Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome

Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe

Gary Ferguson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501755262
• eBook ISBN: 9781501706554
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

From the tenor of contemporary discussions, it would be easy to conclude that the idea of marriage between two people of the same sex is a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Not so, argues Gary Ferguson in Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome.

Making use of substantial fragments of trial transcripts Gary Ferguson brings the story of a same-sex marriage to life in striking detail. He unearths an incredible amount of detail about the men, their sex lives, and how others responded to this information, which allows him to explore attitudes toward marriage, sex, and gender at the time. Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution's complex and contested history.

PART I

Stories—Observers

Chapter 1

A FRENCH WRITER VISITS

Montaigne’s Travel Journal and a Thrice-Told Tale

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne does not offer the contemporary testimony closest to the events at the heart of this book, but he is the logical point of departure since his account, coming from the pen of a famous writer and thinker, is by far the most well known today; it is his version of the story that has generated scholarly interest and stimulated research. Having just published the first edition of his Essais, Montaigne left on a trip to Rome and Italy, via Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, that lasted from June 1580 to November of the following year. He took with him two copies of his recent book: the first he presented en route to the French king, Henry III; the second he offered, on his arrival in Rome, to Pope Gregory XIII.

As the center of Catholic Christianity and the capital of the ancient Roman Empire, Rome was a privileged destination for a Renaissance scholar. Nevertheless, it provoked a conflicted response on the part of many visiting humanists, since it offered the spectacle of architectural ruins, the symbol of a civilization definitively lost, and of a modern papal city easily perceived as corrupt and decadent.¹ Montaigne’s Journal de voyage (Travel Journal) reflects on such topics. Yet what seems most to interest this traveler, strongly influenced by his reading of ancient Skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus, is the diversity of places, peoples, and customs that he encounters. In Germany, for instance, Montaigne is impressed by the general atmosphere of religious tolerance that prevails, in contrast with France, and notes with admiration the frequency of marriages between Catholics and Protestants. In each place he visits, the Frenchman is eager to see the sights and to hear notable stories—of historical events, current happenings, or unusual customs. His enthusiasm for curiosities of all kinds is such that he complains if locals fail to show him some site of interest. Montaigne confided the redaction of the first part of his Journal to a secretary, later taking up the writing himself, in French, then in Italian, before reverting to French in conclusion.² The Travel Journal served as a notebook on which Montaigne would later draw as he expanded and revised his Essais in subsequent editions; it was never intended for publication itself, however, and was almost lost to history.

When a previously unknown work by one of France’s most famous authors came to light in the late eighteenth century, it was a major event. Nonetheless, the publication of the Journal de voyage was a contested process, since its discoverer, the abbé Prunis, to whom it was initially entrusted, found much of its content distasteful. Perhaps with the encouragement of the famous philosophe Jean le Rond D’Alembert, therefore, he decided to prepare an anthology of selected passages. Fortunately, Count Charles-Joseph de Ségur, the owner of the manuscript and of the castle of Montaigne where it had been uncovered, insisted on an unabridged publication and charged the Parisian publisher Le Jay with finding a suitable editor. Le Jay turned to Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon, keeper of the king’s manuscripts, who, with the assistance of collaborators, brought out the first printed editions, in three different formats, in 1774. Once published, Montaigne’s original manuscript was deposited in the Bibliothèque royale, from where it disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come to light.³ A number of handwritten copies of the original manuscript were also made in the eighteenth century, one of which, by Canon Guillaume-Vivien Leydet, survives to this day. The usefulness of the Leydet copy is that it allows a comparison with the printed text, and in the many places where the latter’s readings are clearly faulty or in doubt, corrections can be made. The passage concerning the same-sex marriages in Rome embarrassed Canon Leydet, just as parts of the manuscript had embarrassed his friend the abbé Prunis, and the canon suppressed most of it and translated other crucial words and phrases into Greek, thus ensuring they might be understood only by a restricted scholarly elite.⁴ Meusnier de Querlon was also not without misgivings concerning the same-sex marriage story; to our great fortune he published it nonetheless, limiting himself to adding a footnote qualifying the events described as an “impiété sacrilége et monstrueuse que nous n’avons lue nulle part ailleurs” (a sacrilegious and monstrous impiety, the like of which we have read of nowhere else).⁵ Here is what Montaigne relates:

On the 18th [March] the ambassador of Portugal made obeisance to the Pope for the kingdom of Portugal on behalf of King Philip—the same ambassador who was here to represent the deceased king and the Cortes opposed to King Philip.

On my return from Saint Peter’s I met a man who informed me humorously of two things: that the Portuguese made their obeisance in Passion week; and then, that on this same day the station was at San Giovanni Porta Latina, in which church a few years before certain Portuguese had entered into a strange brotherhood [/confraternity]. They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages, [took communion together, read the same wedding gospel, and then went to bed and slept with each other]. The Roman wits said that because in the other conjunction, of male and female, this circumstance of marriage alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp folk that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with ceremonies and mysteries of the Church. Eight or nine Portuguese of this fine sect were burned.

I saw the Spanish ceremony. They fired a salvo of cannon from the Castle of Sant’Angelo [and the palace, and the ambassador was conducted] by the Pope’s trumpeters and drummers and archers. I did not go in to watch the harangue and the ceremony. The ambassador from the tsar of Muscovy, who was at a decorated window to see this ceremony, said that he had been invited to see a great assemblage, but that in his country, when they speak of troops of horse, it is always twenty-five or thirty thousand; and he laughed at all this ado, from what I was told by the very man who was commissioned to talk to him through an interpreter.⁶

Le 18 [mars], l’Ambassadeur de Portugal fit l’obedience au Pape du royaume de Portugal pour le Roy Philippe: ce mesme Ambassadeur qui estoit icy pour le Roy trespassé et pour les Estats contrarians au Roy Philippe. Je rencontray au retour de Saint Pierre un homme qui m’avisa plaisamment de deux choses: que les Portugais faisoient leur obedience la semaine de la Passion, et puis que ce mesme jour la station estoit à Saint Jean Porta Latina, en laquelle eglise certains Portugais, quelques années y a, estoient entrés en une estrange confrerie. Ils s’espousoient masle à masle à la Messe, avec mesmes ceremonies que nous faisons nos mariages, faisoient leurs pasques ensemble, lisoient ce mesme evangile des nopces, et puis couchoient et habitoient ensemble. Les esprits Romains disoient que, parce qu’en l’autre conjonction, de masle et femelle, cette seule circonstance la rend legitime, que ce soit en mariage, il avoit semblé à ces fines gens que cette autre action deviendroit pareillement juste, qui l’auroit autorisée de ceremonies et mysteres de l’Eglise. Il fut bruslé huict ou neuf Portugais de cette belle secte.

Je vis la pompe Espaignole. On fit une salve de canons au Chasteau Saint Ange et au Palais, et fut l’Ambassadeur conduit par les trompettes et tambours et archiers du Pape. Je n’entray pas au dedans voir la harangue et la ceremonie. L’Ambassadeur du Moscovite, qui estoit à une fenestre parée pour voir cette pompe, dit qu’il avoit esté convié à voir une grande assemblée; mais qu’en sa nation, quand on parle de troupes de chevaux, c’est tousjours vingt cinq ou trente mille; et se mocqua de tout cet apprest, à ce que me dit celuy mesme qui estoit commis à l’entretenir par truchement.⁷

The first characteristic of Montaigne’s story likely to strike the modern reader (and contrasting with the reaction it provoked from its eighteenth-century editors) is its lightness of tone and the absence of any expression of condemnation or moral outrage—an attitude apparently shared by the French traveler, his unnamed interlocutor, and a segment of the inhabitants of the papal city, the “Roman wits.” Montaigne records an anecdote he was told on his way home from the Vatican, an anecdote intended to surprise and amuse the worldly, cultivated visitor in search of diverse customs and unusual happenings. If we were to take the text of the Journal as straightforward reportage, the Portuguese described would appear as men having sexual relations, convinced of and sufficiently anxious about the sinfulness of their actions that they decided to go through a religious wedding ceremony in the belief that this would render them blameless. This they might have done conscious of the fact they were profaning a sacrament, but trusting that the rite would be efficacious in spite of their sacrilege.⁸ They would thus reveal their naivety through the logical contradiction of seeking to avoid one sin by wittingly committing another one yet more serious. Alternatively, it would be possible to suppose that the men as they are portrayed in the story were not conscious that their performing of a marriage was sacrilegious, and thus that the second sin, representing a blindly futile attempt to avoid the first, was the result of a no-less-naive ignorance. For the reader, this second scenario would open up the further possibility that the men in reality might not have believed they were committing a sacrilege since performing a wedding between people of the same sex might be, or should be, legitimate.

The difficulty, clearly, is that Montaigne’s Journal records the story secondhand and in a highly self-consciously narrated form; moreover, as we shall see, other accounts of the same events were in circulation that give different details and convey different attitudes. First, then, a fundamental characteristic of the passage from the Journal is its ironic posture, although given the impossibility of untangling the three levels of telling, it is equally impossible to know to whom and to what degree any given expression might be attributed: the traveler composing his journal in French; the interlocutor who addresses him “plaisamment” (humorously), most likely in Italian; or the wits with whom the commentary, undoubtedly in Italian, originates. Since ironic distance is a prime basis for wit, it is easy to see the Roman raconteurs as mocking the naivety of the not-so-clever “fines gens” (sharp folk), who provide them with such good material. This expression may be more Montaigne’s, however, since he employed it earlier, in his Essais, to describe those whose testimony he mistrusts because of their tendency to embellish.⁹ Just to whom, moreover, might the phrase “esprits Romains” refer? The Italian equivalent of the French bel esprit would be bel ingegno, an expression current in the sixteenth century. According to Federico Barbierato, in certain quarters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became synonymous with libertinism and free thinking, often in relation to sex: “One therefore became a ‘bel ingegno’ (a wit) and ‘galant’huomo’ (a noble spirit) by putting forward propositions, theories or simple formulations that could create a scandal, perhaps by treating subjects usually considered to be sacred lightly.… The virtuosi therefore professed a range of liberties for themselves, first of all in the sphere of thinking, then in reading and finally, almost inevitably, sex.”¹⁰ While Barbierato’s examples come from Venice and a somewhat later period, many of the ideas in question, the author notes, had been circulating for at least a century, some having been shared by Menocchio the miller, studied by Carlo Ginzburg.¹¹

Treating a subject “usually considered to be sacred lightly” is certainly what Montaigne is doing in this passage—and we know the profound influence his Essais would have on his early free-thinking readers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also appears to be what certain enlightened Romans were doing, perhaps with a more sympathetic than mocking attitude toward the men who provided them with such a bold example of ingegno and independence vis-à-vis religious authority.¹² If the wits felt any sense of superiority, indeed, this might have been the case only to the extent that they saw the Iberians as adhering uncritically to an orthodox view of sin and sex and to marriage as both institution and sacrament.¹³ Such a perception, indeed, might lie behind the emphasis placed in this account on the exact replication of specific elements of a traditional wedding ceremony, a narrative element not found so clearly in most of the other early sources. In short, in terms of pinning down with certainty the opinions and motivations—and even the precise actions—of the men who met at the Latin Gate, the evidence offered by Montaigne’s Travel Journal is rich but irreducibly slippery. In particular, we should not assume that the twice-retold words of the Roman wits echo faithfully the voices of those they concern. To one degree or another, this may or may not be the case.

Turning to other aspects of the wedding story as Montaigne formulated it, we can note that if the men involved are presented as a curious and marginal group (“certain Portuguese,” “strange brotherhood,” “fine sect”), they nonetheless gain a viable presence, standing as a “they” over and against a “we.” Subsequently, moreover, heterosexual sex is referred to as “the other conjunction, of male and female,” a formulation that serves to adumbrate a point of view that might be associated with “them” and from which “our marriages” are questioned and relativized. In its turn, however, sex between men becomes “this other action,” so that all sexual activity here is other, as the narrative identification shifts between “them” and “us.” Such a labile vision is quite characteristic of the skeptical Montaigne and of the appreciation of the variety of customs and of the suspension of judgment that this philosophical school advocates. The resulting attitude to unusual practices is not necessarily devoid of value judgment, however, since Skepticism also encourages the acceptance (if not the endorsement) of the status quo, of established social norms, an outlook tending to confirm the unusual and marginal as unusual and marginal.¹⁴ We see this here in the deceptive self-evidence of an expression like “our marriages,” to which I shall return; we see it also...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Stories—Observers
• Part II. Stories—Actors
• Part III. Histories
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index