Renaissance Homosexuality

In Florence Cosimo de’ Medici helped found humanism. He sent envoys to Jerusalem in search of the ancient manuscripts that would bring the words of the likes of Plato into Florentine homes. Each discovery that Cosimo made, each old text unearthed, was like Howard Carter peering into the tomb of Tutankhamen. Hunched over, afraid of every storm, medieval men lived out their existence is pure anonymity. There were no clocks, not even calendars among them, and even the century in which they lived was both unknown and of no importance. Peasants passed their days in perpetual toil, seeking out the church at the time of baptisms, marriages and deaths, alongside priests as ignorant as they. Illiterate, pockmarked, gullible, superstitious, for them there were no changes anywhere simply because they were unaware of all. Only later, when the ancient world was rediscovered, did the individual begin to emerge from the formless masses. Finally names emerged from the mist, those of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Poliziano, Romano, Aretino, the Borgia, all thanks to the rediscovery of the ancient texts, a rediscovery and a rebirth: a Renaissance. This book is the story of that blessed moment.