Salacious, scurrilous and provocative, Boccaccio’s Decameron speaks verbosely on the subject of sex, and yet it concludes, paradoxically, by reminding us of its own silence on the subject. Boccaccio ultimately denies having used unseemly language to recount his novelle claiming that his tales cannot be disoneste, if they are told with onesti vocaboli. This retrospective meta-literary statement calls for a thorough reconsideration of the text’s complex sexual metaphorics. It implies that Boccaccio’s interest lay not, as his detractors would have us believe, in indulging his readers in a shamelessly pornographic text, but rather, as this paper maintains, in determining how sex may legitimately be made an object of discussion.
Whilst critics have examined the complexities of medieval sexual behaviour at length, research into the ‘rhetoric of sex,’ in late medieval Italy appears, at present, to be largely understudied. Yet there existed a deep-rooted medieval theory of discourse regarding verba obscena which combined contemporary ethical debates with rhetorical theory. This paper reviews the prohibitions imposed upon sexual language by medieval theologians and argues for Boccaccio’s advocacy of metaphor in its reconciliatory role as linguistic mediator to provide an ethically efficacious solution to the veto. It argues that in citing ‘Galeotto’ as the sobriquet assigned to both the incipit and the explicit of his book, Boccaccio is not solely alluding to the traditionally nefarious ‘book-as-Galeotto’ trope in the Dantean sense of the term, but also to Galeotto as figure for metaphor itself. Drawing on case studies from the Decameron, this paper posits a theory of metaphor which functions as pimp, pander and protector of sexual language. Not only are these the very traits of the Arthurian mezzano, but they essentially allow Boccaccio to beat the theologians at their own game and elude sexual explicitness whilst simultaneously alluding to the sexual subject.
Beginning in the eleventh century, generations of students learnt to navigate the musical scale by means of the solmization syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. This scale could begin on three different pitch locations, but the distance between the intervals was always the same, and there was only one semitone, mi-fa. Over the course of the centuries this sober pedagogy was turned into a game, where one of the manifestations of the crucial semitone, A-B flat, became associated with sex and gender: in Latin the note B flat is called b molle, ‘soft b’, and softness is equated with effeminacy and lasciviousness. Composers discovered that where the text was daring or laden with emotion they could match it in music that departed from its normal course—the words ‘lascivious’ and ‘promiscuous’ mean just that. When an anonymous fifteenth-century composer came to the words ‘the beautiful breast of my lady has touched mine nude’, he suddenly switched into flats. This is an effect that can be heard, and it was exploited by countless madrigal writers of the sixteenth century. In Arcadelt’s Il bianco e dolce cigno (Book I), at the word ‘piangendo’ the (male) speaker weeps in E flats, as he does to the words ‘oymè lasso’ in Io mi rivolgo indietro (Book II). ‘Dolce’ is another word for which flats are often used. When this rather elevated musical vocabulary goes below the belt and invades the popularizing repertoire, B natural and B flat become sexualized, and are specifically associated with sexual intercourse fore and aft: ‘we never bother with B natural; we always use B flat’ sing the three men in Andrea Gabrieli’s Chi nde darà la bose.
In this paper I shall explore how the note B flat acquired this meaning, drawing on music theory, the pedagogy of music in the Middle Ages, and musical examples.
In this investigation I aim to study the iconography of the shepherd couple/duo in landscape drawings, etchings and paintings during the first part of the sixteenth century in Venetian area. Considering the themes developed in eclogues from bucolic and then pastoral traditions in Italy, in which homoeroticism is one of the topoi of Arcadian life, I would like to consider how the particular physiognomy of men couples in Domenico Campagnola’s drawings, like the two “Shepherds in a landscape” (British Museum), or in other paintings, like the “Concert Champetre” (Louvre) by Titian, tends to reflect the status of relations between the young members of Venetian aristocracy.
These few examples may even tell about homosexuality in Renaissance Venice, and its perception, its place in this patrician society (cf. Ruggiero, 1985)—it is an important fact that the Serenissima ‘denounced’ it during the Cinquecento, while the ambiguous ‘dandies’ of the time, the Compagni della Calza were tolerated. This paper could be the opportunity to focus on another aspect of the revival of Antique Traditions, its maturation within the arts and its confrontation to a modern context.
This paper places emphasis on the vital role that the canzone villanesca alla napolitana played in the erotic comic culture of the Cinquecento. Neapolitan songwriters, influenced by the equivocal language of burlesque poets, appropriated their copious lexicon of sexual euphemisms to raise laughter through erotic jesting. Several Neapolitan dialect songs for three voices feature insects and birds, all replete with erotic comical gestures. When arranged for four voices by Lasso, Willaert and Donato, they become even more humorous due to sensitivity to timing and content on the part of these composers. The Neapolitan songs that will be addressed are: ’No police m’intrat’intro l’orecchia (the flea is gendered as female); S’io fusse ciaul’et tu lo campanile; Madonna mia famme bon’offerta. The widespread diffusion of flea songs is indicated by publication of their texts in miniature, inexpensive books of popular verse.
The paper will explore the interrelationship of economic and emotional factors in the plays of Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante). Beolco’s women peasant characters are associated, before all else, with economic resources: they are heirs of their mothers’ holdings, earners of cash through various agricultural activities, and purveyors of access to wealthy households when employed as domestics. This economic independence, which in many cases forms their primary attraction to the opposite sex, permits them to set the parameters and the pace of courtship. Their ability to choose among suitors fosters male-male competition. The plays make tantalizing allusions to that courtship competition’s being realized through male performance in activities such as dance, song, and gift-giving at fairs and festivities, allusions that will be explored in the paper. Moreover, the plays do not exist in a historical vacuum but give clues as to how these realities of country life could be utilized at that time by Venice’s patrician class to its advantage.
I propose to read early modern Roman trial testimonies as a site of intersection of several discourses of sex. To be sure, the law had its say, both written in statutes and treatises and orally in the mouths of the interrogating magistrates. The legal setting supplied both vocabulary and habits of framing narrated events. But the mostly illiterate ordinary folk—men and women, more and less respectable—who testified also spoke about sex in words and cultural contexts of their own. This is not an elegant or nuanced discourse of desire such as we may find in the high arts like lyric poetry or allegorical painted nudes. But it brings us closer to the mentalities of most people most of the time. Some aspects of “popular” talk may seem little surprising, for example, the centrality of sex as something for men rendered in metaphors of commerce and the workshop: in informal discourse men “negotiate” and “screw” women. But even such presumed continuity is interesting, when the cultural circumstances transformed as premodern became modern. This male language, seemingly familiar, even “universal,” had to resonate differently in a pre-eighteenth-century world where women were not yet passionless, but instead creatures of appetite. Women’s words about sex in the trials were certainly more elusive. Adopting a rather formal vocabulary from the law, some women may appear unaccustomed or uneasy with such talk. Yet we should not impute all female reticence too readily to overwhelming guilt or shame. Other women were very matter-of-fact. The instrumentality of male discourses about sex in many trials had analogs among women. Sex was, for some at least, a “resource” in Lucia Ferrante’s phrase. Yet in the end, we are left with parallel queries about how all discourses of sex—high culture eroticism or plain-spoken instrumentality—corresponded to experience, or indeed to a range of experiences.
While it has been demonstrated that male-male sexual practice in sixteenth-century Italy had an important base in the power and hierarchical structures of society, literature in general suggest a different picture for female-female desire; perhaps erotic practice between women could have been infact more driven by pleasure and play. This paper will explore instances of female-female desire in renaissance comedies and novelle that mostly employ cross-dressing as a narrative and a theatrical device and will analyze them in light of the lyric and epic tradition, the legal codes and the judiciary records. My reading argues for an interpretation of female-female desire as at the same time transgressive and normative largely because the importance of pleasure and play was often more significant than the choice to love someone of the same gender.
Florentine carnival songs (canti carnascialeschi), many of which are written in the name of sometimes fictitious craft-guilds supposed to address the ladies offering their services or explaining their art, are regularly couched in sexually allusive terms of which some are either obvious or well-known slang, but others belong to a coded language studied in detail by Jean Toscan. Using texts composed by Lorenzo de’ Medici, I shall illustrate the range of metaphor from the popular and the recondite; I shall also examine the notion often expressed in carnival songs themselves that sodomy is a pleasure reserved for the social and intellectual elite, and challenge the claim that Lorenzo attempted to reform carnival by composing songs of a less drastic nature with the demonstration that these too are not without their double meanings.
The lives of the saints are rich in erotic and sensual imagery. Saints of both sexes overcome lustful urges by bodily mortifications, yet their rewards for such endeavours, particularly but not exclusively for female saints, are often mystical raptures with the Godhead, presented in the nuptial and erotic imagery of the Song of Songs. The female martyrs were usually beautiful women whose virgin bodies were subjected to violent tortures, listed with relish by the hagiographer. How could the painter of saints lives transpose the sensual language of the texts into a visual narrative that served both didactic and devotional ends? In the lives of female saints, how could the boundaries between sensual ecstasies and religious propriety be negotiated? Saints were, by definition, heroic. While their lives were to be emulated, certain aspects of those lives were not deemed suitable for everyone. This is particularly true of female saints, seen as more prone to ecstasies and the extreme mark on the flesh of holiness: stigmata. The authorities, believing that women were more libidinous than men by nature, and fearful that these ecstasies were demonic in origin, continuously attempted to control female piety. The increased naturalism of Trecento and Quattrocento painting reawakened religious tensions over the depiction of the holy female body. This paper will examine the discrepancies between religious text and image in depicting the sensual lives of female saints in Tuscan art. It will look explore the reception of visual and textual narratives and examine how different, if overlapping, needs such as clerical and lay, male and female, educated and illiterate, were addressed.
The theme of the Roman Charity, in which a young woman breastfeeds her old father to prevent him dying from starvation, has its origin in the work Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri IX (The Nine Books of Memorable Facts and Sayings) written c.31CE by the historian and moral writter Valerio Maximo (c.20BCE - 50CE). This work tells of human virtues and vices.
The iconography of the Roman Charity, whose earliest representations are those of Pompei, was inspired by the chapter dedicated to De Pietatis parentes (family charity). This chapter tells about the Roman tradition, represented by the couple mother-and-daughter, and the exempla inspired in the Greek tradition, represented by the young woman Pero and her old father.
Nowadays, interpretations of the image of the Roman Charity are independent of the moral fable behind it. This paper seeks to discover whether the observer of the time recognised in this image either the erotic content or the moral fable written by Valerio Maximo, and also to explore what this might suggest to the artists, customers, and observers of the time, in particular to German and Italian artists of the Renaissance.
In this paper, I try to demonstrate how the image, and more concretely the subject of the Roman Charity, might have served better than the text purposes far-removed from the moral principles behind the story. The mother-and-daughter scene was not so efficient at providing pleasant erotic recreation for the male observer.
This paper will examine three of Titian’s paintings of Venus with an Organ Player (two in Madrid and one in Berlin). Most often these paintings have been interpreted as neoplatonic allegories of perceived beauty through the spiritual senses of hearing and sight—the higher senses rather than with the lower ones of touch, smell, and taste. On another level the figure of Venus whom men worship with their music and adore with their eyes is the embodiment of all sensual pleasures, including sexual pleasures of the flesh. While considering traditional interpretations of these paintings, this paper will explore other avenues of interpretation including literary sources, the social milieu of Venice, and the artist himself, and the role of music as metaphor for morality and sexuality in sixteenth century Venice.
Alvise Castellino’s Il primo libro de villotte (Venice, 1541) is dedicated to Ercole II d’Este and indeed the songs might have been performed at Ferrarese banquets similar to those described by Christoforo da Messisbugo. This paper explores links between Castellino’s songs, civility books and comic theatre associated with Ferrara, paying particular attention to songs concerning female speech and sexuality. While noblewomen and noblemen alike seem to have enjoyed these types of ‘rustic’ entertainments, the context of their active participation differs considerably. Although noblemen might strengthen their noble identity by patronizing or performing strophic dialect song, in theory (if not in practice), noblewomen had to be more circumspect.
Ci sono testimonianze del modo di vivere le relazioni con le donne da parte del clero prelatizio (cardinali) e dell’élite regolare (confessori e predicatori di corte) che suscitano quesiti e sollecitano riflessione e chiarimenti. Appaiono infatti lontani dalle posizioni tradizionalmente repressive in materia di etica sessuale predicate della Chiesa, soprattutto dopo il Concilio di Trento: pensiamo alla nuova normativa in fatto di matrimonio (limitativa delle pratiche sessuali fino allora consentite nel periodo di fidanzamento), alla condanna dei peccati sessuali del clero (la “sollicitatio ad turpia”), ai cambiamenti cui fu sottoposta la curiosa tradizione del “risus paschalis” (studiato da Maria Caterina Jacobelli).
Si tratta di testimonianze, oltretutto, che attraversano un ampio periodo della cosiddetta età moderna, di comportamenti cioè di lunga durata. Si prenda il caso del cardinale Stefano Borgia (segretario di Propaganda Fide) e del suo interesse per la riproduzione scultorea di falli, che raccolse nelle misure e nelle fogge più varie da diverse parti del mondo, dando vita a una vera e propria sezione nella sua ricca e nota collezione settecentesca.
Inoltre, le relazioni privilegiate di parte del clero regolare, soprattutto gesuita, con uomini e donne di appartenenza aristocratica e principesca - risultato anche di un progetto educativo e culturale ad essi indirizzato che alimentò un ampio e significativo patronato femminile - favorì la condivisione da parte di un’élite della Compagnia di comportamenti in sintonia con il sentire estetizzante e sensuale dell’ambiente di corte codificato da Baldassare Castiglione. Affrontando alcuni casi cinquecenteschi, la relazione intende approfondire, al di là delle facili condanne moralisitiche, il contraddittorio percorso di emancipazione del clero da valori e costumi propri della ‘forma del vivere’ aristocratica.
In the Lagrime del peccatore of 1586, a volume of spiritual madrigals dedicated to Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga, Don Lodovico Agostini includes two works with the rubric “A L’Anima,” in which the soul is commanded to wake, and to direct its attentions to God. A third work, “L’anima mia, Signore,“ paraphrases the words spoken at Communion asking for God to heal the communicant’s soul, which themselves paraphrase the prayer of the centurion (Matthew 8:8) who asks Christ to heal his servant. In earlier books, Agostini had already published several dialogue settings of texts between the poet and his soul; and very near the end of his life, Agostini published a collection of sermons on the Sacrament of the Eucharist, in which he again addresses the soul, and admonishes it to prepare for union with Christ as a bride.
In each of these texts, the soul is conceived as a somehow discrete entity, separate to that part of the speaker from which the text is pronounced, yet integral to his or her being. However, in the dialogues, although the separateness of the soul is established at the outset, nonetheless the integration of the two interlocutors is stressed by the use of the first-person plural (havremo, preghiamo). Moreover, these works address the soul in a secular context, as inner musings regarding the power of love and the love object. Not so the later texts: in the spiritual madrigals and in the sermons, the speaker instructs his soul, which has no voice, in the second person—or, in the case of “L’anima mia, Signore,” describes it in objective, third-person terms.
The distance between the speaker and the soul is emphasized by a gender difference enforced by language, which is further elaborated by poetic metaphor and conceit. Descriptions of the mystical marriage between Christ the bridegroom and the soul are, of course, replete with gendered metaphors (even St Bernard of Clairvaux did not shrink from metaphors of penetration when speaking of spiritual union), but the instructional texts themselves have more intriguing aspects. “Ecco il sol novo strugge” chides the female soul for sleeping “in ice” while time flies, yet implores her, when she wakes, not to adorn herself in flowers that will wilt and die. Instead she is advised to turn herself to the warmth of the true Sun. Not only does this neatly reverse the popular conceit behind such contemporary texts as “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” or “Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,” it also inverts the philosophy of Guglielmo Gonzaga’s own madrigal “Padre che’l ciel la terra e ’l tutto reggi” (closely imitated elsewhere in Agostini’s book) which prays that amorous flames may be turned into ice.
The Ciceronian division of animus (the immortal soul) and anima (the life force) does not seem to be in operation here, and in a sense cannot be, as the vernacular does not allow it. Indeed, it could be argued that the femininity of the immortal soul is essential to allow spiritual union with the Divine to take place. Yet this femininity has to be embraced by all men, perhaps ultimately introducing an unresolvable instability in early modern masculine identities.
Last updated 14 May 2007. Page maintained by Melanie L. Marshall with help from Han-earl Park. The views expressed here are the authors’ own, and not those of University College Cork.