Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy

Jacqueline Murray, Nicholas Terpstra, Jacqueline Murray, Nicholas Terpstra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351008709
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

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.

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Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy

Themes and approaches in recent scholarship

Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstra

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 reflected 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 influence 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 the Renaissance. 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 fluidity 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 influence on the understanding of the history of sex, gender, and sexuality into the twenty-first century. The most influential 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 reflections 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 influences such as Foucault had urged. Nevertheless, despite criticisms about 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, and sexuality. 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 reflected 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 multi-valent. 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. There 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 dimensions of 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 reflect 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 reflecting 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Sex, gender, and sexuality in Renaissance Italy: themes and approaches in recent scholarship
• PART I Sex, order, and disorder
• PART II Sense and sensuality in sex and gender
• PART III Visualizing sexuality in word and image
• Bibliography of Konrad Eisenbichler’s publications on sex and gender
• Index