Forbidden friendships: homosexuality and male culture in Renaissance Florence

Uittreksel

depicts this vibrant sexual culture in a world where these same-sex acts were not the deviant transgressions of a small minority, but an integral part of a normal masculine identity. Rocke uncovers a culture in which sexual roles were strictly defined by age, with boys under eighteen the "passive" participants in sodomy, youths in their twenties and older men the "active" participants, and most men at the age of thirty marrying women, their days of sexual frivolity with

Inhoud

Introduction: Florence and Sodomy -- 1. Making Problems: Preoccupations and Controversy over Sodomy in the Early Fifteenth Century. Traditional Controls. Agitation for Reform, 1400-1432. The Attack from the Pulpit: Bernardino of Siena -- 2. The Officers of the Night. The Institution. Politics and Sodomy in the 1430s. The Turning Point in the Late 1450s. The Magistrates at Work. Community Controls -- 3. "He Keeps Him Like a Woman": Age and Gender in the Social Organization of Sodomy. Sexual Roles and Behavior. Boys and Men. Becoming a Man -- 4. Social Profiles. Young and Old. Bachelors and Husbands. Provenance and Residence. Social Composition -- 5. "Great Love and Good Brotherhood": Sodomy and Male Sociability. Encounters. The Character of Sodomitical Relations. Family Complicity. Friends, Networks, Sodalities -- 6. Politics and Sodomy in the Late Fifteenth Century: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Abolition of the Night Officers. The Lorenzan Age. The Coming Scourge. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sodomy in Savonarolan Florence. The Suppression of the Office of the Night -- Epilogue: Change and Continuity in the Policing of Sodomy in the Sixteenth Century -- Appendix A. Penalties Levied -- Appendix B. Statistical Tables.