- Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe by Gary Ferguson
Gary Ferguson’s book deals with a group of men put to death in 1578. Many things about their case, such as issues of personal identity and motivation, are ultimately unknowable; the great virtue of this book is that even when it is not able to provide definitive answers, it raises the right questions. The book is based on close readings of records of the proceedings and later historical accounts that interpreted the events in different ways. Ferguson begins with an account in Montaigne’s journal: a group of Portuguese men engaged in a ceremony where they married each other. Eight or nine of them ended up being burned. Montaigne saw the ritual as somewhat amusing. Ferguson places Montaigne’s account within the larger frame of the political subjugation of Portugal. He argues that previous scholars, including John Boswell, have misinterpreted the ritual as a brotherhood ceremony rather than a wedding, which Montaigne, in Ferguson’s reading, clearly understands it to have been. The second witness discussed—although he wrote before Montaigne—is the Venetian ambassador Antonio Tiepolo, who described the men as being both Spanish and Portuguese and said that they “join[ed] together like husband with wife” (25). Tiepolo thus explicitly genders the unions by making one party a quasi woman. Male same-sex relationships were often age and rank graded in a way that was analogous [End Page 152] to the power relations within marriages. But, Ferguson argues, Tiepolo’s account must be understood within a certain contemporary ambiguity about who held authority over marriage and who got to say which marriages were valid. Other accounts introduce other elements into the story, for example, making some of the men Marranos, a derogatory term for descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity who were suspected of maintaining their Jewish beliefs and practices.
The most interesting information comes from documentary sources. The records of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, who cared for men condemned to death, indicate that the men were indeed six Spaniards (three Castilian, two Aragonese/Catalan, and one Andalusian), one Portuguese, and one Slav. These records also indicate that the men were not in fact burned alive but hanged first, possibly because they confessed. The most important pieces of the puzzle are fragmentary trial transcripts, which seem to be a copy of original records that were deliberately burned. Ferguson claims that the torture the defendants underwent does not invalidate their testimony, “since the court is usually looking for confirmation of specific details it has already elicited from one or more of the other prisoners” (87). But even if the men were interrogated separately, there were certainly ways for an interrogator to indicate what story he wished to hear, and Ferguson may overestimate the truth value of the statements. Nevertheless, he is quite right to state his caveats and then proceed with the analysis; historians have to work with the documents that they have.
The interesting questions Ferguson asks revolve around what these men and those who prosecuted them thought they were doing when they entered into “marriages.” The men were not tried by the Inquisition, as marriage cases were supposed to be, an indication that the men were not seen to have committed heresy by thinking that these were valid marriages; but they were punished unusually severely by the Court of the Governor, which commonly dealt with sodomy cases. Even though fragmentary, the testimony is very rich and allows Ferguson to reconstruct something of the lives of some of the men involved, particularly the boatman Battista, a Serb, and the Spaniard Alfonso Robles, who however did not testify due to illness (possibly torture). Their testimony reveals that the church San Giovanni at the Latin Gate was a gathering place for men and boys who wished to meet each other for sex, including Jews, who were said to come on Saturday (Shabbat). The testimony also...