Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaisance Florence.

Michael Rocke. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. x + 371 pp. $35. ISBN: 01-95069-75-7

Michael Rocke's important book is a history of the Ufficiali di notte, a Florentine magistracy that between 1432 and 1502 "carried out the most extensive and systematic persecution of homosexual activity in any pre-modern city" (4). The abundant archival record left behind by the Night Officers documents the extraordinarily high incidence of homosexual behavior among Florentine males, a majority of whom, during the last decades of the fifteenth century, "were officially incriminated" at least once in their lives for having sex with other males (5). The mass of new data that Rocke has uncovered allows him to describe in careful detail the predominant shape of Florentine homosexuality and to suggest as well some striking deviations from the traditional model. This is an indispensable book that needs to be read by everyone interested in Florence, Renaissance Italy, and the history of sexuality.

The most pervasive characteristics of Florence's homosexual culture would not have surprised an ancient Greek or Roman. The model was age-structured. The adult partner was typically an unmarried man in his twenties or early thirties, his boyfriend between the ages of thirteen and twenty - commonly an adolescent of fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen. With the rarest exceptions, adults would not have had sex with each other. The relationship was role-structured and the defining sexual act was anal intercourse (ex parte post or retro, a terminology that goes back to the early medieval penitentials). The older male was the active partner (agens), the younger the receptive patiens. The gendered meanings attached to the two roles derive from heterosexual vaginal intercourse - the agens was seen as masculine while the patiens was imagined to behave "like a woman" (come donna), a powerful simile already explicit in Leviticus 20:13. On entering his twenties, the young man was expected to assume the active role with a younger male (the adult pathic provoked ridicule and disgust), while agens typically married after age thirty and abandoned, or much reduced, their pursuit of same-sex pleasure. For most men, desire for boys did not exclude desire for women or eventual marriage. The variety of homosexuality customarily practiced in Renaissance Florence was thus non - exclusive pederasty.

However, some characteristics of Florentine male homoeroticism point forward to modernity rather than backward to antiquity. The Florentine practice of genital oral sex, for example, signals a sharp break with tradition. The Romans had distinguished fellare (to suck a penis) from irrumare (to penetrate somebody's mouth with a penis). The irrumator was the active insertor, the fellator the receptive passive, in spite of the fact that he did all the work. The irrumator incurred no serious disesteem, while to fellate was to act out an accepted inferior role, passive concentration on another's pleasure, servicing another - all postures appropriate to women, slaves, and prostitutes of both sexes, but never to free men. In Florence, the reverse is true: older men fellated the boys. The word irrumare and its derivatives have dropped out of the sexual vocabulary; the ancient contempt for the fellator has been mitigated. Although the older man was the fellator, he remained the active partner; in anal intercourse he would be the penetrator. In the language of the documents, he "sodomizes" the boy by sucking him as well as by penetrating him. Since the Florentine sodomite, the agens, could be at once a buggerone (bugger) and a poppatore (fellator), reciprocity enters the sexual equation. During the Renaissance, Rocke suggests, "a new ethos of mutual enjoyment in homoerotic interactions was emerging, without yet breaking down the rigid separation of sexual roles typical of sodomy in this culture" (94).

Rocke's computerized analysis of the data has been able to detect a small minority of Florentine men who were "notorious," "habitual," "inveterate," or "infamous" sodomites, like Miniato di Lapo, charged in 1352 as a "publicus et famosus sodomita," a man defiled with wicked desire "who has practiced the vice of the sodomites for a long time in the city of Florence publically and openly, with many, many boys" (23). Such men appear in the archival record as older "confirmed bachelors," implicated in sodomy with several partners over much of their lives. Rocke suggests that they may have deliberately avoided marriage because their inclinazione was to boys rather than women. Most of the men who fellated their boyfriends appear to have come from this group. Though small in number, these are the men whose sexual profiles most closely anticipate those of twentieth-century homosexuals.

No evidence for the intricate and paradoxical ways in which homosexuality pervaded Florentine male culture in the Renaissance is more telling than the contrast between the violent rhetoric of preachers and moralists and the actual efforts of magistrates to control and punish it. The fourteenth-century statutes quote freely from the Novellae of Justinian and, from time-to-time sodomites were indeed castrated, decapitated, or burned. In the fifteenth century, the Officers of the Night were radical innovators. They gave much attention to distinctions of "age, quality, and condition." Because of their youth, boys who consented to penetration were usually not punished. Adults were customarily punished by fines, public humiliation, short prison terms, and/or exile. If a sodomite freely confessed, his fine was reduced by half. If a sodomite turned himself in before he was caught or denounced, described what he had done and named his partners, he was guaranteed immunity from prosecution. Eleven men were condemned to death for homosexual sodomy between 1478 and 1502: seven fled to other cities, the sentence of one was commuted to a fine, three sentences were carried out. Rocke summarizes the data in appendix A. The reluctance to put convicted sodomites to death measures the embarrassed self-interest of magistrates attempting to police the sexual behavior of a population over half of whose male members had very likely committed the crime of sodomy.

One of the many pleasures of this remarkable book are the generous quotations from the dossiers with which Rocke has peppered his text and notes.

EUGENE F. RICE, JR. Columbia University