Same-Sex Relations This illustration from a fourteenth-century manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy (see “Literacy and Vernacular Literature”) depicts those who engaged in same-sex relations in the seventh circle of Hell, with murderers and those who committed suicide. Dante regarded all of these as violent: murderers against others; suicides against themselves; and men who engaged in sex with men against nature and against their family line because they did not father children. They are condemned to run forever on burning sand, which represented their sterility; note that one of the men wears a bishop’s hat. Dante’s work was written and this illustration was painted at the time that religious and political authorities were increasingly criminalizing same-sex relations.

(Detail, Cantica del Inferno from Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri [1265–1321], vellum/Musée Condé, Chantilly, France/Bridgeman Images)