Giovanni di Giovanni
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Giovanni di Giovanni (c. 1350 – May 7, 1365?) is one of the younger victims of the campaign against sodomy, waged in Florence since the Middle Ages against the majority male population of the city.
He was convicted by the Podestà court of being the passive partner of a number of different men. He was labeled "a public and notorious passive sodomite." His punishment was to be paraded on the back of an ass, then to be publicly castrated. Finally, he was to have his anus burned with a red-hot iron (or, as the sentence read: "[punished] in that part of the body where he allowed himself to be known in sodomitical practice.") It is presumed he did not survive the ordeal.[1][2]
His prosecution came on the heels of the Black Death, the bubonic plague epidemic which had ravaged the city two years earlier. Many in the religious establishment associated the disaster to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and blamed sodomites for having brought the wrath of God down on the heads of the populace. The remedy they promoted was to purify the city of evil by means of fire, leading to burnings at the stake and other punishments such as that suffered by Giovanni di Giovanni.[citation needed]
[edit] References
- ^ Rocke, Michael (1996). Forbidden Friendships, Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford University Press, pages 24, 227, 356, 360. ISBN 0195122925.
- ^ Meyer, Michael J (2000), Literature and Homosexuality, Rodopi, ISBN 904200519X
