Queer Places:
Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore
Florence, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Toscana, Italy
Brunetto Latini (1220–1295) was an Italian author and poet. The son of a judge, Latini was born in Florence, where he took up political activity and held various important posts, becoming chancellor and notary of the comune (municipality). Because of internal political disputes in Florence, he spent a long period of exile in France, returning in 1266. Latini's literary fame derives largely from Li Livres dou trésor, one of the first ‘encyclopedias’ (which he wrote in French), and to a long didactic poem, ‘Il tesoretto’ (written in the Tuscan vernacular).
Yet after his death Latini was less remembered for his literary works than for the fact that Dante Alighieri (1265– 1321), the ‘father of the Italian language’, made him the key figure in the circle of sodomites in hell, in Canto XV of The Divine Comedy. Dante treated Latini with such deference – paying tribute to him as his intellectual mentor – that generations of commentators on The Divine Comedy have been scandalised. How was it possible that a person guilty of the filthiest of all sins could otherwise be treated with such care as implied in the ‘Inferno’?
The answer, as the Enciclopedia dantesca correctly emphasises, is that Dante was the product of an age in which sodomy was a most grave sin in terms of religious morality, but less grave in the eyes of lay morality. It was only during the last years of Dante's life that secular morality changed to such a point that the Italian communes adopted the first laws which punished sodomy with death. The twosided nature of Dante's judgement on Latini – condemning him to hell but also honouring him – was thus the expression of the doubled-edged views of the society in which he lived: attitudes which would undergo a total change in the course of only a few decades. This explains why, only a few years after Dante's death, his position on sodomy was incomprehensible to commentators and remained so until very recent times.
This explains, as well, why the question of Latini's homosexuality has been discussed so frequently in the last century and a half and why Dante's medieval view – that the sodomite, though a contemptible sinner, could also be an admirable person – was unacceptable (given the homophobia of modern scholars). Some, among them Kay and Pézard, even managed to deny that the sodomites of the ‘Inferno’ were truly sodomites. In order to deny Latini's sexuality, they insisted that he was married – but so were most homosexuals of his time – and that in Li livres dou trésor he repeatedly condemned sodomy – but it would have been unthinkable to do otherwise in a moralistic work.
Such arguments lost credibility, however, when Silvio Avalle D'Arco rediscovered and published a love poem, ‘S'eo son distretto inamoratamente’ (‘ If I am pressed by love’), which Latini wrote to a man, Bondie Dietaiuti. The poem had long been known, but until Avalle's study, writers had purported that it was written for a woman, and censored the fact that Dietaiuti had written a verse response to Latini, ‘Amor, quando mi membra’ (‘ Love, when I remember’). Notwithstanding this indubitable proof, Latini's homosexuality continues to be a source of great embarrassment for a majority of Dante scholars, and the debate, incredibly, continues today.
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