Fiesole will be his enemies. They are reputed blind, avaricious, envious and proud. Let him beware, he warns, not to be stained by them. Mark Musa suggests that in this speech between the two there is sexual imagery indicative of the act of sodomy. According to John D. Sinclair, Dante respected Latini immensely but nonetheless felt it necessary to place him with the sodomites since, according to Sinclair, such behaviour by Latini was well known in Florence at the time. The squalor of Latini’s sin and penalty is nevertheless painful for Dante to visualize. Other critics point to the fact that, outside of The Divine Comedy, there are no firm historical records suggesting Latini was accused of sodomy or homosexual relations—and indeed he seemingly condemns it himself in the Tesoretto. Some therefore have suggested that Latini is placed in Canto XV for being violent against art and against his vernacular (Latini wrote in French instead of Florentine, which Dante championed as a literary language in De Vulgari Eloquentia). Yet, Latini started working in the treatise in 1260, before Dante was born, and thus in a very different cultural climate, when French was the language of aristocracy. Perhaps Latini is there to demonstrate and underline that even the greatest of men may be guilty of private sins. Neither objection rules out the possibility that he was guilty of the perceived sin himself; and given the setting and context, it is difficult to see that there can be any doubt, particularly following the discovery in recent years of a love poem, "S'eo son distretto inamoratamente" which Latini sent to another poet, Bondie Dietaiuti, who replied with another love poem. Notes References Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, Berne: Peter Lang, 1993. Barbara Reynolds, Dante: The poet, the political thinker, the man, New York, 2006 Sources Turco, Jeffrey. "Restaging Sin in Medieval Florence: Augustine, Brunetto Latini, and the Streetscape of Dante's Vita nuova." Italian Studies 73 (2018): 15-21. External links Website on Brunetto Latino 1220 births 1294 deaths Writers from Florence Italian philosophers Politicians from Florence Italian LGBT writers Medieval LGBT people Italian rhetoricians 13th-century philosophers 13th-century Italian philosophers Italian notaries LGBT Roman Catholics Italian writers in French Nobility from Florence Characters in the Divine Comedy