Renaissance Italy

Noel Malcolm, a former political columnist of The Spectator, the historian of English nonsense verse and editor of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, has written a book on an arresting subject. Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe gives close and relentless scrutiny to male-male sexual relations in Europe, the Ottoman empire, north Africa and in such dispersed colonies and outposts as New England, Peru, Cape Town and the Dutch East Indies. Malcolm’s interest in the subject began with his find of a cache of documents dating from 1588. These recorded the official investigation of a male couple – a trainee interpreter for Venice’s envoy in Constantinople and the envoy’s barber – who

In 1299, Amatino Manucci, a Florentine helping to run a merchant’s business in Provence, kept at least seven ledgers and notebooks, each serving a specific purpose. One covered the firm’s trade in wool and cloth, another in wheat, barley and other victuals, and so on. It wasn’t just figures Manucci worked with. It was also financial concepts, quite advanced by the standards of that time: accounting entities and periods, profit and depreciation – notions that heralded the invention of accounting as we know it. ‘If you’ve ever tapped numbers into an Excel grid,’ Roland Allen writes in his engaging popular history, ‘you have Manucci and his contemporaries to thank –