im not italian, so sorry if this is inappropriate or anything!! could you explain your pier delle vigne essay some more? i took a class on the divine comedy and dante in college, but we really didnt touch on queer themes at all! thank you in advance! :*
Sure, I’d love to! Now, my essay wasn’t quite about queer love per se, especially since my Italian teacher is basically a nun and would probably collapse if I wrote about it, but it had lots to do with it, given the character I discussed. I’m more than happy to write about Pier delle Vigne and queer love in the Divine Comedy in general, but keep in mind that I’m not an expert at all and I haven’t studied all of it yet, so I may well skip some things or misinterpret others.
The theme of homosexuality and queer love is most prominent in the Inferno, an obvious choice given the times Dante lived in, and even then it is often referred to mostly through metaphors, such as “the unspeakable vice” and other such phrasing. Sapphic love is not quite present either, given the views of the time concerning female sexuality or its lack thereof, though there’s something there in the Paradiso if you squint really hard (which I’ll get to later).
Our first introduction to homosexuality in the Comedy is arguably Vergil himself: we know from his poems that he had sexual relations with and loved men, as was customary under certain circumstances in ancient Greece and Rome, but this is never mentioned by Dante, most likely because of the heavy censorship ancient poems concerning “sinful themes” would undergo - this didn’t necessarily mean sodomy or homosexuality, as many relations that could be read as camaraderie were left uncensored (see Achilles and Patroclus or Euryalus and Nisus, which were explained away as mere friendships) and poems which discussed heterosexual activities were also censored, such as Ovid’s works.
Barring Vergil and the other ancients and fast-forwarding to Canto XIII, we meet the first and one of the only demonstrations of love between two men in the whole Divine Comedy: Pier delle Vigne, the most important royal advisor at the imperial court, and emperor and king of Sicily Federico II (damned respectively in the seventh girone for his suicide and in the sixth girone for his heretic, epicurean beliefs).
All homoerotic readings of this scene aside, it’s crystal clear that what they felt for each other was love: “I am he who held both keys / to the heart of Federico, and who turned them, / locking and unlocking, so sweetly / that I removed nearly all others from his intimacy” (vv 58-61), “On the recent roots of this tree / I swear to you I never broke the faith / of my sire, who was so worty of honour” (vv 73-75); excuse my wonky translations, for I don’t have an English copy at hand and one could never do justice to Dante in translation, but the relationship transparing from these verses is very much one of love, be it fraternal or romantic.
So, where’s the homoerotism? Well, Federico II’s court was well-known in Europe as a hub of sodomites, especially in Guelph and papist environments where word was spread that Federico himself was a sodomite, with even his wife Isabelle of England giving credit to those rumours. Of course, we’ll never know for sure what Federico did in bed, but we do know that his harem of concubines and his crew of all-male Arabic dancers often intermingled and performed together on the same nights, and we also do know that in the Liber Augustalis or the Constitution of the Kingdom of Sicily sodomy was not mentioned as a punishable offense, so we will make of that what we will.
Additionally, the language used here and the context in which it is used is not random: you can’t tell from my translations, but the language used is high in register and rich in rhetoric figures, similes, metaphors and sicilianisms, creating a turn of phrase very similar to that used by the poets of the Scuola Siciliana, a poetic movement to which both Piero and Federico belonged to. The Scuola Siciliana was known for a lot of things, but one of them was its complete uniformity in themes: it couldn’t discuss politics or current events, obviously, as it was affiliated to the literal emperor, so its only thematic focus was love, specifically courtly and amorous love.
So, what was then seen as the language of love, with a word choice that included “sweetly”, “faithfulness”, “honour”, “the keys to his heart”, “intimacy” and “broke his faith”, all words and themes very much seen in both Sicilian and Stilnovista love poetry, definitely help to think that perhaps Dante really did imply something in these verses.
After the encounter with Pier delle Vigne, Dante finally meets the real, actual sodomites in Canto XV, among which features Dante’s very own teacher Brunetto Latini; he is visibly shook by seeing him damned for sodomy, but still retains all the admiration he had for him and refrains from judging him aside from the initial shock, which has led many to speculate that Dante either knew something about Brunetto’s inclinations or was actually involved with him himself in some way, in a complex fusion of homoerotic attraction and period-typical homophobia. Now, I haven’t studied this canto the way I have studied Pier delle Vigne’s so I cannot comment much on it, but whoever wants to add something about this topic is welcome to do so!
In Canto XXVI, Dante meets Odysseus and Diomedes in the girone of the fraudulent advisers: here, souls are punished with burning inside a flame one by one, except for the two heroes, who burn together inside a single flame with two heads, and of which Odysseus tells their story, while Diomedes stays back and listens.
This, of course, is a direct parallel to Paolo and Francesca, the two lovers in the Canto III who are damned for their lust towards one another; while all the other lustful souls are trapped in the vortex alone, the two of them are together, and Francesca tells Dante their story as Paolo stays back and listens (and weeps): Paolo+Francesca and Odysseus+Diomedes are the only damned souls who are punished together and are almost always remembered together in the context of the Divine Comedy, and when we add that to the fact that they were considered to be lovers by the Greeks and that they were ancient Greeks and thus sinful pagans to the Christian medieval audience of Dante’s times, it’s pretty evident that a message is being sent by the poet here.
That is basically the extent of my knowledge on male homosexuality and sodomy in the Divine Comedy, but I did mention something about sapphic love before: in the Canto III of the Paradiso, when Dante meets the inconstant spirits of the First Sphere, we meet Piccarda Donati, sister of Dante’s friend Forese, and Costanza d’Altavilla, queen of Sicily and mother of Federico II. Now, the two of them couldn’t possibly have known each other in real life, but they are joined together here because, as Piccarda explains, they both were forced to abandon the convent to marry a man they never loved.
Back in Dante’s day, of course, women couldn’t avoid marriage unless they became nuns (and even that could backfire, as we’ve seen), so lesbians and women who weren’t attracted to men tended to join convents fairly consistently; this doesn’t necessarily mean that the two were lesbians just because they joined the convent, and Dante probably just used them as two examples of extemely faithful women who were ripped away from God and forced into secularity and still got to Heaven, but the subtlest hint is still there, especially when you consider how their spirits are tied together and how only Piccarda speaks while Costanza stays back and listens (YES, yet another comparison to Paolo and Francesca).
I hope you found this interesting! I loved writing this, it’s a really interesting topic which I think deserves so much more attention, and I’m really looking forward to reading more about it. Thanks so much for the ask!
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