Sex, Power, and Knowledge in Cinquecento Siena: Che Cazzo Vuoi?

Thanks to Ian Frederick Moulton's lively and appropriately salacious translation of La Cazzaria, Antonio Vignali's Book of the Prick is now readily available to an Anglophone audience. Vignali (c. 1500-1559) founded Siena's Academia degli Intronati (Academy of the Stunned is one possible rendering), where he took the name Arsiccio (Burned). La Cazzaria comprises a brief frame text and a lengthy dialogue between Arsiccio and one Sodo. This suggestive sobriquet was the academic pseudonym of Marcantonio Piccolomini, one of the Intronati and, apparently, Vignali's lifelong friend. In La Cazzaria Arsiccio chastises Sodo for his ignorance of sexual matters and educates him in a wide-ranging discourse that touches on the Italian language debate, includes a sustained bawdy allegory of Sienese politics, and answers such crucial questions as "Why Balls Enter Neither in the Cunt nor the Asshole" (157).

Moulton's introduction, "The Greatest Tangle of Pricks There Ever Was: Knowledge, Sex, and Power in Renaissance Italy," provides useful political, social, and intellectual background for La Cazzaria and does much to foreground its interest for the modern reader. Perhaps most salutary is his discussion of the political allegory that makes up the latter half of the dialogue. In this allegory, relations between Sienese monti, or political factions, are depicted as interactions between sexualized body parts. Along with a lucid explication of the allegory's historical referents, Moulton offers a comprehensive analysis of its representational system. Whereas traditional corporeal allegories of the body politic naturalize social hierarchies by asserting that individual parts must work together if the body is to flourish, in Vignali's pessimistic account "Cocks rule because they can effectively impose their desires on others. Cunts and Assholes can only hope to protect themselves from violation. Balls are just along for the ride" (32). While the body politic is often represented as an integrated whole and is gendered female, in Vignali, Moulton observes, it is fragmented and hermaphroditic. Moulton's discussion of the hermaphrodite is informed by Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium, which he suggests Vignali may be evoking. Whereas in the Aristophanic myth sex is the means by which separated halves seek to reunite themselves in a semblance of primordial wholeness, in La Cazzaria sex is about power, not pleasure, and "body parts try to screw each other over" (32).

As Moulton observes, the political allegory works in part because of the gendered hierarchy of active Cocks over passive Cunts and Assholes. At the same time, as Moulton points out, Arsiccio is clearly invested in the superiority of Assholes over Cunts and of male over female. There is, however, no easy homology between these two pairs. While the fact that everyone has an asshole might lead a text so interested in anal sex to deny sexual difference, La Cazzaria does not. In Arsiccio's account, anuses are gendered: "Ambrosia and nectar are nothing but the sweet tongue of a beautiful young man and the profound secret pleasure that is to be found in his soft delicate asshole" (93). This passage is characteristic of La Cazzaria's generally celebratory emphasis on sex between men. In his introduction Moulton surveys the salient critical literature and deftly locates the peculiar erotics of La Cazzaria in the context of Italian humanism and cinquecento social practice. But he does not note the ways in which La Cazzaria frustrates certain expectations that we might gain from this literature.

Early in La Cazzaria Arsiccio reprimands Sodo for squandering time and opportunity: "What the devil have you been doing poking around the asshole if you haven't learned anything about it? What use has it been to you to have fucked and to have been buggered so often if you haven't even contrived to learn at the very least why no one's balls have ever once entered your ass and you've never put yours in anyone from the front or behind?" (83). This account of Sodo's efforts does not square...