Social Profiles

Abstract To say that sodomy was a social as much as a sexual fact in Florence is, in a sense, to state the obvious. With as many as 15,000 individuals incriminated and 2,500 convictions for homosexual acts in little more than the last forty years of the fifteenth century, sodomy was no “deviant” behavior of a distinct sexual minority but a common part of male experience that had widespread social ramifications. The significance of sodomy lies not only in these impressive numbers, however. The hierarchical configuration of pederasty, for example, with its rigid code of sexual comportment, itself embodied and expressed social divisions and rank. As David Herlihy first proposed, moreover, the very social structure of Florence, with its late age of marriage for males of around thirty or thirty-one, a large proportion of men who never married, and the resulting profusion of footloose, profligate bachelors—those merrily singing about doing the euphemistic “born, ba, ba”—probably helped create favorable conditions in which sodomy and other unauthorized sexual activities flourished. Certain social dimensions of sodomy, real or perceived, also influenced the apparatus for policing it, as in 1459 when fines were reduced in response to the alleged ubiquity of the practice among craftsmen and the poor, or again in the early sixteenth century when penalties were scaled by age to the advantage of youths. As precise a definition as possible of the social composition of males incriminated for sodomy, then, should contribute to a better understanding of the nature and organization of homosexual activity and illuminate social tendencies and prejudices in its control.