Where 'Reason and the Sense of Venus are Innate in Men': Male Friendship, Secret Societies, Academies, and Antiquarians in Eighteenth-Century Florence

Abstract

This article studies male friendship in eighteenth-century Florence and the forms of homosociability that supported it, in particular the first Masonic Lodge in Florence, antiquarian societies, and artistic as well as literary academies. Inspired by the parallel studies of George Haggerty on British male friendship and Robert Tobin on male relations in the German eighteenth century, this contribution considers overlapping, Grand Tour homoerotic circles in Florence where British, German, and Italian men shared common interests and forged new aesthetics, taste, lifestyles and forms of knowledge transfer. This Italian case corroborates and advances the queer studies debate by furnishing a conspicuously missing tile in the mosaic of eighteenth-century homoerotic history. It proposes a queer reading of Illuminismo that can be applied to several other Italian eighteenth-century contexts to reveal Florence as a transformational space of sexual and social reform.