Book Alert / Machiavelli in Love

Machiavelli in Love -- Sex, Self and Society in the Italian Renaissance by Guido Ruggiero, Johns Hopkins UP '07, $45, 285 pages, ISBN #0801885167. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

What a relief! I had worried that the current obsession with one's sexual identity was a preoccupation of the modern age and maybe a harbinger of the decline of civilization. Not so, writes University of Miami historian Guido Ruggiero, who tells us people were pretty self-consciously horny as early as the Italian Renaissance.

His proof lies in works of such literary figures as Boccaccio, Aretino, and Castiglione, which he visits against contemporary archival evidence. As opposed to simply dealing with "consensus realities of family, neighbors, friends and social peers," the author contends "Renaissance Italians understood sexual identity as a part of the human life cycle, something that changed throughout stages of youthful experimentation, marriage, adult companionship and old age."

Ruggiero devotes a chapter to "Macchiavelli in Love," from where he draws the book's title, with the subtitle of "The Self-Presentation of an Aging Lover," although "aging" meant something quite different in those days than it does to us. In 1515, at age 45, Machiavelli had already referred to himself as "almost 50" and "old," yet probably not even a candidate for Viagra.

Ruggiero is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of European Social History and author of several other books.