Books like Forbidden Friendships by Michael Rocke

Michael Rocke’s work draws exclusively on the detailed filings of Florence’s Office of the Night—a body created in 1432 to police sodomy—to illuminate a society in which as many as half of Florentine men were cited for same‑sex acts by age thirty. Over seventy years of denunciations, interrogations, and sentences provide a vivid record of everyday sexual life, showing that such encounters were not fringe transgressions but rather a normal component of male identity in the Renaissance capital. Through rigorous analysis of these archival materials, Rocke offers a nuanced portrait of how male homosexual practices were woven into the fabric of Florentine social customs, challenging modern assumptions about the rarity of such relations in the past. The book situates these findings within the broader context of LGBTQ history and the evolving attitudes toward sodomy in early modern Europe.

First publish date: 1996