“Give your love full rein”: Mandragola, (Homo)Sexuality and Princely Virtue

This article provides an alternative, sexual reinterpretation of Machiavelli’s Mandragola from an alternative sexual perspective focusing on sodomy (in its sixteenth-century meaning), and especially male-male sexuality. In this reading, Messer Nicia is, put in today’s terms, a homosexual and, at the same time, surprisingly enough, the key, princely character in the play. Dri ven by a desire to establish a new, less oppressive familial order, Nicia is able to renew his corrupted family by means of a conspiracy aimed at liberating Lucrezia’s sexuality from the restraints of the dominant morality. Mandragola constitutes an intrinsic part of Machiavelli’s political project, showing how the explosion of sexual desire beyond the confines of dominant heteronormative morality can serve as a productive way of expressing plebeian desire not to be oppressed and commanded by the great, which proves beneficial to all.