On Monday night, Harris Friedberg, professor of English, delved into the topic of nature’s deepest, darkest orifices in his lecture, “Making Nature Afraid: Sodomy and Usury in Dante’s Inferno.” The talk explored the connection between the two themes in the classic work and identified some possible reasons behind its inclusion.

The audience seemed to expect more of a dissertation on gay politics than a foray into the odd relationship between sodomy and usury.

“I think people came for the sodomy and stayed for the hell,” said Brendan Conuel ’10.

Friedberg’s talk aimed to understand Dante’s perplexing linkage between usury, an essentially “white-collar crime,” and sodomy, held as an unspeakable crime against nature.

“Why in hell does Dante put the usurers next to the sodomites?” Friedberg asked the modest audience.

The minutiae of “Inferno,” the 14th-century Italian poet’s multi-layered conception of the underworld, consumed much of the lecture. Friedberg focused on why sodomites and usurers are sent to the inner circle of the seventh ring of Hell, reserved for violent sinners against God or Nature. Both “dwell in a landscape repudiating nature,” he said, where they are scorched by a perpetual and unnatural rain of fire that reflects the sinners’ unnatural acts.

Friedberg first focused on the concept of sodomy.

“To the scholastics, sodomy was a mistake of gender, not orifice,” he said.

Dante, on the other hand, saw it more “as a mistake of vessel,” and less as a matter of sexual orientation, he explained.

“To Dante, homosexual desire does not seem to be sinful, but sodomy does,” Friedberg said.

The laws of the era reflected that as well, he said. In 14th-century Italy, a man would serve forty days’ penance for performing vaginal intercourse with his wife from behind, and three years’ penance for engaging in anal sex. Essentially, Dante took issue with the unnatural form and abuse of reproduction, not with homosexuality.

Friedberg contended that Dante saw usury, the lending of money at excessive interest, as another unnatural form of reproduction—a violation of the natural state of culture.

“Usury gave money the frightening power to reproduce,” Friedberg said.

In this way, he contended, these two seemingly disparate crimes were inextricably linked in one of literature’s greatest and most influential works.

Sarah Leonard ’09 expressed that it wasn’t quite what she had expected.

“His main point was a theoretical one about the unnatural and supernatural,” Leonard said. “There were more theoretical implications than practical.”

The lecture was the first of twelve talks in the Center for Humanities Fall Term Lecture Series,“The Natural, The Unnatural, and the Supernatural.” Before Friedberg was introduced, Jill Morawski, director of the Center for Humanities, expounded on the nature of the series.

“We will ask how the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural, the unnatural and the supernatural, the natural and the supernatural, have been variously understood, conceived, and policed, in different times, places, and circumstances,” she said. “We will also ask how the natural, the unnatural, and the supernatural have been represented in art and literature.”

Every year, the Center invites three faculty applicants to explore a particular theme. Four post-doctorate fellows, four student fellows, and one music graduate fellow then write theses on the chosen theme.

Next semester the theme will be “Domesticity, Past, Present, Future,” in which, according to the Center’s website, talks will discuss the connections between domesticity, family life, violence, consumption, literature, and popular culture.

At a luncheon Tuesday, Friedberg fielded questions on the lecture from a group of professors, roaming scholars, and post-graduate fellows. For much of the lunch, Friedberg was challenged on the scientific historical accuracy of a particular box diagram that was pivotal to his thesis. After repeated challenges to his diagrammatic methodology, Friedberg finally issued his final response.

“Here’s the deal: make your own box,” he said.