ABSTRACT
The work of the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino strongly inflects Book of La nef, which imports Ficinian Neoplatonism to France and to the French language and sets the stage for later representations of male-female love in which corporeal beauty leads to the higher forms. The signification that concerns Symphorien Champier is specifically bound to his rereading the Ficinian-Platonic tradition. This chapter discusses how the story of male-male love demonstrates a specific approach to gender and sexuality in which gender relations are balanced and the potential for Neoplatonic homoerotics contained. As the transformation of Lucilia illustrates how Champier rereads Plato by purging Ficino's work of the temptation of male beauty, he goes on to enact that very hermeneutic in which the rereader of Plato has abandoned exterior signs of male-male love and sexuality. Champier's text marks an important split between male desire for the male body and male desire for the female body.
