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Alois Riegl and the Baroque”), situates Riegl’s ideas on the Baroque in the 
context of their time. A second contribution by Arnold Witte (“Reconstructing 
Riegl’s Entstehuung der Barockkunst in Rom”) addresses the complexities 
of interpreting Riegl’s text and original notes while a third essay by Andrew 
Hopkins (“Riegl Renaissances”) treats the reception of the book. Collectively 
these essays offer a very fine addition to a text that is certain to open further 
enquiry on the late ideas of this important art historian.

gregory davies, McMaster University

Ruggiero, Guido. 
Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. 
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 285. ISBN 13-978-0-
8018-8516-7 (hardcover) $25.

Guido Ruggiero is the historian who has done the most to shape our current 
understanding of sex and violence in Renaissance Italy. Reaching deep into the 
Venetian archives, and particularly into criminal court records, he has drawn 
out evidence of how Italians constructed behavioural boundaries and how they 
dealt both personally and socially with violations of those norms. This is the 
hard edge of sex and violence, stiffened and complicated by the contexts of 
crime, court, and discipline, and always coloured by them. It gives us a view of 
sexual identity that Foucault would recognize, a construct built out of forms of 
discipline and with an often hollow centre.

In this collection, Ruggiero aims to move from the hard edge of conflict 
and discipline to see how sex figured in the lives of those who took it as a form 
of pleasure, enjoyment, and entertainment. Conflicts here are more about 
performance than about honour. More to the point, conflicts are not the defining 
centre of the story. Ruggiero aims instead to capture a broad range of shared 
understandings and assumptions about sex, and to show how Italians used 
these to shape the way they understood their own experiences and presented 
their selves to others. To get at this idea of socially-constructed sexual identities, 
he frames the concept of ‘consensus realities’: that is, the imagined, performed, 
and shared understandings about sex that were operative within groups. To 



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ensure that these aren’t static, he emphasizes that an individual might share 
different consensus realities with different groups, and that these might change 
at different times and particularly at different stages of life. 

Ruggiero argues that an individual like Machiavelli was known to his 
friends in terms of these realities. They were negotiated & performed in self-
fashioning, and they incorporated a potential for social discipline — your 
group held you to an identity and kept you in line, and so enabled you to live 
up to a particular reality.

These identities do emerge in court records, but Ruggiero turns in this 
collection to a different range of sources in order to recover consensus realities 
that take a more creative and celebrative view of sexuality. He works with three 
forms in particular. The first are the novellas, short stories, and popular plays 
that constitute renaissance storytelling. They rely on stereotyped characters and 
stock situations, but in fiction as in life, particular deeds stand out from the 
stereotype and point to more complex and individual identity. Sex is alluded to 
playfully and often through double entendres. The second set of sources are the 
erudite classical comedies that were popular in the early Renaissance and that 
give way to less formal commedia dell’arte by century’s end. Very mannered, 
they suspend traditional morality without abandoning it, and function as a 
prism giving a multi-hued look at sex as playful and something to be celebrated. 
The third set of sources are letters, which were literary and self-consciously 
‘fashioned’. Ruggiero is particularly interested in letters circulating in groups 
that show how consensus realities were framed, and how they shaped and 
disciplined self-presentation. 

The question with all these literary forms is determining whether they 
show self-presentation or simply the mannered or deliberate imitation of 
classical forms. It’s impossible to tell but Ruggiero deals with this openly to show 
that he’s conscious of being something of an interloper in literary scholarship. 
Less interloper than mediator, because he aims in this collection to suggest 
ways of rereading and rethinking some familiar texts to see how they might 
reveal consensus realities. So, for instance, Aretino’s Il marescalco can be read 
as conveying the more positive and tolerant view of male-male sodomitical 
relations that must have existed as a consensus reality alongside the more 
traditional legal and theological condemnations. In particular, it shows male 
sexual identity as something that evolves over the life span. Reading sources 
like Boccaccio’s Decameron together with items from the Venetian archives 



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that may be overtly condemning let us recognize sex as playful, celebrative, 
and full of pleasure. Perhaps too full, because these and other sources also 
depict the troubles that result from too much access to sex, and particularly 
men’s vulnerability in face of hungry and canny women. That stereotype can be 
turned, self-deprecatingly, to excuse, explain, or manipulate situations — as we 
see in some of Machiavelli’s letters to Francesco Vettori when he is in his forties 
and outside politics. Machiavelli depicts himself comically as both a victim of 
his own passions and yet a successful lover, and his friends are in on this self-
deprecating and hardly ‘Machiavellian’ image of male identity. 

Ruggiero describes his chapters as essays, and they have precisely that 
fresh, allusive and illuminative character. He encourages us to tease more out of 
familiar sources, and by approaching these canonical texts with a fresh eye and 
a curiosity shaped by years in the archives, he draws more out from the spaces 
between their lines. Ruggiero demonstrates that what’s unsaid and implied 
puts a different cast to the words on a page, and he offers rereadings that are 
suggestive and persuasive. He disciplines his readings with three criteria: they 
must stay close to the internal demands of the text, stay close to the context, 
and find meanings that open up critical thinking about the text and allow more 
sheer pleasure in the encounter with it. 

Given his experience with the broad social range found in court records, 
it would be helpful to hear more from Ruggiero on how we might find some 
way of integrating precisely that range of class and gender into our re-readings. 
The pens writing the lines that we peer between are usually held by men of a 
certain station and experience. The pleasure they imagine, project, and share 
carries the shadings of their privilege. Yet the reality for many women was that 
sex was hardly consensual. A startling number of women experienced rape or 
assault as a reality or a fear, and it would be intriguing to see whether and how 
that shaped consensus realities for the different genders and classes of Italians. 

Ruggiero is aware that social historians haven’t always been able to convey 
the renaissance joy of sex, and in this collection he aims to give us some of that 
celebrative pleasure. With essays that are fascinating, provocative, and highly 
suggestive, he succeeds beautifully.

nicholas terpstra, University of Toronto