Martin Michalek - “Coming Out of the Underworld: The Queer Time of Renaissance Scholarship”

QATC 2022 Day 2 - Martin Michalek - “Coming Out of the Underworld: Poliziano, Orpheus, and the Queer Time of Renaissance Scholarship”

Abstract:
In antiquity, the myth of Orpheus was the origin myth of queerness. Orpheus is transformed by the loss of Eurydice at the gates of the underworld, transferring his love for the dead woman onto “tender men” (Met. 10.84). This paper examines the work of Angelo Poliziano, a fifteenth-century humanist who wrote Orpheus into the proem of his poetic miscellanea, the Sylvae. For Poliziano, the underworld’s entrance is no longer a place of loss, but the front door to a party. Hidden inside, antiquity’s homoerotic heroes eat, drink, and play with each other. This cthonic space, playful in its reworking of its source material, acts as an allegory for Poliziano’s queer life and work.

Fifteenth century-Florence was home to a distinct culture of queer love, a culture in which Poliziano played a starring role. He was implicated twice on charges of sodomy, but likely acquitted through the sway of his Medici patrons. In a concrete sense, Poliziano’s literary work enabled him to live a queer life. His Letters, published for his contemporaries, chronicle a flirtation with his friend (and perhaps more), Pico della Mirandola. Their pages are filled with elisions and learned allusions to desires yet undefined, transforming the work of textual criticism into a site for queer play. Poliziano’s work blurs multiple mythic timelines with the past and present, offering us a fascinating queer temporality from one of the Renaissance’s most remarkable minds.