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  • Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance
  • Thomas Kuehn
Guido Ruggiero . Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xii + 286 pp. index. bibl. $45. ISBN: 978–0–8018–8516–7.

In the age of Viagra it is easy to envision Machiavelli in thrall to a lively libido, even without modern pharmaceuticals. Guido Ruggiero's intent in Machiavelli in [End Page 888] Love is much more than a recasting of Machiavelli: it is to examine self and identity in the Renaissance. Through the window of sexuality, Ruggiero looks at the complex process by which "Renaissance self-fashioning" interacted with "consensus realities." Ruggiero argues that the "regime of virtù" — "an ongoing display of male power, rationality, and control which was central to adult masculine identity, status, and discipline" (86) — rested less on government control than "on the social disciplining of individuals — once again by the groups within which one lived, worked, and played" (17).

His method is to engage in skilled, careful, but at times (by his own admission) possibly over-the-top, readings of letters, comedies, and short stories. Such sources are a departure for Ruggiero, whose earlier works on sexuality utilized judicial records and perforce centered on transgressive sexual acts. In each chapter Ruggiero compares two or more sources and teases out telling contrasts. Thematic similarity, not geography or chronology, dictates which texts line up. He begins with the common game of the bird pecking the fig (a play on double meanings of uccello and fico) to examine notions of heterosexuality. Pietro Aretino's resolute homosexual Marescalco figures as the antithesis of the socially correct youth, who despite youthful same-sex encounters graduated to marriage and children. The sexual definition of women contrasts with the complex progression of male stages.

In Aretino's comedy the element of play is manifest, though "ideally sex in the Renaissance was a serious business" (46). Certainly the same held for Boccaccio's tale of Alibech and Rustico putting the devil back in hell. Sex that escaped family and civic morality was, as Ruggiero demonstrates, riddled with the ludic. And as he comes to note, Alibech in the story was in no way hurt by her adventures. But he also considers an inquisition case of 1574 from Venice in which a nun claimed to have had an affair with the devil. Her allegations can be taken as imaginary, invented to free her from the convent: but the Holy Office took them seriously. "[S]ex had become a more serious matter by the late sixteenth century" (59). Alibech's tale was expurgated from the Decameron, and the nun did public penance.

The 1573 problems of an abbot with his former concubine are next compared with those of the popular commedia dell'arte figure Captain Fear, male concubine of the Amazons. Filippo Brunelleschi's identity trick on the fat woodcarver, as told by Antonio Manetti, is the occasion for an extended discussion of the masculine spaces of the Renaissance city. Ruggiero then turns to discussion of Machiavelli and virtù in two chapters. The first circulates about his correspondence with Francesco Vettori at the time Machiavelli was writing The Prince. Machiavelli played with the interconnections of sex and power in his letters. He exchanged gossip on mutual acquaintances and their known sexual proclivities, while depicting himself as the un-Machiavellian captive of love. The chapter projects Machiavelli onto his characters in Mandragola and Clizia. Ruggiero's sexualized Machiavelli is a playful and self-mocking Machiavelli, whose political and moral sense was shaped not so much by a high cultural tradition but by everyday usages.

Ruggiero ends with tales of virtuous deaths — Clearcus, King of Crete, and [End Page 889] Giulia da Gazuolo of Mantua — contrasted with Gentile Sermini's tale of the Sienese Scopone, and a further contrast of Boccaccio's tragic Ghismonda with Machiavelli's and Castiglione's discussions of virtù. It is virtù above all that was the "consensus reality" against which sex and identity played. This chapter is rich in allusion to text and contexts and deserves the sort of careful and even playful reading Ruggiero gives his...

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