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Reviewed by:
  • Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance
  • William J. Connell
Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. By Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) 285 pp. $45.00

Ruggiero has been thinking about Niccolò Machiavelli and sex for many years. I write with personal knowledge, since Ruggiero many years ago in Florence suggested that I and a girl that I was dating read [End Page 275] Machiavelli’s Mandragola in the evening under the pretext of improving our Italian. The courtship was a smashing success, but the ensuing marriage was a failure—a romantic version of Cesare Borgia’s experience in the Romagna.

Ruggiero’s long acquaintance with Machiavelli, his eye for detail, and his generous sense of humor are fully evident in Machiavelli in Love. The volume is best understood as the third in a series with Boundaries of Eros (New York, 1980) and Binding Passions (New York, 1993). As in the previous volumes, most of the chapters offer one or two captivating stories. And the themes remain those of the earlier books—the relationship between sex and power, the creation of urban subcultures centered about sexual activity, and an attempt to define the Renaissance as a distinctive period in the history of sexuality.

Three things in particular are worth underlining. The first is that Ruggiero in this book applies to a group of what he considers to be high literary texts the methods and insights that he developed in years of studying the records of criminal archives. Thus, Mandragola (1518), Machiavelli’s correspondence with Francesco Vettori, Giovanni Boc-caccio’s Decameron (1350–1353), Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), and Antonio Manetti’s fifteenth-century novella of the Fat Woodworker are among the texts that he explores for the ways in which they illuminate aspects of Renaissance sexuality. The second new element is an intermittent polemic with Foucault and/or certain “neo-Foucaultians” (not always identified by name) who argue that there was “virtually no sense of sexual identity before the modern period” (dust-jacket text).1 A third aspect is Ruggiero’s more forceful statement of the role of sexuality in our understanding of the Renaissance life cycle, in which youth (gioventù) assumes a pronounced role.

As always, Ruggiero knows how to tell a good tale. His version of Boccaccio’s Rustico and Alibech, in which the maid Alibech learns to “put the Devil back in Hell,” manages to be nearly as funny as the original, while also pointing out that one of the characteristics of Renaissance sexuality was its playfulness. Ruggiero’s Boccaccio was no “medieval” (as in Branca’s reading) but rather an early “Renaissance Man.”2 Far and away the most elegant of his discussions is an essay (previously published) on the Fat Woodworker, in which Ruggiero reaches as close as a historian can get to discussing what an individual’s sense of self may have been. Manetti’s novella reveals a Renaissance “self ” that, because it lacked internal anchors, was reliant instead on an urban topography consisting of semiotic networks of friends and acquaintances.

Regarding Machiavelli (who figures in the title and in about half of the book’s substance), Ruggiero brings out the bawdy quality of the correspondence with Vettori—an aspect (as he delicately points out) neglected [End Page 276] in Najemy’s relatively chaste treatment of the same letters.3 With respect to the view (argued by Martelli) that the correspondence suggests that Machiavelli and Vettori had homosexual affairs when they were young, and that as adults they may have had occasional affairs with young men while also carrying on with women, Ruggiero seems uncharacteristically indecisive.4 After some strangely harsh words for Martelli (in a note to page 109 and elsewhere), Ruggiero develops what he calls “an admittedly highly problematic reading” (albeit similar to Martelli’s), contending that the young Machiavelli had homosexual liaisons at the time of Savonarola’s preaching (129–130)—although Rug-giero subjoins this contention with a puzzling statement that he does not want “to argue that [proposition]” (130).

The indecisiveness about a seemingly central issue is confusing. Possibly Ruggiero was...

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