Breeding Monsters: Sodomy and Usury in Dante’s Inferno

David Hawkes, Arizona State University

… is it not certain that every man has been infused with the idea of acquiring wealth? That being so, the means he employs to become rich are just as natural as they are lawful. Similarly, are not all men given to seeking the greatest amount of delight in their pleasure-taking? Well, if sodomy is the unfailing means to this acknowledged end, sodomy is no infamy.^[1]

Marquis de Sade, Juliette

1. The Ancient Homology

Like William Shakespeare and John Milton, Dante Alighieri was the son of a usurer. It seems plausible that an early familiarity with financial symbols may foster a facility with linguistic signs, and certainly a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to Dante’s treatment of usury.^[2] Twenty-first century critics are also finely attuned to the influence of sexuality on literature, and recent studies have taken a detailed interest in Dante’s portrayal of sodomy.^[3] Scholars are, of course, aware that since Aristotle usury and sodomy have been regarded as intimately related. The Aristotelian tradition, which molded Dante’s mind, regards them as two forms of appearance taken by a single essence or, in slightly different terms, as two accidental manifestations of a single substance. Although critics have often studied Dante’s view of either sodomy or usury, however, relatively few have explored the way he conceives the relation between the two practices. As this essay will show, the complicated relations among sodomites, usurers and blasphemers in the Inferno, as well as the moral status of such individuals as Brunetto Latini and Jacopo Rusticucci, are all elucidated when read with this homology in mind.

The relative lack of critical attention to the connection between sodomy and usury doubtless reflects the modern assumption that finance and sexuality occupy discrete areas of experience. Yet Dante’s contemporaries saw what we call compound interest and queer sexuality as intimately related, even essentially identical, albeit empirically distinct. For them, the autonomous reproduction of money in usury was conceptually inseparable from the diversion of desire away from biological reproduction in sodomy. It is important to emphasize that both terms enjoyed a far broader scope in the Middle Ages than they do today. Catherine Keen is doubtless correct to observe that ‘‘sodomia… connotava sempre la lussuria e il coitus non riproduttivo, e nell’uso generale il senso primario indicava il contatto sessuale fra due uomini,”^[4] (“sodomy… always connoted lust and non-reproductive coitus, and in general usage the primary meaning referred to sexual contact between two men”). While “sodomia” may have connoted male homosexuality in the demotic vernacular, however, literary and scholarly interpretations of the term could and did take in every conceivable species of “coitus non riproduttivo,” including heterosexual anal, oral and intercrural sex, masturbation, contraception, bestiality, prostitution, pimping, and anything that diverted sexual activity from its natural end (telos) of childbirth. In 1333 Domenico Cavalca declared that the prevention of biological reproduction within marriage is an especially egregious form of sodomy: “ogni disordinaria corruzione, e mutazione in matrimonio, per la quale s’impedisca la generazione, è molto peggior soddomia, che non sarebbe con maschio, o con altra femmina non moglie”)^[5] (“every disorderly corruption, and change in marriage, by which procreation is prevented, is much worse sodomy than would be with a male, or with a female who is not one’s wife.”) As J.T. Noonan has shown, the closest Greek equivalent of sodoma is atokion, “without offspring.”^[6] In short, sodomy meant infertile sexuality considered as a general category.

The term usury (usura, or sometimes osura, uxura or ucura)^[7] was equally capacious. It designated any interest on a loan, not merely compounded or excessive exactions, it could refer to the paying as well as to the taking of interest, and it might simply mean an intention to turn a profit unfairly. The definitive characteristic of usury was its fertility: it made money “breed.” As Aristotle notes in the Politics, the Greek word for usury, tokos (“birth” or “offspring”), expresses antiquity’s conception of usury as artificial generation. In short, usury meant fertile money. Thus, both sodomy and usury involve the displacement of phusis (nature) by nomos (custom). Just as sterility is an unnatural characteristic imposed upon sexuality by human custom, so fertility is an unnatural characteristic ascribed to money by social convention. The two vices formed a precise parallel in practice: usury induced artificial reproduction in a substance that is naturally barren, while sodomy artificially prevented reproduction in an activity that is naturally fertile. Aristotle’s description of interest as unnatural birth remained canonical for over two thousand years:

The most hated sort [of money-making], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest [tokos], which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. That is why of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.^[8]

According to Aristotle, the natural telos of money is to facilitate the exchange of useful commodities. Money is a common denominator, which imposes an artificial similarity on objects that are naturally different, thus rendering them commensurate. But usury subverts that end, making money into the object rather than the medium of exchange, so that the reproduction of money becomes an end-in-itself. Only living creatures naturally reproduce themselves. Aristotle argues that, for any animal, “the most natural act is the production of another like itself,”^[9] but in usury that act is performed by money. In a monstrous violation of nature, then, usury makes money come alive.

Sodomy was to sex what usury was to money. The natural telos of sex was assumed to be reproduction. Non-procreative sexuality was seen as unnatural because its only end is itself—just as, in usury, money’s only telos is the infinite reproduction of itself.^[10] Neither sodomy nor usury has an exogenous end, they are both autotelic. On these grounds, Aristotle’s Patristic and Scholastic commentators established an ethical hierarchy between fertile and sterile sexualities that perdured into modernity. The crux of the polarity is that reproductive sexuality is teleological. It has a purpose beyond itself, which limits and defines it, giving it an essential identity. In contrast, non-reproductive sex is an end-in-itself. It has no external end, no boundary, no border, and thus no definite identity at all.

In Greek thought, that which is endless is unnatural, for the nature of anything is defined by its end. As Aristotle explains: “nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end.”^[11] Like sodomy, compound interest is infinite and, as Basil the Great observes, it forms a polarity with natural reproduction, which is finite: “animals, after transmitting to the offspring the power of bearing, desist from conception; [but] both the money of the moneylenders and the accruing interest produce, and the capital is redoubled.”^[12] Just as, in usury, money ceases to fulfill its natural end as a medium for the exchange of useful commodities, so in sodomy sexuality ceases to fulfill its natural purpose as a means to the reproduction of the species. In both cases, the means become the ends, so that money and sex are rendered autotelic and unnatural.

In the first century CE, Aristotle’s construction of financial reproduction as an unnatural parody of natural reproduction was followed by Philo of Alexandria, who claimed that usurers “amass money bred from money, as their yeanlings are from cattle,”^[13] and by Plutarch, who declared that “the usuries of these barbarous and wicked usurers bring forth before they conceive.”^[14] In the fourth century, Ambrose of Milan alluded to Matthew 23.33 when he pointed out that “each month comes, interest is born, evil offspring of evil parents. This is the generation of vipers.”^[15] His contemporary Gregory of Nyssa sternly addressed himself to precious metals: “you, copper and gold, things that cannot usually bring forth fruit, do not seek to have offspring,” before drawing the commonplace comparison between usurers and biological parents: “Fathers do not rejoice as much at the birth of their children as usurers do at the end of the month.”^[16] Through the Latin Fathers, this originally Hellenic conception of usury found its way into Christian canon law. Gratian’s twelfth-century Decretum observed how “by the most vile cunning of usury, gold is born from gold.”^[17] By the fourteenth century Alexander Bonini could treat as a truism the proposition that “money, by means of this craft, reproduces itself as if by impregnation and birth.”^[18]

Above all, it was Thomas Aquinas who systematized the homology between auto-reproductive money and non-procreative sexuality into Christian doctrine, warning that just as “the emission of semen… should be accomplished in a manner befitting the end for which it is needed,”^[19] so the use of money should fulfill its natural telos as the medium of exchange—a telos manifestly violated in usury. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, Aquinas observes that “a kind of birth takes place when money grows from money,” and that this “is especially contrary to Nature, because it is in accordance with Nature that money should increase by natural goods and not from money itself.”^[20] Aquinas also stresses the infinite character of avarice, when he distinguishes between “natural” wealth (use-value, which “serves man as a remedy for his natural wants”) and “artificial” wealth (exchange-value, “invented by the art of man, for the convenience of exchange”). Thus “the desire for natural riches” is natural, but “the desire for artificial wealth” is “infinite” and therefore unnatural. For medieval Florentines like Dante, furthermore, the unity of usury and sodomy was no merely abstract, theological point, but an empirically observable, topical and local concern.

2. Usanza in Dante’s Florence

Dante’s concern with the ethics of sexuality may reflect the lingering influence of the Manichean Cathar heresy in southern France and northern Italy. Like the ancient Gnostics and the medieval Bogomils, the Cathars considered the material world to be a creation of the devil, and they allegedly advocated sodomy to avoid increasing the population. Many historians connect the Cathar heresy to the code of chaste, courtly love transmitted by the troubadours. As Noonan observes: “In the second quarter of the twelfth century a new ideology appears which is opposed to procreation. It is the code of courtly love sung by many of the troubadours of Languedoc and Aquitaine.”^[21] The troubadours disdained reproductive sex, while simultaneously protesting against the rising power of usury, and Dante’s interest in their work is obvious—the famous troubadour Arnaut Daniel is found in the Purgatorio, among the lustful. Noonan suggests that troubadour poetry reflects a “Cathar ambience… Praising the love of man for woman, they [i.e., the troubadours] separated love from marriage; celebrating sexual pleasure, they rejected generative purpose” (182).

In Trecento Florence, the cultural connections between sodomy and usury were confirmed by their simultaneous rise to social prominence. The city of Dante was throughout Europe a veritable by-word for both vices. Michael Rocke opens Forbidden Friendships, his magisterial history of Florentine homosexuality, by quoting Pope Gregory’s 1376 declaration: “there are no two sins more abominable than those that prevail among the Florentines. The first is their usury and infidelity. The second is so abominable that I dare not mention it.”^[22] The dual connotation of Florence permeated Europe’s very languages. The florin was first coined in 1252: it immediately became a synonym for money throughout the continent. Meanwhile, as Rocke notes, “in contemporary Germany ‘to sodomize’ was popularly dubbed florenzen and a ‘sodomite,’ a Florenzer” (3). In 1305 Goridano de Rivalto claimed that “nearly all… or at least a majority”^[23] of Florentines were sodomites, and as Randolph Trumbach observes: “Two-thirds of all Florentine men were accused of sodomy. When a legal system nets so high a percentage, the practice it forbids can be taken to be universal.”^[24] Medieval Florence arguably developed the earliest modern homosexual culture, which exerted a profound though incalculable influence on every sphere of urban life.

Usury’s influence matched that of sodomy. As Jeremy Catto observes: “The bankers of Florence had established, by 1300, an astonishingly precocious system of international credit,”^[25] and usury’s effects extended far beyond what modernity calls “the economy.” The city was guided by an “arithmetical justice” which ensured that public morality adapted itself to financial considerations. Conservative moralists lamented that, as Francis Hittinger puts it, “individual citizens [were] seen qua their status as market agents, and not in terms of their virtuous contribution to the commune.”^[26] The city government was dominated by the Mercanzia, a coalition of bankers drawn from the most important guilds, whose role was to execute the demands and desires of finance. All the specialized guilds had a common interest in finance, which consequently became the ruling force in Florentine politics. John Najemy remarks that, by the dawn of the thirteenth century: “The prominence of financial interests in the primo popolo is remarkable.”^[27] As coalitions of bankers competed for wealth, power and influence, they developed rival social circles with distinctive manners and attitudes. Financial interest determined political allegiance, personal behavior, even aesthetic taste. As Antonio Montefusco has shown, the decades preceding Dante’s birth witnessed the peak cultural influence of “poet-bankers” like Brunetto Latini.^[28]

Dante thus grew up in the first society since antiquity whose government was guided by mainly financial exigencies, and whose culture displayed what today we might call a self-consciously queer milieu. Both usury and sodomy were pervasive throughout his native city, and the correspondence between them would presumably have forced itself upon the poet’s mind, even had it not already been established by Aristotle and Aquinas. Dante was born into a culture war between the rising social mores of finance-based capitalism and traditional Thomist morality, in a city where a concatenation of linguistic, theological, philosophical, cultural and economic factors made the convergence of usury and sodomy impossible to ignore. Despite moralistic, theoretical objections, sodomy remained rampant in practice, while the effective legitimization of usury was already bestowing the power of reproduction on money de facto.

Indeed, Dante’s Florence flourished by seizing the vanguard role in the development of international money-lending. Within the poet’s lifetime, merchant banking houses like the Bardi and the Peruzzi established the framework of finance as the source of the city’s fabulous wealth. Florentine merchants introduced the “bill of exchange” into Western Europe and, as Jan Mosselaar reminds us, this constituted “the ideal instrument to circumvent the Church’s prohibition on charging interest rates when lending money.”^[29] It also incarnated financial value in a performative symbol, and the fortunes that funded the Florentine Renaissance sprang from the autonomous reproduction of such symbols. By the standards of Thomistic tradition, however, this economic and cultural blossoming was a fleur du mal. Financial value is not part of nature (phusis) but an artificial invention of custom (nomos). To make money reproduce like a natural creature is therefore to collapse the mutually constitutive polarity of nomos and phusis, by reducing the latter to the former. According to the numerous Jeremiahs whose prophecies would culminate in the rule of Savonarola, the alliance of usury and sodomy was nothing less than human custom’s assault on divinely-created nature.

The earliest commentaries on Dante’s Commedia easily discerned the logic behind the proximity of sodomites to usurers. In his comment on Inferno 11.99-105, Jacopo Alighieri (1322) simply summarizes Aristotelian doctrine, noting that usury is both “contro a Dio” and “contro all’arte,” because “[c]ontra sua natura è guadagnandosi moneta per moneta, la quale per sua natura è disposta a essere mezzo solamente in aguagliare ogni mercato”^[30] (“it is against its own nature to earn money for money, which by its nature is only meant to be a means of equalizing every market”). The physical and temporal organization of Inferno follows the logic linking sodomy to usury, as Jacopo della Lana (1324-28) explains in his note on 17.43-45: “Posciaché l’autore ha trattato del peccato de’ sodomiti, mo intende trattare delli usurarii li quali similemente peccano contra l’ordine della natura ordinata da Dio…” (“Since the author has dealt with the sin of the sodomites, he now intends to deal with usurers who similarly sin against the order of nature ordained by God…”).

In Trecento Tuscany, the concept of usanza, seems to have provided a nexus within which sodomy and usury might mingle. In his preliminary nota to Inferno 17, Jacopo della Lana (1324-28) deploys usanza to mean the use of a “fungible” good—that is, anything whose telos is realized in its consumption, such as food, drink or money. The usanza of such a thing is identical with the inherent proprietà, or qualities, of the thing itself: “molte cose sono nel mondo, le quali l’usanza di quelle e la sua consumazione… e di queste non si può partire l’usanza d’esse dalla sua proprietà…” (“There are many things in the world, the use of which is their own consumption… and the use of these cannot be separated from the property.”) In the nota to Inferno 17, the Ottimo Commento (1333) also employs usanza to mean the “use” of fungible goods, when “l’usanza” is identical to “il loro consumamento” (“their consumption”). The fact that the natural usanza of a fungible involves the elimination of its properties was a conventional argument against usury, and early modern Florentines referred to the exaction of interest on any fungible commodity as usanza.

Yet the term could also allude to sodomy. Bernard of Siena described sodomy as a usanza among the Florentines^[31] and Giovanni Boccaccio seems to use usanza in this sense when discussing the tyrant Dionysus of Syracuse in his commentary on Inferno 12: 108: “essendo allevato con certi giovanetti greci, l’usanza de’ quali il dovea trarre ad amarli…” (“being brought up with certain Greek youths, whose habits would lead him to love them…”). In his note to Inferno 15.106-108, Boccaccio denounces the “sogdomia” practiced by the scholars found in Brunetto Latini’s company, immediately before asserting that “con ciò sia cosa che l’usanza de’ giovani” (“with this thing being the custom of the youth”) and that “l’usanza de’ giovani non paia disdicevole a qualunque onesto uomo” (“the custom of the youth does not seem inappropriate to any honest man”). The Anonimo Fiorentino (circa 1400), indicates at Inferno 16.43-45 that Jacopo Rusticucci was driven to usanza by the repellent qualities of his wife: “credendo potere meglio coprire colla usanza de’ giovani che delle femmine, usò questo peccato…” (“believing he could better cover up the custom of young men than of women, he committed this sin…”).^[32]

Further complicating its significance, the term could also, like the English “use,” refer to nomos or custom in general. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics calls attention to the etymological link between “custom” and “money:” “this is why it has the name “money” (nomisma) – because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless.”^[33] Jacopo Alighieri (1322) employs the phrases “per usanza” and “secondo l’usanza” to mean simply “according to custom.”^[34] Dante himself uses the word in this sense in Purgatorio, when he observes that the landscape permits nothing “fuor d’usanza” (21.42) and when recalling how “l’usanza fu lì nostra insegna” (22.126).^[35] The TLIO cites a source from c. 1345 which explicitly differentiates between “osura” and “usanca:” “no(n) sia receputo nullu che presti ad osura oi che fusse d’altra mala usança”^[36] (“no one shall be accepted who lends at usury or engages in other bad customs”).

Even when it does mean “custom” in general, rather than “compound interest” in particular, usanza often implies moral turpitude. According to Francesco da Buti (1385-95) on Inferno 11.1-66, “froda” (“fraud”) degenerates into “bestialità” (“bestiality”) “quando viene in usanza” (“when it becomes customary”). Punning on “usura,” da Buti warns against “usare con le persone maculate di vizi” (“intercourse with people stained by vice”) and of “cadere per l’usanza loro” (“falling because of their habits). Similarly, in his comment on Inferno 16.46, where the poet mentions his urge to join the sodomites among the flames, da Buti remarks that it is “sua usanza” to empathize with those whose sin he shared. According to the Ottimo Commento (3) (1338) on Inferno 11.79-90, the human character can grow so distorted that “l’uomo poi per usanza scientemente s’inchina alle cose che desidera lo corrotto appetito…” (“the man then knowingly inclines himself by habit to the things that his corrupt appetite desires…”). This versatility of usanza shows how easily both usury and sodomy were interpreted as synecdoche for nomos in general. Their alliance seemed to involve a wholesale reduction of phusis to nomos, displacing divinely-created nature with human custom, with human labor-power represented in the symbolic form of money, and with an idolatrous conception of the human body as an end-in-itself.

3. Sodomy and Usury in Inferno

At the beginning of Inferno 11, Virgil and Dante leave the sixth circle of Hell (the circle of heresy), and enter the seventh, the circle of the violent. Before they descend into the seventh circle, the pilgrims pause at the tomb of “Pope Anastasius, / enticed to leave the true path by Photinus” (11.8-9). This image gestures back towards the previous canto’s focus on heresy, although the Monophysitism that Dante associated with Photinus of Thessalonika was the intellectual opposite of the Epicureanism discussed in canto 10. In medieval Europe, Epicurus stood for carnality: an irrational fetishization of the flesh, a vain glorification of the things of this world. Photinus represented the opposite extreme: the blasphemous denigration of Creation which was expressed by refusal to admit Christ’s divinity. He was reputed to have pronounced “homo solum est Christus, non est et deus,” revealing his conception of Christ as a purely human product of biological reproduction. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that “Photinian is the name for any who held Christ to be a mere man.” Dante’s contemporaries blamed Pope Anastasius II for having admitted Photinus to communion, thereby appearing to legitimize the Monophysitism practiced by the Eastern church, of which Photinus was a delegate. The Roman church regarded the Monophysite rejection of Christ’s divinity as a blasphemous insult to Creation, and Dante alludes to that blasphemy by mentioning Photinus just before the sinners who insult natura—that is either nature per se, or nature’s Creator God, or nature’s creation, art—which Dante describes as God’s “nepote” (grandchild).

The presence of Anastasius’ tomb may help to explain the stench that disgusts the pilgrims, since he famously died a gruesome death in his bathroom. In his note to 11.8-9, Guido de Pisa (1327-28) explains that “egerendo intestina miserabiliter expiravit” (“he died miserably straining his bowels”), while in his comment on the same lines Pietro Alighieri 3 (1359-64) claims that “omnia intestina emissit moriendo” (“he expelled all his intestines as he died”). Yet the foulness clearly emanates mainly from the seventh circle’s inhabitants. The lowest, third ring of the circle contains blasphemers, sodomites and usurers, who are collectively described as the “violent against God.” Here usury and sodomy are in alliance against the God-given bounty of nature. As Virgil explains: “Puossi far forza nella deïtade, / col cor negando e bestemmiando quella, / e spregiando natura e sua bontade; / e però lo minor giron suggella / del segno suo e Soddoma e Caorsa / e chi, spregiando Dio col cor, favella” (11.46-51). Cahors was a town in the Languedoc, home of the antinomian Cathar heresy, and also synonymous with usury,^[37] so that sodomy and usury are here united by synecdoche.

The confinement of sodomites, usurers and blasphemers together demands that the pilgrims, along with the reader, consider what these ostensibly disparate transgressors might share in common. Virgil’s response is that, in their different ways, each category of sinner denies or denigrates Creation’s divine character. The blasphemers attack the Creator directly, the sodomites attack God through His Creation nature, and the usurers insult God by attacking the creation of His Creation—human culture or “art”—turning away from referential mimesis and instead constructing an autonomous hyper-reality out of self-reproducing, numismatic symbols. Each of these sins diverts a characteristic human practice away from its natural telos. The natural telos of language is referential communication, but blasphemy turns it into a performative curse. The natural telos of money is exchange, but usury’s purpose is infinite self-reproduction. The natural telos of sex is reproduction, but the purpose of sodomy is barren repetition of itself. In each case, the sin consists in the perversion of a telic activity into one that is autotelic.

Furthermore, blasphemy, usury and sodomy were all mortal sins, and the ultimate end of any mortal sin was death: the negation of the individual’s creation. Sodomites and usurers blaspheme against their Creator by replacing His nature with their own fantasies. Usury replaces Creation with culturally-defined financial value, while sodomy negates the natural urge to reproduce, fetishizing the body by making it into its own end, ignoring its natural function as the sign of the soul. Immediately prior to their descent into Hell’s seventh circle, Virgil reminds Dante that teleology is the basis of divine morality, as well as of Aristotelian ethics. He informs his student that violation of telos (“fine”) can involve either “forza” (force) or “frode” (fraud), explaining how “forza” can be deployed against either God, the community or the self. This is followed by a further distinction between violence “in loro e in lor cose” (11.32), that is, between violence directed against God, self and neighbors in substance (“e loro”) and violence directed against the accidental manifestations of those substances in “lor cose,” “their things” (11.32). He then connects “frode” to usury with a pun on “usare” (11.53), before noting that it can be perpetrated both against those who trust the fraudulent, and also against those who do not trust them. In each case, “frode” is described as antithetical to the “l’amor che fa natura” (11.56, 11.62).

Questioned further, Dante’s mentor informs him that art is an imitation of nature, which is in turn the “art” produced by the Divine Intellect, so that “vostr’ arte a Dio quasi è nepote” (11.105). It is possible to direct violence against God either in substance, as blasphemers do, or by means of His accidents, His proprietà. This includes what Virgil calls nature’s “bontade” (11.48). Since it is produced by a natural creature, furthermore, and since it therefore imitates nature in mimesis, humanly-created “art” is also part of nature’s “bontade.”

The pilgrim provokes further instruction from his guide when he asks how “usura offende / la divina bontade” (11.95-96). As the paradigm of unnatural reproduction, usury is the antithesis of God’s “bontade.” It does not imitate nature through mimesis but rather obscures it by imposing an artificial system of financial value upon nature, rendering its original form invisible. The autonomous reproduction of money deconstructs the distinction between nomos and phusis, bringing into question the very existence of a “natural” realm that can be distinguished from customary, subjective perception. Virgil explains how usury replaces nature and art with custom and convention: “e perché l’usuriere altra via tene, / per sé natura e per la sua seguace / dispregia, poi ch’in altro pon la spene” (11.109-11). The rise of usury holds out the prospect of an entirely artificial world, in which human culture replaces nature, and the infinite reproduction of financial signs becomes an end-in-itself. The fourteenth-century friar Gerard of Siena explained the danger in detail. To the extent that money, the measure of value, itself becomes a commodity with a variable value, the very concept of objective value is undermined:

A contract of usury causes natural things that are weighed or measured to transcend the nature or the value, fixed and determined by weight and measure, that they have been assigned by God or nature. For by means of this contract the usurer extracts something beyond the weight and measure of the thing lent, and consequently causes such things to transcend their value with respect to their weight and measure, which is wicked and unnatural, because God and nature have assigned their value in accordance with the weight by which they are weighed and the measure by which they are measured.^[38]

Usury brings into being an artificial, imaginary form of value, which is not contained in the natural body of the commodity, but which is ascribed the power of independent reproduction. This is what we would call a “supernatural” power. It is not an art that imitates nature in a referential manner, and which can thus be regarded as her tokos or offspring, but rather a conventional symbol grown independent of its natural referent and become efficacious: a performative sign.

In the third ring of Hell’s seventh circle, the usurers known personally to Dante are identified by their family crests embroidered on the moneybags which still hang around their necks. Just as they bestowed artificial life on symbolic money before their death, so their attention remains fixed on the symbols that define their identity in Hell. Just as usury treats money as an animal, moreover, Dante describes the usurers in bestial imagery. Inferno canto XVII compares them to oxen and dogs.^[39] There was a long tradition of comparing usurers to swine and Reginaldo degli Scrovegni’s money-pouch is emblazoned with an azure, pregnant sow (17.64), ironically contrasting biological reproduction with the financial fertility by which he lived. Giotto depicts the same person in Padua’s Arena Chapel, although he does not include Reginaldo among the usurers suffering in Hell, for the excellent reason that the Chapel had been commissioned by Reginaldo’s son, Enrico Scrovegni, as penance for his father’s notorious usury.

Dante was in Padua while Giotto was at work on his masterpiece, so it is quite possible that the two men met. In the fresco known as The Last Judgment, Giotto depicts Scrovegni humbly presents a model of the chapel to the Virgin, ostentatiously opposite the naked sodomites and usurers being tormented in Hell. Elsewhere in the chapel the sterile gain of usury is represented by Judas’ pieces of silver, juxtaposed with Mary in her role of theotokos, as well as with the immaculate conception. Giotto shows Mary’s elderly but miraculously fecund parents locked in passionate embrace, directly opposite the wretched usurers, who are so closely associated with death that they are executed by hanging despite already being in Hell. As Derbes and Sandona remark, the chapel presents a series of polarities between “usury and charity, sterility and fertility, natural generation and supernatural generation… The tie between usury and fertility seems to us critical to the meaning of the chapel” (278). Whether or not the two men were personally acquainted, Dante’s Inferno echoes Giotto’s emphasis on the convergence of usury and sodomy. Nor did the poet neglect to imitate the painter’s portrayal of the monsters that emerge when nous bows to eros, reason sleeps within the soul, and human beings curse the day they were born.

4. Blasphemy and Performativity

Dante’s Inferno confines the sodomites and usurers along with blasphemers, because they attack God’s works (cose) in the same manner as the blasphemers attack God Himself. In the words of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae: “the order of nature is from God Himself: wherefore in sins contrary to nature, whereby the very order of nature is violated, an injury is done to God, the Author of nature.”^[40] The essence of blasphemy was rejection of the “order of nature” in favor of a human re-creation. Thus Aquinas describes blasphemy as a sin against God in His capacity of Creator—“Nam blasphemare est contumeliam vel aliquod convitium inferre in iniuriam Creatoris”—and as Anthony Cassell argues: “blasphemy derives from pride and reflects the original sin of Adam and Eve who desired to be ‘sicut dii.’” Like sodomy and usury, blasphemy involves the displacement of natural by unnatural telos because, while the natural purpose of language is communication, blasphemy uses words to curse—to do harm, to impose a practical effect upon the cursed.

To use J.L. Austen’s term, blasphemy treats language as “performative.” Performative speech was a familiar phenomenon to Trecento Florentines, for as Virginia Cox reminds us, the Ciceronian inheritance of Renaissance Italy produced “a culture that attributed an almost superstitious importance to the persuasive agency of the spoken word within the political sphere.”^[41] Melissa Vise has recently described how the idea of peccata lingue, “linguistic sin,” emerged in the Italian city-states as a moralistic response to the rise of efficacious representation. In this context, “[b]lasphemous words were not just immoral or sinful: they attacked,”^[42] and “[w]ords possessed a violent potential: blasphemy was violence against which everything and everyone needed to be protected” (162). Vise also points out that “Dante spent most of his life suffering from a performative speech act (the Florentine council’s sentencing of him to exile) that he considered to be a total fraud” (199).

Unlike such political speech-acts, however, blasphemy had no hope of achieving its ostensible intent of damaging the Creator. To curse the Creator is to curse one’s own conditions of possibility, and thus finally to curse one’s own existence. As Virgil emphasizes, the effects of blasphemy take place only “col cor,” in the heart of the blasphemer. Blasphemy is thus autotelic in the sense that its end lies in its impact on the speaking subject. While the Virgin and the Saints could plausibly be wounded by verba iniuriosa, to insult one’s own Creator is logically to invoke one’s own annihilation. As Giovanni Battista-Gelli (1541-63) comments on Inferno 11.46-51, blasphemy “remains entirely in the agent and in the one who does it, and does not pass in any way into God.” Thus blasphemy, usury and sodomy were all understood as fetishizing the performative over the referential function of signs.

Since precious metals were obviously incapable of autonomous reproduction, the prevalence of usury proved that financial value was separable from specie. Money was thus revealed to be a performative sign, a symbol endowed with supernatural efficacy. Sodomy made a homologous fetish of the body, which is naturally a sign representing the soul, but which autotelic sexuality treats as an end-in-itself. In medieval Neo-Platonism, erotic desire is the unsublimated form of humanity’s natural desire for eternal life, so that sodomy, the negation of that desire, is construed as expressing a lust for death. Meanwhile usury creates an artificial, self-generative mode of reproduction in parodic compensation for the loss of natural life. The arrangement of Dante’s Inferno indicates that sodomy and usury are ways of cursing Creation, of wishing not to exist in a natural form, of attempting to replace God’s nature with human art. To scorn nature is ultimately to insult nature’s Creator: hence the kinship of sodomy, usury and blasphemy, and Dante’s location of them together in the seventh circle.

It is particularly striking that the usurers are differentiated from what we might consider “economic” sinners. In canto 16 the hybrid monster Geryon must transport the pilgrims between the seventh circle, where the usurers abide, across an immense gulf before they reach the realm of “fraud” in the eighth. Furthermore, canto 11 distinguishes between usurers and the avaricious, who are punished in an entirely different circle. Dante draws an analogous distinction between sodomites and the lustful, who are also located in quite different areas of Hell. While the usurers are separated from economic sinners, then, the sodomites are separated from sexual sinners—and yet the usurers and the sodomites reside together. We conclude that usury has more in common with sodomy than it does with avarice, and that sodomy has more in common with usury than it does with lust. Furthermore, both sodomy and usury are worse, ethically speaking, than either lust or avarice, deadly sins as these are. Lust and avarice are sins of incontinence: they consist in the culpable excess of a natural impulse and, as Teodolinda Barolini points out, Dante treats them with “comparative mildness.”^[43] In contrast, usury and sodomy are peccata contra naturam: sins against nature.

The modern mind might imagine that non-procreative sexuality and compound interest occupy two distinct “fields” or “spheres” of life. For Dante however, their violation of natural teleology unites them, and the fact that this violation is committed in the different “areas” of erotics and economics does not divide them. The concept of usury was addressed at length by the Dominican friar Remigio de’ Girolami, a former student of Aquinas, who gave a series of lectures in early thirteenth-century Florence, which Dante may have attended. His treatise De peccato usurae opens with a lengthy disquisition on both usury and sodomy as peccata contra naturam. As such, he notes, their effects are not limited to any particular area of experience. Rather, Remigio emphasizes the infectious character of usury’s violation of nature, showing how it spreads through every part of Creation. He conceives of usury as unnatural fruition, or “perverse fruit” (“perversum fructum”), describing it as “contra naturam terre” (“opposed to the nature of the earth”). Just as “omnis fenerans peccet” (“every usurer sins”) he claims, so “omnis peccator sit fenerator” (“every sinner is a usurer”).^[44]

Whether or not Dante knew Remigio’s work directly, this all-encompassing character of peccata contra naturam helps to explain why he portrays violations of teleology as not merely unnatural but anti-natural. He represents them in the most grotesque forms available from mythology. Even before the Inferno’s pilgrims enter the circle of the violent, they encounter some of the most monstrous creatures ever conceived by the Western imagination. At the start of canto 12, the pilgrims meet the Minotaur “stretched” across the entrance to the seventh circle. This image’s mythological source provides a preliminary admonition against replacing nature with art. As the hybrid and therefore sterile tokos of its human mother’s taurine fetish, the Minotaur embodies the monstrosity of sexual incontinence. In canto 26 of Purgatorio, Dante recounts the story from Ovid. Cursed by Zeus with lust for a beautiful bull, Queen Pasiphae of Crete persuades Daedelus, the archetypal human artist, to make a model of a cow so realistic that the bull will cover it while she hides within. Pasiphae’s desire exceeds the bounds of continence so completely that she persuades the mythical epitome of human art to displace nature, seducing an animal into a grotesque perversion of its natural reproductive instinct. Yet even Pasiphae’s wildly incontinent lust does not amount to the peccata contra naturam, and her acolytes can wind their way up Mount Purgatory to redemption, even as the tokos of her sin remains fixed in eternal damnation.

The Minotaur is a hybrid creature, and therefore unable to reproduce itself: “born to sterility,” as Euripides notes in The Cretans.^[45] It is also antithetical to humanity, to the extent that it feeds solely on human flesh. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the barren Minotaur embodies the violent repudiation of natural reproduction, devouring its annual sacrifice of seven nubile Athenian couples before they can conceive. King Minos exacts this penalty as recompense for the murder of his own son at an Athenian festival. Like the Minotaur, Minos was conceived in an act of bestiality, when his mother Europa was raped by Zeus disguised as a bull. In Apollodorus he ejaculates snakes, spiders and scorpions instead of semen, and the infinite repayment he demands in Ovid recalls the regular exactions of usury—“ed era usanza” as Jacopo della Lana notes in his commentary on Purgatorio (1324-28). It also anticipates what Lisa Freinkel calls the “usury” of Dante’s contrapasso, whereby “the ingiuria of sin gains… the hatred of heaven,”^[46] ensuring that a heavier tribute is exacted than is warranted by the sin per se.

The myth of the sterile hybrid occurs in Hebraic as well as Hellenic culture. Ann Kibbie recalls the story of Anah the mule-breeder in Genesis 36.24, which reveals “a point of intersection between two seemingly unrelated topics: usury and hybridity.”^[47] The conceit comparing mules to money was apposite because as an artificial invention of man, the mule is sterile like money, a similarly artificial invention. Kibbie quotes Henry Smith’s The Examination of Usury (1591): “he that saith to his money, increase and multiply, deviseth a monstrous birth, like Anah, which devised a creature which God had not created before” (52). As with the conception of the Minotaur, the artificial breeding of the mule represents the “transgressive generation” (53) by which nomos imposes itself upon phusis. In Dante’s Inferno, Geryon, the “imagine di froda” (17.7), is a similarly startling figure for the unnatural, emerging from the seventh circle that contains the blasphemers, usurers and sodomites. He is also found in Virgil’s Aeneid, where he is connected to the Harpies, and Carlo Ginzburg argues that “Geryon’s association with usury might have been inspired by the connection between Harpies and usury.”^[48]

We saw above how, due to their “violence against God,” the unnatural sodomites and usurers are located below the incontinent lustful and avaricious in Hell. Here Virgil again distinguishes the unnatural from the incontinent, whose sins of excess mean that they are subjected to a milder punishment, outside the infernal city of Dis. He angrily asks if his disciple has forgotten “quelle parole / con le quai la tua Etica pertratta / le tre disposizion che ’l ciel non vole, / incontenenza, malizia e la matta / bestialitade? e come incontenenza / men Dio offende e men biasimo accatta?” (11.79-84). The allusion is to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which identifies three “states of moral character to be avoided” as “Vice, Unrestraint and Bestiality.” Although it is the most degraded of the three, “bestiality” is not necessarily sexual in scope. People are bestial insofar as their appetites (which are shared with animals) dominate their reason (which is uniquely and definitively human). As Aristotle observes: “We sometimes also use “bestial” as a term of opprobrium for a surpassing degree of human vice.”^[49] The least immoral of Aristotle’s three states is incontinence or “Unrestraint,” and therefore Dante regards Pasiphae’s “[i]ncontenenza” as less culpable than either the “malizia” or “la matta / bestialitade,” committed by the sodomites and usurers of Inferno.

5. Brunetto Latini

Dante’s depiction of usury avoids any mention of Jews: an eloquent silence that forces the reader to reconsider the vice’s conventional associations, and to construct new ones based on its relations to sodomy and blasphemy, on which Dante insists. In a similar fashion, the presence of Dante’s former mentor Brunetto Latini among the sodomites of Inferno impels readers to think about sodomy’s figurative possibilities, thereby to focus on what those figures share in common, and thus to deduce the essential character of the sin they represent. We are prevented from a literal reading of sodomy in Inferno by the presence of self-proclaimed sodomites in Purgatorio, which compels us to ask what excludes their comrades from salvation in the earlier canticle. Latini is not an obviously appropriate incarnation of sexual perversion, and the pilgrim actually cries out with surprise on finding him among Inferno’s sodomites. Latini does however provide an excellent warning against mistaking art for the telos of life, and his location in Hell suggests that his “sodomy” is defined by its essential auto-teleology, rather than by its accidental manifestation as sexual perversion. As Warren Ginzberg observes, the violation of natura is a common factor that over-rides the specificity of sodomitical sin: “[a]ll the sodomites who walk in Brunetto’s subcircle… no matter the particular form of their sin, repudiated Nature by abjuring the fusion of contrary elements by which she creates.”^[50]

It is nonetheless true that Latini’s own Tresor defines “sodomy” specifically as “lying with a male,”^[51] and Gary Cestaro argues convincingly against “the old saw that not a shred of independent evidence exists for Brunetto’s predilections.”^[52] Yet it is also true that the Tresor insists that sexual intercourse must be “chaste” (aimed at procreation) and practiced “according to human nature,” and many early commentaries construe Dante’s placing of his mentor among Inferno’s sodomites as some kind of metaphor or synecdoche. Da Buti’s gloss on Purgatorio 26.82-86 asserts: “here our author has used great skill, giving to understand every illicit act that can be in the sin of lust, beyond that of Sodom.” Although the Chiose Vernon [circa 1390] insists that Latini “engaged in such vices as sodomy,” later commentators cite the maxim pedagogus ergo sodomiticus, suggesting that his mere status as a teacher was enough to earn a place among Dante’s sodomites.

Just as Remigio insisted that all sinners were usurers, so the charge of sodomy could reach well beyond the erotic sphere. In the Tesoretto (v. 2561) Latini admits to being “un poco mondanetti” [“a little bit worldly”] and the Anonimo Selmiano [circa 1337] understands Latini’s sodomy as a consequence of this more general “worldliness”: “fu uomo molto mondano; e molto peccò in soddomia… E è da notare, che questo peccato de’ soddomiti è peccato contro a natura” (“he was a very worldly man; he sinned much in sodomy… And it should be noted that this sin of the sodomites is a sin against nature”). Carnality or “worldliness” was the ultimate violation of natural teleology, for it ignores the proper telos of all humanity, which lies beyond this world, just as sodomy disregards the exogenous telos of the human desire to reproduce in this world.

Modern critics like John Boswell,^[53] Peter Armour^[54] and Glenn Steinberg^[55] agree that, regardless of Latini’s actual sexuality, canto 15 uses “sodomy” in a figural sense. André Pézard declares that Latini’s sodomy consisted in writing the Tresor in French rather than Italian: “he reversed the order of value established by God.”^[56] Richard Kay suggests that Dante’s “conception of unnatural vice was something more subtle than sodomy,”^[57] and that Latini’s sin was to reject Dante’s ideal world monarchy in favor of independent city-states. Dante’s Monarchia argues that the political telos of humanity is a state uniting “the whole of mankind,” and in De vulgari eloquentia he dismisses Latini as a “merely municipal” thinker, whose Guelphism led him to idolize the individual city-state, thus obstructing mankind’s natural progress towards unity. For Latini, the city-state was an end-in-itself, not a means to the further end of a universal monarchy, and in Dante’s view this was sufficient to render Latini’s politics unnatural.

Yet the most persuasive explanation for Latini’s damnation lies in the conventional association of sodomy with usury. Although his Tesoretto contains such platitudes as “[a]ncora abbi paura / d’improntare a usura”^[58] (“still be afraid of imprinting at usury”), Latini’s personal involvement with usury was widely suspected. Robert Davidsohn mentions that he loaned money to his students at excessive rates,^[59] and his biography reveals intimate links with Florentine financial interests. Exiled along with the mercantile Guelfs, Latini worked with the Lombard bankers in northern France, consistently facilitating and profiting from money-lending. A contract survives in which a group of Florentines lends two thousand marks to the Bishop of Hereford, and Latini is notably enthusiastic in his advocacy for the loan. In what Julia Bolton Holloway calls an “extraordinary sentence,”^[60] Latini even points out that the Florentines have received the Pope’s sanction to charge interest, emphasizing that this carried with it the special “crusading” indulgence. Such unscrupulous usury may have made Latini a sodomite in Dante’s eyes.

In fact, several of Latini’s colleagues among the usurers are also tainted with sodomy, as if their sexual sin is interchangeable with their financial transgression. Holloway claims that “most of the figures in this circle were connected to Florentine or papal banking and finance—which involved usury” (9). Among Latini’s sodomitical companions in Hell we find Bishop Andrea dei Mozzi, scion of a prominent banking family. Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, Guido Guerra and Jacopo Rusticucci were all usurers, and Holloway notes that “the circle in which Dante finds Brunetto is not so much sodomy as that in which usury was punished.”^[61] She observes that what troubled the historical Aldobrandi at his death “was not sodomy, homosexuality, but his knowledge and guilt of the great usury he had practiced during his career,” and that Rusticucci was “likewise involved in financial dealings.”^[62]

The appearance of Latini, a scholar aspiring to literary immortality, in this company confirms that all forms of unnatural reproduction are united in essence, however much they might differ in appearance. When they first meet, Dante acknowledges Latini as patriarch, recalling: “la cara e buona imagine paterna / di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora / m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna” (15.83-85). In return, Latini twice addresses Dante as “figliuol” (“son”) (15.31, 37). However, these terms allude not to a biological but to a literary affinity. Dante is not Latini’s son but his pupil, yet the Inferno endows the conventional trope of the scholar seeking to reproduce himself in his students with what Heather Webb calls “a literal and sexual density.”^[63] Latini observes that his fellow sodomites are all intellectuals or “clerks,” and Blake Leland finds that he “sinfully attributes to rhetoric a power of generation.”^[64] In other words, Latini believes in the fertility of signs, both verbal and financial, and the reproduction of his ideas in his pupil provides him with a surrogate for natural offspring. According to the Thomistic teleology informing the Commedia, this substitution of literary for natural reproduction makes him both a sodomite and a usurer.

When Dante tells Latini that “you taught me how man makes himself eternal” (15.85), then, the complement is backhanded at best. The human impulse towards eternity is naturally manifested in the urge to biological reproduction which, properly sublimated, issues in aspiration to eternal life. In contrast, the literary immortality offered by Latini involves a temptation to pursue worldly fame as the prime end of life, in a departure from telos just as pronounced as the redirection of the sexual urge away from reproduction in sodomy. Hence the bitterly comic irony that, although his soul is already damned, Latini vainly continues to boast of his literary immortality: “my Treasure, / In which I still live, and ask no more” (15.71). Cestaro finds “a fantasy of male cultural (re)production”^[65] in Latini’s stubborn pursuit of an afterlife on earth, which distracts him from humanity’s telos in eternity, linking him forever to the infertile vice of sodomy. His procreative urges have been perverted away from their proper purpose and, for Dante, sodomy was the archetypal transgression against nature, readily available to represent such barren desires as Latini’s lust for earthly immortality.

Yet there is one vital difference between sodomy and usury, as Dante portrays them. From their presence in Purgatorio we deduce that redemption is possible for sodomites. As thinkers from Plato to the queer theorists of postmodernity have argued,^[66] it is perfectly possible for erotic desire to aim at an exogenous end other than reproduction—at spiritual love, for example, or at the quasi-political liberation of jouissance. This is impossible for usurers, however, because endless reproduction is usury’s essence. Unlike natural growth, compound interest increases exponentially. Infinite reproduction is not accidental to usury but essential: its nature is to multiply without end or purpose. In usurious economies, “growth” is pursued an end-in-itself. Usury is the endlessly compounded reproduction of performative symbols, and whatever is infinite has no end, and thus no definite or natural existence at all.

The “Sodom” of Dante’s Inferno is located in the third ring of the seventh circle to emphasize its homology with “Cahors,” and to establish the blasphemous character of both cities. As the earliest commentaries show, Dante’s original readership was quite familiar with the homology between usury and sodomy. Yet the two practices gradually grew apart with the dissociation of modern sensibility until, by the twentieth century, sexuality and economics seemed to belong to entirely different areas of experience. Perhaps however, the “postmodern condition” of our own century hints at a recurrent correlation between the financialized economy and the cultural prominence of queer sexualities. If so, novel interpretations of Dante will surely emerge in response.

1. Marquis de Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 85. ↑

2. The 2020 edition of Dante Studies (vol. 138) contained a lengthy section devoted to “Dante and Economics” (176-308), in which several essays discussed usury. See also Susan J. Noakes, “Virility, Nobility, and Banking: The Crossing of Discourses in Dante’s Tenzone with Forese,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Simon Ravenscroft, “Usury in the Inferno: Auditing Dante’s Debt to the Scholastics,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 42 (2011): 89-114. ↑

3. In addition to works cited later, see Fabian Alfie, “Sinful Wives and Queens: The Medieval Concept of Sodomy in Dante’s Comedy,” Journal of Language and Sexuality 11, no. 1 (2022): 101-24; Bruce W. Holsinger, “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of Manuscript in The Divine Comedy,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), 243–74; Michael Camille, “The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 60–64; Gary Cestaro, “Queering Nature, Queering Gender: Dante and Sodomy,” in Barolini and Storey, 90–103. ↑

4. Catherine M. Keen, “Lectura: Canto XV,” in Voci sull’Inferno di Dante: Una nuova lettura della prima cantica. 3 vols., eds. Zygmunt G. Barański and Maria Antonietta Terzoli (Rome: Carocci, 2021), 364. My translation. ↑

5. Domenico Cavalca, Specchio de’ peccati (1333) (pis.), cap. 2, pag. 16.3, cit. TLIO, accessed November 30, 2005, http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/. My translation. ↑

6. John T. Noonan, “Tokos and Atokion: An Examination of Natural Law Reasoning against Usury and against Contraception,” Natural Law Forum 109 (1965): 215-35. ↑

7. TLIO: Tesoro della lingua Italiana della Origini, accessed November 30, 2025, http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/. ↑

8. Aristotle, The Politics (1258b1-8), trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25. ↑

9. Aristotle, On the Soul (415a27), trans. J.A. Smith, in The Basic Works of Aristotle ed. Richard McKeon (London: Penguin, 2001), 561. ↑

10. As Gregory Stone observes in “Sodomy, Diversity, Cosmopolitanism: Dante and the Limits of the Polis,” Dante Studies 123 (2005): 89-132, 96: “Like homosexuality (as it is understood by medieval thinkers), usury, involving a coupling of the same with itself, is marked by excessive self-identity, a resistance to difference.” ↑

11. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals (715b14-16), in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), vol. 1, 1114. ↑

12. Basil the Great, “Homily 12,” trans. Sister Agnes Clare Way, in The Fathers of the Church vol. 46, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari et al. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 188. ↑

13. Philo, De virtutibus 14.82-83, cited in Brenda Llewelyn Ihssen, They Who Give from Evil: The Response of the Eastern Church to Moneylending in the Early Christian Era (London: James Clarke & Co., 2012), 102n37. ↑

14. Plutarch, Against Running in Debt in Plutarch’s Essays, ed. The Rev. Andrew Peabody (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1883), 419. ↑

15. Cit. Rev. Vincent Shemwell, “We Have Got to Talk About Usury,” Gottesdienst: The Journal of Lutheran Liturgy, accessed November 30, 2025, https://www.gottesdienst.org/gottesblog/2025/8/21/we-have-got-to-talk-about-usury-part-vi-the-church-fatherschurch-councils-and-ambrose. ↑

16. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Usurarios, cited in and trans. Robert Maloney, “The Teaching of the Fathers on Usury,” Vigiliae Christianae 27 (1973): 241-65, 250n53. ↑

17. Gratian, Decretum, cited in Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, “Barren Metal and the Fruitful Womb: The Program of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua,” The Art Bulletin, 80, no. 2 (1998): 274–291, 277. ↑

18. Ibid., 279. ↑

19. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, question 153, article 3, reply to objection 1, trans. Fr. Laurence Shapcote (The Aquinas Institute), accessed November 30, 2025, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3153.htm. ↑

20. Thomas Aquinas, Exp. Polit. I, lecture 8, n134. Cit. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Dante’s Inferno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 182. ↑

21. John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 181. ↑

22. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3. ↑

23. Ibid., 2. ↑

24. Randolph Trumbach, “The Transformation of Sodomy from the Renaissance to the Modern World and Its General Sexual Consequences,” Signs 37, no. 4 (2012): 832-848, 833. ↑

25. Jeremy Catto, “Florence, Tuscany and The World of Dante,” in The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and His Times, ed. Cecil Grayson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 1-17, 12. ↑

26. Francis Hittinger, “Dante as Critic of Political Economy in the Monarchia,” in Dante as Political Theorist, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizonne (Newcastle u. Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 128-50, 136. ↑

27. John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200-1575 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 336. ↑

28. Antonio Montefusco, Banca e poesia nell’età di Dante (Milan: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2017). ↑

29. Jan Sytze Mosselaar, A Concise Financial History of Europe (Rotterdam: Robeco, 2018), 62. ↑

30. All commentaries on the Commedia are cited from the Dartmouth Dante Project, accessed November 30, 2025, https://dante.dartmouth.edu/. My translations. ↑

31. Cited in Steven Stowell, “Visualizing the Sodomites in Dante’s Commedia,” Dante Studies 126 (2008): 143–74, 146. ↑

32. Massimiliano Chiamenti argues that Dante refers to her preference for anal sex in “Due schedulae ferine: Dante, Rime CIII 71 e Inf. XVI 45,” Lingua nostra 59 (1998): 7-10, while Simon Gilson suggests that her “harshness turned him to the opposite sex, or perhaps – as seems more likely – to sodomitic or unnatural sexual practices with her.” “Inferno XVI: From the Circling Sodomites to Geryon’s Cord,” in L’Alighieri 63 (2024): 89-107, 101. ↑

33. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V.8.1133a, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 30. ↑

34. See his notes to Inferno 5.61-62, 2.118-120, and 20.31-36. ↑

35. All citations from The Divine Comedy are from the Petrocchi Edition on Columbia’s Digital Dante project, accessed November 30, 2025, https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/. ↑

36. Stat. viterb., c. 1345, pag. 158.19, cit. TLIO, accessed November 30, 2025, http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/. ↑

37. As Judith Koffler reminds us, “usurers, or ‘Cahorsines’ in thirteenth-century parlance, are not petty consumption lenders, but among the great international merchant bankers of Dante’s time…” (“Capital in Hell: Dante’s Lesson on Usury,” Rutgers Law Review 32, no. 4 [1979]: 608-660, 611). ↑

38. Gerard of Siena, “A Question of Usury,” in The Idea of a Moral Economy: Gerard of Siena on Usury, Restitution and Prescription, ed. Lawrin Armstrong (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 40-143, 81. ↑

39. See Marino Alberto Balducci, “Usury, Proto-capitalism and Giotto in Dante’s Inferno XVII,” Romanica Cracoviensia 16, no. 1 (2016): 147-155, 149. ↑

40. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (2.2.154.12), accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.SS_Q154_A12.html. ↑

41. Virginia Cox, “Ciceronian Rhetoric in Late Medieval Italy,” in The Rhetoric of Cicero and its Late Medieval and Early Modern Commentary Tradition, ed. Virginia Cox and John O. Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 109-43, 110. ↑

42. Melissa Vise, The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 154. ↑

43. Teodolinda Barolini, “Dante’s Sympathy for the Other, or the Non-Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia,” Critica del testo 14, no. 1 (2011): 177-206, 178. ↑

44. Remigio de’ Girolami, De peccato usurae, cited in Roberto Lambertini, “L’usura tra Santa Croce e Santa Maria Novella: Pietro de Trabibus e Remigio de’ Girolami a confronto,” in The Dominicans and the Making of Florentine Cultural Identity (13th-14th centuries), ed. Johannes Bartuschat, Elisa Brilli and Delphine Carron (Florence: Firenze UP, 2020), 193-205, 201n53. My translations. ↑

45. Euripides, The Cretans (f472a), trans. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp, in Selected Fragmentary Plays (Liverpool: Aris & Phillips, 1995). ↑

46. Lisa Freinkel, “Inferno and the Poetics of Usura,” Modern Language Notes 107 (1992): 1-17, 10. ↑

47. Ann Louise Kibbie, “Inventions and Devises of Man: Usury and Hybridity in the Early Modern Period,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 51-72, 53. ↑

48. Carlo Ginzburg, “Dante’s Blind Spot: (Inferno XVI and XVII),” in Dante’s Plurilingualism: Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity, ed. Sara Fortuna, Manuele Gragnolati and Jurgan Trabant (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), 150-163, 154. ↑

49. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (1145b), trans. Harris Rackham (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996), 171. ↑

50. Warren Ginsberg, “The Tailor, the Footrace, and the Circles of the Same and the Other: The Beginning and the End of Canto XV Inferno,” Dante Studies 138 (2020): 70-91, 78. ↑

51. Brunetto Latini, The Book of the Treasure, trans. Paul Barette and Spungeon Baldwin (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 171. ↑

52. Gary Cestaro, “Queering Dante,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 686-700, 692. ↑

53. John E. Boswell, “Dante and the Sodomites,” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 63-76, 73. ↑

54. Peter Armour, “Brunetto, the Stoic Pessimist,” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 1–18, 5. ↑

55. Glenn Steinberg, “Dante’s Bookishness: Moral Judgment, Female Readers, and a “Rerealization” of Brunetto Latini,” Modern Philology 112, no. 1 (2014): 25–55, 26. ↑

56. André Pézard, “Dante sous la pluie de feu, Enfer Chant XV” (Paris: Vrin, 1950), 107-08. ↑

57. Richard Kay, Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1978), 7. ↑

58. Brunetto Latini, Tesoretto, a. 1274 (flor.), 1512, p.228. Accessed November 30, 2025, http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/. My translation. ↑

59. Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), vol. 3, 104n105. ↑

60. Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 56. ↑

61. Ibid. ↑

62. Ibid., 29. ↑

63. Heather Webb, “Power Differentials, Unreliable Models, and Homoerotic Desire in the Comedy,” Italian Studies 68, no. 1 (2013): 17-35, 22. ↑

64. Blake Leland, “‘Siete voi qui, Ser Brunetto?’ Dante’s Inferno 15 as a Modernist Topic Place,” ELH 59, no. 4 (1992): 965–86, 968. ↑

65. Gary Cestaro, “Pederastic Insemination, or Dante in the Grammar Classroom,” in The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, ed. Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 41–73, 71. ↑

66. See for example David Halperin’s critique of Aristotelian teleology in “What Is Sex For?” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2016): 1-31. ↑