SOURCE: Mussetter, Sally. “‘Ritornare a lo suo principio’: Dante and the Sin of Brunetto Latini.” Philological Quarterly 63, no. 4 (fall 1984): 431-48.

In the following essay, Mussetter considers Dante's repudiation of Brunetto as a sodomite in his Inferno within the context of the differing approaches to politics and secular knowledge represented by these two writers.

It is not easy after nearly seven hundred years' familiarity with Inferno 15 to persuade ourselves that Brunetto Latini has not been condemned as a sodomite in the usual sense of the term. The sterility of the burning sand, the searching of one man's eyes for those of another, the touch of hand to garment, hand to face—all seem calculated to evoke the suspicion of homosexuality in a canto devoted to one of the most poignant testimonials to male friendship ever to appear in the literature of Europe. Virgil himself has all but set the...