ABSTRACT
I shall begin with a story from fourteenth-century Italy, drawn from a work that was nevertheless a major literary reference in sixteenth-century France, and that continues to be so within queer studies today. The fiftieth tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron represents a notable rewriting of an episode drawn from a classical model, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses or Golden Ass. Pursuing a wider web of intertextual relations, we will examine another Renaissance rewriting of the same model by Girolamo Morlini; we will also look at Boccaccio’s reception in France: on the one hand, through the translations of the Decameron prepared by Laurent de Premierfait (1411-1414) and Antoine Le Maçon (1545) and, on the other hand, through the reading of the fiftieth tale offered by Brantôme in the Dames galantes. After turning to a consideration of a short story written in France by another Italian, Matteo Bandello, we will conclude with a brief evocation of a number of French writers, notably Marguerite de Navarre. The focus of our discussion will be the representation of (hetero)normative codes and male deviance from them. This will enable us to address immediately the fundamental question of the different ways in which homosexual desire and activities were portrayed in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the modern debate generated by those portrayals that turns around questions of sexual acts versus sexual identities or characters, and around universalising versus minoritising conceptions of same-sex desire. We will see vividly that the Renaissance was not characterised by a single conception of homosexual desire and practices; different attitudes coexisted and different discourses were deployed (sin, nature, taste), sometimes in ways likely to strike the modern reader as contradictory. Contradiction was also typical of French attitudes towards Italy more generally in the Renaissance, as indeed it was of attitudes towards the classical past as a whole.
