Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance

Homosexuality, Gender, Culture

Gary Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351907187
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on multiple aspects of Renaissance culture, and in particular its preoccupation with the reading and rewriting of classical sources, this book examines representations of homosexuality in sixteenth-century France. Analysing a wide range of texts and topics, it presents an assessment of queer theory that is grounded in historical examples, including French translations of Boccaccio's Decameron, the poetry of Ronsard, works in praise of and satirising Henri III and his mignons, Montaigne's Essais, Brantôme's Dames galantes, the figures of the androgyne and the hermaphrodite, and religious discourses and practices of penance and confession. Close comparison with the ancient models on which they drew - the elegy and epic, the works of Plato, Ovid, Lucian, and others - reveals Renaissance writers redeploying an established set of cultural understandings and assumptions at once congruent and at odds with their own society's socio-sexual norms. Throughout this study, emphasis is placed on the coexistence of different models of homosexuality during the Renaissance - homosexual desire was simultaneously universal and individual, neither of these views excluding the other. Insisting equally on points of convergence and difference between Renaissance and modern understandings of homosexuality, this book works towards a historicisation of the concept of queerness.

Chapter 1

Italian Imports: Tales of Sodom and Other Cities

I shall begin with a story from fourteenth-century Italy, drawn from a work that was nevertheless a major literary reference in sixteenth-century France, and that continues to be so within queer studies today. The fiftieth tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron represents a notable rewriting of an episode drawn from a classical model, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses or Golden Ass. Pursuing a wider web of intertextual relations, we will examine another Renaissance rewriting of the same model by Girolamo Morlini; we will also look at Boccaccio’s reception in France: on the one hand, through the translations of the Decameron prepared by Laurent de Premierfait (1411–1414) and Antoine Le Maçon (1545) and, on the other hand, through the reading of the fiftieth tale offered by Brantôme in the Dames galantes. After turning to a consideration of a short story written in France by another Italian, Matteo Bandello, we will conclude with a brief evocation of a number of French writers, notably Marguerite de Navarre. The focus of our discussion will be the representation of (hetero)normative codes and male deviance from them. This will enable us to address immediately the fundamental question of the different ways in which homosexual desire and activities were portrayed in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the modern debate generated by those portrayals that turns around questions of sexual acts versus sexual identities or characters, and around universalising versus minoritising conceptions of same-sex desire. We will see vividly that the Renaissance was not characterised by a single conception of homosexual desire and practices; different attitudes coexisted and different discourses were deployed (sin, nature, taste), sometimes in ways likely to strike the modern reader as contradictory. Contradiction was also typical of French attitudes towards Italy more generally in the Renaissance, as indeed it was of attitudes towards the classical past as a whole.

***

The last tale of the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron introduces us to Pietro di Vinciolo, a native of Perugia, who, in order to counter the bad reputation he has acquired, decides to marry. Faced subsequently with Pietro’s complete lack of interest in her and the failure of her admonitions to produce any change in his behaviour, Pietro’s young wife begins to seek sexual satisfaction in the arms of various lovers, availing herself of the services of an old entremetteuse. One evening when Pietro is dining with a friend, Ercolano, his wife receives one of the most handsome youths of the town; as they are sitting down to eat, however, Pietro unexpectedly returns. Taken by surprise, the woman conceals the youth in an adjoining room, having him hide under a hen cage over which she throws a sack. Her husband explains his sudden arrival by describing how, before the guests at Ercolano’s could begin eating, they were disturbed by the sound of sneezing coming from inside a closet, where, it was revealed, Ercolano’s wife had been constrained to hide her lover. The latter, suffering horribly from the effects of breathing in sulphur fumes, was dragged out; Pietro restrained Ercolano from killing the adulterer and quickly took his leave. This doubling of hidden lovers serves not only to produce the moment of crisis in the primary intrigue, it is also the source of considerable irony as Pietro’s wife, in an attempt to reinforce her own position, delivers a severe condemnation of Ercolano’s spouse and indeed of all women who deceive their husbands, and who deserve, she affirms, to be burned alive. Shortly afterwards, however, Pietro’s wife finds herself in the same position as Ercolano’s: her lover is revealed by the loud cry that he emits when an escaped donkey treads on one of his hands that was protruding from his hiding place. Pietro initially remonstrates with his wife, but she quickly realises that he is, in fact, far from unhappy to discover such a handsome youth in his house. Emboldened, she therefore offers a vigorous defence of her actions, which she attributes squarely to his neglect of her. Pietro promises to arrange matters to everyone’s satisfaction: the supper that they eat together is a prelude to more intimate activities, so that, the next morning, ‘infino in su la Piazza fu il giovane, non assai certo qual piú stato si fosse la notte o moglie o marito, accompagnato’.¹ The tale thus concludes in racy fashion, though, as we shall see, the exact meaning of this crucial phrase has been the source of significant readerly disagreement.

For obvious reasons, the character of Pietro di Vinciolo is of considerable interest to historians of homosexuality, being notably the subject of a discussion by David Halperin, recently critiqued by Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon and by Carla Freccero.² Halperin’s aim is to demonstrate that historically sodomy, or homosexual acts, could be related to more generalised features of identity in various ways, yet that these should not be thought of as ‘a sexual identity, or a sexual orientation in the modern sense – much less as equivalent to the modern formation known as homosexuality’.³ Halperin establishes a contrast between Boccaccio’s character, on the one hand, and the figure of the ancient kinaidos or cinaedus, on the other. Drawing on the work of classicists such as John J. Winkler, Maud Gleason, and Craig Williams, Halperin argues that the latter constituted a deviant sexual morphology but did not display a deviant subjectivity; his offence, in other words, was not perceived as one against a particular form of desire – heterosexuality – but against a requisite order of gender – masculinity. As such, he was a recognised social type whose deviance was inscribed and legible in his whole being. By contrast, Pietro di Vinciolo is characterised by his deviant sexual desire; he is said to display a deviant subjectivity but not a deviant morphology.

While the schema that Halperin establishes illuminates aspects of the differences between the two figures in question, nevertheless, upon closer scrutiny, it also presents important difficulties. Halperin develops Gleason’s argument that the ancient kinaidos – like the nineteenth-century homosexual for Foucault – constituted a morphology, a ‘life-form’, whose deviance defined his whole being. This deviance is essentially one from a prescribed masculine gender role, however, and only secondarily includes deviant (passive) sexual desires: the kinaidos is defined primarily in relation to his effeminacy, of which the desire to be penetrated is symptomatic. Thus, the kinaidos may constitute a ‘morphology’ whose deviance is readily visible, but it would be misleading to present this as a ‘sexual morphology’, since it is constructed fundamentally on the basis of gender types. While I am not a classicist, I cannot help wondering also whether it is completely justified to say that the kinaidos represents a morphology devoid of subjectivity, since his ‘morphology’ does not exclude deviant sexual desire or indeed various other subject positions in relation to proscribed gender roles (i.e., the giving in to the desire for forms of sexual pleasure that men were acknowledged to feel but were expected to and generally did resist). I leave these questions aside, however, to concentrate on the later text.

Pietro di Vinciolo’s deviance, as Halperin notes, is described primarily in terms of his desire, an element that is emphasised throughout the story. What is of particular significance is not only the fact that Pietro pursues male objects but that he shows no sexual interest in his wife. She finds in him a husband ‘che molto piú a altro che a lei l’animo avea disposto’; later, she laments to herself: ‘Egli che sapeva che io era femina, perché per moglie mi prendeva se le femine contro all’animo gli erano?’.⁴

Finally, she confronts her husband directly, accusing him of being as fond of women ‘come il can delle mazze’.⁵ As fate would ironically have it, Pietro’s wife is described as being particularly lusty, so that, as Goldberg and Menon observe, the novella plots ‘what happens when too much meets too little’.⁶ Nevertheless, it is difficult to follow Goldberg and Menon when they maintain that it is not possible to affirm that Pietro has no desire for his wife, ‘just that he does not satisfy her’ (ibid.). The disinclination of the protagonist for his wife and for women in general is repeatedly stated, and, as we shall see, is of the utmost importance.⁷ A very different assessment of the character of Pietro was offered by Jonathan Walters a decade earlier, when he asserted that ‘[w]hat we see in Boccaccio’s version of the story is one of the earliest portrayals in Western culture of a man defined by his sexuality, which is somehow his most deeply defining characteristic, and which tells “the truth” about him’.⁸ This was undoubtedly to overstate the case in the opposite direction, and, as Halperin observes, to infer too much from too little. As we have noted, Halperin affirmed, in response, that Pietro is different from ‘the modern homosexual’ because the only connection between him and the sodomitical acts in which he engages is a ‘sexual subjectivity’. Even though his ‘deviance’ is lived in a particular social context and is thus part of his social identity, nevertheless, Halperin contends, it cannot be seen as constituting a (sexual) morphology.

Halperin is evidently deploying a term here that is inspired by Foucault, who, in seeking to define the unique characteristics of sexuality as invented in the nineteenth century, claimed that only at that time did the homosexual become a ‘morphology’ or a ‘life form’.⁹ For Halperin, then, Pietro does not display a morphology based on sexuality. A first objection to this general argument is that, in this sense, the kinaidos cannot be said to have had a ‘sexual morphology’ either. As we have seen, it is gender deviance that allows the characterisation of the latter in terms of a morphology. And it is on the basis of his gender deviance, not sexuality, that Gleason compares the kinaidos as a ‘life-form’ to the nineteenth-century homosexual. Rather than the presence or absence of a ‘sexual morphology’, then, the contrast between Pietro di Vinciolo and the ancient kinaidos concerns, at root, the presence or absence of visible gender transgression: unlike the latter, the former is not apparently gender deviant.¹⁰

Similarly, the principal criterion that Halperin establishes in his argument that Pietro has no ‘sexual morphology’ turns on the question of the legibility of his desire:

Note that Boccaccio’s narrator says nothing to indicate that Pietro is effeminate or in any way deviant in terms of his personal style or sexual morphology. You wouldn’t know he was a paederast or a sodomite by looking at him. Nothing about his looks or his behavior gives him away – or gives his wife any advance warning about the nature of his sexual peculiarities. … Nothing in his morphology made her suspect he harbored deviant desires. (How to Do, p. 40)

The fundamental argument for Pietro’s lack of a ‘sexual morphology’ is thus the lack of legibility of his deviant sexual desires; the only concrete example that is given of how these desires might be legible, however, is that of effeminacy, that is, again gender deviance, or else a rather vague ‘personal style’. A little later, Halperin elaborates by arguing that, unlike the ‘modern homosexual’, Pietro’s sexual tastes do not appear to connect to other aspects of his personality, ‘such as a sensibility, a set of personal mannerisms, a style of gender presentation, or a psychology’ (ibid., p. 41). The first and the last of these characteristics relate to modern concepts of identity based on psychological notions, which, as was noted in the Introduction, it is futile to seek in or apply to pre-modern individuals or literary characters. Only over the course of a long evolution would identity come to be construed in terms of a unique psychological interiority, structured by metaphors of depth; but, again, this does not mean that earlier forms of identity were any less ‘real’ than their modern counterparts. The second and third elements in Halperin’s list return us again to questions of gender or unspecified personal mannerisms. Once more, then, the notion of ‘sexual morphology’ seems to dissolve into a question of conformity to gender roles.

In arguing for Pietro’s lack of a ‘sexual morphology’, then, Halperin paradoxically emphasises his lack of gender deviance. He notes, for example, that Pietro’s wife reflects that she married him believing that since he was a man, he would desire what men do and should desire (‘credendol vago di quello che sono e deono essere vaghi gli uomini’).¹¹ He also remarks that there is in fact no reason to expect that Pietro should be effeminate, since, as the end of the tale reveals, he adopts an active penetrative role in sexual relations: Pietro takes the boy, as the boy takes Pietro’s wife. This is, indeed, the most likely reading of the conclusion of the novella, that would thus end with a salacious joke, leaving the youth, accompanied to the town square, unsure as to whether, in the course of the night, he had been more ‘husband’ or ‘wife’: ‘infino in su la Piazza fu il giovane, non assai certo qual piú stato si fosse la notte o moglie o marito, accompagnato’. At the same time, the passage has given rise to a different interpretation, some translators taking the final participle, ‘accompagnato’, not with the beginning of the sentence, ‘infino in su la Piazza fu il giovane’, but with the phrase that immediately precedes it: ‘qual piú stato si fosse la notte o moglie o marito accompagnato’. In this case, the youth becomes unsure as to which of the two, the wife or the husband, had been more ‘accompanied’ during the night, that is, with which he had spent more of his time. This reading has recently been advocated by Goldberg and Menon because of what they see as its queerer possibilities: ‘Boccaccio’s more relaxed tale finds that it can accommodate a variety of desires in a ménage à trois that refuses to privilege gendered difference and that multiplies in a nonpunitive way the possibilities of varieties of sex acts’.¹² At this point, then, we must look at the sentence more closely.

First, it should be noted that all of the modern Italian editions that I was able to consult, including the various editions prepared by Vittore Branca, punctuate Boccaccio’s phrase as it was first quoted. In placing commas after ‘giovane’ and before ‘accompagnato’, the editors indicate that they opt for the first of the two possible readings. The second would require a different division of the sentence’s constituent parts, either through the suppression of both of the commas or else through the inserting of a third comma after ‘la notte’ and before ‘o moglie o marito’. This having been said, it must also be noted that the Berlin Hamilton manuscript, considered to be in Boccaccio’s own hand, and that forms the basis for all modern editions, contains no punctuation marks at all in the entirety of the phrase in question.¹³ It is also the case that early editions of the Decameron punctuate the phrase in a variety of ways, some of which might encourage the reader to construe it in the second way. In the edition published in Lyons by Guillaume Roville in 1555, for example, a single comma placed after ‘non assai certo’ invites seeing the end of the sentence as forming a unit.¹⁴ It is necessary to conclude, then, that highly trained readers working with the text, from its early modern editors and translators to their twentieth-century counterparts, have been able to take the passage in one of two alternative ways. Since the sentence is long and its syntax convoluted, it is tempting to conclude that Boccaccio constructed it with precisely this intention. Whatever the case, however, at one of the most sexually daring moments of the Decameron, readers have construed two different meanings, the one offering an explicit picture, the other considerably more discreet.

Despite these interpretative hesitations, the reading preferred by modern Italian editors is buttressed by a number of considerations of both a philological and narratival nature. First, Branca’s work on a manuscript of the Decameron that predates the H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Italian Imports: Tales of Sodom and Other Cities
• 2 Splitting Hairs: (Re)Reading (with) Ronsard
• 3 Mourning/Scorning the Mignons: Representations of Heroism and Favouritism at the Court of Henri III
• 4 Montaigne’s Itchy Ears: Friendship, Marriage, (Homo)sexuality, and Scepticism
• 5 Androgynes, Hermaphrodites, and Courtesans: Women, Queer Nature, and (Queer?) Pleasures
• 6 Towards Modernity: On Kissing, Whipping, Confession, and the Closet – François de Sales and Henri III
• Bibliography
• Index