In Early Modern Bromance, Aria Dal Molin resituates the contemporary genre of the bromance, as well as its surrounding cultural discourse, in the theatrical practices of early-sixteenth-century Italian academies, revealing how a group of early modern Italian academicians institutionalized alternative friendships between men to prolong male bonding. This study combines New Historicism with Queer Theory and scholarly discourse on film to analyze the early modern influences on the performative practices of masculinity and male friendships in the bromance of contemporary film, television, and media. This book therefore analyzes the lives and friendships of young Italian members of the early-sixteenth-century Accademia degli Intronati and their public theatrical performances that displayed homosocial triangles using women to strengthen the bonds between men, by referring to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Below, Prof. Dal Molin discusses narratives of male friendship in early modern Italy:

In ways similar to the contemporary bromance, narratives of male friendship were pervasive in early modern Italy, in genres as diverse as lyric poetry, burlesque poetry, the short story, novella-inspired comic theater, the epic (Ariosto), and para-literary or semi-philosophical texts, such as the trattati d’amore (treatises on love) of the sixteenth century. The concept of what was considered to be the rare amicitia perfecta in early modern Italy made a radical distinction between all other relationships in a man’s life, especially that of husband and wife. Such a privileging of male friendship over relationships with women was memorably dramatized in the Accademia degli Intronati’s Comedia del Sacrificio degli Intronati di Siena (Comedy of the Sacrifice of the Intronati of Siena), in 1532, when thirty young members of the nascent literary academy infamously marched into the piazza holding gifts from their rejected female beloveds to “sacrifice” in a communal bonfire in the name of fraternalism and the Academy. In ways similar to the contemporary bromance, the Intronati’s sacrificial performance situated bonds formed in the Academy in contrast to other relationships early modern life had to offer; it was especially concerned with the problem of women getting in the way of male bonding. The theater produced in the academic atmosphere of the early sixteenth century in Siena engaged with circulating philosophical debates of the time and can thus be viewed as using drama to participate in (or philosophize about) timely discussions of the period, specifically debates on love, perfect friendship, and marriage.

This book thus resituates or returns the contemporary term, bromance, as well as its surrounding cultural discourse, the bromantic sensibility, and its narrative structures back to the theatrical landscape of early modern Italian academies to demonstrate how a group of men sought both to institutionalize and prolong phases of male bonding as a means of escapism from the social and political issues of the sixteenth century, in particular the Italian wars. As this book argues, the Intronati Academy formed a veritable Renaissance “Guyland” in many ways similar to the contemporary bromance, wherein young men could remain “deaf” (intronati) to political and social realities, while focusing their attentions instead on the liberal arts. Within this homosocial group, the playwrights created fictive and philosophical worlds that explore sincere tenderness and true feelings between male characters that, in fact, transformed the genre of theatrical comedy during the period. Rather than the usual romantic triangle of romantic comedy, a different, homosocial triangle took shape. This triangle dramatized not only theoretical developments concerning the nature of male friendship in the sixteenth century, but also, importantly, the possibility of the coexistence of perfect friendship with married adulthood. 

The theatrical contributions and meditations on male friendship, male-male intimacy, and marriage in the Italian Renaissance are surprisingly transgressive and radical, and, one may even assert, postmodern. The male protagonists are eloquent, well-versed in Neoplatonic theories on amicitia, and provide markedly dignified examples in which simple matrimony between a man and a woman does not suffice. They refuse the pattern of sexual maturation in which kinship is replaced by married adulthood. In the first half of the sixteenth century, many treatises on love and marriage propose the possibility of adultery to help alleviate discontentment caused by the system of arranged marriages and the lack of love in marriages. For example, Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore (Dialogue on Love, 1537), Alessandro Piccolomini’s Raffaella, ovvero dialogo della bella creanza delle donne (Raffaella, Or Dialogue on the Fair Perfectioning of Ladies, 1538), Francesco Sansovino’s Ragionamento dell’arte d’amore (Reasoning on the Art of Love, 1545), and Bartolomeo Gottifredi’s Specchio d’amore (Mirror of Love, 1547) all feature advice concerning the disjunction between practical marital love and romantic love found outside of marriage. Theater of the academies in Siena in the early sixteenth century present spectacularized performances investigating social requirements of love, monogamy, and marriage. These scenarios negotiate paths of desire that undermine the mono-normative idea that “true love” in the Renaissance must be singular and/or sexual. 

Early Modern Bromance is available in print and digital editions at the Cambria Press website.

Aria Dal Molin is an assistant professor of Renaissance Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of South Carolina. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA from the University of Oregon, and a BA from Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Professor Dal Molin’s scholarly interests include sex and gender in sixteenth-century literary academies, Early Modern Disability Studies, and transnational mobility in the early modern theater of Italy and France. Dal Molin has published scholarly articles on Ariosto, Machiavelli, and the sixteenth-century literary academies of Siena.