodoma’s fresco. He wrote to Sodoma twenty-five years
later, expressing nostalgia for their shared youth, and wishing that “we were
embracing each other now with that warm feeling of love with which we used to
embrace when we were enjoying Agostino Chigi’s home so much.”43 One glimpses
the atmosphere of an affectionately demonstrative, pansexual pleasure-palace.
Like the life it looked out upon, Sodoma’s picture is a mélange of sexualities,
with intimacy between men given “equal time.”FIGURE 10.5 Sodoma, The Marriage
of Alexander and Roxana, Villa Farnesina, Rome, fresco, 1517–19.Photo credit:
Scala/Art Resource, NY.Further evidence for the casual attitude toward
homosexuality—Sodoma’s in particular—is a set of epigrammatic couplets
published in 1517 by Eurialo d’Ascoli, a poet in the circles around Chigi,
Aretino, and Leo X, bluntly informing his readers that “Sodoma is a pederast.”
The poem celebrates Sodoma’s painting of Lucretia, which earned his knighthood;
only the final verses turn comic. Having praised the artist for verisimilitude
that brings Lucretia back from the dead, Eurialo imagines her interpreting this
miracle as an opportunity to convert the artist sexually. The narrator then
asks her his own facetious question, implying that as a sodomite the artist
would not normally be inspired by female subjects: Now beautiful Venus grants
me the nourishment of light breezes [i.e., earthly life], So that I can reclaim
you, Sodoma, from tender youths. Sodoma is a pederast; why then, Lucretia, did
he make you So lifelike? He has our buttocks instead of Ganymede. Nunc mihi
pulchra Venus tenui dat vescier aura, Ut revocem a teneris, Sodoma, te pueris.
Sodoma paedico est; cur te Lucretia vivam Fecit? Habet nostras pro Ganimede
nates.44Sodoma’s knighthood was cited by whitewashing early scholars as proof
that the artist could not have been homosexual, since such sins would have
disqualified him from religious honors.45 But here we see again how casually
this milieu treated sexual transgressions. The fabulously wealthy Chigi married
Ordeaschi in 1519, and Leo X—himself a reputed sodomite who, Vasari records,
“took pleasure in eccentric and light-hearted figures of fun such as [Sodoma]
was”— legitimized their four children.46 Worldly success was hardly evidence
against impropriety. Eurialo’s couplets recall Vasari’s statement about
Sodoma’s nickname that “he used to glory [in it], writing about it songs and
verses in terza rima, and singing them to the lute.” As with clothing, Sodoma
was participating in another cultural tradition that linked artists, writers,
and readers of non-normative sexuality in a web of self-expression. Bawdy
burlesque poetry treated all sexuality with lighthearted comedy; Sodoma’s texts
have not survived, but we can garner some sense of their contents and tone from
verses by contemporaries. What Deborah Parker labels “a poetry of
transgression,” full of sexual innuendo and whimsical exaggeration, circulated
in manuscript, public readings, and print.47 The father of burlesque poetry,
Francesco Berni, was banished from Rome in 1523 for too openly mourning a young
male lover.48 The genre became popular among visual artists eager to establish
their intellectual credentials through writing, including such homosexuals or
bisexuals as Michelangelo, Bronzino, and Cellini.49 Sodoma’s personality chimed
perfectly with the genre’s subversive insolence. Bronzino’s capitolo “In Praise
of the Galleys,” for example, unashamedly eroticizes the all-male world of
oarsmen on ships, muscular and sweaty males confined in close quarters where
sex among themselves was the only outlet: here “boiled and roasted meats are
hardly ever mixed,” a common metaphor for vaginal (wet) versus anal (dry) sex.
Berni, expanding on the trope that priests are sodomites, declares that their
example is infecting monks, using a fruity symbol for boys’ buttocks: Peaches
were for a long time food for prelates, But since everyone likes a good meal,
Even friars, who fast and pray, Crave for peaches today. Le pesche eran già
cibo da prelati, Ma, perché ad ognun piace i buon bocconi, Voglion oggi le
pesche insin ai frati, Che fanno l’astinenzie e l’orazioni.50 The sardonic,
guilt-free humor of such texts suggests, as Domenico Zanrè describes, “a
marginal undercurrent operating within an official cultural environment,” and
demonstrates that “certain individuals were able to produce alternative
literary responses within a dominant . . . milieu that attempted to
contain and, insome cases, exclude them.”51 An incident around 1530
corroborates Sodoma’s own refusal to accept derogatory comments from authority:
when a Spanish soldier insulted him, the artist got revenge by drawing his
portrait and identifying him to his superiors.52 San Bernardino was furious
precisely because so many sodomites seemed unrepentant and unafraid of divine
judgment. What enraged him and Vasari was not these men’s behavior alone, but
the quality Italians call faccia tosta—“cheek” or “a big mouth”—refusal to give
even lip service to official mores.53 The burlesque mode evinces the first buds
of an oppositional response to social disapproval: a selfaware articulation of
outsider status, and an emerging rebellion against social convention that
opened a space, however narrow, for asserting alternative consciousness and
self-affirming values.54 Greco-Roman texts and images served Sodoma, like other
homosexual artists and patrons from Michelangelo to Caravaggio, as validation
for their all’antica desires and pretexts for visualizing male beauty and
eros.55 Within educated elites, a tolerant, classically inspired hedonism held
its own against legal and clerical taboos until late in Sodoma’s lifetime, when
the Council of Trent began its anticlassical reform (1545). In this libertine
culture, an artist widely known for sexual nonconformity was able to smilingly
adopt a derogatory nickname as a public identity and even f launt his sexual
interests in word and image, with little harm to his string of major
commissions and honors.Later religious works Sodoma’s late commissions were
predominantly religious. As at Monteoliveto, these images emphasize the erotic
appeal of figures who are nominally not sexual: saints, angels, and soldiers.
Whereas at the monastery it was possible to analyze the reactions of a specific
clerical audience, commissions for more public locations could be viewed by the
whole cross-section of society, some proportion of which, as outlined earlier,
would have understood and welcomed homoerotic allusion. As Patricia Simons has
explained, “Renaissance imagery might appear to condemn non-normative sex
. . ., but it was possible for viewers to take works in other,
imaginative directions.”56 Sodoma’s best-known work, depicting Saint Sebastian
(1525), epitomizes his typical traits: androgynous classicizing male beauty,
emotional pathos and sensuous chiaroscuro (Figure 10.6).57 Iconographically, it
offers a prime example of his sensitive antennae for elements of religious
narrative with specialized appeal. Sebastian was a Roman soldier who refused to
renounce Christianity, for which Emperor Diocletian, despite their intimate
personal relationship, ordered him shot by archers. Saint Ambrose’s hagiography
establishes their strong emotional bond, open to erotic interpretation: he
notes that Sebastian was “greatly loved” by Diocletian and his co-emperor
Maximian (intantum carus erat Imperitoribus).58 Sodoma paints a virtually nude,
Apollo-like Sebastian with blood trickling from several wounds. He looks
longingly at the angel bringing a martyr’s crown—his reward for loving
sacrifice to God—with an expression that could Sodoma, Saint Sebastian,
processional banner, Pitti Palace, Florence,1525. Photo credit: Scala/Ministero
per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY.equally connote divine or
earthly ecstasy. While his bond with the emperor offered a secular hint at
Sebastian’s sexual inclinations, the implied passion between Sebastian and the
godhead is a more important, and universal, emotional dynamic, with a profound
yet ambivalent homoerotic subtext. For all Christians, intense, loving union
with Christ was the ultimate spiritual goal; for men, however, exhortation to
the symbolically feminine ideal of passive, ecstatic submission to another male
raised the specter of sodomy. The phallic arrows piercing Sebastian evoke
sexual penetration, a symbol of the saint’s necessary, but problematic, feminization;59
they also recall Cupid’s love-inducing shafts, multiplying the signals for an
erotic response. Cinquecento image-makers were expected to encourage such a
passionate response because, as Simons observes in relation to Christ, for
Sebastian too “the visualization of supreme beauty was necessary in order to
induce reverence.”60 Theoretically, religious images could function on these
two levels simultaneously, without contradiction: the lure of physical beauty
would hopefully lead the viewer to a higher spiritual adoration. In practice,
however, it was difficult to police the borders between earthly and heavenly
passion. We know that Sebastian’s beauty was experienced as problematically
titillating by at least one sex: the Florentine artist-monk Fra Bartolommeo
painted a nude image of the saint so appealing that female parishioners
admitted in confession that it stimulated carnal thoughts, after which it was
taken down.61 It was just such temptations that the Council of Trent
acknowledged when it set out to purge church imagery of eroticism. So, it is
not difficult to imagine that men, as well as women, were attracted to Sodoma’s
provocative Sebastian in the physical sense.62 The “seeming contradictions of
deliberately evoking erotic desire in religious painting” have been parsed by
Jill Burke, who sees in this practice “a deep and knowing ambivalence toward
sexuality” that signals “a huge variance between official rhetoric and widely
accepted practice.”63 By including formal and iconographic cues to a homoerotic
response, Sodoma could appeal to men who, like himself, experienced love and
desire in male terms. Like extravagant dress and burlesque poetry, pictorial
ambiguity opened another narrow cultural space for expressing alternative
sexuality.Historiography: a modest proposal This essay has aimed to demonstrate
three propositions: that Sodoma was known for, and acknowledged, desire for
men; that his work evinces a distinctive mode of seeing and representing that
expresses that erotic inclination; and that contemporaneous audiences would
have appreciated that sensibility. As Ruggiero asserts, It is no longer
possible to ignore the general shared culture of the erotic and its
omnipresence in daily exchange, nor is it possible to overlook the particular
subcultures that coexisted at the time and that were such a central part of
daily life.64Without claiming anachronistically that this evidence establishes
anything so coherent and exclusive as a modern “gay identity,” I submit that
these emerging networks and customs, alongside visual and literary production
on homosexual themes, constitute early shoots of an alternative sexual
consciousness that would reach critical mass only during the Enlightenment. I
accept the historiographic formulation of the Renaissance as “early modern,”
which stresses continuities from that culture into the modern era, presupposing
a model of cultural change that is gradual and evolutionary rather than abrupt
and discontinuous. To quote Reed again, “If modern ideas of sexual identity and
artistic self-expression cannot be simply mapped onto the Renaissance
. . . it is nevertheless true that these notions have Renaissance
roots.”65 However, to seek the “roots” of anything “modern” in anything “past”
has become problematic since the advent of postmodern theory. There are now, as
Reed observes, “wildly varying interpretations of Renaissance art’s
relationship to homosexuality”66 —more broadly, of relationships among desire,
behavior, identity, and self-expression. To social constructionists, the search
for glimmers of an alternative, proto-modern awareness in Sodoma’s ambiente is
misguided. There can be no transhistorical connections between sexual actors in
different periods, because sexual identity is not innate or fixed; rather, it is
created through social discourses that define and control sexuality, an
unstable product of external forces acting on the passive individual. There
were no homosexual persons, only homosexual acts. Puff ’s formulation: “Sodomy
was not thought of as a lifelong orientation, let alone a social identity,” is
echoed by Reed’s: “[S]exual behavior in Renaissance Italy was not seen as a
basis for individual identity.”67 This school coined the term “essentialist” to
disparage earlier researchers who, from Symonds to John Boswell, saw sufficient
commonality with those in earlier times who desired other men to justify
searching the Middle Ages and Renaissance for branches of a sexual family tree
dating back before 1867 (when “homosexual” was coined). Without accepting all
the methodological baggage identified with an often over-simplified
“essentialism,” one can still maintain that someone calling himself “Mr.
Sodomite” seems a prime excavation site for evidence of such genealogical
links, since his name rendered his erotic proclivity a “lifelong social
identity.” Like a genetic mutation that may crop up in random individuals, and
only gradually spread across a species’ gene pool, Sodoma constituted an
irruption of anomalous possibilities that, while not yet fully articulated,
began to diffuse new forms of sexual identity and self-expression that
increased over the next several centuries. These methodological disagreements
center on two questions: one external and sociological, the cultural
categorization of homosexual behavior; the other internal and psychological,
the conscious experience of individuals who desired other men and their degree
of agency within a hostile official discourse. There was clearly a dominant
conceptual structure of canon and civil law that confined homosexuality to
taboo acts that might potentially tempt anyone, within whichour modern notion
of inherent sexual “orientations” was not officially recognized. Just as
clearly, however, no culture is monolithic, and a complex of alternatives
operated alongside these formal structures. As we have seen, the elements of
this quasi-underworld were in place by the sixteenth century: meeting places,
distinctive behaviors, and cultural expressions.68 As Ruggiero has outlined,
such “illicit worlds had their own coherent discourse,”69 which viewed
male–male sexuality as an amusing peccadillo; suggested that some individuals
were drawn to it by distinctive character traits; and expressed awareness of
(and resistance to) the gap between official values and their own experience.
The solution to this impasse lies in moving beyond an “either–or” cultural
analysis to a “both–and” approach. Instead of setting arbitrarily precise
boundaries to ever-shifting conceptions of sexuality, it would more accurately
ref lect Sodoma’s transitional environment to acknowledge the temporal
overlapping of contrasting systems of thought and behavior, and to explore the
realities of those who negotiated the dialectic between them. Two tendencies in
current scholarship, however, militate against such open-ended rapprochement.
The first is reluctance to accept evidence for alternative sexual
consciousness; the second is ascribing to cultural discourses an unrealistic
power over against embodied experience. What follows is part summary, part personal
statement: a roadmap out of an increasingly pointless stalemate, and a brief
for greater attention to the lived experience of men-who-had-sex-with-men and
its genealogical links to later generations. Two principal examples of the
discord over what “counts” as evidence of sexual desire and identity are the
tendency to downplay or deny evidence for Sodoma’s sexuality, and the disregard
of alternative language imputing distinct personality to sodomites. First, the
present examination of how Sodoma expressed his homoerotic desires depends on
establishing that his nickname was in fact a marker of his sexuality, which
raises the question: how reliable is Vasari? Unfortunately, as Paul Barolsky
notes, “How we read Vasari depends on our sensibility and taste. We all ride
our own hobbyhorses.” 70 Since the Victorians, homophobic scholars have
attempted to discredit Vasari and defend a respected Old Master against any
implication of immorality in “his evil-sounding sobriquet.” 71 Efforts to give
it a non-sexual meaning are highly speculative: Enzo Carli supposes the
nickname was simply Bazzi’s own little joke, “with which . . .
he loved to glorify himself facetiously,” but it strains credibility that a
heterosexual man would consider a false claim of deviancy “glorifying.” 72 When
such dismissals are echoed by queer-studies scholars, the hobby-horse is
epistemological caution rather than morality, but the effect is the same: to
erase facets of queer history that conf lict with a higher belief—that
homosexuality did not (yet) exist.73 We do have to read Vasari cautiously:
despite the author’s claims, Sodoma’s wife never left him, nor did he die
poor.74 Because few details in Vasari’s psychological profile are confirmed by
other sources, postmodern skepticism insists that any statement not
independently documented is probably false. But Vasariis generally most
informed about artists close to his own time, many of his artistic facts are
documentable, and details in the Vite of Sodoma and Beccafumi indicate that he
visited Siena, saw artworks, and interviewed informed sources. Moreover, his
characterization of Sodoma as capricious, insolent, and sodomitical is
corroborated by three period sources: Eurialo d’Ascoli’s couplets, Paolo
Giovio’s life of Raphael (“a perverse and unstable mind bordering on madness”),
and Armenini’s account of Sodoma’s revenge for an insult.75 Thus, this essay
has followed a less restrictive approach, accepting any statement that is not
contradicted by external sources as possible and perhaps likely. All historical
reconstructions involve judgments of probabilities; giving one’s sources “the
benefit of the doubt” can make up for any loss of positivistic certainty with
gains in breadth, depth, and detail. Secondly, there is linguistic evidence that
particular psychological traits were becoming attached to habitual sodomites;
but this suggestive vocabulary is often brushed aside to “save the phenomenon”
of an episteme of acts, not personalities. I agree with Simons that “both
categorical approaches are problematic.” A more subtle, inclusive view is
adumbrated by Robert Mills, who demonstrates that the juridical focus on
potentially universal acts was in tension with moral, Church perspectives which
also sought to make an identity of the sodomite . . . by
characterizing sodomy as a more enduring kind of practice, a vice for which one
had a particular disposition, tendency or taste. . . . [S]uch
perspectives developed unevenly, over long periods of time, [but there are]
signs that some medieval thinkers . . . wished to pin the sin down to
particular bodies and selves.76 Examples of how “Sodoma” might thus denote an
individual with an inborn sexual preference include one of Matteo Bandello’s
humorous tales (novelle), ca. 1540, in which the dying Porcellio, pressed by
his confessor to admit that he performed acts “against nature,” claims to
misunderstand the question because, he says, “to divert myself with boys is
more natural to me than eating and drinking.” 77 Similarly, Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio
della bestia triunfante (1584) praises Socrates for resisting “la sua natural
inclinatione al sporco amor di gargioni” (his natural inclination toward the
filthy love of boys).78 Dall’Orto has surveyed numerous Renaissance Italian
terms for those who commit homosexual acts, notably inclinazione, which implies
“leaning” in a particular direction.79 Similar spadework for the French cognate
inclination has been performed by Domna Stanton, while numerous other French
and English tropes, such as “masculine love,” have been catalogued by Joseph
Cady.80 Language was clearly emerging at this point articulating distinctive
traits among those drawn to sodomy: not yet an “identity” in the modern sense,
but a critical shift toward notions of internal difference. If postmodernism
underplays evidence of sexual self-awareness, it conversely overestimates the
power of discourse, unduly minimizing individual agencyand the imperatives of
the embodied self. The ability of collective discourse to enforce social norms
is never absolute. It engages in perpetual dialectic with the potentially
anarchic desires of society’s diverse individual members, a situation in which
“lived eroticism did not always conform to the rules of social hierarchy,”81
from Romeo and Juliet to Sodoma and his apprentices. This ineluctable tension
arises because discourse is inculcated into the mind, whereas sexual desire is
grounded in parts of the biological organism less susceptible to rational
suasion. Embodied experience is transhistorical: lust, like hunger, pre-exists
cultural conditioning, and “the recalcitrant realities of human conduct”82 are
insistent enough when unsatisfied to overcome any social convention. This essay
has marshalled evidence that Sodoma, and his contemporaries with similar
inclinations, felt a dissonance between their desires and the dictates of
society, and they possessed sufficient agency to imagine alternative
values—what Walter Pater viewed as a signal Renaissance development, a “liberty
of the heart” that enabled nonconformists to move “beyond the prescribed limits
of that system.”83 Individual bodies are not mere passive receptacles for an
overpowering discourse “poured into” them, but are capable of awareness of that
effort at marginalization, and of active resistance. The ultimate question
lying behind such methodological differences is: why do we do queer history?
Here again, divergent answers ride different hobbyhorses: postmodernists focus
on epistemology, while those open to historical continuity are more interested
in phenomenology. The former philosophize, “How and what can we know about
Renaissance sexuality?” answering that we can comprehend little about a
shifting discourse in which “sexuality” did not exist; the latter
psychoanalyze, “How did it feel for sexual outsiders to negotiate this social
regime?,” and seek clues in intimations of difference in life, language, and
art. While the former stress chronological discontinuity, the latter seek a
“usable past,” a narrative that produces affinities and resonances across time.
The latter project is inherently political: as George Chauncey characterizes
emerging queer studies in the late nineteenth century, claiming certain
historical figures was important to gay men not only because it validated their
own homosexuality, but because it linked them to others. . . . This
was a central purpose of the project of gay historical reclamation.
. . . By constructing historical traditions of their own, gay men defined
themselves as a distinct community.84 Put another way, this school, and this
essay, seek to recover evidence of homosexual desire and expression—however
fragmentary, ambiguous, and carefully historicized—to counter centuries of
suppression, and it seems ironic when social constructionism abets the same
historical erasure. A final image, recently attributed to Sodoma, provides an
enigmatic but tantalizing coda to this discussion85 (Figure 10.7). His hair
garlanded with leaves, beard and brows untamed, “Allegorical Man” leers like a
satyr while his rightJames M. SaslowFIGURE 10.7Sodoma (attributed), Allegorical
Man, ca. 1547–8, oil, Accademia Carrara,Bergamo. Photo credit: Scala/Ministero
per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY.hand makes the contemptuous
gesture of “the fig,” an insult that, since Martial’s Epigrams (2:28), can
imply that the receiver is a sodomite. The picture’s precise iconography
remains unexplored; Radini Tedeschi suggests the gesture alludes to Sodoma’s
nickname, and the picture may thus be a final self-portrait, literally or
symbolically. If so, it contrasts poignantly with the artist’s first
self-portraitforty years earlier ( Figure 10.2). Once young and beardless, his
foppishness a silent assertion of nonconformity, he has aged to a still
elaborately costumed but more overtly defiant graybeard, telling the world in
gesture what his burlesque poems expressed in words: I am what I am, I’ve
survived your derision, and I still don’t care what you think. Admittedly, this
interpretation remains speculative, but it would effectively bookend the scenario
of Sodoma’s life and work presented here. Our ability to entertain such a
hypothesis depends, however, on more than attribution and iconography. The
potential to recover the self-expression of creative Renaissance sodomites also
requires a polyvalent openness to a range of both personal and cultural
evidence and interpretive methods. Hearteningly, many seminal postmodern
theorists are more accepting of multiplicity than their acolytes. Foucault
praised Boswell’s conception of “gay,” while Carla Freccero deploys Foucault’s
own theoretics against his discontinuity between early modern and modern
sexuality. She approvingly cites David Halperin’s suggestion that we supplement
rigidly compartmentalized ideas of identity with concepts of “partial identity,
emerging identity, transient identity, semi-identity . . .,” the
better to “indicate the multiplicity of possible historical connections between
sex and identity.”86 Murray reassures us that “the alternative to intellectual
conformity is not a lack of coherence but rather a series of interwoven,
complementary . . . approaches.”87 Perhaps the most balanced and
inspiring methodological f lag has been raised by Valerie Traub, who recalls
that, while seeking traces of early modern same-sex eros, she assumed “neither
that we will find in the past a mirror image of ourselves nor that the past is
so utterly alien that we will find nothing usable in its fragmentary traces.”88
I have sought in Sodoma not a mirror-image, but a family resemblance. He is
“usable” as our ancestor: someone with whom we share an identifiable lineage of
desire and self-expression, in whose uniquely chronicled creative life we can
recapture the origins of an increasingly prominent familial trait.Notes1 2 3 4
5This essay grew from a paper delivered at a 2007 conference at University of
Toronto organized by Konrad Eisenbichler. Thanks to Patricia Simons for her
constructive suggestions. Vasari, Le vite, 6: 380; Vasari, Lives, 7: 246.
Vasari repeats these accusations in his Vita of Domenico Beccafumi, ed.
Milanesi, 5: 634–35. Vasari, Le vite, 6: 382; Vasari, Lives, 7: 247. Vasari, Le
vite, 6: 381; Vasari, Lives, 7: 246. Vasari, Le vite, 6: 389–90; Vasari, Lives,
7: 251, records the old men’s protest; for documents for the 1513 and 1515
races, see 6: 389 n. 3, 390 n. 1; Bartalini and Zombardo, Giovanni Antonio
Bazzi, 44–45, nos. 15–19. A note on terminology: I use “homosexual” throughout
in the narrow descriptive sense, to refer to sexual desire or behavior between
persons of the same sex. Although modern audiences read “homosexual” with
broader connotations of psychology and identity, here it is only shorthand for
“male–male sex.” In modern typology, Sodoma would be considered bisexual, since
he was also married and a father.6 Vasari, Le vite, 6: 379; Vasari, Lives, 7:
245. The artist did not die destitute or insane: see below, n. 74. 7 Fisher, “A
Hundred Years,” 13–39, outlines the activist project of research into
Renaissance homosexuality since the nineteenth century. 8 For an overview of
this position, see Grantham Turner, “Introduction,” 8, n. 3. 9 Reed, Art and
Homosexuality, 54–55. 10 Bartalini, “Sodoma.” 11 The standard English monograph
remains Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi; for Monteoliveto see 93, cat. no. 4. See
further on the abbey Radini Tedeschi, Sodoma, 138–47; Batistini, Il Sodoma;
documents in Bartalini and Zombardo, Fonti, 15–31, no. 7. 12 Hayum, Giovanni
Antonio Bazzi, 93, no. 4.8; Batistini, Il Sodoma, no. 8. The incident is
recorded by Gregory the Great, Life of St. Benedict, chap. 2. 13 Only a few
illustrations of this subject are known: both a fresco by Spinello Aretino (San
Miniato, Florence) ca. 1387 and a panel by Ambrogio di Stefano Bergognone, ca.
1490, show a pale, unidealized body among prominent briars. A sexual reading of
the series is supported by Kiely, Blessed and Beautiful, chap. 7, “Sodoma’s St.
Benedict: Out in the Cloister.” 14 Vasari, Le vite, 6: 383; Vasari, Lives, 7:
248, for the quote and cloak. The gift, along with other payments of fabrics
and clothing, is transcribed by Bartalini and Zombardo, Fonti, 18–19, 266. See
also Radini Tedeschi, Sodoma, 78–80. 15 Rocke, “The Ambivalence,” 57. 16 Rocke,
Forbidden Friendships, 3–6; his book provides extensive data and analysis of
fifteenth-century Florence. On sodomy elsewhere, see Ruggiero, The Boundaries
of Eros; Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, chap. 9; Mormando, The
Preacher’s Demons. For a Europe-wide perspective, see Crompton, Homosexuality
and Civilization, chaps. 10–12; Puff, “Early Modern Europe,” 79–102. 17 Rocke,
Forbidden Friendships, 112, 134. 18 Simons, “The Sex of Artists,” 81. 19 Rocke,
Forbidden Friendships, 163; Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, 262–69.
20 Puff, “The Sodomite’s Clothes,” 251–72. 21 Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche
volgari, ed. Pietro Bargellini (Milan: Rizzoli, 1936), 796–97, 898, cited and
discussed in Dall’Orto, “La fenice,” 5, and n. 27 and n. 28. See also Rocke,
“Sodomites.” 22 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 2–7. 23 Ladis,
Victims, 109. 24 Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 94, no. 12. 25 On anal sex as
social practice and artistic motif, see Saslow, Ganymede, chaps. 2–3; Rubin,
“‘Che è di questo culazzino!’”; Grantham Turner, Eros Visible, 274–99. Sodoma’s
Deposition, ca. 1510, similarly spotlights the rear view of a soldier: Hayum,
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 117, no. 7. Other artists emphasized rear views, often
motivated by the formalintellectual challenge of the paragone: Summers,
“‘Figure come fratelli.’” When we have evidence of an artist’s sexual
proclivities, as with Sodoma, it is reasonable to explore whether he imbued the
motif with personal erotic interest; lacking such evidence, however, we cannot
know which other artists might have done the same. Regardless of artistic
intent, similar stimuli would invite similar audience responses. 26 Similar
figures appear in scenes no. 1, 30, and 36 as catalogued by Batistini (Hayum,
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 93–4, nos. 1, 20, 26). 27 Alain of Lille, The Plaint of
Nature, trans. James Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1980), 187, cited
in Puff, “The Sodomite’s Clothes,” 260. 28 Bernardino, as quoted by Rocke,
“Sodomites,” 12, 15; cited in Simons, The Sex of Men, 99. 29 Randolph, Engaging
Symbols, 151, chap. 4. For nuns, see Hayum, “A Renaissance Audience”; for both
sexes, Hiller, Gendered Perceptions. 30 On the prevalence of clerical sodomy
see Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance; Mills, Seeing Sodomy, chap. 4;
Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 136–37. See also Parker, Bronzino, 37: “burlesque
poets tended to present clerics as sodomites.”31 Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi,
93–94, nos. 4.13, 4.14, 4.21; Batistini, Il Sodoma, nos. 13, 14, 31 (illns. 59,
60, 68). 32 The regulations are in the monastery’s fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century chronicle: Regardez le rocher, 182–83, 418–19 (my
translation). 33 Illustrated and discussed in Saslow, Pictures and Passions,
103–04. 34 Frans Hogenberg, Execution for Sodomitical Godlessness in Bruges,
1578; illustrated in Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, 327. 35 Vasari,
Le vite, 6: 387; Vasari, Lives, 7: 250. 36 On the city’s licentious paganism,
see Bartalini, Le occasioni, 39–86. 37 Rowland, "Render unto Caesar.” 38
Other homoerotic images are in the Sala di Psiche, where Ganymede appears
twice, and one spandrel depicts Jupiter kissing Cupid; Saslow, Ganymede in the
Renaissance, 135–40; Turner, Eros Visible, 109–33. 39 Vasari, Le vite, 6:
384–88; Vasari, Lives, 7: 248–50. Alexander and Hephaestion’s love is alluded
to by Aelian, Various History, 12: 7, and other ancient authors. 40 Hayum,
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 164–77, no. 20; Bartalini, Le occasioni, 78–81; Radini
Tedeschi, Sodoma, 193–94, no. 56. 41 On Sodoma’s use of classical sources and
gender ambiguity see Smith, “Queer Fragments.” 42 Baldassare Castiglione, The
Book of the Courtier, book 2, chap. 61. On the sexual tone in Rome, see
Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, 269–90; Talvacchia, Taking Positions.
Leo X’s Rome also associated sartorial effeminacy with homosexuality:
pasquinades mocked Cardinal Ercole Rangone and sodomite friends for “going
around disguised as nymphs”: Burke, “Sex and Spirituality,” 491. 43 Aretino,
Lettere sull’arte, vol. 1, no. 68 (1537), vol. 2, no. 244 (1545); Aretino, The
Letters, 123–25, no. 58. Other sources record a sculpted Antinous, Hadrian’s
lover: Bartalini, Le occasioni, 73–75. 44 d’Ascoli, Epigrammatum, 11v–12r;
Bartalini and Zombardo, Fonti, 64–67, no. 29; Radini Tedeschi, Sodoma, 71–72.
45 Ibid., 23. 46 Vasari, Le vite, 6: 386–88; Vasari, Lives, 7: 250. On Leo’s
sodomitical reputation see Giovio’s biography, in Le vite di dicenove,
141v–142v. 47 Parker, Bronzino, chap. 1; Parker, “Towards;” Rocke, Forbidden
Friendships, 3–5; Tonozzi, “Queering Francesco”; Zanrè, Cultural
Non-conformity, chap. 3. 48 Tonozzi, “Queering Francesco,” 589–91. 49 On these
artist-authors see Parker, Bronzino; The Poetry of Michelangelo; Gallucci,
Benvenuto Cellini. 50 Fisher, “Peaches and Figs,” 158–59. 51 Zanrè, Cultural
Non-conformity, 1-2. 52 Armenini, De’ veri precetti, 42–43; Vasari, Le vite, 6:
393; Bartalini, Le occasioni, 17. 53 Dall’Orto, “La fenice di Sodoma,” 71-72,
quoting Bernardino, in Le prediche volgari, ed. C. Cannarozzi (Pistoia:
Pacinotti, 1934), 277. A document dated 1531, purportedly Sodoma’s tax
declaration, is even more insolent, signed with a sexual vulgarity; Bartalini
and Zombardo, Fonti, 131–33, 281–92. While now considered a seventeenth-century
forgery, it demonstrates that a “legend” about Sodoma’s sexual brazenness
persisted after his death. 54 See Milner, “Introduction.” 55 Sodoma depicted
anther homoerotic myth distinctively: his Fall of Phaeton is almost unique in
including Phaeton’s cousin Cycnus, with whom literary sources imply a loving
relationship (Hayum, 135, no. 12). Suggestively, the only other artist to
include Cycnus was Michelangelo. 56 Simons, “European Art,” 135. 57 Vasari, Le
vite, 6: 390; Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 191, no. 24; Radini Tedeschi,
Sodoma, Acta sanctorum, 2: 629, 20 Januarii; Jacopo da Voragine’s
thirteenth-century Golden Legend repeats this phrase (s.v. “St. Sebastian”).59
On arrow symbolism, including homoerotic potential, see Cox-Rearick, “A ‘Saint
Sebastian,’” 160–61. 60 Simons, “Homosociality,” 38. 61 Vasari, Vita of Fra
Bartolommeo. For additional complaints about sexualized Sebastians, see Bohde,
“Ein Heiliger,” 86, n. 18. 62 Sodoma’s later depictions of Sebastian evoke the
same erotic subtext. In his Madonna and Child with Saints, ca. 1541–44 (Hayum,
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 257, no. 43), Sebastian stares at Jesus, who toys with
the saint’s arrow—a phallic detail seen in no other image. Similarly unique is
Sodoma’s Resurrection, 1535 (Hayum, 235, no. 33) in depicting the angels as
nude putti. 63 Burke, “Sex and Spirituality,” 488–92. 64 Ruggiero,
“Introduction,” 2. 65 Reed, Art and Homosexuality, 43. 66 Ibid., 47. 67 Ibid.,
43; Puff, “Early Modern Europe,” 84–85. 68 On this alternative culture in
various cities see Puff, “Early Modern Europe,” 87; Ruggiero, “Marriage,”
23–26; Dall’Orto, “La fenice di Sodoma,” 61–64, 79. 69 Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love,”
11. 70 Paul Barolsky, “Vasari’s Literary Artifice,” 121. 71 Cust, Giovanni
Antonio Bazzi, 10. 72 Carli, Il Sodoma, 9–12; Carli, “Bazzi.” 73 See, e.g.,
Patricia Simons, “Sodoma, Il,” 286. 74 Vasari, Le vite, 6: 379, 398, citing
contradicting documents, 399 n. 1. 75 On Eurialo see above, n. 44; Armenini, n.
52. On Giovio’s biographies see n. 46; for his comment on Sodoma (“praepostero
instabilique iudicio usque ad insaniae affectationem”) see Bartalini and
Zambrano, Fonti, 83–86, no. 35. 76 Simons, “Homosociality and Erotics,” 48, n.
4; Mills, “Acts, Orientations,” 205. 77 Bandello, Tutte le opera, ed. Flora, 1:
95, novella 6; Bandello, Tutte le opera, trans. Payne, 1: 94–8. 78 Bruno and
Campanella, Opere, 321. 79 Dall’Orto, “La fenice di Sodoma,” 74–76; Dall’Orto,
“‘Socratic Love,’” esp. 34–35, 46–50. 80 Stanton, “The Threat.” See further
Stanton, ed., Discourses of Sexuality; the historiographic overview by Smith,
“Premodern Sexualities”; Cady, “The ‘Masculine Love.’” 81 Puff, “Early Modern
Europe,” 87. 82 Brundage, “Playing,” 23. 83 Pater, The Renaissance, 3–6, 18–19;
Fisher, “A Hundred Years,” 19–23. 84 Chauncey, Gay New York, 285–86. 85 Radini
Tedeschi, Sodoma, 257, no. 118. 86 O’Higgins, “Sexual Choice,” 10; Halperin is
quoted and discussed in Freccero, Queer, 48. 87 Murray, “Introduction,” xiv. 88
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Symbols: Gender, Politics and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New
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Cultural Non-conformity in Early Modern Florence. Burlington: Ashgate,
2004.Piccolomini’s Raffaella and Aretino’s Ragionamenti Ian Frederick MoultonIn
1539, Alessandro Piccolomini, a thirty-one-year-old Sienese nobleman living in
Padua, published a short dialogue: La Raffaella, ovvero Dialogo della bella
creanza delle donne [Raffaella, or a Dialogue on women’s good manners].1
Piccolomini’s dialogue, in which an older woman encourages a younger one to
commit adultery, owes much to the example of Pietro Aretino’s scandalous
Ragionamenti (1534, 1536),2 in which an experienced courtesan teaches her daughter
how to become a prostitute. While the filial relationship between La Raffaella
and the Ragionamenti has long been noted, the cultural and ideological
significance of this relationship remains largely unexamined. Both texts
imagine private female conversations: what do women talk about when no men can
hear? The answer in both cases is men. Men and sex. (What else would men think
that women talk about?) Both texts are male fantasies of female pedagogy and
sexual knowledge, in which male authors adopt a voice of experienced femininity
to articulate imagined feminine perspectives on sex, gender relations, and
gender identity. In the Ragionamenti, the women’s conversations are scandalous,
but also, at times, radical and transgressive, questioning fundamental norms of
gendered behavior and exploring the role of power in gender relations.3 Despite
Aretino’s ambivalent misogyny, the Ragionamenti imagine possibilities of female
agency and power. Piccolomini’s Raffaella, on the other hand, merely encourages
women to subvert one form of male authority in order to submit to another; it
imagines freeing wives from their husbands the better to subordinate them to
their male lovers. Piccolomini playfully suggests that this shift is doing
women a favor because it acknowledges their need for sexual pleasure.4 His text
takes the subversive energy of the Ragionamenti and turns it into a safe, sly
joke. Women, it turns out, do not want autonomy: they want to submit to
younger, sexier men. In La Raffaella, female agency is not a threat to male
dominance—it simply rewards ardent male lovers over dreary husbands.The
conversations of Aretino’s Ragionamenti take place over six days. An
experienced courtesan named Nanna is discussing with a younger prostitute named
Antonia what way of life would be best for her teenaged daughter Pippa—should
she grow up to be a nun, a wife, or a whore? Nanna spends the first three days
of the dialogue recounting her own experiences in each of these roles; at the
end of the third day she and Antonia decide that Pippa should be a
prostitute. They reason that while nuns break their vows and wives are
unfaithful to their husbands, prostitutes (for all their faults) are not
hypocritical—they are simply doing the necessary work they are paid to do.5
This ends the first volume. In the sequel, having decided Pippa’s future, Nanna
and Antonia teach her the things she will need to know. On the fourth day, they
instruct her how to be a successful courtesan; on the fifth, they discuss men’s
cruelty to women; and on the sixth they listen while a midwife teaches a
wetnurse how to make a living procuring women for sex with men. In all the
discussions about prostitution, Nanna’s instruction focuses not on how to
satisfy men but on how to manipulate them. The condition of a prostitute is
inherently hazardous, and Nanna and Antonia teach Pippa how to survive and
thrive in a world of gender warfare, where men are always seeking to exploit
women, sexually, physically, socially, and financially. Throughout the
Ragionamenti the text takes an ambivalent attitude to its speakers. On the one
hand, Nanna and Antonia are monstrous women who embody a wide range of
misogynist stereotypes. They are deceitful, amoral, gluttonous, greedy,
garrulous, and fickle. On the other hand, they are cunning tricksters, who use
their superior intellect to dupe those who try to exploit and manipulate them.
Nanna is at once a shocking figure of feminine excess and an insightful
satirist who bears more than a passing resemblance to Aretino’s own persona as
an epicurean scourge of powerful hypocrites.6 The Ragionamenti contain
shockingly explicit descriptions of a wide range of sexual activity, but almost
all of these are in the early chapters of the text, in which nuns betray their
vows in endless orgies and wives betray their elderly husbands to find
satisfying sex elsewhere.7 The chapters on prostitution focus not on sexual
pleasure or technique, but rather on how best to earn money and swindle
clients. Aretino’s whores are not particularly interested in sexual
pleasure—they want money, power, and status instead. And the best way to attain
all three is by selling the promise of sexual availability while deferring
sexual activity for as long as possible; the ideal relationship is one where a
man is paying large amounts of money without ever actually managing to have
sexual relations with the woman he is buying. As Nanna puts it, “lust is the
least of all the desires [whores] have, because they are constantly thinking of
ways and means to cut out men’s hearts and feelings.” (“La lussuria è la minor
voglia che elle abbino, perché le son sempre in quel pensiero di far trarre
altrui il core e la corata.”)8 Through a series of cunning tricks, deals, and
lies, Nanna ends up living in luxury in a fashionable house protected by gangs
of armed men whom she employs to remove unwanted suitors.9 She survives and
thrives by manipulating male desire and profiting from male gullibility.Nanna’s
worldly success is, of course, a fantasy that bears little relation to the actual
living and working conditions of most early modern prostitutes,10 but the
Ragionamenti admit this as well. Nanna knows she is not normative, and that her
position remains precarious: “I must confess that for one Nanna who knows how
to have her land bathed by the fructifying sun, there are thousands of whores
who end their days in the poorhouse.” (“Ti confesso che, per una Nanna che si
sappia porre dei campi al sole, ce ne sono mille che si muoiono nello
spedale.”)11 On the sixth day, the Midwife agrees: “A whore’s life is
comparable to a game of chance: for each person who benefits by it, there are a
thousand who draw blanks.” (“E so che il puttanare non è traffico da ognuno; e
percìo il viver suo è come un giuoco de la ventura, che per una che ne venga benefiziata,
ce ne son mille de le bianche.”)12 Consequently, Nanna makes sure to spend a
lot of time warning her daughter Pippa about the many ways that men can harm
the women in their power. In contrast to Aretino’s earthy dialogue of whores,
Piccolomini’s La Raffaella consists of an imagined discussion between two
upper-class women: Raffaella, an elderly, impoverished, but well-born woman,
and Margarita, a newly married wealthy young noblewoman. The tone of
conversation in La Raffaella is certainly more polite and decorous than Nanna
and Antonia’s profane and bawdy language in the Ragionamenti.13 Raffaella, a
friend of Margarita’s late mother, presents herself as a pious widow, eager to
help Margarita adjust to the challenges of being an adult woman and the
mistress of a household. Throughout her talk of pass-times, cosmetics,
deportment, and fashion, Raffaella advises Margarita to take full advantage of
youthful pleasures; if a woman does not enjoy herself while she is young and
beautiful, she is sure to become bitter in her old age: As for God, as I said
earlier, it would be better, if it were possible, to never take any pleasure in
the world, and to always fast and keep strict discipline. But, to escape even
greater scandal, we must consent to the small errors that come with taking some
pleasures in youth, which can be taken away later with holy
water. . . . And moreover, in all this I’m telling you, presuppose
that this little necessary sin will bring you much honor in the world, and that
these pleasures that must be taken can be managed with such dexterity and
intelligence that they will bring no shame from anyone. Quanto a Dio, già t’ho
detto che sarebbe meglio, se si potesse fare, il non darsi mai un piacere al
mondo, anzi starsi sempre in digiuni e disciplina. Ma, per fuggir maggior
scandalo, bisogna consentir a questo poco di errore che è di pigliarsi qualche
piacere in gioventù, che se ne va poi con l’acqua
benedetta. . . . E però in tutto quello che io ti ragionerò
presupponendo questo poco di peccato, per esser necessario, procurerò quanto
piú sia possibile l’onore del mondo, e che quei piaceri che si hanno da
pigliarsi sieno presi con tal destrezza e con tal ingegno, ch non si rimanga
vituperato appresso de le genti.14Margarita’s husband is constantly away on
business; she is bored and feels neglected. By the end of the dialogue,
Raffaella has convinced Margarita to embark on an adulterous affair with a
young man named messer Aspasio (who bears more than a passing resemblance to
Piccolomini himself ).15 It becomes abundantly clear to the reader that
convincing Margarita to sleep with messer Aspasio has been Raffaella’s goal all
along. As the dialogue ends, Margarita looks forward eagerly to her planned
affair, completely unaware of how she has been manipulated by the older woman.
She exults, Having learned today through your words that a young woman needs,
to avoid greater errors, to pour out her spirit in her youth, and having heard
certainly from you the good words of messer Aspasio and the love he bears me, I
am resolved to give all of myself to him for the rest of my life. And thus
having pledged eternal fidelity to messer Aspasio—whom she has barely
met—Margarita goes on to offer the impoverished Raffaella bread, cheese, and
ham as a reward for her kindness.16 Given its subject matter, it is not
surprising that some readers interpreted La Raffaella as an attack on women’s
moral character: older women are presented as corrupt and amoral; younger women
as hedonistic and naive. Women of all ages, it seems, are concerned primarily
with deceiving men to obtain sexual pleasure. Beyond its general cynicism
regarding female virtue, La Raffaella also gives precise and effective
direction on ways to deceive one’s husband and to discreetly carry on long-term
affairs. Raffaella warns Margarita against writing love letters—especially if
her lover is married.17 She recommends that her lover be unmarried, if possible
(messer Aspasio is a bachelor!).18 Raffaella tells Margarita she will need a
trusted servant to communicate with her lover, and that she should choose that
person with great care.19 She recommends a rope ladder for giving a lover
access to private rooms without anyone in the household knowing.20 Raffaella
encourages Margarita to take full advantage of the pleasures that wealth and
leisure can bring, but she insists that all these pleasures are worthless
without the final consummation of adulterous sex: What’s love worth without its
end? It’s like an egg without salt, and worse. Holidays, dinners, banquets,
masques, plays, gatherings at villas and a thousand other similar pleasures are
icy and cold without love. And with love they are so pleasurable and so sweet
that I don’t believe that one could ever grow old among them. In every person
love inspires courtesy, nobility, elegance in dress, eloquence in speech,
graceful gestures, and every other good thing. Without love, they are little
esteemed, like lost and empty things. E amore poi che val, senza il suo fine?
Quel ch’è l’uovo senza’l sale, e peggio. Le feste, i conviti, i banchetti, le
mascere, le comedie, i ritruovi di villae mille altri cosí fatti solazzi
senz’amore son freddi e ghiacci; e con esso son di tanta consolazione e cosí
fatta dolcezza, ch’io non credo che fra loro si potesse invecchiar mai. Amor
riforisce in altrui la cortesia, la gentilezza, il garbo di vestire, la
eloquenza del parlare, i movimenti agraziati e ogni altra bella parte; e senza
esso son poco apprezzate, quasi come cose perdute e vane.21 The “end” of love,
which in Neoplatonic treatises was seen as a beatific transcendence of earthly
desires, is here clearly redefined simply as sex.22 As a result of passages
like this, La Raffaella was attacked both as an insult to women and as an
instruction manual for adultery.23 That the text was explicitly dedicated by
Piccolomini to “the women who will read it” (“A quelle donne che leggeranno”)
only made matters worse.24 Piccolomini was destined from youth for an
ecclesiastical career,25 and at the time he wrote La Raffaella he was starting to
make a name for himself in Italian intellectual circles.26 He had published La
Raffaella under his academic pseudonym, Stordito Intronato, but this did little
to conceal his identity. Responding to criticism of the dialogue, Piccolomini
disavowed La Raffaella almost immediately, writing in 1540 that the text was a
“joke,” written only for his own amusement.27 Clearly, he felt that La
Raffaella’s scandalous reputation was not suitable for his public image and
future aspirations. Unlike Aretino, who published the Ragionamenti in two
installments, Piccolomini not only never published a sequel to La Raffaella, he
never wrote anything like it again.28 In his retractions, Piccolomini insisted
that he had meant no insult to women in La Raffaella, and compared his work to
the licentious novelle in Boccaccio’s Decameron, intended to give “a certain
pleasure to the mind, that cannot always be serious and grave” (“per dare un
certo solazzo a la mente, che sempre severa e grave non può già stare”).29
Although Piccolomini consistently downplayed the dialogue’s significance, La
Raffaella remained in print and remained popular. There were nine Italian
editions in the sixteenth century, as well as three separate translations into
French.30 Indeed, La Raffaella is the most frequently republished of all
Piccolomini’s texts, and one of the few still in print in the twenty-first
century.31 Though criticized for its licentiousness, generically La Raffaella
was in the mainstream of the literature of its time. Neoplatonic dialogues
dealing with love and sexuality were a staple of Italian literary and academic
culture, from Bembo’s Asolani (1505) and Judah Abrabanel’s Dialogi d’amore, to
Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore, and Tullia d’Aragona’s Dialogo
. . . della infinità d’amore (1547). Along with books on love, books
on the status of women and on feminine deportment were also produced in great
numbers in Italy in the midsixteenth century. Advocating adultery may have been
scandalous, but men telling women how to behave was commonplace. Besides
internationally inf luential texts such as Juan-Luis Vives’ De institutione
feminae christianae (1523)32 and Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528),33
there were dozens of lesser known or more specialized books, such as Giovanni
Trissino’s epistle on appropriate conduct forwidows (1524),34 and Galeazzo
Flavio Capella’s treatise on the excellence and dignity of women (1526).35 The
vast majority of these texts were written by men, and many were prescriptive
works that attempted to define appropriate female conduct.36 Of 125 works
listed by Marie-Françoise Piéjus dealing with the status of women published in
Italy between 1471 and 1560, only two were authored by women: Tullia
d’Aragona’s 1547 Dialogo . . . della infinità d’amore and Laura
Terracina’s 1550 Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti d’Orlando Furioso.37 Given
Piccolomini’s deep engagement with academic and literary culture, it is not
surprising that La Raffaella draws on a wide range of contemporary texts. The
character of Raffaella herself has a strong resemblance to the central figure
of the procuress from Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina,38 and passages in
Piccolomini’s dialogue closely echo debates over proper feminine dress in
Castiglione’s Cortegiano.39 But arguably the most important model for La
Raffaella remains Aretino’s Ragionamenti.40 To begin with, there are precise
textual echoes: La Raffaella’s discussion of cosmetics closely follows passages
from Aretino’s work,41 as does Raffaella’s reference to the illicit sexual activities
of nuns.42 Even Raffaella’s notion, quoted above, that youthful sins can be
removed with holy water, recalls a speech by Antonia about the relative
insignificance of the sins committed by whores.43 Beyond her similarity to the
title character of La Celestina, Piccolomini’s Raffaella also recalls the
Midwife from the sixth book of the Ragionamenti. Certainly, the Midwife’s
following account of her own techniques are a good description of Raffaella,
who comes across as a pious churchgoer, says she loves Margarita like a
daughter, and has endless advice on fashions and hairstyles: It was always my
habit to sniff through twenty-five churches every morning, robbing here a
tatter of the Gospel, there a scrap of orate fratres, here a droplet of santus
santus, at another spot a teeny bit of non sum dignus, and over there a nibble
of erat verbum, watching all the while this man and that girl, that man and
this other woman. . . . A bawd’s work is thrilling, for by making
herself everyone’s friend and companion, stepchild and godmother, she sticks
her nose in every hole. All the new styles of dress in Mantua, Ferrara, and
Milan follow the model set by the bawd; and she invents all the different ways
of arranging hair used in the world. In spite of nature she remedies every
fault of breath, teeth, lashes, tits, hands, faces, inside and out, fore and
aft. Io che ho sempre avuto in costume di fiutar venticinque chiese per mattina,
rubando qui un brindello di vangelo, ivi uno schiantolo di orate fratres, là un
giocciolo di santus santus, in quel luogo un pochetto di non sum dignus, e
altrove un bocconicino di erat verbum, e squadrando sempre questo e quella, e
quello e questa. . . . Bella industria è quella d’una ruffiana che,
col farsi ognun compare e comare, ognun figilozzo e santolo, si ficca per ogni
buco. Tutte le forge nuove di Mantova, di Ferrara, e di Milano pigliano la
sceda da la ruffiana: ella trova tutte l’usanze de le acconciaturedei capi del
mondo; ella, al dispetto de la natura, menda ogni difetto e di fiati e di denti
e di ciglia e di pocce e di mani e di facce e di fuora e di drento e di drieto
e dinanzi.44 In his Novelle (1554), Matteo Bandello mistakenly attributed La
Raffaella to Aretino, in part because of its resemblance to the Ragionamenti.45
Clearly, the similarity of the two texts was apparent to contemporary readers.
Socially and intellectually, Piccolomini and Aretino were on friendly terms in
the years immediately following La Raffaella’s publication. Piccolomini wrote
to Aretino in December 1540, publicly praising his satirical attacks on the
abuses of the powerful.46 And in 1541, two years after La Raffaella appeared in
print, Piccolomini invited Aretino to join the newly founded Accademia degli
Infiammati in Padua. As Marie-Françoise Piéjus has suggested, both the
Ragionamenti and La Raffaella function as parodies of the ubiquitous conduct
books addressed to women in the mid-sixteenth century. The Ragionamenti and La
Raffaella are “provocative text[s], animated by an ironic cynicism that, parod[ies]
point by point the lessons habitually taught to women.” By focusing on women’s
sexual lives, both Aretino and Piccolomini “attest to the divorce between
openly affirmed principles and the daily conduct of [their] contemporaries.”47
What makes these texts parodic is their sexual subject matter; they both, in
differing ways, affirm women’s fundamental sexuality and attest to the central
role of sexual desire in women’s lives. This is precisely the aspect of
femininity that most of the conduct books are trying most urgently to restrain,
repress, and police. The vast majority of sixteenthcentury conduct books
written for women are designed to make women into good wives: chaste, silent,
and obedient—pleasing to their husbands and compliant to the wishes of their
male relatives.48 It is telling that these two parodic texts are both written
in the voice of women. Rather than having a male author lay down the law for
women (like Vives does), or imagining a conversation where women listen
silently as men debate (as in Castiglione), both the Ragionamenti and La
Raffaella imagine female conversations with no men present. In Ventriloquized
Voices, her study of early modern male authors’ adoption of female voices,
Elizabeth Harvey has argued that “in male appropriations of feminine voices we
can see what is most desired and most feared about women.”49 If Harvey is
right, what Aretino and Piccolomini most desired and feared about women was
their sexuality—and the ways their sexuality creates possibilities for female
agency. In both the Ragionamenti and La Raffaella, an older woman instructs a
younger one on issues of gender and sexuality—and on ways to trick men to get
what they want. In both cases, the absence of male auditors creates the
illusion that the reader is privy to the secret truth of feminine speech. It is
significant that both Aretino and Piccolomini imagine that the main topic that
women discuss in private is their sexual relations with men. While the
conversation in both the Ragionamenti and La Raffaella is wide-ranging, both
dialogues arguably fail the Bechdel test—an assessment that asks whether or not
a work of fiction has twonamed female characters who talk to each other about
something other than their relationships to men.50 In both works, the women are
constantly concerned about their interactions with men and how their actions
are perceived by men. The very categories of female life as set forth in the
Ragionamenti—nuns, wives, and whores—are defined by the ways in which women’s
sexual relations with men (or their lack) are structured and determined. In
their desire to hear the truth of female sexuality, both the Ragionamenti and
La Raffaella metaphorically echo a tradition of masculine fantasy in which
female genitalia are compelled to speak. In the thirteenth-century French
fabliau Du Chevalier qui fist les cons parler [The Knight Who Made Cunts
Speak], a poor, wandering knight who treats some bathing fairies with courtesy
and discretion is rewarded with the magical power to make vaginas talk.51 He uses
this power to discover the truth in situations where people are lying to him:
when he encounters a miserly priest riding on a mare, he makes the mare’s
vagina tell him how much money the priest is hiding. When a countess sends her
maid to seduce the knight, he makes the maid’s vagina reveal the plot.
Eventually, he makes even the countess testify against herself by compelling
her nether regions to speak.52 The vagina, it seems, always tells the truth.
This provocative trope reappears most famously in Denis Diderot’s 1748
libertine novel Les Bijoux indiscrets [The Indiscreet Jewels], in which a
sultan has a magic ring that makes vaginas tell all. While there is no evidence
that either Aretino or Piccolomini were aware of such tales of talking vaginas,
the gender dynamics of their texts are remarkably similar. The trope of a man
magically forcing a vagina to speak is culturally resonant on a number of
levels. On the most basic level, these stories are fantasies of masculine
power: the masterful male commands the female body to do his bidding and reveal
its knowledge. There is comedy, of course, in the blurring of function between
vagina and mouth—the earthy lower body inevitably tells a tale that refutes the
refined upper body. It is important to note that what the vagina says does not
merely contradict what the mouth says; it unerringly reveals the hidden truth
of the situation. Just as the Ragionamenti and La Raffaella ironically imagine
the sexual desires hidden behind a public façade of decorous femininity, in
these stories, the mouth tells lies, but the vagina tells the truth of the
body; it cannot lie. Indeed, in all these texts, the vagina is the truth, the
essence, the thing itself. The truth of woman is her sex. The same assumption
underlies Eve Ensler’s popular 1996 feminist play The Vagina Monologues, an
episodic work in which women of various ages and backgrounds recount their
sexual experiences, some positive, others negative. While the play was
acclaimed for giving voice to women’s sexuality, it was also criticized for
reducing women to their genitalia: as feminist scholars and activists Susan E.
Bell and Susan M. Reverby wrote, “The Vagina Monologues re-inscribes women’s
politics in our bodies, indeed in our vaginas alone.”53 But of course, in Ensler’s
work, the author who wrote the lines and the actors who perform them are all
women. The voices we hear are the women’s voices—not men’s imagination of what
a woman’s voice might sound like if there was no man there to hearand record
it. In Aretino and Piccolomini’s vagina dialogues, it is always only men
talking—even if the characters are female. Piccolomini’s ventriloquized fantasy
of female speech in La Raffaella is all the more remarkable given that the
Academy of the Intronati,54 the organization under whose auspices he published
the dialogue, was more arguably more open to women than any other
sixteenth-century Italian academy. The Accademia degli Intronati [the Academy
of the Stunned] was founded in 1525 by a group of six Sienese young men. The avowed
object of the group was “to promote poetry and eloquence in the Tuscan, Latin
and Greek languages” and their motto was: Orare, Studere, Gaudere, Neminem
laedere, Neminem credere, De mundo non curare [Pray, Study, Rejoice, Harm no
one, Believe no one, Have no care for the world].55 Membership in the Intronati
was restricted to men, but as Alexandra Coller has argued, “women were awarded
much more than a merely ornamental presence within the context of the academy
[of the Intronati], whether as sources of inspiration, correspondents in
educationally-oriented literary exchanges, or as discussants in female-centered
dialogues.”56 Sometime around 1536, not long before he wrote La Raffaella,
Piccolomini himself wrote a brief Orazione in lode delle donne [Oration in
Praise of Women]. He delivered the oration to the Intronati in person on his
return to Siena from Padua in 1542 and it was published three years later.57
Utterly rejecting La Raffaella’s notion that love must be sexually consummated
to have any real value, Piccolomini’s oration draws heavily on the Neoplatonic
idealization of love articulated in Pietro Bembo’s Asolani, and in Bembo’s
concluding speech in the Fourth Book of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. In this
discourse, love is primarily a spiritual discipline that paradoxically leads to
a transcendence of physical desire. Women’s beauty is an earthly echo of divine
Beauty, and Beauty can be used by the lover to reach a higher plane of
spiritual awareness.58 Women are thus to be served, adored, and obeyed, in the
way that a Courtier should serve, adore, and obey his Prince.59 Many texts
written by members of the Intronati were dedicated to female patrons, including
a translation of six books of Virgil’s Aeneid and Piccolomini’s own 1540
translation of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, a classic treatise on household
management.60 A text from the later sixteenth century, Girolamo Bargagli’s 1575
Dialogo de’ giuochi [Dialogue on Games], describes the activities of the
Intronati in the 1530s, and attests to the support of the Academy by “many
beautiful and noble ladies” (“Molte belle e rare gentildonne”).61 Some scholars
have suggested that women may have even participated in meetings of the
Academy, a rare occurrence in sixteenth-century Italian intellectual culture.62
An unpublished dialogue by Marcantonio Piccolomini, a kinsman of Alessandro and
a founding member of the Intronati, imagines a scholarly dialogue between three
Sienese gentlewomen on whether God created women by chance or by design.63 At
the outset, however, not all the Intronati were so welcoming to women— at least
if Antonio Vignali’s Cazzaria (1525) is any indication. Vignali’s dialogue, in
many ways a defense of sexual relations between men, is a fiercely and
crudelymisogynist text, a product of an exclusively male environment that
denigrates women at every turn.64 The Cazzaria was a scandalous text. It was
initially circulated in manuscript among the Academy’s members and was probably
printed without its author’s consent. Although it was not publicly acknowledged
or defended by the Intronati at any point, it was nonetheless written by one of
the Academy’s founding members and was one of the most prominent products of
the Academy’s early years.65 Piccolomini was surely familiar with the text—
indeed, his kinsman Marcantonio Piccolomini (Sodo Intronato) appears as one of
La Cazzaria’s main characters.66 However eccentric and outrageous it may be, La
Cazzaria is arguably an accurate ref lection of the attitudes towards women of
at least some of the Intronati’s founding members. If the Intronati’s
respectful and inclusive attitude towards women represented in Bargagli’s
Dialogo de’ giuochi is to be believed, things must have changed a lot by the
late 1530s. But it is quite possible that the Intronati’s relatively positive
public attitude towards women masked more negative private views. Perhaps
Alessandro Piccolomini’s ironic attitude towards women in La Raffaella is a
product of this conf lict. As we have seen, the Ragionamenti ’s attitude
towards its female speakers is always ambivalent. But La Raffaella’s
presentation of its speakers is much more straightforward. Raffaella is a
manipulative woman who is working throughout with a very specific goal in
mind—to convince Margarita to have an adulterous affair with messer Aspasio.
Margarita is simply a dupe. Whatever Piccolomini’s praise of women, whatever
support the Intronati gave and received from Sienese noblewomen, La Raffaella
ironically suggests that women are fundamentally submissive to male desire.
Raffaella’s considerable ingenuity is entirely subordinate to the schemes of
messer Aspasio. She has no other function than to help him obtain his desires,
and she is in many ways an abject character, forced to make her living by
tricking young women into having sex with manipulative men. Piccolomini’s
idealistic role as defender of women in his Orazione and elsewhere has an
ironic echo in the dedicatory epistle to female readers that prefaces La
Raffaella. Here Piccolomini insists that he has always been a staunch defender
of women against their detractors. He claims that La Raffaella clearly shows
“the appropriate life and manners appropriate for a young, noble, beautiful
woman,” and holds up the character of Raffaella as proof that women are capable
of “great concepts and profound statements and good judgment.”67 He decries the
double standard that sees extra-marital affairs as “honorable and great” for
men, and “utterly shameful for women.” He admits that if a woman were to be so
foolish as to conduct an affair in a way that would arouse suspicion, that
would be “a great error,” but he trusts that his female readers “will be full
of so much prudence, and temperance that [they] will know how to maintain and
enjoy [their] lovers” for years and years. “There is nothing more pleasing nor
more worthy of a gentlewoman than this.”68 In the epistle, Piccolomini is
doubling down on the joke that underlies La Raffaella as a whole: what women
want most of all is satisfying sex with anattractive and f lattering young man.
Anyone who helps them attain this goal becomes their greatest champion.As we
have seen, Aretino’s Ragionamenti argue at length that at least some women
prefer money, status, and power to sexual pleasure. But this is largely because
the whores of the Ragionamenti are not comfortable, upper-class women like
those in La Raffaella. Aretino’s whores want power, but his nuns and wives,
whose material well-being is secured either by the Church or by their husbands,
want sex. In the more elevated world of La Raffaella, the wealthy and well-born
Margarita lives in luxury; all that is missing from her pleasurable life is a
satisfying sexual partner. The condition of Nanna, Pippa, Antonia—and indeed of
Raffaella, Piccolomini’s impoverished elderly bawd—is much more precarious. The
single-minded pursuit of sexual pleasure, it seems, is a privilege of the upper
classes, of those women who are not compelled to participate directly in a
capitalist market for goods and services in which their sexuality is primarily
a commodity used to raise capital. Aretino’s attitude to women is often
disdainful and dismissive; Piccolomini almost always f latters his female
readers. And yet, it is the Ragionamenti that imagine autonomous women who
manage to hold their own in conf lict with men, whereas La Raffaella presents
women who are entirely dominated by men in one way or another. The Ragionamenti
fantasize about the ways in which women trick men; La Raffaella fantasizes
about the ways women can be tricked. Aretino’s Nanna provides a powerful
contrast to Piccolomini’s fantasy of feminine submission. In Book 2 of the
Ragionamenti, when Nanna recounts her experiences as a wife, she does exactly
what Raffaella urges Margarita to do— she takes young lovers who can satisfy
her sexually in ways her impotent husband cannot. But the key difference is
that Nanna makes that choice for herself—she is not tricked into it by a male
suitor who is using a female confidant to manipulate her. Even before becoming
a prostitute, Nanna is always looking out for herself. She tricks her lovers in
the same way she tricks her husband. She plays to win and is never duped. And
unlike Margarita, who promises to devote herself exclusively to messer Aspasio,
Nanna’s adultery is utterly promiscuous: Once I had seen and understood the
lives of wives, in order to keep my end up, I began to satisfy all my passing
whims and desires, doing it with all sorts, from potters to great lords, with
especial favor extended to the religious orders—friars, monks, and priests. Io,
veduto e inteso la vita delle maritate, per non essere da meno di loro, mi
diedi a cavare ogni vogliuzza, e volsi provare fino ai facchini e fino ai
signori, la frataria, le pretaria, e la monicaria sopra tutto.69 Eventually she
ends up stabbing her husband to death when he assaults her after catching her
having sex with a beggar.70 It is hard to imagine Piccolomini’s wellbred
Margarita acting in a similar manner should her husband ever catch her with
messer Aspasio. Piccolomini’s Raffaella fits into larger trends in the ways in
which Aretino’s Ragionamenti were read and assimilated into mainstream early
modern culture.Broadly speaking, texts that were inspired or inf luenced by the
Ragionamenti adapted Aretino’s text in ways that made it less subversive and
conformed better to traditional ideas of early modern gender relations. Later
editions, translations, and adaptations of the Ragionamenti focused on Book 3
of the first day, on the life of whores, and presented the text to readers
simply as a catalogue of female deceit and monstrosity in which the satirical
and subversive elements of Nanna’s character were downplayed in order to make
her a purely negative figure.71 In a similarly reductive move, La Raffaella
takes the notion that women will attempt to deceive men, and limits it to the
particular case of aristocratic wives deceiving their husbands—a model which
fits well into traditional discourses of courtly love that go back to the
twelfth century.72 Women are represented as fundamentally passionate creatures
that desire physical pleasures above all else, and these are found more
naturally with young men in adulterous relationships than with respectable,
mature, and neglectful husbands. Margarita’s husband spends too much time on
“business” and not enough with his wife, and the well-bred and discreet messer
Aspasio is the natural solution to Margarita’s problems. Raffaella the bawd is
not disrupting traditional aristocratic patterns of behavior, she is
facilitating them. As long as the affair remains discreet, everyone will
benefit and no one will care. (Machiavelli makes much the same point in his
play Mandragola, but in that case the satiric irony is obvious.) In La
Raffaella the extent to which Piccolomini supports Raffaella’s argument is not
clear. As we have seen, he explicitly endorses her point of view in his
dedicatory epistle to his female readers. But the degree of irony in the
epistle is an open question. It is enough that Piccolomini had deniability when
he needed it—La Raffaella, as he later claimed, was obviously a youthful joke.
Later commentators agreed that the dialogue, though seemingly immoral, was
actually a witty jeu d’esprit. The nineteenth-century scholar and editor
Giuseppe Zonta called La Raffaella a “jewel of the Renaissance, the most
beautiful ‘scene’ that the sixteenth century has left us, in which didactic
intent develops deliciously out of a comic drama” (“gioiello della Rinascita,
la più bella “scena” che il Cinquecento ci abbia lasciato, dove l’intento
didattico deliziosamente si svolge di su una comica trama”).73 Many things have
been said about Aretino’s Ragionamenti, but no one ever claimed that they were
a beautiful jewel.Notes 1 On sixteenth-century editions of La Raffaella, see
Zonta, ed., Trattati d’amore, 379–82; Cerreta, Alessandro Piccolomini, 175–77.
There are no known surviving copies of the 1539 edition. Zonta believes the
first edition may have been published in 1540. 2 Aretino, Ragionamento della
Nanna; and Dialogo di M. Pietro Aretino. 3 Moulton, Before Pornography, 132–36.
4 See the dedicatory epistle to “quelle donne che leggeranno,” Piccolomini, La
Raffaella, 31. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to La Raffaella are
to this edition. 5 On prostitution as a form of labor and commerce in the
Ragionamenti see Moulton, “Whores as Shopkeepers,” 71–86.6 Moulton, Before
Pornography, 132–36. On Aretino’s public image, see Waddington, Aretino’s
Satyr. 7 Moulton, Before Pornography, 130–31. 8 Aretino, Sei giornate, 132–33.
English translation: Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues, 116. All English quotations
from the Ragionamenti are from this edition. 9 Aretino, Sei giornate, 115–16;
Aretino’s Dialogues, 102–03. 10 See Larivaille, La Vie quotidienne, esp.
chapter 6 on the economic and personal exploitation of whores and chapter 7 on syphilis.
On hierarchies of prostitution, see Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 35–37. 11
Aretino, Sei giornate; Aretino’s Dialogues, 135–36. 12 Aretino, Sei giornate,
283–84; Aretino’s Dialogues, 310. 13 Baldi, Tradizione, 106–07. 14 Piccolomini,
La Raffaella, 41. All translations from La Raffaella are my own. 15 Piéjus,
“Venus Bifrons,” 121. 16 Piccolomini, La Raffaella, 119. 17 Ibid., 101–02. 18
Ibid., 94. 19 Ibid., 112. 20 Ibid., 113. 21 Ibid., 110. 22 Ibid., 135 n. 120.
23 Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 82–83. 24 Piccolomini, La Raffaella, 27. 25 Piéjus,
“Venus Bifrons,” 86. 26 Cerreta, Alessandro Piccolomini, 10–48. 27 “Molte cose
che per scherzo scrisse già in un Dialogo de la Bella Creanza de le Donne,
fatto di me più per un certo sollazzo, che per altra più grave cagione.”
Dedicatory epistle to Piccolomini, De la Institutione. See Piccolomini, La
Raffaella, 7. 28 He did publish two comedies: L’Amor costante (1540) and
L’Alessandro (1545). See Cerreta, Alessandro Piccolomini, 177–78, 187–88. 29
Piccolomini, De la Institutione (f. 231r-v). See Piccolomini, La Raffaella, 8.
30 Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 81, 161. 31 See the 1960 bibliography of
Piccolomini’s published works in Cerreta, Alessandro Piccolomini, 173–96. 32 An
Italian translation of Vives’ De institutione feminae christianae was published
in Venice in 1546 under the title De l’institutione de la femina. A second
edition appeared in 1561. Vives’ treatise was also the model for Ludovico
Dolce’s Della Institutione delle donne (Venice: Giolito, 1545). Further editions
of Dolce’s text were published in 1553, 1559, and 1560. 33 Burke, The Fortunes
of the Courtier. 34 Trissino, Epistola. 35 Capella, Galeazzo Flavio Capella
Milanese. 36 Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady. 37 See the chronological
bibliography of 125 works on women published in Italy between 1471 and 1560,
Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 156–65. Women did address the issue in unpublished
texts, such as the collected letters of Laura Cereta (ca. 1488). See Cereta,
Collected Letters. Published texts by women were more common is the later years
of the sixteenth century. For an overview of “protofeminist” writing in early
modern Italy see Campbell and Stampino, eds. In Dialogue, 1–13. 38 Baldi,
Tradizione, 99–102. Piccolomini, La Raffaella, 11–15. 39 Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,”
108. On the larger influence of the Cortegiano on La Raffaella, see Baldi,
Tradizione, 86–90. 40 Piccolomini, La Raffaella, 9. Baldi, Tradizione, 100–07.
41 Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 106, 118, 126. 42 Piccolomini, La Raffaella, 43.43
Aretino, Sei giornate, 139; Aretino’s Dialogues, 158. 44 Aretino, Sei giornate,
285, 291; Aretino’s Dialogues, 312, 318. 45 Bandello, Novelle, 1.34. Included
in a list of licentious books, along with the poems of Petrarch, Boccaccio’s
Decameron, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. See Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 83. 46
Cerreta, Alessandro Piccolomini, 43–44. Piccolomini and Aretino corresponded in
1540– 41. Five letters from Piccolomini to Aretino are included in Marcolini,
ed., Lettere scritte. See also Cerreta, Alessandro Piccolomini, 253–54. 47 “De
là naît, comme dans les Ragionamenti, un texte provocateur, animé pare une
ironie cynique qui, parodiant point par point les leçons habituellement données
aux femmes, renverse la finalité d’une conduite désormais subordonnée à la recherche
du plaisir”; “Piccolomini constate, comme l’Arétin, un divorce entre les
principes ouvertement affirmés et la conduite quotidienne de ses
contemporains.” Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 147–48. My translation. 48 Kelso,
Doctrine, 78–135. 49 Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 32. 50 The Bechdel–Wallace
test was first outlined in 1985 in Allison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch
Out For. See Alison Bechdel, “The Rule,” in Dykes to Watch Out For (Ithaca, NY:
Firebrand Books, 1986), 22. Bechdel attributes the idea to her friend Liz
Wallace, and says the ultimate source is a passage in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room
of One’s Own. See also Selisker, “The Bechdel Test.” 51 Rossia and Straub,
eds., Fabliaux Érotiques, 199–239. 52 In order to silence her vagina, the
Countess stuffs it with cotton, but the Knight is able to make her anus speak
as well, and all is revealed. 53 Bell and Reverby, “Vaginal Politics,” 435. 54
On the Intronati, see Constantini, L’Accademia. 55 Maylender, Storie delle
accademie d’Italia, vol. 3, 354–58. 56 Coller, “The Sienese Accademia,” 223.
See also Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 86-103. 57 Coller, “The Sienese Accademia,”
224. A second edition of the Orazione appeared in 1549. See Cerreta, Alessandro
Piccolomini, 189. 58 Moulton, Love in Print, 48–53. 59 Piéjus, ‘L’Orazione,
547. Coller, “The Sienese Accademia,” 225. 60 Piccolomini translated one of the
six books of the Aeneid. For these and other examples, see Piéjus, “Venus
Bifrons,” 91–96. 61 Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi, 22. Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,”
89. 62 Ibid. She cites Elena De’ Vecchi, Alessandro Piccolomini, in Bulletino
Senese di Storia Patria (1934), 426. 63 Piéjus, “Venus Bifrons,” 93–96. The
untitled dialogue is roughly contemporaneous with La Raffaella. 64 Vignali, La
Cazzaria, 40–41. 65 Ibid., 21–26. 66 As well as appearing in La Cazzaria and
being the author of the aforementioned scholarly dialogue between three women,
Marcantonio Piccolomini (1504–79) also appears as the primary speaker of
Bargagli’s Dialogo de’ giuochi. 67 Piccolomini, La Raffaella, 29. 68 “Io vi
confesso bene, poiché gli uomini fuori di ogni ragione tirannicamente hanno
ordinato leggi, volendo che una medesima cosa a le donne sia vituperosissima e
a loro sia onore e grandezza, poich’egli è cosí, vi confesso e dico che quando
una donna pensasse di guidare un amore con poco saviezza, in maniera che
n’avesse da nascere un minimo sospettuzzo, farebbe grandissimo errore, e io piú
che altri ne l’animo mio la biasmarei: perché io conosco benissimo che a le
donne importa il tutto questa cosa. Ma se, da l’altro canto, donne mie, voi
sarete piene di tanta prudenza e accortezza e temperanza, che voi sappiate
mantenervi e godervi l’amante vostro, elletto che ve l’avete, fin che durano
gli anni vostri cosí nascostamente, che né l’aria, né il ne possa suspicar mai,
in questo caso dico e vi giuro che non potete far cosa di maggior contento e
piú degna di una gentildonna che questa.” Ibid., 30–31.69 Aretino, Sei
giornate, 89; Aretino’s Dialogues, 102. 70 Aretino, Sei giornate, 90; Aretino’s
Dialogues, 103. 71 Such texts include Colloquio de las Damas (Seville, 1548);
Le Miroir des Courtisans (Lyon, 1580); Pornodidascalus seu Colloquium Muliebre
(Frankfurt, 1623); and The Crafty Whore (London, 1648). See Moulton, “Crafty
Whores,” and Moulton, Before Pornography, 152–57. 72 On Courtly Love as a
cultural phenomenon, see Newman, ed., The Meaning of Courtly Love. On the
cultural origins of courtly love, see Boase, The Origin and Meaning. 73 Zonta,
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Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Selisker, Scott. “The
Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks.” New Literary History
46, no. 3 (2015): 505–23. Speroni, Sperone. Dialogo d’amore. Venice: 1542.
Terracina, Laura. Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti d’Orlando Furioso.
Venice: G. Giolito, 1550. Trissino, Giovanni Giorgio. Epistola . . .
de la vita che de tenere una donna vedova. Rome: 1524. Vignali, Antonio. La
Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick. Edited and translated by Ian Frederick
Moulton. New York: Routledge, 2003. Waddington, Raymond B. Aretino’s Satyr:
Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in SixteenthCentury Literature and Art.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Zonta, Giuseppe, ed. Trattati
d’amore del Cinquecento. Bari: G. Laterza,Della Porta’s brief thirty-two-page
treatise on the art of memory1 appeared in print in Naples in 1566. There was
another edition in 1583; in 1602 Della Porta published a revised Latin version
of the text under the title Ars reminscendi.2 Despite the fact that The Art of
Remembering did not see nearly as many press runs as Della Porta’s more famous
works on natural magic and physiognomy, and despite (or because of?) its
brevity, his art of memory was frequently utilized by seventeenth-century
preachers.3 Given its author’s dubious reputation with Catholic orthodoxy—and
his constant difficulties with the Inquisition—this popularity might seem quite
amazing.4 In both a series of articles and a book chapter, Lina Bolzoni has
discussed The Art of Remembering; my contribution here seeks to elaborate on
Bolzoni’s work by examining the function of a peculiar sequence of images
appearing in Della Porta’s text—images that inf luence the entire structure and
character of The Art of Remembering. Della Porta recommends the use of explicit
sexual fantasies as the most powerful images for organizing the process of
recollection. The use of erotic images was not uncommon in the medieval and
early modern tradition of the art of memory. Yet in Della Porta’s text, images
depicting sex between human beings and animals are amazingly prominent (and
especially in the two Italian versions of the Arte del ricordare than in the
later Latin Ars reminiscendi ). Here I will argue that Della Porta’s use of
pornographic and even, in the modern sense of the word, sodomitic imagery is
not merely a consequence of the more innovative aspects of his instructions for
developing the capacities of memory. Rather, these images resonate in other of
Della Porta’s numerous and highly inf luential texts—namely, his texts for the
theater, on human physiognomy, natural magic, cross-breeding, and marvels
(meraviglia) in general. Such pornographic images thus refer to the core topics
of his most important texts—and, accordingly, to his general endeavors as an
early modern magus.5The art of memory Basically, the art of memory consists of
imagining a spatial structure—for instance, a house with different rooms (loci
)—and then furnishing these spaces with objects and persons (imagines).6 The
next step is to walk through the rooms of this imagined building and to assign
to each one item one wishes to recall, in the precise order of movement through
the architectonic structure. Originally developed in classical antiquity for
public orators, this method allows a speaker to recall the general content and
order of a speech, but the “art of memory” was also used to recollect specific
sequences of words. In this “art,” it is crucial to visualize and memorize a
mental structure, with its loci and imagines, in the greatest possible detail.
To facilitate this formidable task, the masters of the art of memory frequently
recommended that the images have a strong emotional nature (imagines agentes).
Conspicuously, manuals for the art therefore often recommend erotically charged
images as imagines agentes.7 Remembrance thus becomes dependent on—and
simultaneously synonymous with—exercising vivid (and, as we shall see,
predominantly male) sexual fantasies. The imaginary loci populated by a
sequence of well-ordered and striking images tend to acquire a life of their
own. As Bolzoni writes: “it is easy to imagine how centuries of experience in
memory techniques have given scholars some idea of the complex nature of mental
images and their capacity to inhabit their creators, to come alive and escape
their control.”8 And yet the affective movement of the soul, produced by
recalling a set of emotionally charged images, clashes with the imperative of
order that is the other vital aspect of the art of memory.9 Thus—in contrast to
modern literary authors who acknowledge and actively employ this same
phenomenon in developing their texts—the masters of memory were faced with the
arduous task of restraining the life of their own figments.10Della Porta’s
mnemotechniques Della Porta’s approach to the topic is characterized by a
methodical pluralism that is typical for the art of memory. Along with the
basic principles outlined above, he presents different ways of organizing
memory.11 For example, he recommends memorizing a group of ten to twenty women
whom one has loved to organize a system of pleasant and striking mnemonic
images. He contends that when employing the phantasmata of women one has made
love to or one has desired, one can succeed in remembering not only one word,
but an entire verse or even several verses.12 Della Porta also states one
particular system as his most innovative and preferred innovative contribution
to the art. For setting up the loci, he recommends memorizing little neutral
cubicles eight palms long, each populated with different impressive personae:
here, the sexually attractive women one has made love to or has been in love
with are placed alongside cubicles occupied by friends, jesters, noblemen, and
matrons.13 Della Porta accordingly recommends the use not only of men and women
personal acquaintances, but also of charactertypes—especially from comedy—that
during the sixteenth century were populating contemporary stage plays. In this
respect, The Art of Remembering follows a widespread tradition in
sixteenth-century treatises, as seen for example in Lodovoco Dolce’s
contemporaneous Dialogo del modo di accrescere e conservare la memoria (1562).14
Another important precept in Porta’s Art of Remembering is that the sequence of
personae must vary; for example, he suggests “a woman, a boy, a girl, a
relative, an elderly man.”15 It is crucial to note that this succession of
personae is as fixed as the structure of the cubicles where they are
placed—which they “inhabit,” as it were. This implies that the personae become
part of the spatial setting, of the architecture of the memory palace, the
locus.16 These loci/personae determine the temporal sequence in which the
imagines appear, and in turn the content to be memorized in the correct
sequence (this content I will term the memorandum). In contrast to the fixed
personae, Della Porta defines the images as “animated pictures” which we
construct or spin out ( fingere/recamare) using the faculty of fantasy to
represent things and words.17 The images are mobile and variable: they
constitute what the personae in their fixed sequence do. And these activities
must be extraordinary in every respect; clothed in lavish and shining robes,
the personae’s movements should resemble larger-than-life actors, presenting
the mind with a “painting that is new, strange, marvelous, unusual, pleasant,
varied, and horrific (spaventevole).”18 Moreover, an image should also be composed
of a variable set of living and dead objects, which, like stage props, are
added to the persona—for instance, a cornucopia or a swan. Della Porta
recommends the use of relatively few loci/personae, condensing the sequence of
memoranda to a maximum of ten images agentes, as comic and tragic playwrights
would.19 One cannot help speculating that Della Porta discloses here a vital
aspect of his writing techniques as a prolific and inf luential author of
comedies.20 He obviously followed the advice of his predecessors, shaping his
personae in ways reminiscent of the exceedingly grotesque personae in his
mannerist comedies.21 The most salient feature of these plays is that they use
a limited set of characters whose social roles and statues are fixed in a set
of stock scenes.22 The practicability of this system is obvious, because there
is no need to memorize hundreds of loci and imagines. Yet there is one obvious
difficulty. This artificial memory is rather limited, because it will only
allow the practitioner to memorize one story (or a sequence of ten words).Della
Porta’s ars oblivionis This limitation is, of course, a general difficulty for
the art. From the time of its invention, the ars memoria has entailed an ars
oblivions, an art of forgetting, that in turn allows for the memory to be
organized anew. This is a difficult task, because laboriously constructed
chains of association between personae, imagines, and memoranda must now be
erased.23 Della Porta says that if we wish to remember a new story or a new set
of words, we can assign the same set of personae, in the same sequence, the
task of forging a new sequence of images.To this aim, we must imagine the fixed
sequence of personae in their cubicles, with these “usual suspects” stripped
naked or merely covered in white sheets, all in identical upright posture,
leaning with their shoulders against the walls of their cells.24 In Della
Porta’s system, the sequence of personae set in neutral cubicles is a permanent
pattern. He compares the personae to the lines on a specially varnished sheet
for musical compositions; it is inscribed with permanent lines, but what is
written onto them can be washed off. Thus, just as the musical notes (or signs)
are impermanent and can be reinscribed onto that sheet in a new order, creating
a new melody, so the old imagines agentes may be erased, with the personae free
to assume the pose of new imagines agentes.25 It is not only the architectonic
structure that functions as locus; the personae (who are usually classified as
“images”) become an aspect or a part of “place.”26 The personae assume the
paradoxical role of living statues—and this oxymoron aptly circumscribes the
self-contradictory function of the memory images: in order to impersonate new
imagines agentes, they should be plasmatic, but at the same time their bodies
must remain precisely fixed in dress, comportment, gesture, and the
corresponding affects communicated by these visual traits. However, Della Porta
prescribes that even when the personae are imagined naked, leaning against the
wall—in order to prepare them for a new role in another story—they should not
be the neutral recipients of images. Rather, they must be imagined in a highly
individualized form. And their actions are not arbitrary: Della Porta prescribes
constructing these stock characters of the imagination in the most fitting way
with respect to “age, facial traits, occupation, and comportment (mores).”27
The personae’s actions are predetermined by their sex, social status, and
concomitant habits. Moreover, these actions of the personae—who become the
permanent abodes of the variable imagines—have to be related to the content of
the word or the story to be remembered. Della Porta’s technique of character
development was an important and original modification of the traditional
system of loci and imagines.28 In this way, the formal structure of the memory
is brought into a strong— and reciprocal—relationship with the content that is
to be memorized. In a key example, Della Porta writes that the entire story of
Andromeda can be remembered by the image of a naked, shivering, and wailing
woman chained to a rock.29 The setup of highly individualized loci/personae is
vital for the intricate task of memorizing a sequence of individual images.
Since more than one image is required, the spatial arrangement of the
personae/imagines becomes very important. The Latin version of The Art of
Remembering supplies the following example: if the word to be remembered is
avis (bird) and the cubicle is inhabited by the persona of a boy, then he
should be Ganymede; if it is “cook” then he cooks the bird;30 if the word is
taurus (bull) and a robust boy inhabits the cubicle, then we should imagine
Hercules wrestling with Achelous;31 if we wish to remember horn (cornus) and a
virgin inhabits the cubicle, we visualize her covered in f lowers and fruits,
like a Naiad with a cornucopia in hand.32The Italian Arte del ricordare gives
different examples.33 If we suppose the word “bird” to be the memorandum for a
prostitute (meretrice), Della Porta suggests constructing an image of Leda
during sexual intercourse with Jupiter in the guise of a swan.34 This direction
is confirmed in many other examples: for instance, under the memorandum “bull”
in the locus/persona of a virgin, we might imagine the rape of Europa.35 If the
memorandum “bull” embodies the locus/persona of a meretrice (prostitute), then
we should forge an image of Pasiphaë having sexual intercourse with the bull.36
There is no doubt that the imagery of the vernacular Arte del ricordare is more
graphic, more sexually explicit, and less polished than the later Latin
version. Yet all the versions recommend sexually explicit, or at least
erotically charged, imagines agentes. Another striking feature of Della Porta’s
examples is that all memoranda— the “bulls,” “horns”— are words with sexual
connotations. Of course, uccello “bird” in Italian denotes the penis; thus, the
sexual connotation is as present in the memorandum as in the image. 37 This
intimate thematic connection highlights the rule that imago and memorandum must
be as closely related as possible. These examples reveal that Della Porta
wishes his readers to entwine their individual memories of (present or former)
personal acquaintances with the stories of classical mythology to construct
imagines agentes; like interlacing arches, they support the architecture of the
memory palace. It seems that the thematic link between imago agens and
memorandum is rather uncommon in the art of memory. Usually the imagines
agentes are used as placeholders for any content; for example, one could use
the imagines agentes of naked women to remember any sort of text, not only
erotic topics. Della Porta’s thematic over-determination would seem to imply
that his true interest lay in the actual topics to which the imagines agentes
and their corresponding memoranda refer; namely, a discourse concerning the
human body, the porous boundaries between human beings and animals. Inherent in
these tales of sex with animals is the generation of monstrous—marvelous—offspring.Panoptic
visions and living statues From a Foucaultian perspective, Della Porta’s vision
of the defenseless personae in their mental prison cells has a panoptic
character (though the term here is used, of course, anachronistically). Whereas
gazing at naked or sparsely dressed human bodies, even in the imagination, can
be considered a form of symbolic violence, it is a technique of visualization
in which the different qualities of men and women of various ages, sexes, and
professions become—quite brutally— reduced to their physical features, because
they are bereft of their clothing and the social insignia, which denote,
circumscribe, and protect their social status and their moral integrity. This
practice of examining the physical features of naked men and women is echoed in
the art of physiognomy of which Della Porta considered himself a master. In
fact, in his lavishly illustrated works on the topic we find many depictions of
the naked bodies of men and women, with textssupplying the reader with the
character traits (mores) ascribed to various medical complexions; that is, the
constituent factors of human bodies and their affinities within the animal
world.38 Measuring and classifying naked human bodies according to their
occupational and concomitant social status was a widespread artistic practice
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries following the techniques for
painters described in Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (On Painting, 1435).
Della Porta very closely echoes and even plagiarizes Alberti, adapting
Alberti’s instructions for painters into his art of memory. In order to create
images that appear lifelike and therefore suited for communicating human
emotions, Alberti recommends that painters first draw human figures naked and only
subsequently dress them (“ma come a vestrie l’uomo prima si disegna nudo poi il
circondiamo i panni”). 39 In this context, the parallels between Alberti’s and
Della Porta’s ideas are obvious. In order to create emotionally charged
imagines agentes they must be as lifelike as possible, which means—especially
in the case of erotic imagines—that we undress the personae. Yet, whereas
Alberti had pointed to the appropriate decorum of his images, Della Porta opts
for larger-than-life-personae—for grotesque and exaggerated representations.40
Another point of reference between the De pictura and The Art of Remembering is
that Alberti links his measurements of human bodies to the proportions of
buildings. In Alberti’s context, an implied relation of architecture and body
clearly results from the process of constructing representations of irregular,
organic forms in central perspective. The architectural space must be
circumscribed before inserting the non-geometrical figures which are to
“inhabit” that space. The parallel to Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering is
striking, since for him as well the personae are an integral part of the loci
they inhabit. Paradoxically, Della Porta’s personae can be considered moving
statues. On the one hand, they must be imbued with as much life as possible; on
the other hand, they must freeze in one position, like a tableau vivant. But
the idea that moving statues are sexually arousing is much older than Della
Porta; Andromeda (one of the key examples in Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering)
is described by Ovid as sexually arousing to Perseus, her liberator, because
her naked body resembles a marble sculpture. “When Perseus saw [Andromeda], her
arms chained to the hard rock, he would have taken her for a marble statue
(“marmoreum esset opus”), had not the light breeze stirred her hair, and warm
tears streamed from her eyes. Without realizing it, he fell in love (“trahit
inscius ignes”).”41 When viewed from the perspective of contemporary theater,
Ovid’s erotic statue of Andromeda brings to mind the “living statue” of
Hermione in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (V, 3) or Othello’s description of
Desdemona’s body as “whiter skin . . . than snow” and as “smooth
monumental alabaster” (Othello V, 2, 4–5). On Shakespeare’s stage, this transformational
power from living being to statue (and back again, in the mode of comedy) is
associated with male violence against women caused by jealousy. Such marble
statues may also play an important role in imaginings of pregnant women. In a
more general context, tales of walking statues are associated with magical
arts, as demonstrated in Apuleius’Metamorphoses, a work closely associated with
magic. Lucius, the protagonist of this second-century Roman novel, describes
his arrival in Corinth, the capital of Greek witchcraft: There was nothing I
looked at in the city that didn’t believe to be other than it was: I imagined
that everything everywhere had been changed by some infernal spell into a
different shape – I thought that the very stones I stumbled against must be
petrified human beings, . . . and I thought the fountains were
liquefied human bodies. I expected statues and pictures to start walking, walls
to speak, oxen and other cattle to utter prophecies, . . .42 A
magician’s power thus is akin to what a master of memory does: turning one
thing into another. This topic is intimately linked to Della Porta’s other
interests in the arts of cross-breeding, of physiognomy, and of natural magic.
Yet the relationship between Della Porta’s imagines agentes and contemporary
painting becomes even more striking upon a closer examination of the individual
imagines agentes ref lected in contemporary media.Ovid’s Metamorphoses as
represented by Titian’s paintings Virtually all the examples in Della Porta’s
The Art of Remembering refer to the thicket of myths recorded in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. This is no wonder; as the most inf luential “pagan” text of the
Middle Ages and beyond, the Metamorphoses43 constitute a substantial
encyclopedia of the transformations of the bodies of gods and human
beings—transformations caused mostly by violent sexual acts of transgression on
the part of gods, heroes, or powerful men upon their helpless victims. Ovid’s
text is thus a rich source for the primary task of Della Porta’s art of memory:
not only to associate but to exchange one image for another. Moreover,
Andromeda, Leda, Ganymede, Io, and Actaeon, to mention but a few of the
imagines mentioned in the Ars reminiscendi, were highly popular subjects for
contemporary artistic representation. It is thus no wonder that Della Porta
explicitly refers to the paintings of Michelangelo, Rafael, and Titian in his
writings.44 In the mode of synecdoche, these imagines agentes serve as
abbreviations for entire stories that are reduced to one single imago agens,
just as Della Porta had postulated in the case of Andromeda. Accordingly,
Titian’s most famous works supply the reader with instructive illustrations for
Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering. His key example, Andromeda (in Perseus
and Andromeda 1554–56), is represented by Titian with a body as white as a
marble statue, chained to her rock, with a vivid facial expression, her arms
depicted in an unusual, expressive pattern of movement. The same applies to
Europa (in Rape of Europa 1559–65), with the major difference that she is not
shown in an upright position like Andromeda, but instead reclining against the
back of the bull/Zeus; both female figures are naked, their sexual organs
barely covered by a piece of white transparent garment. In all likelihood, this
is whatDella Porta imagined as the lenzuola with which the bodies of his
personae should be covered in their ground positions. Of course, Titian created
many striking erotic female figures. One thinks of his many Venuses, but also
his renderings of a seductive St. Mary Magdalen (1530–35) or St. Margaret (ca.
1565), paintings also remarkable for the impressive movements of their
subjects’ arms as well as gesture, (lack of ) apparel, and extravagant
demeanor. The myth of Actaeon is the subject of two of Titian’s most impressive
paintings: the Death of Actaeon (1559) and The Fate of Actaeon (1559–75). In
the latter painting, the hunter’s head is already transformed into the form of
a horned stag. With the exception of Leda and the Swan (by Michelangelo),
nearly all the mythological subjects mentioned in Della Porta’s treatise are
represented in Titian’s most famous works. We thus do not lack examples of
contemporary paintings illustrating the imagines agentes in Della Porta’s The
Art of Remembering. Yet there is one notable exception: the story of Pasiphaë
(on whom see below). Like the imagines agentes in The Art of Remembering,
Titian’s figures seem to be frozen in their movements, despite their vividness.
An entire story is reduced to one spectacular moment—a snapshot (to use an
anachronistic term). This reduction is not merely a convenient tool for
remembering a myth in a wink of time. It also constitutes an intervention
eclipsing all other aspects of the story that are not represented in the one
imago agens. Titian’s paintings, like Della Porta’s imagines, are evocations of
a story in the mode of synecdoche. Alive and dead at the same time, they are
fetishistic representations catering to a male gaze, for a specific set of
sexual fantasies. Moreover, the fragmentation implicit in this process also
allows for a reduction of different myths to a limited set of structural
elements or topics which all point to one and the same topic. This is exactly
what Della Porta does in the examples given in The Art of Remembering; he
evokes one and the same topic (for instance, a bull) in various loci/personae
and the concomitant imagines agentes they enact. Moreover, all the different
topics he uses as examples for memoranda (bull, horn, bird) may be subsumed
under one single general topic: sex between human beings and animals.Pasiphaë
As I shall argue in what follows, the myth of Pasiphaë fulfills a paradigmatic
function for Della Porta’s memory technique, since it corresponds so precisely
with his preferred focus in natural magic, the mating of different species and
the creation of marvelous monsters. The myth is well known. Pasiphaë falls in
love with a bull, has intercourse with the animal, and conceives the Minotaur.
The sexual act leading to this monstrous birth is made possible through the
cunning intercession of Daedalus. This archetypal male master-engineer from
classical antiquity constructs a cow-shaped wooden frame in which Pasiphaë
could hide while being penetrated by the bull.45 The remarkably imaginative and
colorful myth of Pasiphaë thus conjoins illicit sex, the art of the engineer,
and the tale of a monstrous offspring.Pasiphaë is a woman in love with an
animal. She has sexual intercourse with a real bull, with her desire thus
inclined toward the animal world. Ergo, she impersonates a highly negative
image of women in the patriarchal societies through which the myth has
travelled. This gender bias is highlighted when we compare Pasiphaë to the rape
of Europa.46 Both Pasiphaë and Europa are situated in a liminal territory of
intersection between the animal, human, and divine— between bodies, souls, and
noumenal entities. Indeed, Europa is an inversion of Pasiphaë’s story. Zeus
here figures as a male lover and a god disguised as a bull who has sexual
intercourse with the maid Europa. Her fate is oriented towards the stars. To
have sex with a god in animal guise is a ticket to immortality. To have sex as
a woman with a real animal leads to ostracism and to the birth of monsters.
Thus, it is no wonder that there are copious visualizations in fine art of the
myth of Europa, but virtually none of Pasiphaë. From the perspective of the art
of memory, we may say that Pasiphae and Europa, as imagines agentes, are
inversions of each other. The mode of synecdoche, whereby an imago agens
embodies the stories of Europa and Pasiphaë, invites a synoptic perspective on
both myths, connecting as intersecting arches in the image of a woman having
sex with a bull. But this contradicts the specific image of Pasiphaë observed
in the myth, where the woman engaged in sexual intercourse with the animal was
a (real) bull covering a (dummy) cow. Pasiphaë in fact disguises herself in
what one could call a statue of a cow-like imago in the art of memory, thus
transforming the dummy cow into a caricature of a “living statue.”47 Yet this
image, on face value, shows an act that can be observed frequently. The myth’s
image of a cow and a bull mating (again, on face value) cannot qualify as an
imago agens, nor is it clear why it should be used in Della Porta’s The Art of
Remembering in the locus of the meretrice. This does not mean the wooden cow is
irrelevant to the phantasmatic transactions that characterize the basic method
of the art of memory, namely to exchange one image for another. For the myth of
Pasiphaë points in an oblique way to Daedalus’s sublime craftsmanship, his
ability to fabricate a wooden image which deceives a bull. Despite the fact
that Pasiphaë is a witch (Circe’s sister), she seemingly has not been able to
concoct a magical love potion that would sexually attract the bull. In order to
fulfill her desire, she needs the help of a male master engineer. In Greek
philosophical terminology, this ability to produce potentially eternally
lasting objects (like tables) is called “poetic.” Daedalus is thus pursuing an
activity that he shares with the poets. Indeed Daedalus’ prop is a powerfully
poetic cow, and the image he created has the power to evoke a series of
(brutally violent) images which are not the image: they are quite literally
“in” the image. The dummy cow (with its dark inside where the male imagination
can pursue its most graphic phantasies of penetration) is a model for the
associative processes at work in the art of memory—but it is in itself not an
imago agens. In marked contrast to Ovid’s version of the story, where Pasiphaë
is disguised in a dummy cow, Della Porta apparently wishes his readersto create
an imago agens in which a prostitute has sexual intercourse with a bull without
recourse to Deadalus’ prop. Pasiphaë’s myth points to the idea that the birth
of monsters, in this case the Minotaur, requires the intervention of a male
mastermind, who not only helps to beget the deviant creature, but also provides
the means to contain the dangers arising from it, for it is Daedalus who
constructs the famous maze in which Pasiphaë’s child is imprisoned.48 This
image of Deadalus as creator and container of monsters or marvels epitomizes
the role Della Porta wished to assign to himself as a cunning magus.49 Here, at
the crossroads between mechanical device and intervention into the organic
body, Della Porta’s particular form of late Renaissance natural magic,
physiognomy, and the theater unfolds. Actually, the imago agens of a woman
having sex with a bull has an interesting relationship to Della Porta’s Magia naturalis.
Here we learn of Della Porta’s keen interest in practices of cross-breeding
between human beings and animals. To bolster his claims, he cites the usual
suspects for such stories: Pliny, Herodotus, Strabo and their tales of women
who were raped by billy goats, producing monstrous offspring.50 This leads him
to believe that “some of the Indians have usual company with bruit beasts; and
that which is so generated, is half a beast, and half a man” (Magick 2, 12,
43). Della Porta also contends that it would be possible for a man to
inseminate a fowl under the right astrological constellation and the right
medical complexion.51 In order to create a human/animal monster, Della Porta
does not resort to the kind of contraption Deadalus constructed for Pasiphaë,
but relies instead on his expertise in measuring, not the proportions of the
head as did Alberti, but rather the lengths and depths of male and female
sexual organs, the course of the stars, and the assessment of the medical
complexions inscribed in the physical traits of human beings and celestial
bodies alike. These parameters—basically a doctrine of signatures—are also the
most decisive indicators in Della Porta’s texts on physiognomonics, where he
postulates the close resemblance of human beings to certain animals, with
attendant implications for the human character.52Apuleius’ Metamorphoses This
impression is confirmed by looking at another imago agens where a woman has sex
with an animal. In both the Italian and Latin versions of The Art of
Remembering, Della Porta claims that we remember the woman having intercourse
with the ass from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses better than we do the heroism of a
Muzius Scevola.53 Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the second-century novel better known
as The Golden Ass, is an interesting source for The Art of Remembering, because
Apuleius describes the sexual act between an ass (not a bull) and a woman in
great detail.54 Lucius, the protagonist of The Golden Ass, is a young man
obsessed by witchcraft who is transformed into an ass after he applied the
magical unguent concocted by Pamphile, a powerful Thessalian witch. In the
shape of an ass—although never losing consciousness that he is a man—Lucius
livesDella Porta’s erotomanic art of recollectionthrough a veritable odyssey
during which he is beaten and mistreated. When one of his many keepers
discovers that this ass is particularly clever, he makes Lucius the object of
special exhibitions and a rich woman falls in love with the ass and hires it. In
contrast to Pasiphaë, this woman has sex with the animal without any recourse
to a prop. Both Lucius and the woman seem to enjoy the act, in spite of his
asinine and—hence proverbially large—sexual organ. This changes as soon as
Lucius has to perform the act again, this time as a cruel public entertainment
in an amphitheater, where a female convict, before being devoured by wild
beasts, is sentenced to have intercourse with the ass. Lucius deeply resents
this act and manages to escape.55 It is interesting to note that Apuleius
explicitly links his salacious story of the wealthy woman who has sex with the
ass to the myth Pasiphaë, given he calls the woman asinaria Pasiphaë (an
ass-like Pasiphaë).56 The story is thus marked as a parody of the myth of Pasiphaë
in the form of a blunt satire on late Roman mores. Upon closer scrutiny, this
story of the noblewoman and the ass is—again structured by a set of inversions,
an oblique evocation of the myths of the rape of Europa as well as of Pasiphaë.
In Apuleius it is a man, Lucius, who has been turned into the shape of an
ass—neither a god ( Jupiter) who willfully changes his shape into a bull (as in
the Europa myth), nor a witch (Pasiphae) who desires a real bull and who needs
the help of a male engineer to fulfill her desire. Instead, Lucius is a man who
has been changed into an animal, not by a Pasiphaë (who was incapable of doing
that job for herself ) but by another relative or follower of Circe—Pamphile.
The sexualized content with a specific violence towards female bodies is deeply
inscribed into the story of Apuleius and, consequently, in the imago agens
prescribed in Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering, which again condenses the
stories of Pasiphaë (the prostitute has sex with a bull) and the story of the sodomite
noblewoman in Apuleius, as well as including the plan to showcase the act with
female convict. The extremity of this imago agens is enhanced by the fact that
such acts of bestiality were a capital crime in Della Porta’s time, primarily
because they were believed to engender monstrous offspring, to humanize the
animal world, and simultaneously to animalize the human perpetrators.57Io: more
cows Another myth Della Porta mentions in his The Art of Remembering —this
time, as an imago agens for remembering the word “horns”—is the story of Io.58
Her story is most pertinent because it concerns a beautiful Naiad who is raped
by Jupiter and subsequently transformed into what Ovid describes as an
extremely beautiful cow. In this shape, Jupiter wishes to protect the girl he
has violated from the wrath of his ever-jealous wife. Unexpectedly, however,
Juno likes the animal and receives it as Jupiter’s gift. Suspecting some ruse
from her husband, she proceeds to have the animal protected by Argos, the
moment in the story Della Porta employs as imago agens. According to Ovid, Io
did not lose consciousness of herreal identity but, rather, terrified by her
transformation, she seeks the company of her (human) family. Io’s father
suspects that the tame, suspiciously human cow is his daughter. He exclaims in
desperation that he had been “preparing and arranging a marriage (thalamos
taedasque praeparam I, v 558), hoping for a son-in-law . . . now you
must have a bull from the herd for husband, and your children will be cattle (de
grege nunc tibi vir, nunc de grege natus habendus. v.660).” Eventually, Juno
discovers Io’s true identity, her wrath subsides, and Io is fully restored to
her former human shape. Similar to Apuleius’ story of Lucius in his
Metamorphoses, Ovid describes Io’s transformations from human being into cow
and back again in great detail.59 Io’s story is constructed as a set of
inversions of the story of Europa. Jupiter approaches Io in the form of a human
being (not as a handsome bull) and he transforms not his own body but that of
the maid into the shape of a beautiful cow, a body in which the sexually abused
girl is deeply unhappy. However, the affinities between Lucius and Io are even
more striking; their stories appear as mirrored inversions along the gender
divide. Both their bodies are transformed into the shapes of animals (a cow
viz. an ass), both are beautiful and attractive in that guise ( Juno
unexpectedly takes a liking to the cow, the noblewoman has sex with Lucius),
neither of them lose consciousness of their human nature and suffer in their
shape as animals (but Io seeks the company of her father, whereas Lucius wants
his girlfriend back), both are subsequently transformed into human shape again,
and both were originally transformed in order to escape imminent persecution.
(Io is turned into a cow by Jupiter in order to protect her from Juno’s wrath,
Lucius is mistakenly transformed into an ass in order to escape from the law.)
The specific aspect making the stories of Europa, Io, Pasiphaë, and Lucius so
significant for Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering is the constant interplay
of various but related inversions of plots. Indeed, this method is intrinsic to
the modes of transformation prescribed by this particular art.60
Interchangeability arises from the set of oblique inter-textual references and
inversions of plots, as amalgamated in a given imago agens.61 In the mode of
synecdoche, an imago agens is designed to represent an entire story in one
image. This is a constitutive strategy of Della Porta’s mnemotechnique, which
aims at the thematic interconnecting of persona/locus, imago agens, and
memorandum. For example, a prostitute Della Porta has slept with
(persona/locus) in turn embodies Leda having sex with Jupiter (imago agens) in
order to remember the word bird (memorandum). Della Porta’s personal (phallic)
imagination thus becomes entwined with classical myth. Within the positional
logic of loci/personae in Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering, therefore,
Leda, Io, Europa, Pasiphaë, the Roman noblewoman, and the female convict all
become different imagines agentes into which one and the same memorandum may be
inscribed. Thus, the porous boundaries between human beings and animals
integral to Della Porta’s imagines agentes not only indicate his personal taste
for a bizarre and grotesque imaginary and his studiesin physiognomy; they
embody the basic principles of the Renaissance natural magic tradition of which
Della Porta was a late (yet inf luential) exponent. It allows for a
“syn-opsis,” a viewing together of very different stories that bolsters one of
the foundational tenets of Renaissance natural magic: the universal drive for
wholeness permeating the entire enlivened and sexualized cosmos, where the male
and female aspects strive to unite. By dint of his profound knowledge of the
occult sympathies and antipathies between things, the natural magus has the
power to tap and organize these cosmic erotic forces so that he may produce his
marvels.62 Within this Renaissance tradition, the human imagination has not
only a specific capacity of the soul for evoking and then transforming images
that originate from sensory perception. The human imagination also had the
power to shape the body it inhabited, as well as other bodies.The formative
power of maternal longings Renaissance natural magic coopted an ancient belief
in order to exemplify the extraordinary formative powers of the human
imagination. If a woman was exposed to a strong sensation or harbored an
intense longing during intercourse or pregnancy, this state was thought to inf
luence the formation of the embryo in her womb. Renaissance magi thus believed
that the image of its mother’s obsession was impressed on the fetus and the
future child would physically resemble the entity she had longed for during
intercourse. Della Porta makes direct reference to such ideas and related
practices. Initially, it appears that he is simply repeating the highly popular
theories on maternal longings encountered in authors as diverse as Ficino and
Castiglione.63 In the circular reasoning characteristic of natural magic, this
set of beliefs about the imagination also opened implications for purposefully
shaping future children, by positively conditioning the imagination of the
mother. A frequently repeated segreto for creating beautiful children
recommends exposing women during intercourse and pregnancy to paintings or
sculptures of beautiful children, inf luencing the future child’s shape via
beautiful imaginamenta.64 Della Porta refers directly to this bedchamber practice:
place in the bed-chambers of great men, the images of Cupid, Adonis, and
Ganymedes; or else [. . .] set them there in carved and graven
works in some solid matter, [. . .] whereby it may come to passe,
that whensoever their wives lie with them, still they may think upon those
pictures, and have their imagination strongly and earnestly bent thereupon: and
not only while they are in the act, but after they have conceived and quickened
also: so shall the child when it is born, imitate and expresse in the same form
which his mother conceived in her mind, when she conceived him, and bare in her
mind, which she bare him in her wombe.65 It is fascinating that Della Porta’s
two discourses on memory and on what one could call family planning are also
interconnected through his choice of visualexamples, of imagines agentes. As in
The Art of Remembering, we again encounter the images of Adonis and Ganymede
and of Cupid. Significantly, in contrast to Della Porta’s The Art of
Remembering, where predominately female personae cater to male sexual
fantasies, all of the images that Magia naturalis prescribes for pregnant women
are of beautiful boys. Della Porta’s ideas on the power of maternal longings
entail a creative female capacity to produce such images in the shape of
children; her imagination is engaged with the future. A master of the art of
memory, on the other hand, is engaged in recollecting the past. Hence, the
process in the pregnant woman’s imagination constitutes an inversion of the
process prescribed in Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering: the woman’s
imagination allows a marble statue to come alive, whereas the (male) master of
the art of memory seeks to freeze the image of a living person (preferably a
sexualized woman) into an imago agens—that is, he turns the figment to stone,
symbolically killing the persona just when it appears to be most alive. This
excursion into beliefs about the effects of maternal longings allows us to
re-contextualize the mental process structuring Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering.
The imagination is a faculty of the human soul capable of producing loci and
imagines agentes, to be frozen into statues, into tableaux vivants. The story
of the maternal longings confirms Della Porta’s creed that the human
imagination can also materialize its products; in both cases, the image may be
unfrozen and directed back to its starting position to assume a new pose. The
master of Della Porta’s art of memory thus arrogates for himself a phantasmatic
power over life and death, inherently a much greater power that the
pro-creative capacity he has ascribed to women. The asymmetric gender bias that
emerges in this account is instructive. As in the story of Daedalus and
Pasiphaë, the art of memory also refers to the preeminent ability of the male
magus to create monsters through artificial cross-breeding, whereas the
imagination of a pregnant woman requires male protection and guidance to its
power to shape future children.Conclusion The evidence for my claim that
Porta’s choice of memory images in his The Art of Remembering is not arbitrary,
but instead it is closely related to the overreaching project he pursued as
author of texts on (and a practitioner of ) natural magic, physiognomy, and the
theater. A set of classical myths—Andromeda, Europa, Io, Pasiphaë, and
Aktaion—handed down by Ovid, parodied by Apuleius, and painted by Titian, was
put to a specific use in Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering. In the mode of
synecdoche, he instructs the reader on how to reduce an entire story to a single
imago agens (for instance, the image of naked Andromeda chained to her rock).
The imago agens thus functions as a synopsis of the entire myth. This
oscillation between the modes of synopsis and of synecdoche—entailing a
constant process of re-focalization—in effect constitutes the basic cognitive
operation in Della Porta’s The Art of Remembering. Since it reduces a whole
welter of ancientmyths to one common narrative, the mode of synecdoche
facilitates the perception of thematic or structural affinities between
different myths. Accordingly, a series of imagines agentes referring to very
heterogeneous stories allows a leveling in our perception of these different
narratives and their content. The mode of synecdoche is conducive to
focalization on a single topic via myriad topical affinities (which become
highlighted in the mode of synopsis). In Della Porta’s mnemotechnique, this
re-focalization of a series of stories may transpire not only through a
heightening affinity, but also in the mode of inversion (for instance, in the
myths of Europa and Pasiphaë). In The Art of Remembering, this results in the
reduction of the stories of Io, Pasiphaë, and Europa (as well as Apuleius’
asinaria Pasiphaë ) to the topic of women having sex with animals and
generating monstrous offspring (bulls, cows, asses). This topical affinity is
also pertinent to the relationship between of sexualized imagines agentes and
memoranda (bulls, horns, birds). The imagines agentes operate within the
imagination of the master of the art of memory. This particular mental faculty
not only receives such images; it also has the capacity to transform them into
new images—images which in turn have the power for transforming the human body.
Not only does Della Porta’s laboratory of monstrous hybridization constitute a
hotbed for the literary imaginary, but the literary image also models the
reader’s imagination, and once the imagination is infected by an image, these
images may acquire a life of their own. This reasoning has its ultimate proof
in the belief that a pregnant woman’s fantasies inf luence the form of the
future child. At the thematic intersections of literature, visual art,
physiognomonics, natural magic, the core topic—sex with animals and the
generation of monstrous offspring—becomes embedded (in the literal sense of the
word) with personal erotic experiences. The women who have intercourse with
animals are impersonated by the women with whom Della Porta has had—or wished
to have—intercourse. As mnemonic personae/loci and hence as slaves of his
erotic fantasy, they are forced to embody any role assigned to them by their
master. Della Porta is thus obliquely portraying himself in the process of
recollecting his own memories—living statues of women who have sex with animals
who may be seen as surrogates for him. In a series of constant mise en abimes
mirroring a phallic erotic imagination, Della Porta points his readers (and
himself ) towards the center of a truly mannerist Minotaur’s abode.Notes I wish
to thank Marlen Bidwell-Steiner for many invaluable discussions and comments. 1
On the art of memory, see Yates, The Art of Memory; Bolzoni, The Gallery of
Memory; Carruthers, The Book of Memory. 2 The Latin Ars reminiscendi was
published 1602. L’arte del ricordare was purported to be the Italian
translation by a Dorandino Falcone da Gioia, but this was in all probability a
pseudonym for the author himself. Both texts are edited in Della Porta, Ars
Reminiscendi: L’arte di ricordare. For the first English translation of the
Italian version and a well-informed introduction to the text in English, see
Della Porta, The Art of Remembering/L’arte del ricordare. On the differences
between the Italian and the Latin versions, see in that edition Baum, “Writing
Classical Authority”; also Bolzoni, “Retorica, teatro, iconologia, 340, with
footnote 5; Maggi, “Introduction,” in Della Porta, The Art of
Remembering/L’arte del ricordare, 29–30; Balbiani on the fortuna of Della
Porta’s Magia naturalis in La Magia naturalis. Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory,
175. Valente, “Della Porta e l’inquisizione.” On which see Kodera “Giambattista
della Porta,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For a succinct and highly
influential discussion of the medieval technique of the art, see Rhetorica ad
Herennium, ed. and trans. Nüsslein, 164–80 (bk III, §§ 28–40, XVI–XXIV); Yates,
The Art of Memory, 63–113. On the medieval use of memory images, Carruthers,
The Book of Memory, 59, writes: “Most importantly, it is ‘affective’ in nature,
that is, it is sensorily derived and emotionally charged.” See also ibid., 109,
134, and 137. Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory, 130–31. Della Porta, Ars
Reminiscendi, 75. See for instance Dolce, Dialogo del modo, 26–32. As Bolzoni,
The Gallery of Memory, p. 137 (with footnote 12) has pointed out, it is
interesting to note that the Ars reminscendi explicitly warns against the use
of medicines or drugs for enhancing the capacitances of memory, whereas in
Della Porta had presented such recipes in his Magia naturalis. Della Porta, Ars
Reminiscendi, 68. On the notion of phantasmata in Della Porta, see Kodera,
“Giovan Battista della Porta’s Imagination.” Della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 70.
See Dolce, Dialogo del modo, 92 and the attendant notes directing the reader to
medieval sources of this method. Della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 70. Dolce,
Dialogo del modo, 33–34, for example, does not try to assimilate the personae
to the loci, but instead distinguishes between them. Della Porta, Ars
Reminiscendi, 17. It is interesting to note that Della Porta does not seem to
be picky about terminology, as for him very different notions—similitudo, idea,
forma, simulacrum are synonyms with imago. Ibid., 79. Galileo loved exactly
such character traits in Ariosto’s heroes; cf. Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory,
211. Della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 17–18. Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory, 167
has pointed to the fact that Della Porta is here quoting almost verbatim from
Leon Battista Alberti’s, De pictura, 2. 40, arguing that “the theatrical
tradition becomes a point of reference to the painter who has to paint an
istoria.” For a discussion of the number of loci from a different contemporary
perspective see Dolce, Dialogo del modo, 39–43 with many references to earlier
sources. Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory, 162–63; Dolce, Dialogo del modo, 145,
footnote 345 with much scholarly literature on the connections between the art
of memory and theater. Kodera, “Bestiality and Gluttony.” Clubb,
“Theatregrams,” has called these variable parts theatergrams. One possibility
is to generate a locus which is then invariably used, because it is recharged
with new imagines that have the capacity to store a new set of memoranda. Yet
if this process of re-inscription of the extant structure proves impossible,
one must destroy the entire setup. In order to do this, many masters of memory
suggested methods that were outright iconoclastic; cf. Bolzoni, The Gallery of
Memory, 142–44. Della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 18. Ibid. Carruthers, The Book
of Memory, 131 on the pictorial turn of medieval art of memory. Della Porta,
Ars Reminiscendi, 76. Ibid. Ibid., 17–18.30 This otherwise puzzling imago seems
to be a remnant from a manuscript version of the Arte del ricordare, which
refers as examples for imagines agentes to one of Boccaccio’s Novellae, on
Chichibio, of the Decameron VI, 4 (Della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 77); in that
version Della Porta also mentions two more highly salacious stories from the
Decameron (III, 10 and VIII, 7); see Della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 79 and 95;
see also Baum, “Writing Classical Authority,” 159. 31 The hero Hercules and the
river god Achelous were fighting over Deianeira, the daughter of Dionysius.
During the battle between the two rivals, the bull-headed river god turned
first into a snake and then into a bull, whose right horn is broken by
Hercules; according to one version, Hercules took that horn down to Tartarus
where it was filled by the Hesperides with golden fruit and is now called Bona
Dea (cornucopia). Graves, The Greek Myths, 553–54; Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. IX,
vv. 1–92. Observe that the cornucopia appears in the next imago agens. 32 Della
Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 18. 33 This increasing prurience is a general tendency
in Della Porta’s works and is probably due to the increasingly intolerant
intellectual climate characterizing the last decades of the sixteenth century;
on this see Kodera, “Bestiality and Gluttony,” 86–87 with references. 34 Della
Porta, Ars Reminiscendi, 77. 35 Della Porta here had openly referred to the
myth, whereas in the Ars reminiscendi he only alluded to it—namely, by
describing the iconography of one of Titian’s most famous paintings (the
persona of a virgin sitting and playing on a bull and holding a crown over the
animal’s head). 36 In the Latin version the prostitute was substituted with the
lover of one’s wife. In the Latin version, ibid., 22, Leda is completely
omitted. 37 The word ucello (bird) denotes penis, with birds commonly looming
large in all kinds of erotic metaphors; on the semantics of ucellare (the word
denoting prostitution, ridicule, and penis) see Alberti, “Giove ucellato,”
59–64; for similar contexts in Della Porta’s theater, see Kodera, “Humans as
Animals,” 108–09. 38 Compare Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties, 61–64 for
perceptive remarks on the gender bias of Della Porta’s Physiognomy. 39 Alberti,
Della pittura, 122–24 (bk 2, §36) For a discussion of the relevant passages,
see for instance Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy, 71–73. 40 Bolzoni, The
Gallery of Memory, 167. 41 Ovid, Metamorphoses IV, vv 671–675; 112. 42
Apuleius, Metamorphoses: The Golden Ass, Book ii, § 1, 22. 43 See Innes,
“Introduction,” 19–24. 44 So does Dolce, Dialogo del modo, 146-47, mentioning
Titian’s Europa and Akataion. 45 Ovid, Ars amatoria libri tres, 26–28, bk. I,
v. 289–326, Ovid., Metamorphoses, bk. VIII, v. 134–36; Graves, The Greek Myths,
293–94. 46 On Europa, see ibid., 194–97. 47 A caricature of the animation of
statues by Egyptian magi, as described by Hermes in the Corpus Hermeticum, an
account which it is well known, and haunted many renaissance minds; for a
commented edition, Copenhaver, Hermetica. 48 A labyrinth, i.e., an
architectural structure designed expressly to get lost in, as opposed to
orderly architectural structures—and also the inversion of the clearly
represented structure of loci in the art of memory. 49 See Kodera, Disreputable
Bodies, 275–93 and Della Porta, De i miracoli, 23–25, bk I, ch. 9. 50 Della
Porta, Natural magick, 43, bk 2, ch. 12. 51 Kodera, “Humans as Animals,”
109–15; Della Porta, Magia naturalis libri XX, 76, bk II, ch. 12. This passage
is an elaboration of Aristotle on crossbreeding, from De generatione animalium
4.3, 769b. In this case Della Porta’s credulity is greater than that of many of
his educated contemporaries, who were usually more skeptical about the
possibility of producing offspring through sex between humans and animals. For
a very interesting24452 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 6263 64 65Sergius
Koderacontemporary discussion of the topic, which clearly accentuates the ways
in which Della Porta is bending his evidence, see Varchi, “Della generazione
dei Mostri,” 99–106. On this see MacDonald, “Humanistic Self-Representation,”
Kodera, Disreputable Bodies, and Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties. Della Porta,
Ars Reminiscendi, 78–79. Cf. Apuleius, Metamorphoses lib. X, §§ 19–22. For a
succinct introduction to that text, and relevant secondary literature, see
Kenney in Apuleius, Metamorphoses, ix–xli. Ibid., 84–186; 190–94, bk 10, §
19–23; § 29–35. Apuleius, Metamorphoseon, bk. 10, § 19, l. 3. See Liliequist,
“Peasants against Nature,” 408. On the increasing belief in the real existence
of such hybrid animals in the later Middle Ages, see Salisbury, The Beast
Within, 139 and 147. Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk I, vv. 588–662 and 724–45, Graves,
The Greek Myths, 190–92. Just see the example of the re-transformation: Ovid,
Metamorphoses, bk I, vv 737–46, trans. Mary M. Innes, 48. For Lucius’
transformations into an ass and back again, see Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 52, bk
3, § 25 and ibid., 202–03, bk 11, § 13–14. In that vein of thought, many more
things could be said also on the story of Hercules and the bull-headed river
god Achelous (on whom, see above, endnote 31). The Arte del ricordare mentions
not only association from the same (dal simile, Della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi,
80 and 81) but also aggiungere, mancare, trasportare, mutare, partire (ibid.,
85) and trasponimento dal contrario (ibid., 95). Kodera, “Giambattista della
Porta,” 8–9 for a short introduction to the idea that all things in the
universal hierarchy of being are moved by the (irrational) forces of attraction
and repulsion they feel for one another. Porta provides an impressive
description of the macrocosmic animal, the male and female aspects of which
mingle in a harmonious and well-coordinated way; cf. Della Porta, Magia
naturalis, bk. 1, ch. 9. Della Porta, Natural magick, 51: “Many children have
hare-lips; and all because their mothers being with child, did look upon a
hare.” For an earlier source see Ficino, De amore, 252. For an introduction to
the history of these seemingly widespread practices and the related artwork
during the Renaissance, see Jacqueline Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of
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Réforme 38, no. 4 (2015): 83–Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Gender, and Medicine
in Renaissance Natural Philosophy. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance
Studies, “Giambattista della Porta.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, “Giovan Battista della Porta’s
Imagination.” In Image, Imagination and Cognition Medieval and Early Modern
Theory and Practice. Edited by Paul Bakker, Christoph Lüthy, Claudia Swan, and
Claus Zittel Leiden. Leiden: Brill,
“Humans as Animals in Giovan Battista della Porta’s scienza.”
Zeitsprünge 17 (2013): 414–432. Liliequist, Jonas. “Peasants Against Nature:
Crossing the Boundaries between Man and Animal in Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Sweden.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 3
(1991): 393–423. MacDonald, Katherine. “Humanistic Self-Representation in
Giovan Battista della Porta’s Della Fisonomia dell’uomo: Antecedents and
Innovation.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 397–414. Musacchio, J.M.
The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1999. Nüsslein, Theodor, ed. and trans. Rhetorica ad
Herennium. Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 1998.Sergius KoderaOvid. Ars
amatoria libri tres/Liebeskunst. Edited and translated by Wilhelm Adolf
Hertzberg. Munich: Heimeran, Metamorphoses. Translated by Mary M. Innes.
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Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994. Schiesari, Juliana. Beasts and
Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance.
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l’inquisizione. Nuovi documenti dell’ Archivio del Sant’Uffizio.” Bruniana et
Campanelliana 3 (1997): 415–45. Varchi, Benedetto. “Della generazione dei
Mostri.” In Lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi, 85–132. Florence: Filippo Giunti,
1590. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. London: Penguin, 1969.13 “O MIE ARTI
FALLACI” Tasso’s saintly women in the Liberata and Conquistata Jane TylusThe
second half of Torquato Tasso’s tormented life was taken up by his epic poem
Gerusalemme liberata and the painstaking revisions he made to it following its
unauthorized publication in 1581. Posterity has canonized the 1581 poem rather
than its more sprawling successor, Gerusalemme conquistata, which Tasso proudly
dedicated to Pope Clement VIII’s nephew when he published it in 1593. Posterity
notwithstanding, Tasso claimed that his “poema riformato” was far superior to
the earlier work largely because of “the much more certain knowledge I now have
of myself as well as of my writings” (“la certa cognizione ch’io ho di me
stesso e de le mie cose”).1 One result of this new certainty seems to have been
if not the eradication of the Liberata’s female characters, at least the
curtailing of their inf luence.2 The enchantress Armida virtually disappears
after Canto 13, lamenting her failures to keep the Christian army’s strongest
knight with her forever, and no longer converting to Christianity as in the
surprising end of the Liberata. The princess of Antioch, Erminia, is denied her
remarkable role in the Liberata as the discoverer and healer of the Christian
knight Tancredi’s wounded body and the revealer of a secret plot against his
captain, Goffredo. Two extraordinary Christian women are completely excised
from the Conquistata: Gildippe, who dies fighting by her husband’s side in the
Liberata’s twentieth canto, and Sofronia, who offered her life to save the
Christian refugee community in a captive Jerusalem, and who, in turn, is saved
by the Muslims’ most celebrated woman warrior, Clorinda. Only Clorinda’s tale
is relatively untouched—with the exception of her rescue of Sofronia. Both the
Liberata and the Conquistata tell of her strident independence and her baptism
into her mother’s Christian faith as she lies dying by the hand of Tancredi,
who has killed what he loved. This essay will not so much catalogue the
Conquistata’s many revisions as attempt to gauge the changing role of the
female body in Tasso’s epic practiceTylusand its relationship to Tasso’s
growing ambivalence about the status of the “arti fallaci” in his poetry—a
phrase, as we will see, that is uttered by the much altered character of
Erminia toward the end of the Conquistata. And even if Clorinda and Armida
continue to stand out in their memorable particularity in the Conquistata, they
are joined by a new host of women who exist largely to create a “dynamic that
is reassuringly familial,” as Claudio Gigante has observed, and who no longer
possess the self-conscious artfulness that characterized female characters in
the Liberata.3 The contrast allows us to see how potentially radical the Tasso of
the Liberata was and at the same time how his transformations of women in the
Conquistata are tied to his reconceptualization of himself as an epic poet.4 I
will elaborate some of these arguments by turning to developments that led to
the Conquistata, necessarily addressing selective incidents within both poems
in order to depict the nature of Tasso’s poetic transformation. One episode in
particular offers itself up for special consideration. It concerns a female
figure in the Liberata who has not attracted much attention, and who, as
mentioned above, is nowhere to be found in the revised poem: Sofronia.5 Willing
to die in exchange for the salvation of her fellow Christians, she is rescued
and subsequently exiled from Jerusalem. The contrast between this stirring
episode in the Liberata and its muted aftermath in the Conquistata could not be
greater, as the following pages will show. At the same time, they attest to
what might be called Tasso’s desire for the organicity of his revised epic, a
poem in which individual characters would be immune from the criticism launched
against Sofronia herself. For according to the Gerusalemme’s first readers, the
episode that centered on her in Canto 2 was “poco connesso” to the Liberata as
a whole.6 This lack of continuity, in turn, has a stylistic echo in the
infamous critique of Tasso’s language as “parlar disgiunto” or disjointed
speech—a disjointedness even Tasso acknowledged when he claimed to have learned
it from Virgil, admitting that it can tempt one to swerve dangerously from the
“truth” in its pursuit of fallacious artistries.7 The path toward wholeness in
the Conquistata thus marks a turn away from Virgil and toward the more
narratively f luid Homer, as readers of Tasso (and Tasso himself ) have readily
ascertained.8 But this path also goes through the body of the female,
inscripted into the Conquistata as bearer of a new epic model of integration
and personal loss. It is a body that the chastened Tasso, in his final critical
writings on his poetic output, may also have recognized as his own. * ** In the early 1680s,
the prolific Luca Giordano executed a series of paintings for a Genovese
palazzo recently acquired by the nobleman Eugenio Durazzo. Among the works
Giordano designed for the entryway into a palace that was on the “must-see”
list of every foreign visitor to Genova, were portraits of the death of Seneca
and the Greek hero Perseus. But his paintings also featured a large canvas
depicting an event from the Liberata’s story of Sofronia, the brave young woman
who volunteers to die for her fellow Christians and who, along with the man who
loves her, is saved by Clorinda. Moved by the taciturn stance of thefemale
victim before her, Clorinda asks Aladino, Jerusalem’s king, to free the two
Christians in exchange for her promise that she will perform great deeds in
Jerusalem’s defense, and Giordano chooses to display this moment in his work9
(Figure 13.1).10 At the same time, Clorinda’s back is turned, so that the real
savior of the two Christians bound at the stake seems to be a painting of Mary
which angels are holding aloft—suggesting that Giordano’s work may also be
about the salvific powers of art. Mariella Utili has written of Giordano’s
intent to throw into relief the religious aspect of the story: “the exaltation
of Christianity, which had been the basis for the immediate success of Tasso’s
poem and which many other artists before Giordano had noted as well.”11 Yet
with respect to the episode of Sofronia and her would-be lover Olindo, who begs
to die with her, such a remark might seem ironic. For this story provoked
almost more than anything else in the epic the concerns of the poem’s
Inquisitorial readers, and in turn Tasso’s worries aboutFIGURE 13.1Luca
Giordano, “Olindo e Sofronia,” Palazzo Reale gia’ Durazzo (Genova).Photo
credit: Zeri Photo Archive, Bologna, inv. 110885.the extent to which its
inclusion would threaten the Liberata’s publication. So much so, that in a
telling letter written on April 3, 1576 to his friend and literary confidant
Scipione Gonzaga he writes, “Io ho giá condennato con irrevocabil sentenza alla
morte l’episodio di Sofronia” (“I’ve already condemned the episode of Sofronia
to death, and my decree is absolute”).12 Having barely escaped death at the
hands of Jerusalem’s king, Sofronia was condemned anew by Tasso. The reasons
for this condemnation are several, even as the episode contains within itself a
germ of the process that will define Tasso’s method in the Conquistata. One
reason certainly has to do with the painting which Giordano has f loating in
the sky—a touch unaccounted for in the Liberata itself, but prepared for by the
odd narrative Tasso weaves in the opening of Canto 2. For the catalyst that set
off a tyrant’s rage, leading him to sentence Jerusalem’s Christians to death,
is indeed a work of art: an image of Mary taken from the Christians’ church by
the magician and former Christian Ismeno, who is convinced of its supernatural
abilities to protect the walls of the city against the Crusaders. He places
Mary’s picture in a mosque so as to provide “fatal custodia a queste porte.”13
For reasons on which Tasso coyly refuses to pronounce—(“O fu di man fedele opra
furtiva, / o pur il Ciel qui sua potenza adopra, / che di Colei ch’è sua regina
e diva / sdegna che loco vil l’imagin copra: / ch’incerta fama è ancor se ciò
ascriva / ad arte umana od a mirabil opra”; “It was either the work of a
stealthy hand, or heaven interposed its potent will, disdaining that the image
of its queen be smuggled somewhere so contemptible” [2: 9]14)—the immagine
mysteriously disappears from the mosque into which Ismeno has smuggled it.
Certain that the Christians have contrived to steal it back, Aladino plots for
them universal slaughter, until the beautiful Sofronia steps forward to take
the blame so that her people will not die, a confession the narrator describes
as a “magnanima menzogna,” a magnanimous lie. In a letter, however, written
soon after he released the poem to an official reading, Tasso seems fearful
that the stolen immagine has invoked the ire not of Aladino but of Silvio
Antoniano, the Roman Inquisitor and official in charge of granting the right of
nihil obstat for books published in Rome. Writing to Luca Scalabrino on a later
occasion, he continued to insist on excising the “episodio di Sofronia”:
“perch’io non vorrei dar occasione a i frati con quella imagine, o con alcune
altre cosette che sono in quell’episodio, di proibire il libro” (“I don’t want
to give the friars a chance to condemn the book because of that image, or
because of any other little things found in the episode”).15 Much of interest
has been written of the status of images in the aftermath of Trent, some of it
in regard to the poem’s second canto. As Naomi Yavneh has pointed out, Trent
was preoccupied with limiting the role that excessive popular devotion played
in religious life, and its stance on images was no exception: it perforce
needed to clarify the extent to which “immagini” were only the simulacri for
the things to which they pointed. As such, the importance of an object in
referencing beyond itself—its deictic function—was accentuated by the orthodox
proclamations from the 1570s and 1580s. One typical characterization of the
post-Tridentine image, although from the Seicento, is offered by the
JesuitGiovanni Domenico Ottonelli. He suggests that in gazing at a painting,
“which represents something other than the thing which it resembles, and from
which it takes its name” (“che rappresenta un’altra cosa, di cui tiene la
simiglianza, e prende il nome”), one must recognize that “while the image
renders visible what is invisible, the image is only worthy of honor by virtue
of resemblance, not substance.”16 Moreover, as Yavneh goes on to point out, in
the episode from Tasso’s Liberata, the transformation of the painting of Mary
into a thing of “substance”— i.e., it alone can save Jerusalem from harm—is
initiated by the renegade Christian, Ismeno, unable to leave his former
religion completely behind him (“Questi or Macone adora, e fu cristiano, / ma i
primi riti anco lasciar non pote; / anzi, in uso empio e profano / confonde le
due leggi a se’ mal note”; “He adores Mohammed, as once he adored Christ, but
cannot now abandon the first way, so often to profane and evil use confounds
the two religions out of ignorance” [2: 2]). It is Ismeno who recommends that
Aladino place “questa effigie lor” of Mary, “diva e madre” or goddess and
mother of the Christian’s god (2: 5) into the mosque because of its talismanic
status—an idolatrous reading in which the Christians, who leave their offerings
before the “simulacro” do not, apparently, concur.17 One can only speculate as
to what about the “immagine” in Canto 2 might have angered Tasso’s
inquisitorial reader; the letter from Antoniano detailing his objections to the
Liberata does not survive. But it is striking that another vergine, Sofronia,
proclaims for herself the protective status Ismeno gave to the immagine of
Maria. Her sacrifice thus effects a substitution originally engineered by the
apostate. She too adopts the language of female uniqueness when boldly stating
to the king Aladino her “crime”: “sol di me stessa, sol consigliera, sol
essecutrice” (“I was the only one [who knew of it], one counselor, one executor
alone”; 2: 23). When Olindo challenges Sofronia’s magnanimous lie, arguing that
a mere woman would be unable to carry out the theft, she insists again on her
autonomy: “Ho petto anch’io, ch’ad una morte crede / di bastar solo, e
compagnia non chiede” (“I too have a heart, confident it can die but once. It
does not ask for company”; 2: 30). But Tasso links her in other ways to the
Madonna that Ismeno made into a singularly potent object. As commentators have
noticed, Tasso compares her to the stolen image when her veil and mantle are
roughly taken from her when she is led to the stake.18 Just as Mary’s image,
“enveloped in a slender shroud” (“in un velo avolto”; 2: 5) was seized
(“rapito”) by Ismeno, so are Sofronia’s veil and mantle seized from her
(“rapit[i] a lei [Sofronia] il velo e ’l casto manto”; 2: 26). And an allusion
to Mary’s face (“il volto di lei”) returns with “smarrisce il bel volto in un
colore / che non è pallidezza, ma candore” (“the lovely rose of [Sofronia’s]
face is lost in white which is not pallor, but a glowing light”; 2: 26). And
yet the resonances between Sofronia and an inimitable female figure do not end
here. Giampiero Giampieri has noted that the white coloring of Sofronia at the
stake is echoed eleven cantos later when Clorinda, the third vergine of the
canto, dies at Tancredi’s hands. This pale demeanor at death’s arrival in turn
has its haunting origins in the phrase accompanying the suicides of
Virgil’smost prominent female character, Dido, and the historical figure on
whom she is partially modelled, Cleopatra. These intertextual allusions thus
trace an unsettling historical trajectory, insofar as far from being “vergini,”
unlike their Tassian counterparts, both women are known for their sensuality
and, in Dido’s case, unrequited passion. At the same time, Clorinda, like
Sofronia, occupies the role enjoyed by Dido and Cleopatra before romantic
liaisons led them astray. They are all the singular, female supports of their
people. When Islam’s powerful woman warrior enters Jerusalem in Canto 2,
Clorinda is defined as the self-sufficient savior of a people that Sofronia
and—according to Ismeno—the immagine of Mary have been before her. In greeting
Clorinda, Aladino bestows on her the signal distinction of the warrior who
alone can protect the city (“non, s’essercito grande unito insieme / fosse in
mio scampo, avrei più certa speme”: “though a whole host should come to rescue
me, I would not hope with greater certainty”; 2: 47). Not only does he concede
to her his scepter (“lo scettro”) but he adds, “legge sia quel che comandi”
(“let the law be what you command”; 2: 48), an honor that prompts Clorinda to
ask for her reward in advance: the release of the two Christians.19 Even as
Clorinda will exact bloody penalties on the Christians who attack the city to
which she pledges her protection, this fantasy of female potency that begins in
Canto 2 will be eclipsed outside Jerusalem’s walls when Clorinda is killed by
Tancredi: Meanwhile they whispered of the bitter chance behind the city wall
confusedly till finally they learned the truth. At once through the whole town
the bad news made its way mingled with cries and womanly laments, as desperate
as if the enemy had taken the town in battle and f lew to raze houses and
temples and set the ruins ablaze. Confusamente si bisbiglia intanto del caso
reo ne la rinchiusa terra. Poi s’accerta e divulga, e in ogni canto de la città
smarrita il romor erra misto di gridi e di femineo pianto; non altramente che
se presa in guerra tutta ruini, e ’l foco e i nemici empi volino per le case e
per li tèmpi. (12: 100) The defeat of a city in wartime evoked in this moving
simile is the fate that Ismeno believes Jerusalem will avoid if Mary’s image is
placed in the mosque; that Sofronia believes her people will avoid if she dies
at the stake; and thatAladino believes his kingdom will avoid if Clorinda
agrees to defend his city. And the moment, of course, looks backward again to
Virgil, and to the demise of another city, Carthage, upon the death of another
singular woman. “The palace rings with lamentations, with sobbing and women’s
shrieks, and heaven echoes with loud wails—even as though all Carthage or
ancient Tyre were falling before the inrushing foe, and fierce f lames were
rolling on over the roofs of men, over the roofs of gods” (IV: 667–71).20 The
“città smarrita,” the urbs in ruin: in both Aeneid 4 and the Liberata, the figurative
collapse of the city, portrayed in a simile that reveals the grim devastations
of war, is tied to the death of a woman characterized as savior. And in both
cases, the two cities of these respective poems will be invaded by the
enemy—one during the Punic Wars that are only predicted in the Aeneid, the
other in Canto 20 of the Liberata. At the same time, the simile of Canto 12
following Clorinda’s death can be said to silence the diabolical suggestion
that women’s bodies might be sufficient protection for Jerusalem’s community;
or in rhetorical terms, that the female body stands in an analogical
relationship to the city and can procure its health. Sofronia’s self less
action in Canto 2 procures temporary salvation for the Christians. But genuine
salvation arrives only eighteen cantos later, when Goffredo’s troops invade
Jerusalem and secure it for its “rightful” owners. In the meantime, Sofronia,
like the Madonna’s image, has been withdrawn forever from the poem. Following
her rescue by Clorinda, she does not refuse Olindo her hand in marriage, and
with him and others “di forte corpo e di feroce ingegno” (whose bodies are
robust and spirits bold; 2: 55) she is banished, so fearful is Aladino of
having so much virtue nearby (“tanta virtù congiunta . . . vicina”;
2: 54). Some of the banished wandered aimlessly (“Molti n’andaro errando”; 2:
55) while others traveled to Emmaus where Goffredo’s troops are gathered. Of
Sofronia and Olindo, however, no more is heard. All Tasso divulges of their
fate is that they both went into exile beyond the bounds of Palestine (2: 54).
Such a finale to Sofronia’s sacrificial offering ensures—intentionally, it
would seem— that the episode is indeed “poco connesso” to the rest of the poem.
Inserted into the beginning of the Liberata, the story of Sofronia operates as
a virtually self-contained unit, ending with its main protagonist banished from
Jerusalem. That the episode can be said to trace Tasso’s ambivalences regarding
“tanta virtù congiunta” in not one, but three, female characters, is suggested
by both Sofronia’s and the immagine’s summary dispatch from the poem—as though
to insist on the heretical nature of Ismeno’s view of the painting, and the
women’s views of themselves, as sufficient to protect a city.21 But there may
be another link between the exiled women and the immagine. The latter is both
more and less than an icon: it is a work of art, in ways which the woman
themselves may replicate. Much of the threat represented by Sofronia has to do
with her inscrutability, which mirrors the unknowability of the immagine’s fate
and of the painting itself. Moved by generosity and “fortezza,” Sofronia exits
alone among the people (“tra ’l vulgo”) after Aladino orders the Christians’
houses burned. But as she journeys publicly to meet the king, Tassointroduces
some seemingly gratuitous phrases: she neither “covers up her beauty, nor
displays it,” and “Non sai ben dir s’adorna o se negletta, / se caso od arte il
bel volto compose” (“If chance or art has touched her lovely face, if she
neglects or adorns herself, who knows”; 2: 18). Similarly, she is described in
relationship to the young Olindo, who has loved her desperately from afar, as
either “o lo sprezza, o no ‘l vede, o non s’avede” (“she scorns him, or does
not see him, or takes no note”; 2: 16), and of her considerable beauty, she
“non cura, / o tanto sol quant’onesta’ se ’n fregi” (“cares not for it, or only
as much as required by honor’s sake”; 2: 14). Even as Tasso depicts her as a
“virgin of sublime and noble thoughts” (“vergine d’alti pensieri e regi”), he
wastes no time in adding that she is also “d’alta beltà” (2: 14), suggesting
that we do not know whether Sofronia is aware of her beauty’s effect on her
admirers. In short, she is the product of an artfulness that at once belies her
sincerity and renders her inaccessibility to public scrutiny even more
pronounced. Indeed, Sofronia is impugned throughout Canto 2 in various ways
that can only force the reader to suspect if not her motive—which emerges
following her struggle to balance masculine virility or “fortezza” and female
modesty (“vergogna”)22—then at least her self-presentation in a public space.
And because she is a woman, “amore” emerges as the vehicle through which her
integrity can be compromised. Or as Tasso says in introducing Olindo and in
returning to the language used only several stanzas before of the chaste image
of Mary and its supposed ability to provide “fatal custodia” to the gates of
Jerusalem: “tu [amor] per mille custodie entro a i più casti/ verginei alberghi
il guardo altrui portasti” (“although a thousand sentinels are placed, you
[Love] lead men’s glances into the most chaste of dwellings”; 2: 15). The
uncertain status of Sofronia’s agency and her inability to control the
reception of her offer are highlighted again after the king, furious over her
assertions that she was right to steal the image, orders her to be burned: “e
’ndarno Amor contr’a lo sdegno crudo / di sua vaga bellezza a lei fa scudo”
(“too slight a shield is womanly grace for Love to f ling against the crude
resentment of the king”; 2: 25): as though she—or Love working through
her—might cunningly be able to soften the tyrant in his resolve. The manner in
which Sofronia is tied to the stake—her veil and “casto manto” stripped violently
from her and used to tie “le molli braccia” (2: 26)—and the ensuing appearance
of Olindo beside her, “tergo al tergo,” heighten the barely suffused sensuality
of the preceding stanzas in which Sofronia’s ambiguously constructed femininity
has been a muted but persistent theme. “O caso od arte.” This is the phrase
that threatens to turn Sofronia into the seductress Armida, who appears two
cantos later at the threshold of the Christians’ camp to lure the Crusaders
away from war. Sofronia is no Armida. Yet in depicting Sofronia’s inner conf
lict between “fortezza” and “vergogna,” while refusing to declare the extent of
Sofronia’s artful self-consciousness, Tasso highlights the problems that emerge
when a woman thrusts herself into the public gaze.23 The questioning presence
of male spectators, a group into which Tasso inserts the (male) reader by way
of the narrator’s interventions, ultimately pointsto the inability of
Sofronia—and by extension, of the immagine of Mary and of Clorinda, who has
already unknowingly inspired the passion of the Christian knight Tancredi—to
control the effects of her self-presentation. Like the Didos and Cleopatras
before her, she is unable to escape from the controlling system of gender that
makes her into the object gazed upon and fantasized about as though she were a
work of art. At the same time, what prevents Sofronia from becoming a martyr
and hence giving her life for her people is another woman, Clorinda: who at
first appears to the populous as a male warrior (“Ecco un guerriero [ché tal
parea]”) but who is betrayed as a woman by her insignia, the tiger. When
Clorinda enters into the crowded piazza where the two Christians are tied to
the stake, she notes Olindo weeping “as a man weighed down with sorrow, not
pain” (“in guisa d’uom cui preme / pietà, non doglia)” while Sofronia is
silent, “con gli occhi al ciel si fisa / ch’anzi ‘l morir par di qua giù
divisa” (“her eyes so fixed on heaven that she seems to be leaving this world
before she dies”; 2: 42). Clordina’s response to this sight—a Clorinda raised
in the woods and led to disdain female pastimes such as sewing and
embroidery—is extraordinary: “Clorinda intenerissi, e si condoles / d’ambeduo
loro e lagrimonne alquanto” (“Clorinda’s heart grew tender at this sight; she
grieved with them, and tears welled up in her eyes”; 2: 43). Such tenderness
leads her to ask for the two Christians as a gift in advance of her promised
salvation of the city: a salvation, as we will soon know, she can never
achieve. Her pity for a woman like herself—at once self-contained and yet
vulnerable to others’ fantasies about her sexuality—breaks through the
religious and ethnic differences on which the Liberata as a whole depends, and
arguably questions for Muslims and Christians alike the very premise of the
war. Clorinda will be revealed later in the poem as the daughter of a Christian
mother, and in retrospect one might see her recognition of herself in Sofronia
as a premonition of her true identity. Yet, at this early point in the poem,
her alignment of herself with Sofronia, along with Tasso’s allusions to
Virgil’s fateful women, creates a potentially scandalous community of women
whose unpredictable and often unreadable actions threaten to undo the
transcendental militarism on which the poem is based. The crisis of the
immagine, in Ismeno’s feverish recasting of its significance, is like that of
the women who are endlessly substituted for it: complete within itself, it has
no deictic function, failing to refer beyond itself to heavenly powers.
Sofronia, too, points only to herself (“Sol essecutrice”), a presumed
self-sufficiency that Tasso’s narrator translates into inaccessibility. It
creates for Sofronia the same unknowable status of the stolen painting, and an
unknowability Clorinda can only admire, and in which she similarly partakes.
Tasso’s simile of the city that dissolves into f lames upon Clorinda’s death
ten cantos later is thus ultimately a failed simile. That he will go on to
banish all of his Christian women from the end of the Liberata suggests both
his attempt to contain the threat represented by the female figures of Canto 2
and his inability to integrate Christian and Muslim women alike into the
culminating events of the poem. Clorinda and Gildippe are dead, Erminia is in
an “albergo” somewherewithin the city, Armida utters words of conversion but
only on Jerusalem’s outskirts, and Sofronia has disappeared forever. To be
sure, on the one hand, Tasso’s poem generally refuses to allow any character to
stand in for the whole and thus represent the city, earthly or celestial, by
him or herself, as the belated “Allegoria del Poema” attests and as numerous
episodes involving Rinaldo and Goffredo suggest.24 In an early letter, Tasso
protests the custom of romance that allows single characters to decide the fate
of entire empires: “non ricevo affatto nel mio poema quell’eccesso di bravura
che ricevono i romanzi; cioè, che alcuno sia tanto superiore a tutti gli altri,
che possa sostenere solo un campo” (“In my poem, I don’t allow that excess of
bravura that the romance welcomes, in which one figure emerges as greater than
all the others, capable of defending the battlefield all by himself ”).25 To
this extent, transforming the painting of Mary or the body of Clorinda into
singularly protective forces copies the excess of romanzi which Tasso claims to
avoid. Only the uniting of Goffredo’s “compagni erranti” or wandering
companions under “i santi segni” can win for the Christians their city (1:1).
The liberation of Jerusalem is the work not of women, but of men; and not of a
single man, but many. On the other hand, unlike Goffredo or Rinaldo, these
“virtuous” women do indeed disappear from the poem, suffering the fate of the
“poco connesso” and summarily excluded from the larger body into which Tasso
incorporates his men in the “Allegoria.”26 Yet is such exclusion ultimately a
penalty? While at work on the Liberata, Tasso was penning his brief pastoral
play, the Aminta, where he experiments with the inaccessibility of a vergine in
the figure of Silvia, whose own near-violation while tied to a tree is
reminiscent, even in its phrasing, of Sofronia’s violent torture. The
Liberata’s “Già ’l velo e ’l casto manto a lei rapito, / stringon le molli
braccia aspre ritorte” (“they tear away her veil and her modest cloak, bind
hard her tender hands behind the back”; 2.26) echoes Silvia’s victimization at
the Satyr’s hands.27 But the exposure of Silvia’s and Sofronia’s bodies is in
turn contrasted with the degree to which they refuse to be contaminated by the violence
that surrounds them even as they are vulnerable to varying interpretations of
their sincerity. The fact that following their rescues neither female character
is seen again suggests an additional layer of inscrutability, as though Tasso
chose to protect the privacy of his vergini from those who would compromise
their virtue.28 Perhaps only in a world where epic values— the seizing of
Jerusalem from the renegade Ismeno and the infidel Turks—are unequivocally
positive can Sofronia’s premature departure be construed as a loss, rather than
a gain. The phrase used with respect to the mosque from which Mary’s image is
taken—“a vile place heaven holds in disdain”—might stand in for the
contaminated city as a whole that Sofronia inhabits with other embattled Christians.
Tasso’s own narrative gesture with regard to all women of “fortezza,” Clorinda
included, saves them from the bitter militarism that informs the second half of
his poem, preserving for them a space offstage—or above it. But Tasso continued
to ponder the ideal relationship of the female body to his epic project, one
which would rely on integration rather than separation. Such integration
demanded a very different kind of poem from the Liberata, whoseMuslim male
warriors, if not its women, are diabolical figures from whom the city must be
wrested. The Conquistata has typically been glossed as a work that celebrates
the Counter-Reformation Church in all its militancy. But attentiveness to the
new women of the revised poem, beginning with a lamenting Mary who has stepped
out of the painting to become a character, may suggest otherwise.29 * ** Death appears
in the Conquistata’s opening stanza, where the triumphant prolepsis of
“compagni erranti” joining together under “santi segni” no longer exists, and
where the explicit allusions to the failures of hell, Asia, and Africa to
defeat the Crusaders is replaced by a description of how Goffredo’s military
feats “di morti ingombrò le valli e ’l piano, / e correr fece il mar di sangue
misto” (“filled the plains and valleys with the dead, and made the sea run red
with blood”). With death, there is mourning—and a world, as Tasso will call it
late in the poem, of “femineo pianto” female lament (23:117). And the first
evidence of female mourning that we see in Tasso’s “poema riformato” is that of
the Virgin Mary, who makes a surprising cameo appearance at precisely the
moment occupied in the Liberata by the episode with Sofronia. Threatened, as
before, by the impending arrival of Crusaders, Aladino decides that the
Christian community within the walls poses a danger, and in his rage swears to
put them all to death. A stolen painting no longer exists to provoke his anger,
but almost immediately the subject of that painting appears, as Tasso’s
narrator redirects our gaze from the cowering Christian citizens of Jerusalem
to heaven, in two entirely new stanzas: Holy Compassion, you did not keep your
thoughts hidden to yourself, as you gazed down from the celestial and sacred
realm onto the site where the King had lain buried, and at his faithful f lock.
Thus: “Lord,” you cried, “help, help—for now I alone am not sufficient to save
their lives.” Upon seeing those moist eyes—the eyes that had wept for her Son
who died on the cross—the Father said, “now let me turn my attention to their
fear” . . . and the savage man [Aladino] tempers his insane rage. Non
fu ’l pensier, santa Pietate, occulto a te ne la celeste e sacra reggia, donde
guardavi il luogo in cui sepulto il Re si giacque, e la fedel sua greggia.
Pero’: – Signor, gridasti, aita, aita, ch’io non basto a salvarli omai la vita.
Vedendo il Padre rugiadosi gli occhi di lei che pianse in croce estinto il
Figlio, – Vo’ – disse – ch’al Timor la cura or tocchi – . . . . [e]
Tempra dunque il crudel la rabbia insana. (2: 11–13) 30Thanks to this heavenly
intervention that happens in the blink of an eye (“ad un girar di ciglio”),
Aladino will “temper his rage” by burning the fields where the Crusaders might
have found food and by exiling, rather than killing, the faithful—excepting “le
vergini”—from Jerusalem, who depart in tears (“gemendo in lagrimosi lutti”; 2:
53). But their laments will not endure for long. When they come upon the
Crusaders in their camp, they offer their services to Goffredo and participate,
presumably, in the final attack on their former city in the closing cantos of
the new poem. As in Canto 2 of the Liberata, we have a threatened community,
and once again Mary figures in its protection. But for those familiar with the
Liberata, this episode in the Conquistata’s second canto represents a loss
rather than a gain, albeit a puzzling loss. Having omitted the episode of
Sofronia that apparently, he, and many of his first readers, found so
troubling, Tasso leaves us with the mere shadow of the women who once occupied
the status, rightly or wrongly, of Jerusalem’s saviors: a mourning mother. When
Mary calls upon God to temper Aladino’s wrath, she is gazing at a tomb: “il
luogo in cui sepulto/ il Re si giacque.” Jerusalem is a place of death, both
past and imminent, and Mary is not celebrating her son’s resurrection, but
weeping for his demise on the cross. Her grief is rehearsed again in the
following canto in stanzas also new to the Conquistata, where it will be shared
by other mothers—many of them Muslim. On tapestries which Goffredo shows the
two ambassadors who have arrived from the enemy’s forces—one of them, Argante,
“intrepid warrior” (“intrepido guerriero”; 2: 91)—is the thunderous defeat of
Antioch, which the Christians have just taken. Tasso lingers not over the
victorious assault on the city but on the artist’s attentiveness to women’s
loss as they watch their sons die below them: talented artist, you made the
faces of their mothers’ pallid and pale, for life no longer was welcome to
them. From above each one gazed at her dead child, who lay on the earth by
enemies oppressed, his head affixed to the enemy lance; and tears bathed their
dry cheeks. And so he created great variety among these images of grief
. . . con viso vi [il maestro accorto] feo pallido e smorto le madri,
a cui la vita allor dispiacque. D’alto mirò ciascuna il figlio or morto che tra
nemici oppresso in terra giacque, e’l capo affisso a la nemica lancia; e di
pianto rigò l’arida guancia. E variò le imagini dolente . . . (3:
48–9) The resulting “istoria” tells of a “Città presa, notturno orror, tumulto,
/ ruine, incendi e peste”, to which the artist adds “Fuga, terror, lutto, e mal
fido scampo / . . . . e correr feo di sangue il campo” (“A city
seized, nocturnal horrors, tumult, ruin, firesand plague . . .
flight, terror, grief, and luckless escape, and he made the field run with
blood”; 50). Argante, the Christians’ enemy, is gazing on these images, and one
could argue that his perspective inf lects the presentation of the tapestries,
much as Aeneas’s grief in Book 1 colors his reception of the carvings in
Carthage that detail the fall of Troy. Yet, elsewhere in the descriptions, we
hear of the “pious Goffredo,” the “good Beomondo,” the “great Riccardo.”
Moreover, the direct apostrophes to the Christian reader (“Italici e Germani
uscir diresti . . .” [2: 17]) suggest that it is Tasso’s narrator—and
Tasso himself—who lingers over the mournful details. In fact, the singular
concentration on the Conquistata’s women as vehicles of lament suggests that Tasso
is far from making their response to loss yet another diabolically tinged
inspiration. Riccardo, formerly the warrior Rinaldo, now also has a mother, who
like Thetis, emerges from sea-depths to comfort her son when his friend Rupert
dies. The prayers of Riccardo in turn are carried by heaven to a female figure
who with tearful face (“con lagrimoso volto” 21: 74) asks God, as did Mary much
earlier, to bring aid by turning “your pitying face to my warrior” (“al mio
guerrier pietoso ’l ciglio”; 72). But as the scenes of the tapestry suggest,
women’s presence as mourners is most visible in the sections devoted to
Argante, scourge of the Christians, and in the Conquistata clearly meant to be
a double for Hector from Homer’s Iliad. To strengthen this parallel with the
Homeric poem, Tasso had to give Argante a wife to protest his going out into
battle as Andromache did with Hector, and a mother—and a Helen—who will mourn
him when he dies.31 In the Liberata, this “intrepido guerriero” was killed by
Tancredi after a bloody duel outside Jerusalem’s walls. The wandering Erminia,
in love with Tancredi, literally stumbles over the bodies when she is escorting
the spy Vafrino back to the Christians’ camp, and restores Tancredi to health
with pious prayers and herbal medicines. Argante is summarily ignored by the
pair until Tancredi insists that they carry his bloody corpse with them to
Jerusalem: “non si frodi / o de la sepoltura o de le lodi” (do not deprive him
of burial or of praise; 19: 116). But we hear no eulogies, nor do we witness
Argante’s burial, and he is as arguably isolated in death as in life. The
Argante of the Conquistata receives a very different fate after he dies at
Tancredi’s hands. His body is given to the women of Jerusalem, who eulogize him
at the close of Canto 23 as husband, father, and son, as well as fierce
protector of his city. This last role is given explicitly to him by Erminia,
rechristened Nicea in the Conquistata, who laments her inabilities to save him
in the plaintive cry “O arti mie fallaci, o falsa spene! / A cui piú l’erbe
omai raccoglio e porto / da l’ime valli e da l’inculte arene? / Non ti spero
veder mai piú resorto, / per mia pietosa cura” (“O my fallacious arts, o my
false hope! What use now the herbs that I gather and carry from the dark
valleys and the hidden sands? I no longer hope to see you risen, saved by my
compassionate healing”; 23:126). The woman who in the Liberata had collected
medicinal herbs for her beloved Tancredi, and who is addressed by him as
“medica mia pietosa” after she saves him from death, here reproaches herself
for having failed to rescue Tancredi’s enemy Argante. Ifshe saved Tancredi and
Goffredo—and the Christian cause—in the Liberata, here she can confess only her
failed arts, and in the context of prophetically imagining a future of grief
and destruction in the wake of Argante’s death: “Sola io non sono al mio dolor;
ma sola / veggio, dopo la prima, altre ruine, / altri incendi, altre morti: e
grave e stanca, / quest’alma al nuovo duol languisce e manca” (“I’m not alone
in my grief, but I alone can see after this first destruction, more ruin, more
fiery blazes, more deaths; and tired and heavy, this soul will languish and
expire, sickened by new sorrows”; 127).32 These three weeping women—mother, wife,
and friend whose arts cannot save a dead man—integrate Argante not only into
the life of the city and the family, but into the future, as the women who
survive him imagine their fates as vividly as the female survivors of Hector in
the Iliad imagine theirs. Or as Argante’s wife, Lugeria, laments, “Ne la tenera
etate è il figlio ancora, / che generammo al lagrimoso duolo, / tu ed io
infelici . . . / non vedrá gli anni in cui virtù s’onora, / Né la
fama tua” (“Our son whom you and I—unhappy— conceived only for tearful sorrow
is still in his tender years . . . he will see the years in which
virtue is bestowed on him, nor will he know your fame” (23:119). For herself,
she can envision only “foreign shores” (“lidi estrani”) and service in the
entourage of some proud, Christian lord. The lines closely follow those of
Andromache in the Iliad, much as the lament of Argante’s mother (“Difendesti la
patria, e palme e fregi / n’avesti, or n’hai trafitto il viso e ’l petto”; “You
defended our country, and had honors and laurels; now your face and breast are
pierced [by a lance]”) repeats that of Hecuba in Iliad 24. Thus just as in the
Iliad, as Sheila Murnaghan has written, female lament has the function of tying
the hero back into his community, while making it clear that the hero’s kleos
or fame is achieved at women’s expense.33 Such a constitution of a larger, more
sorrowful, poem can be allied in turn with Tasso’s new relationship to epic.
Even for a poet as relentlessly psychoanalyzed as Tasso, the creation in the Conquistata
of the familial contexts that Tasso may have longed for after the death of his
mother, never knew, may come as a surprise.34 Tasso’s redefinition of the epic
poet in his unfinished Giudizio del poema riformato, the last of his critical
works, may instead have been in response to those readers of the pirated
Liberata who complained about the inauthenticity of some of the characters’
emotions that drove the poem. In particular, he argues forcefully in the
Giudizio for the new sentiment he seeks to generate throughout the Conquistata:
pity, or “la commiserazione e de la purgazione de gli affetti” (“commiseration
and purgation of its effects”; 165). With respect to Argante, whom he
explicitly declares to have now fashioned as “most similar to Hector” (“similissimo
ad Ettore”), he comments, where Argante earlier was not wretched, now he’s
completely so, because he’s been changed from a foreign and mercenary soldier
into the son of a king and a Christian queen, and has become the natural prince
of the city: defending his father, loving his wife, and constant in his defense
and in hisfaith; and so that pity that is denied him by [Christian] law can be
granted out of natural and human sentiment. dove la persona d’Argante prima
[nella Liberata] non era miserabile, ora è divenuta miserabilissima, perché di
soldato straniero e mercenario è divenuto figliuolo di re e di regina cristiana
e principe natural di quella città, difensor del padre, amator de la moglie e
costante ne la difesa e ne la fede; e però quella pietà che si niega a la legge
si può concedere a la natura ed a l’umanità. (164) Arguing against the likes of
Dion Crisostomos who complained about the scenes of mourning in Homer
(“Defunctum vero memoria honorate non lachrymis” [“the memory of the dead are
not honored by tears”]), Tasso strives for a poetics “that is more humane and
more appropriate to civil life” (“piú umana e piú accommodata a la vita
civile”), resisting not only Dion but Plato and the Pythagoreans as “too rigid
and severe” (“troppo rigida e severa”). Taking sides with that “most excellent
Aristotle,” Tasso argues for a poetry that will motivate the sentiment of
compassion “even for the enemy” (“ancora da’ nemici”; 178), and hence for the
creation of a human community in which one takes stock not so much of differing
religious beliefs, but of the parallels that make all humankind members of a
single family. Thus, for example, the king Solimano is to be considered not as
the emperor of the Turks, but as a valorous prince and father of a valorous and
compassionate son. . . . If they were deprived of the theological
virtues, they did not lack natural virtue, nor those bred by custom. non come
imperator de’ Turchi, ma come principe valoroso e padre di valoroso e di
pietoso figliuolo . . . quantunque fosser privi de le virtú
teologiche, non erano senza le virtú naturali e quelle di costume. (177) As a
result, as Alain Goddard has observed, Solimano and Argante both now fail to
embody “a code of values opposed to that of strict Catholic orthodoxy” (“un
code de valeurs opposé à celui de la stricte orthodoxie catholique”)35 —a
failure that unleashes “a tide of ambivalence” despite the ideological claims
made throughout for Catholicism’s supremacy. And the figures who help to
generate such ambivalence and, in particular, compassion for those with
“natural virtues” are largely Tasso’s women, as the Conquistata shapes not only
a new definition of masculinity but a new role for its women.36 Tasso’s early
readers may have challenged the authenticity of Armida’s conversion, the
“saintliness” of Sofronia, the status of the missing “immagine,” and the
rationale for Erminia’s midnight foray into the Christian camp, and her
supposed self lessness when ministering to a wounded Tancredi.37 The
Conquistata seems dedicated rather to making female behavior transparent and
unquestionably sincere, a sincerity that Erminia/Nicea’s rebuke of her
“artifallaci” confirms. The ubiquitous female mourner, for whom Mary is
paradigmatic, embodies the essence of non -theatricality, conveying a spiritual
intensity which Tasso himself longed to experience as clear from his late
canzone to the Virgin, “Stava appresso la Croce,” in which he asks Mary to
become the guarantor of his own prayerful sincerity: “Fa ch’io del tuo dolor / senta
nel cor la forza” (“Grant that I may sense in my own heart the power of your
grief ”), and later in the poem, “Fa ch’l duol sia verace / e ’l mio pianto sia
vero” (“Enable my grief to be authentic, my lament sincere”).38 If—with the
exception of Clorinda—there was no place for this expression of commiseration
in the Liberata, fixated as it was on the triumphant attaining of the city, the
Conquistata ensures with its weeping mothers and, on occasion, fathers and
friends, that we see Jerusalem’s conquest as mixed a blessing as was the defeat
of Troy. If the body recognized in the Liberata’s “Allegoria” is an exclusively
militaristic one, the corpus of the Conquistata is familial, in which men are
humanized, perhaps feminized, through their claims to having mothers, wives, or
children. In the meantime, Erminia’s pious arts of healing, Sofronia’s daring
sacrifice, and the immagine itself—aspects of feminine “artistry” not easily
assimilable to this model—are gone. * ** One final
glance at Luca Giordano’s painting may help to clarify the trajectory I have
attempted to chart throughout this essay. The interesting detail of Mary’s
image, lifted high above the scene of impending death, can be said to resolve
for Genova’s Counter-Reformation audience the identity of the “thief ” which
Tasso had left in abeyance. Clearly the “mano” that perpetrated the theft was
that of the queen of Heaven herself, who forcibly intervenes when her image is
placed in a mosque, and who exhibits her power by rescuing not only her “immagine”
but the brave Sofronia. Giordano restores Mary’s protective immagine, letting
us “see” it for the first time as he rescues Mary herself from oblivion in a
work that makes the exaltation of Christianity derive from her comforting
presence. To this extent, the painting confirms the overtly Catholic structure
on which the Conquistata insisted. But it does so by countering the very
notion, emphasized by Mary herself in the Conquistata’s new second canto, that
she is “not enough now to save their lives” (“io non basto a salvarli omai la
vita”). Perhaps the key word in the passage is “omai”: now, as opposed to some
earlier time when Mary presumably was sufficient. Reading backward from Mary’s
phrase in Canto 2 of the Conquistata, one emerges with a nostalgic vision of
female sanctity which the Liberata never intended to confirm; but a vision
which for Tasso may have resided in a not-so-distant past before Trent, found
in a work such as the Divina commedia, in which the Virgin has power to do more
than weep. Her compassion can be said to have generated an entire poem, and it
is thanks to her example that Beatrice is able to say to Virgil in Inferno 2,
“amor mi mosse” (“love moved me and made me speak”). Giordano’s late
seventeenthcentury painting willfully misreads the Liberata, as it envisions a
world in which Mary can glowingly transmit her power to the two central women
of Canto 2in the form of light radiating from her painting. The work of art
thus comes to possess a divine, unambiguously protective status such as a
renegade Christian, the wizard Ismeno, would confer on it—even if Tasso himself
would not. 39 This was a world that never did exist in the Liberata. But that
may finally be beside the point. Yet as Tasso tried to create a poem “senza
arti fallacy,” newly directed toward the compassionate involvement of all its
personaggi, Muslims and Christians alike, in the family of the “vita civile,”
Mary and the women like her enable a different kind of salvation, albeit of a
less dramatic kind. If threats of “parlar disgiunto” and episodic discontinuity
hang over the Liberata; if the three women of Canto 2 both embodied and
actualized these threats, once we arrive at the inclusive poem that is the
Conquistata, the lonely isolation of heroic difference is no longer a danger.
And as a result, there are no more female heroes.40Notes 1 Tasso, Lettere, ed.
Guasti, 5: 72; the letter is from July 1591, when he had almost completed the
Conquistata. 2 For a summary of how female characters change in the
Conquistata, see Goddard, “Du ‘capitano’ au ‘cavalier sovrano,’” 236–38. Also
of interest is Picco, “Or s’indora ed or verdeggia.” 3 See Gigante’s
introduction to Tasso’s Giudicio sovra la Gerusalemme riformata, xlviii, as
well as his discussion of the Giudicio and Conquistata in Tasso, chapter 13. 4
That the female figures of the Liberata are intriguing mirrors for Tasso
himself is not a new argument; particularly in the wake of a feminist criticism
that has focused on Armida and Clorinda. In some cases, such as Stephens’ article
on Erminia (“Trickster, Textor, Architect, Thief ” or Miguel’s “Tasso’s
Erminia,” 62–75, a female character’s narrative and artistic capabilities are
put forth as convincing evidence for self-portraits of the author/artist. 5 For
two recent studies devoted to the episode of Sofronia, Giamperi, Il battesimo
di Clorinda and Yavneh, “Dal rogo alle nozze,” 270–94; also see the few pages
dedicated to Sofronia in Hampton’s Writing from History, 116–18. 6 Some early
readers of the Liberata considered the episode “poco connesso e troppo presto,”
a point with which Tasso concurred; e.g., the letter to Scipione Gonzaga from
April 3, 1576; Lettere di Torquato Tasso, vol. I, letter #61; 153. Molinari’s
edition of the Lettere poetiche of Tasso contains this letter with ample
critical text; 374. The debate over the episode went on for a period of many
months in 1575 and 1576; see the excellent account of Güntert, L’epos
dell’ideologia regnante, 81–85. 7 The syntactic “difetto” or defect that Tasso
claims he learned from reading too much Virgil is that of “parlar disgiunto”:
“cioè, quello che si lega più tosto per l’unione e dependenza de’ sensi, che
per copula o altra congiunzione di parole . . . pur ha molte volte
sembianza di virtù, ed è talora virtù apportatrice di grandezza: ma l’errore
consiste ne la frequenza. Questo difetto ho io appreso de la continua lezion di
Virgilio . . .” (Lettere, vol. I, 115). Fortini calls attention to
the symptomatic crisis of “parlar disgiunto” in relationship to Canto 2 in
Dialoghi col Tasso, 81, describing it as “la frattura degli elementi del
discorso per ottenere maggior rilievo, maggiore drammatizzazione e
magnificenza.” 8 Tasso’s references to Homer in his Giudicio are extensive, as
are his spirited defenses of Homer against those who would call him a liar; he
often invokes Aristotle’s praise of the poet. 9 On Tasso’s impact on and
interest in the visual arts more generally, see Waterhouse, “Tasso and the
Visual Arts,” 146–61 and, more recently, Unglaub’s Poussin and the Poetics of
Painting and Traherne’s “Pictorial Space and Sacred Time,” 5–25.Jane Tylus10
The image is item 176 in the catalogue Luca Giordano, ed. Ferrari and Scavizzi.
11 See Utili’s entry on Giordano’s Olindo e Sofronia in Torquato Tasso, 313. 12
From the letter to Scipione Gonzaga of April 3, 1576; in Lettere di Torquato
Tasso, 153; Lettere poetiche, 374. This came less than a month after Tasso had
informed Luca Scalabrino on March 12, that he was going to add “eight or ten
stanzas” to the end of the Sofronia episode, in the hope of making it seem
“more connected” (“che ‘l farà parer più connesso”); ibid., 339. 13 I use the
edition of Fredi Chiappelli; II: 6. 14 Translations of the Liberata are from
Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Esolen; occasionally modified. 15 Lettere, I, 164;
also in Letter poetiche, 406; italics mine. 16 Yavneh, “Dal rogo alle nozze,”
272–73. 17 Giampieri, Il battesimo di Clorinda, 27, has noted in the “casto
simulacro” of Mary a parallel with the famous Palladium of Troy: Mary’s image
takes the place of the Palladium, and this substitution is extended further
when Sofronia herself “porta quella salvezza che tutti si aspettavano
dall’efige della Madonna” once the Madonna is gone. 18 See Yavneh, “Dal rogo
alle nozze,” 150, as well as Warner, The Augustinian Epic, 86. 19 This line is
echoed by Armida eighteen cantos later, when she proclaims herself Rinaldo’s
“ancilla,” and observes that his word is her law: “e le fia legge il cenno”
(20: 136). Intentionally or not, the line brings us full circle to the missing
image of Mary, but reducing the supposed potency of that image and the women
who mirror it to a gesture of submission to a “conquering” Gabriel. 20 Virgil,
Eclogues, Georgiecs, Aeneid I–VI, 441. 21 The Judith echoes are relevant as
well, on which see Refini, “Giuditta, Armida e il velo,” esp. 87–88. But unlike
Judith, who dominates the second half of the apocryphal book of Judith,
Sofronia and Clorinda disappear long before the ending. 22 “A lei, che generosa
è quanto onesta, / viene in pensier come salvar costoro. / Move fortezza il
gran pensier, l’arresta / poi la vergogna e ‘l verginal decoro; / vince
fortezza, anzi s’accorda e face / sé vergognosa e la vergogna audace” (2: 17).
23 Eugenio Donadoni remarked on Tasso’s “incapacità di ritrarre una santa,” and
while he doesn’t elaborate, he clearly has in mind the puzzling presentation of
Sofronia herself. Torquato Tasso, 324. 24 As Lawrence F. Rhu nicely puts it,
the “Allegoria,” first composed in 1576, probably functioned “as a guarantor of
acceptable intentions in the face of potential censorship . . .
rather than as a sure guide in the right direction for a comprehensive
interpretation of his poem”; The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory, 56. At
the same time, with regard to the conflict between the “one and the many,” the
poem, with its announced attention to bring together Goffredo and his “compagni
erranti,”and the Allegoria, focused on demonstrating how the bodies of the
(male) warriors are eventually incorporated within the body of the army,
seemingly speak with a single voice. 25 Lettere, vol. 1, 84. Interestingly,
Tasso will exempt Rinaldo from this rule. 26 On the possibility that Tasso
resists making his female warriors stronger than the men, see Günsberg, The
Epic Rhetoric of Tasso, 128: “female valour is described essentially in terms
of negative comparatives. This culminates in male supremacy over a femininity
that is already fragmented, and in an act characterized by sexual
overtones”—such as the deaths of Clorinda and Gildippe. 27 See Act III, scene
1, from Aminta, and Tirsi’s description of the Satiro’s would-be rape of
Silvia: She is tied with her own hair, to a tree, while “‘l suo bel cinto, /
che del sen virginal fu pria custode, / di quello stupro era ministro, ed ambe
/ le mani al duro tronco le sstringea; / e la pianta medesma avea prestati /
legami contra lei . . .”; lines 1237–42; from Opere di Torquato
Tasso, Volume 5: Aminta e rime scelte. 28 For a more sustained reading of the
Aminta and Tasso’s protectiveness of his two main characters, see my chapter in
Writing and Vulnerability, 82–95. 29 In truth, a more nuanced criticism of the
Conquistata has emerged in recent years, including that of Goddard and of
Residori, L’idea del poema, as well as in the recent article of Brazeau, “Who
Wants to Live Forever?” Yet critics have been overly hasty to dismiss the30 31
323334 35 3637 38 39 40265later poem as the project of Tasso’s new
Counter-Reformation orthodoxy. This may be the case, but surely only in part;
as the Giudicio and contemporary letters attest, Tasso was involved in a
continuing dialogue with ancient authors, and the Conquistata attests to his
desire to write a poem that creates more of a balance between opposing forces.
Gerusalemme conquistata, II: 11–12. Luigi Bonfigli’s edition, which comprises
part of his five-volume Opere di Torquato Tasso, regrettably has no notes;
there is still no fully annotated modern version of the poem. Shortly after
Argante’s death a trio of female mourners lament his loss in a passage taken directly
from Iliad 24; the fact that they appear in the Conquistata’s twenty-third
canto makes the connection structural as well as thematic. See Stephens,
“Trickster, Textor, Architect, Thief,” on Erminia, in which he talks about
Erminia’s imitation of Helen; while he finds in the Conquistata allusions to
Helen’s weaving (Canto 3), he does not consider the Homeric echoes in Canto 23.
Also see my “Imagining Narrative in Tasso.” Murnaghan, “The Poetics of Loss in
Greek Epic,” 217: “As she gives voice to her role as the bearer of Hector’s
kleos, Andromache’s words fill in what Hector’s gloss over . . .
[she] insists that the creation of kleos begins with grief for the hero’s
friends and enemies alike. . . . Before it can be converted into
pleasant, care-dispelling song, a hero’s achievement is measured in the
suffering that it causes, in the grief that it inspires.” Ferguson’s Trials of
Desire and Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus explore psychoanalytic material.
Goddard, “Du ‘capitano’ au ‘cavalier sovrano,’” 240n. I want here to make note
of Konrad Eisenbichler’s suggestive work with respect to new versions of
masculinity articulated in early modern Europe, and especially to his generous
support of the volume that Gerry Milligan and I edited for his series at the
University of Toronto, The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and
Spain (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2010). The
letters that take up these various episodes, surely to be read in the larger
context of Tasso’s oeuvre, include a majority of the letters in Molinari’s
Lettere poetiche, which date from March 1575 through July 1576. Opere di
Torquato Tasso, vol. V, 583. See Traherne, “Pictorial Space and Sacred Time,”
for a bracing discussion as to why Tasso refused to indulge in any ekphrasis of
sacred images in his work—as in his late poem, Lagrime. In the Conquistata,
Tasso adds eight stanzas (15: 41–8) representing a prophetic dream regarding
Clorinda’s future baptism as a Christian—a future less certain in the Liberata,
when a number of verbs suggest the possibility of an only apparent conversion
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and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme 24, no. 1 (1988): 21–33. “Political
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Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme -- abandoned women Abrabanel, Judah
Accademia degli Infiammati Accademia degli Intronati Actaeon Ad compascendum
(papal bull) adultery: as crime of violence cultural narrative in fiction legal
definitions of; locations of prosecutions for and prostitution Aeneid aesthetics:
and masculinity and military prowess and social control agency: of courtiers female
Agnoletto the Corsican Agnolo di Ipolito Alain of Lille Alberti Alberti Albertoni
Alessandro de’ Medici Alexander the Great Alexander VI Altaseda Amadesi, Angela
Aminta (Tasso) anal penetration see also sodomy Andreoli, Andreoli androgyny Andromeda Angela of Foligno angels,
Carlini invoking animals, sex with Antoniano Apuleius Arenula Aretino and Il
Sodoma and Piccolomini Ragionamenti aristocratic behaviour Aristotle Armida “arti fallaci” autonomy Averani badgers Baliera
Ballerina Bandello Bandello Bargagli Barolsky bastards beastliness Bechdel Test
beffa Belforte Bell Bellini Belvedere di Saragozza Bembo Benazzi Benedek Benedict
Benedictine order Bernardino bernesque poetry Berni Bernini bestiality see
animals, sex with Betta la Magra Bianco bigamy Bignardina birds: eating symbolising
the penis bisexuality blasphemy Blastenbrei Bocca di lupo Boccaccio Bollette
see Ufficio delle Bollette Bologna: Borgo degli Arienti Borgo di San Martino Borgo
di Santa Caterina di Saragozza Borgo di Santa Caterina di Strada Maggiore Borgo
Nuovo di San Felice Borgo Riccio Broccaindosso men’s relationships with
prostitutes in regulation of prostitutes in residencies of prostitutes in sausages of Bolzoni
The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) arms and letters in dress and aesthetics
in homosexuality in on women’s behaviour Bossi Boswell Botticelli Bovio Bràina Braudel
Brizio Bronzino brothels see also prostitution Brown Bruno Buonacasa Burckhardt
burlesque literature Cady Camaiani Campi Campo di Bovi canon law Canossa Capatti
Capella Cappelli Cappello Capramozza Captain of Justice (Siena) Caravaggio Caretta
Carli Carlini: becoming abbess entry into religious life imprisonment of investigation
into marriage to Christ modern controversy over, sexual contact with Mea spirituality
of carne, multiple meanings of Carnevale (neighbourhood) Carnival Carracci Carracci
Castiglione castration Catherine de’ Ricci, Saint Catherine of Alexandria,
Saint Catherine of Bologna, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Cavedagna, Domenica Cazzaria
(Vignali) Cellini Chauncey Chigi family Christ: Carlini speaking as Carlini’s
visitations from forgiving the adulteress gender of loving union with Christianity:
and eating meat and masculinity and sexuality Circe Clarke Clement VIII Cleopatra
clergy: sexual violence by and sodomy Clorinda baptism of body of death of and Sofronia clothing: foreign and masculinity
and military defeat and sexual deviance Cockaigne, Land of Cohen Colieva Colle Colloquies
(Erasmus) “compagni erranti” concubines conjugal debt Connors Conquistata see
Gerusalemme conquistata convents: power of prostitution and sexuality within Corio Cornaro
Correggio cose brutte Cosimo cosmetics Council
of Trent and adultery 7and failed saints and images nunneries after and sodomy Counter-Reformation court ladies courtesans:
in fiction idealized depiction of in Rome courtiers: ideal sacrificing
masculinity Crawford Criminal Judge (Siena) Cristellon Crivelli cross-breeding cuckoldry
Currie Cycnus Daedalus Dante d’Aragona d’Ascoli de Bertini de Montaigne Decameron:
adultery in Branca’s edition of culinary language in and Dante and della Porta female
heroines in Griselda and Gualtieri in and La Raffaella Walter of Brienne in deceit,
courtiers and de’Grassi della Porta Art of Memory and myth and natural magic and
nudity and Titian d’Este the Devil, and sexual violence di Loli family of
prostitutes Dido dildos discourse, and social norms Dolce Domenidio, inn of Domitilla
Donatello (Donato) Donina dress see clothing Durazzo, ecclesiastical courts effeminacy:
in clothing and military defeat Eisenbichler
Elbl, Ivana Elliott, Dyan embodied experience England, debts to Florence Ensler
epistemological caution Erminia/Nicea erotic
forces, cosmic erotica, learned essentialism Europa Fabritio faccia tosta fallacious
artistries Farnese the Farnesina female bodies see also genitals, female
Ferrante Ferrara Ferrari Ficino Finucci Fiorentina, Francesca Fiorentina Fiorentina
Fiorentina Fiorentini Firenzuola Florence: annexation of Siena bank failures in
conquest of Siena ghetto homosexuality in laws on sexual violence nobility and
tyranny in prostitution in sausages of forgetting,
art of fortezza Fortini Foucault Fra Bartolommeo France: in Book of the
Courtier humiliation of Italy Francesco
I Franchi Francis Franco Frangipane Franzesi Frassinago Freccero Fregoso Fregoso
Furlana Gabriel Galen Galianti Gallucci, Margaret gambling Ganymede Garzoni gender:
and art Foucault and Boswell on gender bias gender nonconformity genitals: of
animals female male mediaeval theories about Gentileschi, Artemisia Gertrude of
Helfta Gerusalemme conquistata (Tasso) female characters in as orthodox and Sophronia episode Gerusalemme liberata
(Tasso) female characters in Sofronia episode in Gesso Ghirardo Giampieri Giannetti
Giannotti Gigante Gildippe Giordano Giovanni Giudi Giustiniani gluttony Goddard
Goffen Gonzaga gossip Gozzadini Grandi Grazzini Gregory the Great Grosseto group
sex Hadewijch Halperin, David 1Harvey,
Elizabeth hearts, gifting of Hercules Homer homoeroticism: between nuns in
master-apprentice relationship in religious imagery in in Renaissance Italian
art in Sodoma’s secular work homosexuality: among clergy clothing denoting in
early modern Italy Il Sodoma and in Renaissance scholarship Saslow’s use of
term 203n5; see also lesbians; sodomy honour: and adultery in Decameron male and sexual violence honour killings Il Sodoma (Gianantonio Bazzi) “Allegorical
Man” biography of early religious works historiography of later religious works
of painting of Catherine of Siena secular art of Iliad images: holy sexual imagination,
phallic imagines agentes imitatio Christi immagine see images, holy impotence incest,
laws on incontinence of desire inns, and prostitution Inquisition instruments
see dildos interdisciplinarity intersectionality inversions Italian
Renaissance: idealised image of scholarship on sex and gender in Jews: and
prostitutes in Rome Kodera La Raffaella (Piccolomini) and Aretino’s
Ragionamenti depiction of women textual sources Labalme labyrinth lactation,
miracle of Landriani Marsilio lavoratori Leda and the swan lenzuola Leo X Leonardo
da Vinci lesbians, use of term for
Renaissance women levitation Liberata see Gerusalemme liberata loci, in art of
memory Lorenzo the bathhouse worker love: in La Raffaella masculine Neoplatonic
discourse of Lucanica sausages Lucretia, wife of Cynthio Perusco Lucretia
(Roman heroine) Lucretia the madam Lugeria lust luxuria Machiavelli magic:
charges of and love natural Magrino male dress see also clothing, and
masculinity male solidarity malmaritate Malpertuso manly masquerade Mantuana, Chiara Marcutio,
Marino Marema, Caterina Margaret of Cortona Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, Saint marital
debt see conjugal debt marriage: arranged mystical and passion married women,
sexual laws about Martelli Martinengo, Maria Maddalena marvels Mary Magdalene
Mary mother of Christ: and Catherine of Siena in Gerusalemme conquistata images
of as mourner and mystical marriage Visitation of masculinity: arms and letters
in as conformity and courtiers’ self-presentation Renaissance masturbation maternal
longings Mattei Matthews-Grieco Matuccio Mauro McCall McCarthy Mea see
Crivelli, Bartolomea meat: eating and sexuality see also carne; sausages
memory, art of Messisbugo Michelangelo militarism Mills, Robert Minotaur misogyny mixti fori monogamy, serial monstrous
offspring Montalcino Montanari, Massimo Montauto,
Federico Barbolani di Monte of the Riformatori Monteoliveto Maggiore Moroni, Doralice Moulton,
Ian Frederick Murnaghan, Sheila Muslim
women mysticism: erotic physical signs
of myths, classical naked bodies: physiognomy of in Titian Negri Neoplatonism Niccoli
Nolli Plan normative codes Nosadella novelle nunneries see convents nuns: as
brides of Christ in fiction lust of clergy for and prostitutes sexual
activities of Office of the Night Olimpia Ordeaschi Ordinances of Justice Orsini
Otto di custodia Ottonelli Ovidio Paleotti Pallavicino Palloni, Agostino Panicarolo,
Pietropaolo panopticon Paolo Parabosco Parigi Parker parlar disgiunto parodies parties, prostitutes throwing Partner
Pasiphaë Pasulini Pater patria potestas Paul III Paul IV pederasty pedagogical Pellizani
personae, in art of memory Perusco Pesenti Petrarca version of Griselda story Phaeton
phallus, sexuality centred around the see also genitals, male Philip II of
Spain 3physiognomy Piazza Navona Piccolomini Oration in Praise of Women see
also La Raffaella Piccolomini Piéjus Pietro piety, emotive register of pity Pius
V Pizzoli Platina (Bartolommeo Sacchi)“poco conesso” poetry, and homosexuality Ponce
Pontano Poor Clares Porcellio pork: poetic praise of social attitudes to pork
sausage Porta Porta Procola Porta Stiera
56–7 postmodernism power, in gender relations printing, transformative effects
of procuresses prostitution: behaviour associated with and courtesans and
courtiers in della Porta evidence of ex-prostitutes in fiction and Ludovico
Santa Croce male men’s interaction with female residential patterns in Bologna social
and familial circles of Puff queer studies queer visuality Querzola, Giovanna Randolph,
Adrian rape see sexual violence Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) Raymond of
Capua reception theory Reed re-focalization Renaissance Italy see Italian
Renaissance Renaissance scholarship, sexuality and gender in Renaissance sex Rice the Ripetta Rocke Rojas Roman
antiquity, effeminacy in Roman law romance Romantic Friendships Rome: adultery
trials in early modern street plan prostitution in regulation of illicit sex in
Renaissance demography of sexual bohemianism in Romoli Rosetti Rossi Rossi Ruggiero
Sacchetti Sacchi Romana Sack of Rome saints, failed same-sex eroticism see
homoeroticism San Colombano Santa Caterina di Saragozza Santa Croce Santa Croce
family Sarteano sausages Savi sbirri Scapuccio Schutte Sebastian Sedgwick self-expression
self-fashioning self-harm semen sensuality:
in Renaissance Italy and spirituality women known for Senzanome Sercambi sex
crimes sex ratio, in Rome sexual fantasies sexual identity sexual innuendos sexual
non-conformity sexual positions sexual violence: against women and young girls against young boys in art in classical myth by
clergy laws on in Renaissance Italy sexuality: female Foucault on male (see
also phallus); and meat eating Neoplatonic discourse on newer approaches to in
poetry see also homosexuality Sforza, Caterina Sforza, Galeazzo Shakespeare,
William shrines, prostitution around sibille Siena: administration of justice
in Il Sodoma in sexual violence in Vasari on Simio Simon Simone Simons sin,
sexual single women, vulnerability of Sixtus V slander, sexual social
constructionism social control Socrates sodomy: defences of in early modern
Italy and meat preachers against regulating Roman laws on Sienese laws against see
also anal penetration; homosexuality; Il Sodoma Sofronia: episode of Giordano’s
paintings of inscrutability of Song of Songs Speroni Sperone spirituality,
sensual imagery Spisana Splenditello Spoloni sponsa spousal violence, and
adultery sprezzatura Stanton statues, living Statuta Stefani Stiera stigmata Storey,
Tessa strada dritta stufa subcultures Symonds synecdoche synopsis Tagliarini Tarozzi
Tasso “Allegoria del Poema” and female bodies Giudizio del poema riformato and
Sofronia episode Gerusalemme
conquistata; Gerusalemme liberata Taylor Tedeschi Teresa Terracina Tiziano Torre
Sanguigna torture Toschi transgender Traub, Valerie Trevisana, Margareta and
Francesca Tridentine rules see Council of Trent Tuscany, duchy of Tylus Ufficiali
sopra la pace Ufficio delle Bollette Urban VIII Ursini Usinini, Terenzio Utili,
Mariella The Vagina Monologues 218 vaginas see genitals, female Vallati Vanna
of Orvieto Vanni, Francesco Varchi,
Benedetto Vasari, Giorgio Venetiana, Vienna Venice: prostitution in sex crimes
in Veronica Giuliani, Saint Via del Portico d’Ottavia Via Santa Anna Vicario Vignaiuoli Villani, Giovanni Virgil
Virgil virtù: in Boccaccio in Tasso
Virtuosi visions, religious
visual culture Vives, Juan-Luis Walter of Brienne whores see prostitution witchcraft 1 see also
magic women: abuse of depictions in Renaissance culture honest and dishonest (see also prostitution); in the Intronati men
writing about men writing for 2in myth
published and unpublished texts by see also female bodies women’s
history word play Yavneh Zanetti Zanrè Zapata Zonta. Giovanni Battista Modio.
Modio. Keywords. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Grice e Modio” – The Swimming-Pool
Library.
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